#climateDiary
We’re told that renewables are ‘sustainable’ and yet they are for the foreseeable future dependent on non-renewable fossil fuel inputs for their manufacture.
We’re told that we are heading for net zero. (Though now not so much.)
What both these framings have in common are absolutes. In an era built on binary switches.
What would be much better is if we are more honest…
…From a purely financialised economics standpoint, continuing as we have been by *adding* rebuildables (‘renewables’) to our existing energy mix has been holding up. Just about.
But it has been pulling out Jenga blocks from its own foundations.
And now we’re seeing the consequences. Peak *conventional* oil production looks like it happened in 2018.
Peak diesel *consumption* looks like it happened around 2015.
And the world’s largest oil producer and most ravenous economy has started a war…
…It’s easy to imagine that without Trump we wouldn’t be in this bind. The US would be handling it differently, for sure, and we would be experiencing it differently.
But what we are doing – uniting a deep time store of carbon with a deep time store of oxygen over no time at all (geologically speaking) – leads to bust.
Not just bust for the global economy probs this year and next. Also a *lasting bust* for the affordability of a steady stream of billions of ‘energy slaves’…
…That’s a bust for billions of energy slaves with which we currently build ‘renewables’
…So my plea to you is to look past the vapid promises of ‘sustainability’ and see it for the propaganda that it is.
We are in a *bust* and we need to *adjust*.
And the adjustment mandates doing what we need for a convivial life with a *radically lower* throughput of resources and energy. And electrification is part of that. But only part.
Because “electrify everything” is not ‘sustainable’. Because industrialism which cannot be metabolised by the community of life is not regenerative…
…That is going to take generations to adjust to. Humanity has entered its mandatory phase of stepping down the energy and resources ladder.
We can do that creatively and imaginatively with love and laughter, or the hard way by propagating delusion
…Electrification is one way for us to buy time, which is not the same as it being ‘sustainable’.
But it only buys us time if at the same time we work as much as possible with what we already have.
For example, recycling copper uses about 1/10th of the energy to derive it from mining copper ore. As the cost of mining copper continues to accelerate up (Hukki principle), that saving gets even better…
…I’ve spent 3/4 of a life conditioned to having electricity. I can’t just let go of that because all the people in my life are bound up with that lifestyle too.
But I can regard it differently. I can recalibrate my emotional attachment to what it claims to be but cannot be. I can see it as a vital conduit of a multi-generational cultural transition, while understanding that it is not the end point
@urlyman I'm more worried about the organisation level power wasters.
For example, streetlights are a suck. We have a thousand ways to light activities, but authorities are still addicted to the security doctrine.
There was a time where security was impacted by streetlights. That time has passed. Current security practices can bypass constant lighting as a need. Movement detection, infrared/thermal, camera traps, quick start LED floodlights, spotlighting, drone and robot surveillance, …
Jonathan Schofield
Goose