[MCN] The most stinging criticism I’ve seen of solar- and wind-generated energy

[Lance Olsen]

The most stinging criticism I’ve seen of solar- and wind-generated energy is that it is being promoted to assure us that we have to give up nothing, just go on as before, now with an electric car instead of a gasoline powered car, and so on, leading the still-innocent public to think we can avoid inconvenient and even uncomfortable change in how we spend our time and lives. 

 Change is hard. Any call for change can be felt as cause for anxiety, a felt threat. Politicians dread telling voters we’ll have to change our ways, and it’s even somewhat a taboo among friends, or within families.

It’s fallen to a 16 year old kid to tell it like it is, scolding politicians: " You only speak of a green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular. … You are not mature enough to tell it like it is.” 

Alas, politicians may fear that voters are not mature enough to accept it like it is, as a need to change the way we spend our time and lives. 

Despite the climate of fear, others have since found courage enough to repeat the 16 year old kid's basic message in their own words :“It’s time that everyone, from the humble homeowner to the highest levels of business and government, rethink their relationship with energy and take action. Relying on renewables alone won’t be enough.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikehughes1/2019/08/02/climate-change-18-months-to-save-the-world/#166763c749bd <https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikehughes1/2019/08/02/climate-change-18-months-to-save-the-world/#166763c749bd>

 Just as chocolate is not enough to make a chocolate cake, but is an essential ingredient, we need all the ingredients necessary to putting a limit on how much heat we will be applying to every living thing for as far as the eye can see.

Renewables won’t be enough. They’re only a necessity. A carbon tax, by whatever name, won’t be enough. Its only a necessity. 

Installing energy-efficient furnaces and windows won’t be enough. They’re only one among the necessary ingredients of a success. It’s the same story for slashing consumption of lamb, pork, and beef, and the same story again for insulating businesses and homes. It’s the same story for turning a farm — or lawn — into a carbon sink, giving up the power mower and the garage door opener.

What politicians may fear most is telling us that nothing by itself will be enough. That would be telling like it is.

Politicians are in a tough spot. If they level with us, they’ll risk alienating us with the daunting extent and cumulative scale of all the work ahead. It’s all possible of course, but it has to be socially acceptable, so the responsibility falls on all of us. This buck stops everywhere. And there’s no place like home for getting some necessary ingredients put together. 

If the politicians won’t be telling us, we need to start telling them.
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“Full of recent references and statistics, Harvesting the Biosphere adds to the growing chorus of warnings about 
the current trajectory of human activity on a finite planet, of which climate change is only one dimension. 

“One can quibble with with some assumptions or tweak Smil's calculations, but the bottom line will not change, 
only the time it may take humanity to reach a crisis point.”

Stephen Running. “Approaching the Limits” Science 15 March 2013.

Book review. Harvesting the Biosphere: What we have taken from Nature. by Vaclav Smil .  
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2012. 315 pp. $29, £19.95. ISBN 9780262018562.

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