The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics [View all]

[NickB79]

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-04-10/the-rising-chorus-of-renewable-energy-skeptics/

For largely ideological reasons many greens and “transitionists” have presented the transition to renewables as a smooth road with no potholes.

In so doing they have ignored much basic geology, energy physics and even geopolitics. As a consequence many imagine the construction of millions of batteries, wind mills, solar panels, transmission lines and associated technologies, but they downplay the required intensification of mining for copper, nickel, cobalt and rare minerals you’ve probably never heard of such as dysprosium and neodymium.

One of the great lies of modern technological society is that of endless mineral abundance. Urban consumers, who have little knowledge of energy realities underpinning their existence, have swallowed the idea that digital gadgets and automation will somehow detach society from the physical world and allow us to do more with less, leading to a dematerialization of society.

But that’s a wholesale fiction long debunked by the likes of the energy ecologist Vaclav Smil and the late geologist Walter Youngquist. The average North American citizen not only consumes 1.3 million kilograms of minerals, metals and fuels in their lifetime but has no idea where they come from or at what cost.

Continuing to burn fossil fuels is suicidal.

But, trying to support our current global civilization and capitalist society, and keep it growing economically year after year, is also suicidal.

Trapped between a rock and a hard place.