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In magazines like Mother Jones and Sierra Club, environmentalists who aim to reduce harmful impacts to public health, wildlife habitats and climate systems propose “electrifying everything.”
I don’t get it.
Already, most of our food, shelter, communications and transportation systems depend on electricity. Replacing vehicles, stoves, heaters, water heaters and money (mining bitcoin) with electric ones would require massive expansion of the power grid. We’d have to manufacture lots of new appliances and vehicles (and discard old ones). We’d have to manufacture and operate more substations, generators, transformers, power lines, appliances, circuit boards and batteries. Their manufacturing would require more fossil fuels, more rare earth elements, more water, more smelting and refining, more hazardous chemicals and more international shipping. It would generate more toxic waste and more electromagnetic radiation.
So would adding artificial intelligence (AI), solar PV, wind and battery systems to our technosphere. Electrifying everything would also require expanding telecommunications: more satellites, cell sites, data storage centers and computers.
Given power outages’ increasing frequency, increasing our dependence on electricity now…makes no sense.
What are our goals again?
To reduce harms to nature: to reduce harms to public health, wildlife habitats and climate systems. To keep power reliable and safe.
Electrifying everything cannot accomplish these goals.
To reduce harms to nature, we need to manufacture less, consume less and significantly limit new infrastructure. We need liability-carrying subject-matter experts to evaluate every product’s ecological impacts from cradle-to-grave.
To keep power reliable and safe, we need engineers in charge of the grid.
To reduce demands
I understand that using fossil fuels increases global temperatures and severe weather conditions. Electricity, usually powered by natural gas or coal, accounts for roughly 20% of global energy consumption. Transportation (of people and goods), run largely on petroleum, accounts roughly for 25%.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
July 31, 2022 (original posting date)
Magical Thinking About the Energy Transition
A really short contemplation prompted by an article posted in Resilience.org from The Rapid Transition Alliance regarding sustaining long-distance trade via electric ships.
The entire narrative around ‘electrifying’ everything is primarily about the marketing of ecologically-destructive and completely unsustainable industrial products while leveraging human emotions about well-meaning care and compassion for the world and fellow species.
I believe the reasoning is simple: those who own the industries and financial institutions that are required for such a transition stand to profit handsomely from the belief that we can have our cake and eat it too, so let’s pour all remaining capital into ‘transitioning’ to something ‘green/clean’.
Only this is a fantasy.
The denial of reality required to believe in this tale not only serves to reduce the anxiety from the cognitive dissonance created when we realise that we live on a finite planet that has blown past the natural carrying capacity for humans and have hit significant diminishing returns on the most important resources to support our various complexities, but also leads to significant magical thinking about our ability to ‘transition’ from fossil fuels (that underpin virtually everything in our complex societies, especially food production, transportation, and adequate shelter) to something equally effective but non-destructive and sustainable.
There is nothing ‘resilient’ about this narrative. Humanity (at least in the form of complex, industrial societies) is not going to ‘recover quickly’ from the energy cliff we have likely already begun our descent from. It seems a misguided and misinformed story that serves to dish out ‘hope’ as opposed to the harsh ‘reality’ that we are in significant ecological overshoot and the primary resource that has led us here (fossil fuels) is in terminal decline with no substitute available[1].
We seem to be flailing about telling ourselves and others comforting tales while deferring to our ruling elite who are hell bent on leveraging our various crises to their economic and political advantage.
It’s past time we stop looking for magical solutions and face the looming hardships that are before us.
Let’s divert our remaining energy and resources towards safely decommissioning those dangerous complexities we’ve created (e.g., nuclear power plants and their waste products, biosafety labs and their dangerous pathogens, and chemical production and storage facilities) and relocalising as much as is possible the procurement of potable water, food production, and regional shelter needs.
Telling ourselves and believing in lies and fairy tales is a sure recipe for the consequences of our well-meaning but ecologically-destructive ways to be significantly worse than they could otherwise be. Ramping up our industrial production of unsustainable technologies not only expedites the negative consequences of our overshoot but worsens our plight by further reducing the planet’s carrying capacity.
[1] This avoids the even more difficult discussion that even if we were to stumble upon a ‘green/clean’ energy substitute for fossil fuels, there are a host of other significant impediments to sustaining an 7+ billion population on a finite planet.
‘Renewables’, Electrify Everything, and Marketing Propaganda
As per usual, my comment on an article in The Tyee that gives an interesting perspective on the idea of ‘Carbon Footprint’ and individual verses collective actions in addressing the behavioural/consumption changes necessary for effective action on climate change.
Great read and perspective.
“The problem is that climate change is as much a political problem as it is a scientific one. It’s not that we’ve been failing to make individual lifestyle changes; it’s that powerful interests have knowingly obscured, distracted from and delayed climate action over the last 50 years.”
I find this key to help in understanding one of the narratives that have come to dominate the ‘environmental/climate change/global warming’ movement: a transition to ‘renewables’ (or ‘green/clean’ energy) and ‘electrifying’ everything is the best path forward; and many of The Tyee writers are as guilty of this as well.
As has been shown by Jeff Gibbs’ Planet of the Humans and Julia Barnes’ Bright Green Lies, the ‘environmental’ movement appears to have been hijacked by powerful/influential political/economic interests in order to market the idea that getting everyone to shift away from fossil fuel-based industry and products is the key action in fighting climate change and avoiding the predicted consequences of it.
This idea is, I believe, primarily a marketing/sloganeering/narrative control campaign to help the businesses/corporations/industries involved in ‘renewables’ and associated products in expanding their consumer base and shifting capital towards them. It is not and never has been about protecting or saving the environment and ecological systems. It is about protecting and saving our energy-intensive, business-as-usual complexities and the technologies necessary to support/maintain these; and it is driven by the primary motivation of the ruling class/powers-that-be/elite: expansion/control of the wealth-generating systems that provide their revenue streams.
Scratch even gently at the surface of this propaganda/narrative and you will find the emperor has no clothes. Fossil fuels are just as necessary, in fact probably more so, in any transition to ‘renewables’.
Mining and processing of finite materials (particularly rare-earth minerals) require fossil fuel driven vehicles and machinery (and, of course, the fact that these materials are ‘finite’ in nature is key here as their production and distribution would be significantly limited and not capable of meeting the demand of our world — especially of ‘advanced’ economies and their complexities).
Massive amounts of concrete and steel production, which depend greatly on the high heat only available via fossil fuels (particularly coal), would be needed.
Then there’s the issue of energy-return-on-energy-invested (EROEI): fossil fuels provide far, far greater energy (or at least they did when we were retrieving the easy- and cheap-to-access reserves; not so much now that we are relying on marginal sources such as deep sea reserves, tight/shale oil, and oil/tar sands) than ‘renewables’. And it is the surplus energy that has been provided by high EROEI fossil fuels that has allowed our modern, industrialised, and global civilisation to grow and flourish the way it has over the past couple of centuries. Low EROEI ‘renewables’ are incapable of supporting our complexities in the same way; not even close.
As a final point (although there are other issues/problems/disadvantages), the production of ‘renewables’ also wreaks havoc on ecological systems. From the very dirty mining and material processing to the after-life/disposal of the products, ‘renewables’ continue to produce and disseminate toxins into the atmosphere and local environments. They are neither ‘clean’ nor ‘green’. In fact, the notion of ‘green/clean’ energy is an oxymoron of epic proportions and should never be used by anyone serious about the issues involved in energy production and environmental/ecological issues for it just feeds the monster that is corporate marketing.
And here I come back to another statement in the article that supports my view: “It’s about realizing that the consumer choices we have available to us are deliberately limited by the powerful interests that seek to maintain the status quo.”
Yes, we have powerful interests that have hijacked the narrative via what could be considered the use of the Overton Window: a limiting of ideas of what is acceptable to consider. Fossil fuels verses ‘renewables’. There’s no discussion of the limitations or profoundly propagandised view of what ‘renewables’ actually are and require. There’s just a ‘you’re-with-us or you’re-against-us’ framework and a bunch of well-intentioned but misguided people repeating the mantra: renewables/electrification now.
There’s no thinking outside the box or consideration of what I believe is desperately needed: degrowth. Degrowth is off limits and its discussion suppressed for a number of reasons but mostly because it challenges the primary motivation of those at the top of society’s power/economic structures: control/expansion of the wealth-generating systems that provide their revenue streams.
We live on a finite planet with real biophysical limits that have very likely been well surpassed in a number of areas. The sooner we realise this and reach the conclusion that we cannot in any way support or expand our high-energy complexities and the growth that accompanies this, the sooner we might, just might, get on the path towards degrowing our world in a just and equitable way rather than continue to chase the magical thinking necessary to sustain our world as currently contrived and going even further into overshoot than we already have. Reversion to the mean always happens in such instances and if we hope to mitigate in any controllable way the consequences that will flow from this, we need to get started — like yesterday.
Electrify Everything: Neither ‘Green’ Nor ‘Sustainable’
Electrifying everything has become a rallying cry for many people concerned with the ecological/environmental impact of humanity. But do such attempts to mitigate/solve such problems/dilemmas actually do what they claim to? I would argue no. They are simply substituting one set of problems for another set of problems and completely avoiding the underlying causes. They are primarily about creating the idea that they are a solution, not that they truly are. They are a marketing scheme to sell products and gloss over using language the problematic issues they prolong or create. It is fundamentally about propaganda, not addressing the plight that human expansion is.
In this vein, here is my comment on an article that looks at substituting electric long-haul trucks for internal combustion engine ones.
We really do need to stop using language that does not reflect reality. Electric vehicles are neither ‘green’ nor ‘clean’. A shift to them is not in any way, shape, or form helping us to address the various ecological/environmental dilemmas humanity has created in its endless expansion and exploitation of the planet’s limited resources (and that go far beyond carbon emissions).
Narratives that use the small Overton window of internal combustion engines vs. electric vehicles completely disregard the underlying issues of our dilemmas and avoid the hard choices that need to be made — to say little about the fact that they mislead and propagate false beliefs. They do, however, help significantly in reducing our mass cognitive dissonance that is created from our pursuit of the growth chalice on a finite planet with hard, biophysical limits.
The question that needs to be confronted and at the forefront of hauling goods around is why we continue to pursue an energy- and resource-intensive approach to living and should real sustainability not be primary in our thoughts? We need to not only be discussing fervently the concept of degrowth and how we can implement it equitably, but focusing our energies and finite resources on localising everything so such wasteful pursuits are curtailed significantly, not attempting to use up the remaining resources in some hollow pursuit to hold on to unsustainable practices.
Electrifying everything is not a panacea. In fact, I have increasingly come to view the entire idea as primarily an attempt to shift capital from one unsustainable, ecologically-destructive enterprise (fossil fuels) to another equally unsustainable and ecologically-destructive one (all the alternatives). It is a marketing scheme concocted to ‘sell’ the idea that we can seamlessly transition to other energy sources and address our toxic legacy. All it is doing, however, is substituting one problematic technology for another (and that still depends upon and requires massive amounts of fossil fuels from the mining for resources to the processing of minerals to the manufacture of products…to say little about the impact of the toxins that must be considered in the after-life of electric products and alternative energy sources, especially the batteries necessary).
We have been increasingly propagandised through repetitive sloganeering that electric vehicles and alternative energy sources to fossil fuels is our saviour. They are not. They are snake oil from salesmen whose primary purpose is to generate wealth and profit regardless of the cost. We would do well to stop listening to such nonsense and shout as often as possible “the emperor has no clothes!”
