A Reality Check on Our ‘Energy Transition’
A Reality Check on Our ‘Energy Transition’
Obligatory note that if you think moving to renewables is difficult and thusly unlikely, than degrowth is straight up not happening until civilization collapses. Like pure degrowth is a straight up harder, less supported, and less likely to happen option than expanding the renewable build out that has been replacing fossil generation in many countries.
Both decarbonization by moving things like heating and transport to electricity and the increased occurrences of extreme weather due to climate change inherently result in more electricity demand, and if people are apparently unwilling to cheaper energy than why do you thing they will instead choose to go without?
Moreover, this argument neglects the fact that over the last ten years overall emissions in both the US and EU have been steadily, if far to slowly, falling, which means that fossil fuels are demonstrably being replaced, and why even among the managers of BP and Shell the discussion is not are they going to be replaced by solar and wind but rather can they drag the process out to fifty years instead of twenty years and how much can they export to the third world before that happens.
This is also why said companies are moving from ‘climate change isn’t real’ to ‘it is real but there is just nothing you can do about it so please stop replacing us’.
US greenhouse gas emissions fell by a bit over 5% between 1990 - 2023. At this rate it has to be obvious that just deploying renewables is just not going to be enough, to prevent a collpase due to a climat crisis. Nearly all degrowthers are argueing for a massive rollout of green technolgies but since it is not enough, cutting energy consumption has to be on the table to reduce fossil fuel consumption quickly. Obviously degrowth and pushing for green technologies is much harder, but it is the only somewhat realistic way to prevent a massive collapse.
The US based emissions fell by 5% since 1990 because a lot of the manufacturing industry has been delocalized to China.
If you look at the emissions adjusted for trade the US is emitting more CO2 now than in 1990
Which also means we’re down 17 percent since the peak in 2005, most of which has come from electrical generation despite the article’s insistence that renewables did not and fundamentally could not replace any fossil fueled generation.
No one is saying that just deploying renewables is going to solve anything, but rather that a massive rollout of green technologies is going to result in a massive increase in electricity demand as everything from heat pumps and EVs to rail electrification and industrial production involves replacing everything we currently do with fossil fuels with electricity.
As this article in particular is saying over and over again that we cannot generate enough clean electricity to power even our current grid and thusly must shrink our electric demand, it is arguing not for an massive rollout of green technologies but rather that we massively reduce demand for things like heating and cooling our homes or transporting food long distances.
I am saying that not only is this far harder to achieve than rolling out green technologies, but directly at odds with a world full of lethal heat waves and extreme weather destroying crops and supply chains.
I am not debating ‘degrowth’ as a whole, but rather the explicit position this author takes that it’s fundamentally impossible to replace fossil fuels so the only approach can be to somehow eliminate demand for food, transport, heating, etc…
Degrowth is also based on the fallacy that economic activity has a constant or at least near-constant energy intensiveness. But real-life economies already vary by at least an order of magnitude in energy consumed per unit GDP. So as long as energy intensiveness declines faster than the population grows, it's still a net win.
And just to keep things in perspective, there's also a lot of false narratives about how population reductions are inevitably a bad thing. The underlying reason is that some of the measures of economic performance are proportional to population. But those are the wrong measures to be looking at if you want to know how life is for the average (median) person.