Benefits and price of clean energy

I can't get the link to work, Elly. Can you fix it?

Having read the article before, I was also struck but the author's omission of the amount of fossil fuels that would be required to mine all the raw materials he says we'll need. It's the same supply chain issue that plagues the agriculture industry, taking into account all of the energy and fossil fuel inputs required to produce any food, from vegetables to meat.

We harm the environment in ways that we don't know or recognize.

In my opinion, the writer of the piece Elly refers to makes valid points.

As an advocate for “cleaner” energy, I try to be careful to not paint an “everything is going to be wonderful” picture. The truth is that regardless of where we get our energy from, we are living beyond the Earth’s ability to sustain us over time, and on our present course, things will only get worse. Something significant is going to have to change. At this point, as a species we still have a choice regarding many of the needed changes, but the choices are diminishing over time. Eventually the choices will be taken away from us altogether and nature will take its course.

There’s another aspect to “clean energy” that the article doesn’t address, but that is also significant, and that is, what are we going to do with all the clean energy technology once it’s reached the end of its useful life? Photovoltaic cells, wind turbines, batteries, etc. Yes, I know that we can recycle to an extent, but that’s just an extent. The simple truth is that most post-industrial revolution era human activity results in harm to the environment. Especially in scale.

I concur with Ray that, while clean energy is an integral part of transitioning towards a sustainable environment, in itself it’s not enough.

Reading this, it appears as if there is no escape. We’re damned if we eliminate fossil fuels and we’re damned if we don’t.  Certainly if we assume we must maintain the status quo, i.e., life as usual, with our normal comforts (and ignoring the needs of the other 90%), then I believe we are damned.  

The climate crisis is essentially an energy problem, a huge energy problem, because our energy needs are so vast.  The world uses 500,000,000,000,000,000 BTUs (can be shortened to 500 Quads) of energy per year.  The US alone uses 100 Quads.  And this huge need is driving the climate toward our own destruction.  

It seems like we need to drastically reduce our energy consumption if we have any chance of making it thru to the other side.  As it is, of those 500 Quads consumed, 350 Quads are lost was waste heat.  70% is lost!!  This is from LLNL, not me. The laws of physics dictate some of this loss, but we can be much more efficient in our usage. So being much more energy efficient is good, right?  Still, the resources required to make us more efficient, on the scale that is needed, could well rival what is needed for the green energy solutions per the article. Damned if we do...

How should we be preparing ourselves, our families, our communities, our world for the inevitable change that’s coming?  It’s already baked in.  How bad it gets remains to be seen. So what should we do? Obviously what CCL and other such groups are doing needs to continue. And we should continue moving toward more energy efficiency and more renewables.  But I think we need, absolutely need, to look backward to simpler times when we needed much less energy.  Certainly we can learn how to reduce, renew, recycle our way into the future. And (re)build community.  Moving forward, looking back.  

Easy, right? Human nature tells us that once we have something we want, we won’t give it up without a fight.  I think modern technology combined with this look backward can help. Regardless, tough times are ahead with us fighting each other while we’re dealing with the climate crisis itself.