Coal plants are expensive to operate and the costs are just increasing. It is reaching the point where building new renewable facilities would be more cost effective. These are the type of economics which will drive the evolution of the U.S. electric grid. 99 percent of US coal plants are more expensive than new renewables would be: report https://thehill.com/policy/energy-e...xpensive-than-new-renewables-would-be-report/ All of the nation’s coal-fired power plants but one are less cost-effective to operate than constructing new solar or wind facilities in the United States, according to a study published Monday by the firm Energy Innovation. Analysts compared operating costs at the 210 coal plants in the continental U.S. in 2021 to the estimated costs of developing new solar and wind, both within about 28 miles of the plants and within the broader region. They determined that 209 of the plants were costlier than either wind or solar would be. When adding energy community tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act, 199 of the plants were more expensive than solar plants within 28 miles would be, while 104 plants have cheaper wind-energy sources within 28 miles. The single plant that is cost-competitive with wind and solar is Wyoming’s Dry Forks Station, which the analysis determined is one of the newest and cleanest in the U.S. coal fleet and is still only $0.32 per megawatt-hour cheaper than regional wind would be. If a similar plant were built now, capital costs would keep it from being competitive with renewable energy. Overall, the median cost for coal-fired plants is $36 per megawatt-hour, compared to $24 per megawatt-hour for new solar. Analysts also found that the savings from transitioning to locally produced solar energy could be used to add 137 gigawatts worth of batteries across all plants and at least 80 percent of the capacity at one in three existing coal plants. In other words, they wrote, “the economics of replacing coal with renewables are so favorable that they could fund a massive battery storage buildout to add reliability value along with emissions reductions.” Coal is one of the biggest drivers of carbon emissions worldwide. In the U.S., its use has steeply declined since the 1960s, but at a year-to-year level, it increased 14.5 percent from the previous year in 2020, according to data from the Energy Information Administration. Over 90 percent of that coal was used for electricity generation.
"Throughout your book, you write about animals evolving to adapt to changes. Why can’t the natural world adapt to what’s happening to the planet now? "The simple answer is that it’s far too fast. Some degree of warming and cooling is absolutely a natural cycle, but the way we’re doing it now is entirely unnatural. When we talk about the changes that occur on geological timescales, they’re typically extremely slow. The fastest-known increase in carbon dioxide concentration is happening now." Paleontologists study the past. This one has a warning for the future. What do ancient fossils tell us about life on a hotter planet? By Neel Dhanesha Feb 2, 2022 A fossilized dinosaur skeleton at the headquarters of CAPPA, a paleontology center in Brazil. In his book Otherlands, Thomas Halliday writes that fossils provide clues about the past and future of the planet. Carl De Souza/AFP via Getty Images Neel Dhanesha is a reporter covering science and climate change at Vox. Prior to Vox, Neel was an editorial fellow at Audubon magazine and an assistant producer at Radiolab. Help our biodiversity reporting by taking our survey. When Thomas Halliday was a young lad in the village of Rannoch, Scotland, he loved exploring the Caledonian Forest. The pinewoods were like living fossils, a remnant of the last glacial period and a bygone age when the west coast of Scotland was covered in trees. “It was such a diverse and wonderful place to explore as a 7-year-old,” Halliday told Vox. “I essentially had free rein to go and run about, and I became very interested in the natural world.” Fittingly, the boy who explored the ancient forest went on to become a paleontologist.In his new book, Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds, out this week, Halliday writes about primordial history as though we could witness it first-hand, bringing life to prehistoric geese that were as ornery as their modern-day cousins, towering forests that transformed our planet, and dinosaurs that lived before the evolution of flowers. “By visiting extinct sites with the mindset of a traveler, a safari-goer, I hope to bridge the distance from the past to the present,” Halliday writes. He dives into the fossil record and invites readers to“see ancient life forms as if they were commonplace visitors to our world, as quivering, steaming beasts of flesh and instinct, as creaking beams and falling leaves.” I recently spoke with Halliday about the clues the past leaves for us. He told me that “temporal wanderlust,” or a hunger to understand eras that were different from our own, can teach lessons about the future of the planet and the grave dangers of human-caused climate change. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You describe this book as a travelogue through time. What inspired that idea? When people think of paleontology, they tend to think of skeletons in a museum. It’s very separated from the living creature. And when it is presented as a living creature, it’s usually in some sort of monster film, out for human blood. This isn’t really how creatures behave in reality. The past isn’t this barbaric age, you know? It was a real, functioning, biological system. So I thought, “If we can visit the Cairngorms [a mountain range in Scotland] and talk about their wonderful biology, then why not interpret the fossil record in such a way that it becomes sort of like visiting those worlds?” The chapters of your book read like vivid descriptions of a day in time — say, a Tuesday in the Pleistocene. How did you do that? How did you collect the details of the weather or the behaviors of animals? The behavioral side of things and the climatic side of things are obviously not directly observed, they are inferred. If you look at sedimentology, there are patterns of grains in the rock that tell you something about the environment. For example, in the Miocene chapter, about 4 million years ago at Gargano [present-day Italy], the Mediterranean Sea has dried out and we’re on this island. There’s a giant, flightless goose there. It has a bony spur on its wing, which is an anatomical feature that you can directly observe [in fossils]. And we know birds today have this kind of spur on their wing for fighting. We can then reconstruct that this is a behavior that probably happened among these geese on Gargano. It’s probably something that is happening within the flock, between birds of the same species, rather than defense against predators, because of what we can see in today’s biology. Many of your chapters are set on the cusp of disaster, either right before or right after. Why are these events so useful when you’re looking for stories in the past? Part of it is because they are incredibly important in telling the story of life. There have been several mass extinctions, and the way that life responded to them is very important — not just for telling us what’s happened in the past, but what’s going to happen in the future. Everything in my chapter on the Oligocene is represented as fossils in what’s called a lahar, which is what happens when a volcano has erupted and you have this layer of ash that turns into a sort of slurry, which goes down mountainsides at horrendous speeds and buries everything. There’s little chance for things to escape. In Tinguiririca [present-day Chile], we see the remnants of mammals in this lahar, so I’m talking very specifically about particular individuals. At one point you describe one of the earliest species that might have been lost to our human ancestors, or hominins. How far back can you see those impacts? Right, so this is about 4 million years ago in what is now Lake Turkana. This is sort of a cradle of African fauna. There are several species of relatives of elephants, and there are a couple of giraffe species, and there’s early wildebeests, antelopes, and the ancestors of the domestic cat. All sorts of creatures that are very familiar to us now. There are these bear otters, which are lion-sized otters that used to live alongside early hominins. And they have no living relatives, so this is a group that has gone extinct. Some people have suggested — although this is a little controversial — that because they had a similar sort of generalist diet to humans, perhaps the bear otters were out-competed and essentially sort of lost their place in the ecosystem. We’re not talking about Homo sapiens. We’re talking about three-foot-tall Australopithecines. They’re some of the first species that we can confidently say are on the human lineage. When you begin to talk about humans directly impacting ecosystems, that comes much later. There’s good evidence for people managing fire and using fire to clear ecosystems and to change the forest layout tens of thousands of years ago. And even in what we would today think of as relatively undisturbed ecosystems, like the Amazon jungle, there’s been thousands of years of very active management by people. Even though it’s not been done in the sort of open plantations we’re used to in Europe and North America, it’s a landscape which has been highly modified by humans. Throughout your book, you write about animals evolving to adapt to changes. Why can’t the natural world adapt to what’s happening to the planet now? The simple answer is that it’s far too fast. Some degree of warming and cooling is absolutely a natural cycle, but the way we’re doing it now is entirely unnatural. When we talk about the changes that occur on geological timescales, they’re typically extremely slow. The fastest-known increase in carbon dioxide concentration is happening now. When you get rapid changes in climate, however temporary, you often then get a big transition in what life is doing. At the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago, was what’s known as the Great Dying. It is the worst mass extinction that has ever happened. There was a huge outgassing of things like methane and other greenhouse gases from volcanic activity. In Siberia, 95 percent of life was wiped out by this radical change in global climate. There were huge problems with ocean acidification, with these gases going out into the atmosphere, and a loss of oxygen in the oceans. And a lot of these things are problems that we are seeing now. “Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds” was published on February 1, 2022, by Random House. (Lucas Heinrich (cover design) and Chris Wormell (cover illustration) for Penguin Random House) Are there any other organisms that have changed the biosphere in the way that humans have? Yeah, absolutely. One of the classic stories is the first photosynthesizers. Photosynthesis is the process that turns carbon dioxide and light into oxygen and sugar and energy. This was first done by single-celled organisms billions of years ago, and before then there wasn’t really much oxygen on Earth. When the photosynthesizers started producing oxygen, it completely changed the atmospheric composition. Most of the microorganisms that lived on Earth were not really able to tolerate oxygen, and so it caused problems for them. More recently, 360 million years ago or so, we have the scale trees. This is in the period that’s called the Carboniferous, when we really get the first big plants. These scale tree forests formed in sort of swampy conditions, there’s a huge growth in plant material, they’re absorbing lots of carbon dioxide from the air. All of this carbon that was in the atmosphere was absorbed by growing plants, the plants that died fell into the swamp, and their bodies were converted into peat and then into coal and then buried, and so all of this carbon was captured. All of this served to change the global climate. It made the world cooler. Very shortly after, you get what’s known as the Carboniferous rainforest collapse. The plants havechanged the world’s climate such that swamps are no longer a common ecosystem, and scale trees and their kin go extinct. In a sense, they sowed the seeds of their own destruction. How are humans different from the other organisms that have changed the planet? Well, we as conscious beings are able to reflect on our actions. We are able to predict what the outcome of our actions will be, and therefore to choose an appropriate path. The first experiments that showed that carbon dioxide caused air to warm faster were done by a woman called Eunice Foote in the late 19th century, about two years before the first oil well was dug in the US. And for various reasons, despite having known about the warming effects of greenhouse gases for well over 100 years, little has been done so far. I am always hopeful, though. There is now a movement to choose the right path and to recognize what we’ve already lost forever, and what we can salvage. Every day we go on without changing things, things are going to get worse, but there’s never going to be a single point at which all is lost. We can always, as a society, choose the right path. In your last chapter, you write that human-induced change is not new, and can even sort of be considered natural. How is the intervention natural? And how should we think about it going forward? It’s natural in the sense that we are part of the biological world and that we should not try and consider ourselves apart from it. We have been part of this world as a species for 200,000 years and as a genus for 2 million years. There are so many species that we have evolved alongside. We depend on that biological world that we are tightly integrated into. It’s a very unusual time in Earth’s history, in that all the ecosystems of the world, from the bottom of the sea to the tops of mountains, are affected by the actions of this single species. Are there periods in the past that you think are particularly important parallels for us to pay attention to as we look to the climate-changed future? If we’re talking about climate change, the important periods are the five major mass extinction events. The Ordovician is the only one which was caused by global cooling, and I think is an important parallel here. People have an assumption that warmth is somehow what is bad here. But in fact it’s not the warmth itself, it’s the rate of change. At the end of the Ordovician, you get this onset of glaciers that expanded out across the whole of Africa and South America, which at that time were joined. And when that happens, we see a big extinction event in marine organisms as they are forced into deeper water, which perhaps they can’t survive in. But then you get this rebound, and the world begins to warm again. The ice begins to melt, and there’s a second pulse of extinction. Earth has two roughly stable states. You’ve got the icehouse world, which we are in at the moment, where there is permanent ice at the poles. And then you have greenhouse Earth, where there is no permanent ice at the poles. Life is currently not really adapted to a greenhouse world. Humans — and I mean all hominins, all great apes — have never experienced the greenhouse world. You write that we shouldn’t become despondent, which is easy to do when you’re faced with forces that affect life on a planetary scale. What should we do instead? The problem with despondency is it leads to inaction. There’s a poem which I really like by Piet Hein: Eradicate the optimist who takes the easy view that human values will persist no matter what we do. Annihilate the pessimist whose ineffectual cry is that the goal’s already missed however hard we try. The point is that we cannot sit back. It’s never too late. The sooner we act, the more we save, but there’s always something else to save. If this is a mass extinction that we are causing right now, life will rebound and eventually be as diverse as it is today. But this is our world.We are here, and there are wonderful creatures around today. There are wonderful landscapes and wonderful plants. And I think it’s a shame to throw it away. If we undergo a huge period of transition, usher in a new age where life is fundamentally different, then we’re less likely to be a part of it. So we should protect the world that is our land, our part of geological time. https://www.vox.com/22913101/paleontology-fossils-otherlands-thomas-halliday-climate
When the ice is gone, the latent heat is gone, and all solar warming then goes to rapidly warming the water and, with time, the atmosphere.
A follow-up covering the coal power plants in North Carolina. We have a large number of coal-fired power plant in our state. In fact, the RTP area is pretty much surrounded by them; Hyco, Mayo, etc. plus one nuclear plant (Shearon Harris). Report: Duke Energy’s NC coal plants cost twice as much as solar https://energynews.us/newsletter/report-duke-energys-nc-coal-plants-cost-twice-as-much-as-solar/
The Energy Crisis, Renewable Energies and RR+E By Luis González Reyes, originally published by 15/15\15 February 6, 2023 (Originally published in Spanish in issue number 156 of Papeles magazine, under the title “Crisis energética”. Translated by Steven Johnson & Amelia Burke, and reviewed by Manuel Casal and the author.) Capitalist growth, not environmental limits, is the root cause of the energy crisis Over the long history of humanity a wide variety of political, economic, and cultural systems have been developed. Most of these have been able to satisfy human needs with a low level of consumption of materials and energy. Only capitalism has exhibited an unrestrained need for growth which has brought about an unprecedented collision with environmental limits.[1] One manifestation of that is the energy crisis. The need of capitalism to constantly grow derives from the fact that economic entities need to be competitive in order to survive. If they are not, the companies go bankrupt or are taken over by others, and people lose their jobs and, with them, their ability to meet their needs (since in capitalism we have lost access to our own means of production by which we could provide for ourselves without needing wages to survive). It is not only a matter of need, but of ability. There were other systems in the past that sought to grow (though nothing like capitalism). But in all of those economies, wealth had a material base (lands, cattle, gold, etc.), which limited their ability to grow. This changes with capitalism, because money can reproduce itself, at least in an illusory manner, partially without connection to the physical bases of the planet. To achieve that continual growth, capitalism has periodically undergone mutations that have freed itself from past constraints. It is difficult to put any of these in reverse, because to do so would decrease the ability of capital to reproduce itself. Probably the most important of these mutations has been the transition from renewable energies to fossil fuels as its energy base.[2] Fossil fuels gave capitalism an unprecedented capacity to grow: Oil well at Okemah, Oklahoma, 1922. Source: Wikimedia Commons. They are a very concentrated source of energy, with a high energy density, which means that it can provide a lot of energy with little mass and volume. And this enables it to have a high energy return on energy invested (EROI), that is, a high ratio of the amount of energy it provides to the amount of energy that is invested in obtaining it. They are available in the form of stock. This is very important, because it allows their availability to be independent of natural cycles (circadian, seasonal, life, etc.). And this also relates to why they are easy to store and transport. Until now, they have been available in great quantities. They are an energy (and material) source with multiple uses, which gives it an historically unprecedented versatility. As we know, fossil fuels are not renewable, and are therefore limited. The limit that matters to our economy is not the quantity of reserves but the rate at which those reserves can be extracted. The concept of peak extraction is therefore crucial. In the exploitation of a mineral resource, the first stage follows a rising curve. It is a period in which ever greater amounts of the raw material can be obtained over time. It is in this stage that the largest and most easily accessed fields are found. But, inevitably, there comes a moment in which the extractive capacity begins to decline. This turning point is the peak of the substance. During this second stage, the substance is obtained in decreasing quantities. And it is of lower quality, since the sites that were largest and easiest to exploit were chosen first, and now the substance becomes harder and harder to extract. In this way, as the peak of production is passed, what remains is decreasingly available, of lower quality, and it is more technically difficult, costs more money, and requires greater investments of energy, to obtain. It also requires methods which are more polluting and therefore require more remediating measures. All of this exerts upward pressure on the price of the raw material, so long as demand for it is maintained, until it hits the ceiling of prices that buyers can afford to pay. Likewise, the reduced ability to control how much of the material is put on the market at any given time gives rise to speculation, which is amplified by the functioning of the financial markets. This creates a scenario of wide fluctuations between high and low prices. The high prices lead the global economy into recession, while the low prices are below the cost of extraction, creating great uncertainty for the extractive companies, which withdraw their investments. French ex-minister Yves Cochet at a conference on Peak Oil, 2007. Photo: Guillaume Paumier. Source: Wikimedia Commons. The peak of extraction has to do with geology and is calculated using data from resources or from reserves.[3] But the question of when the peak arrives also depends on other kinds of factors: political (state subsidies, instability), economic (levels of investment, economic crises), social (opposition to extractive projects), environmental (lack of necessary conditions for extraction), and technological (improved machinery). Some of these factors are included in the calculation if reserves are used, but others are not. In any case, all of these factors influence when the peak is reached and, above all, how the decline in extraction will be experienced once the peak is passed. That is to say, the peak of extraction of a given substance depends on geological factors, but also on social factors: economic, technical, political, and cultural. From beginning to end, the use of fossil fuels in capitalism has been profoundly influenced by economics, not just physics and chemistry. We have likely already passed the peak of petroleum production, since it has gone down since 2018. And we will likely pass the peak of coal and gas production in the next few years, if we have not passed it already. We are also past the peak of uranium production.[4] What is important is not the exact moment in which the peak occurs, but that it has happened, or soon will happen, during these historically crucial years in which we are living. So the energy crisis is due not to the exhaustion of fossil fuels by itself, but to a system that is poorly adapted to the characteristics of the biosphere, from which it cannot escape. The energy crisis is not external to our socioeconomic system. Rather, it is a consequence of that system. The hyper-technological renewable energies[5] are not the solution to the energy crisis In the face of the energy crisis, which in reality is a crisis of the system, it is thought that renewable energies will be able to support capitalism’s need for continual growth. But this will not be the case, because there are environmental, technical, and socioeconomic limits to their deployment. Let’s begin with the environmental limits. The greater part of the renewable energies are of solar origin. In the case of photovoltaic and thermic solar this is evident, but it is no less the case with wind, hydraulic, and biomass, because all of these are nothing other than transformed solar radiation. Human beings and animals, when they act as energy vectors, also do this by means of solar energy, since this is the ultimate source of all of our food. The problem for capitalism, but not for humanity and even less for other living things, is that the properties of solar energies (to which we can add geothermal and tidal energy) are almost the opposite of the properties of fossil energies: Wind turbines at Findhorn ecovillage. Photo: W. L. Tarbert. Source: Wikimedia Commons. A large quantity of solar energy falls on the surface of the earth, but it is very diffuse. This means a low EROI, since a considerable amount of energy must be invested in concentrating the solar radiation in its various forms. Large amounts of land must also be used, and, ultimately, large demands on ecosystem functions must be made, to obtain an appreciable amount of energy. There would just be one exception: hydraulic energy, since it is nature, by means of orography, that does the work of concentrating the energy. In any case, hydraulic energy only comes close to fossil energies when we are talking about large-scale hydraulic which, as we shall see, has other limits. Solar energies function as flows, not as stock. And so they are hard to store. Further, these flows are irregular, following circadian, seasonal, and, what is the worst for capitalism, stochastic rhythms. As a result of this, they have low capacity factors[6], and therefore many wind and solar farms must be installed in several places so that, when some are not producing, others are, and so compensate each other. And we must rely on batteries for storage, but these require a great deal of energy to produce. Biomass and hydraulic energy (making use of reservoirs) are a partial exception, since they can function as stock, but always in quantities that are considerably lower than the fossil energies. Renewables, even in a best case scenario, would provide half of the energy of fossil energies[7]. In reality, what matters is not the energy, but the power, in that renewables have still more problems due to their low energy density. But the best case scenario will never occur because life also demands solar energy. Ecosystems require this energy for their homeostasis, and, to put it simply, we cannot endlessly remove it from the ecosystems because we are eco-dependent. The hyper-technological renewables use high technology devices that convert the various energies of solar origin into electricity. This technology has some additional limits for replacing fossil fuels. And so we come to the second category of limits, the technical ones. Electric energy generation accounts only for a relatively small fraction of total world energy consumption. Source: EIA and Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc. Electricity comprises approximately only 20% of our energy consumption. The 80% remaining is not electrified. And the problem is not just that it is not electrified, but that it would be extremely difficult to make it so. This is obvious in the petrochemical sector, and especially in the transport sector. In the first place, because we do not have technology that can move heavy vehicles of high cargo capacity and autonomy of movement with electric batteries (for example, trucks). But even in what we do have technology for (vans and smaller vehicles), the challenge is gigantic. Not even 1% of the fleet of vehicles is electrified, and to electrify much more of it would require an investment of energy (from fossil fuels, let’s not forget), materials, time, and money that is beyond our capacities[8]. The alternatives that are put forward are biofuels and hydrogen, but, in addition to other problems, both of these energy vectors have very low net energy. It takes a large investment of energy to obtain very little. This is no minor issue, since transport is utterly crucial to our socioeconomic order. Without rapid mobility of large masses of freight over long distances, which is what petroleum allows, there would be neither modern cities nor globalization. The second problem of a technical nature is that what we call renewable energies are not really renewable. To build dams, wind generators, and solar panels, fossil fuels are used. They are used in the process of extraction of the needed resources (for example, in the heavy machinery used in mining), in manufacture (for example, of concrete), in distribution (which is done via global value chains), and in installation and dismantling (heavy machinery is needed yet again). But it is not only that these fuels are being used. It is also that there is no technology that would enable us to stop using them. From this perspective, it can be said that the hyper-technological renewables are an extension of fossil fuels. Book by Valero, Valero and Calvo on mineral limits to Energy Transition, published by Springer, 2021. The problem also lies in materials. The high performance of the hyper-technological renewables depends on elements that in many cases are in short supply in the earth’s crust, and are simply not available in the quantities that the maintenance of capitalism requires. This would be the case with tellurium, indium, tin, silver, gallium, and lithium[9]. Moreover, the lifespan of the hyper-technological renewables is relatively short, from 25 to 40 years in the case of wind and solar, and somewhat longer in the case of hydraulic. This makes them a very poor alternative since, when they start to break down, the availability of fossil fuels and minerals will have decreased by a significant amount, making it impossible to replace more than a small percentage of their installed capacity. With regard to socioeconomic limits, the first point to consider is that the hyper-technological renewables are serving, not the energy transition, but the reproduction of capital. This is made evident in various ways: By the hierarchical control of these technologies, a control that is in the hands of the oligarchy that dominates their production and commercial development; the technology is not one of social access. By the coloniality of their deployment, in that they are located in sacrifice zones. This lies behind conflicts that are being generated between centers and peripheries, at state and international levels. By the unjust ways in which markets allocate the uses of the electricity that is produced, which is one of the causes of energy poverty. And, ultimately, because the spread of these technologies is pursued only to make money, as is shown by the lack of planning in their current development, which has all the characteristics of an economic bubble. But even though these technologies’ purpose is to further the reproduction of capital, they cannot really sustain it, due to their distinct properties from those of fossil energies. It is not surprising, then, that models are forecasting that their massive deployment will not avoid a significant fall in world GDP[10]. Further, the fact that they serve the reproduction of capital turns them into capital. Or, in other words, they can only be developed if capitalism goes well, if it continues growing. For this reason, the crisis of capitalism also means the crisis of the hyper-technological renewables. ‘La Escondida’ in Chile, largest copper mine in the world. Photo: Antofagasta Municipality. Source: Wikimedia Commons. In the environmentalist movement it is commonly suggested that the hyper-technological renewables serve as bridge to others that are really renewable, making the process of change easier to accept, socially and economically. It is one of the arguments used by defenders of a Green New Deal with an emancipatory vision. The problem is that we are no longer in the 1980s or 1990s, when such a transition in two stages could have been viable. At this time we are witnessing the collapse of the present order, as shown by the proliferation of completely exceptional phenomena in recent months all over the world (pandemic, deep economic crisis, especially virulent fires, shortages of numerous materials, the proliferation of extreme weather events, diseases, etc.). We are no longer looking at a coming systemic collapse that we might avoid. Rather, we are already living in the midst of it. Not only that, but the peak of fossil fuels and of many materials prevents us from being able to use these resources to accomplish a transition in two stages. And, even more importantly, the United Nations says that emissions must be reduced, without delay, by 7.6% per year[11]. But a massive buildout of the hyper-technological renewables requires an unacceptable increase in emissions over the short term[12]. It cannot be otherwise, considering the massive amount of industrial production it involves. While the climate emergency and the ecosystem emergency both require urgent action, the latter affords us even less time to spare. In the case of the climate emergency, the development of the hyper-technological renewables means an improvement in the mid-term (emissions increase at first, but decrease later). But in the case of preserving biodiversity there is not even that. The expansion of hyper-technological renewables is already hindering protection of the environment, as shown by mining[13], and this conflict will grow over time. That being the case, and since human beings are eco-dependent, there can be no such transition in two stages. It will need to be accomplished in one movement, which rules out the hyper-technological renewables as the means. This is another of their socioeconomic limits. Resolving the energy crisis requires a change of system Climate protests in September of 2021. Photo: Ivan Radic. Source: Wikimedia Commons. If the hyper-technological renewables are not the solution to the energy crisis, what should we look to instead? What is proposed here is to rapidly develop renewable energies that are really renewable, and that are also emancipatory. Such really renewable and emancipatory energies (hereafter, RR+E energies), have the following characteristics: First, the RR+E energies are built with renewable energy and materials. The primary inspiration comes from plants, which use solar energy by means of photosynthesis, but also to draw the sap to the leaves. The technical working of plants is a marvel of nature. They grow and repair themselves, function at ambient temperature, and use materials that are abundant. They generate and maintain a patterning of life that virtually enables them to close the cycles of materials (the recycling rates of nitrogen, carbon, and phosphorous reach values in the order of between 99.5 and 99.8%[14]). Along these lines, the materials used in the RR+E energies are biomass, materials that are abundant and easily recyclable, and that can be obtained using renewable energies, as is the case with iron, and those which do not need to be purified, such as granite. Japanese water mill at Onden, xilography by Katsushika Hokusai (c. 1830). Source: Wikimedia Commons. Second, the RR+E energies perform direct work, not just generate electricity. That is, they pump water from below the ground, or mill grain. We need engineering developments that apply the knowledge generated over the last decades to give a qualitative leap to the renewable energies that were used in preindustrial times and in the first decades of the Industrial Revolution, such as hydraulic mills. Along these lines, human beings and animals will likely need to again become some of the key energy vectors, due to our multifunctionality. Third, the RR+E energies are harmoniously integrated into the functioning of ecosystems. What is more, they rely on the functioning of the ecosystems without which they cannot be developed. Their logic is therefore not of leaving areas free of these natural workings, nor of environmental impact statements, dynamics which are necessary for the hyper-technological renewables due to the fact that they do not function within the web of life. In this regard, an example of an RR+E energy is sail navigation, which uses sea winds, which are more regular than those on land, to travel. Hydraulic mills use the potential energy found in the flow of water down rivers, together with the concentration of water that is received at the bottom of the valley. Bioclimatic construction takes advantage of the sun, orientation, and currents for cooling and heating, making use of local materials. Permaculture and food forests are based in ecosystemic balances to feed (provide energy to) people and many other living beings. Image on the reverse of a commemorative dollar coin with a tribute to native American agriculture, representing ‘the three sisters’. Design by Norman Nemeth. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Fourth, the RR+E energies abide by the principle of honorable harvest[15]. This is a concept used by North American Indigenous populations to pursue a twin goal: On the one hand, to leave enough for the rest of living beings. That is, to not hoard all of the solar energy. Nor even a significant portion of that energy, since this is crucial for the functioning of ecosystems. On the other hand, honorable harvest seeks not only to leave enough for the rest, it also seeks to favor the growth of life, for example, by taking wood from the forests by means of a thinning that enables the regeneration of arboreal mass and other types of vegetation, thus enriching the ecosystem. An important implication of the principle of honorable harvest is that it will not be possible to maintain the guarantee of the current level of energy supplied, since large quantities of energy would not be hoarded. And this means that societies will have to prioritize which are the most important things for which to maintain a guaranteed energy supply (for example, a medical center or a community refrigerator), and which other uses of energy will have to adapt to natural rhythms. This is not to say that there can be no storage, for example, with wood or hydraulic dams, but that these energy stores will guarantee the supply better the less consumption there is. Finally, the RR+E energies are controlled by communities. Control over both the uses and the technic. This is the only way they can be technologies characteristic of genuinely democratic and just societies. This means simple, local technics involving nearby materials and energy sources. It is plain to see that the RR+E energies are not compatible with capitalism, which has hybridized itself with the fossil energies and uses the hyper-technological renewables as a crutch. And so an important conclusion is that there is no energy transition without political, economic, and cultural transition. The energy crisis cannot be resolved without changing the system. Conclusions Without a doubt, the hyper-technological renewables are preferable to fossil and nuclear energies, as their socio-environmental impacts are qualitatively and quantitatively lower. But these energies are tied to the functioning of capitalism. Further, we are experiencing the peaks of extraction of fossil fuels and various elements, together with the climate and ecosystem emergencies (with all their implications). This means that these energies do not even buy us time, especially if we take a holistic look (impacts on biodiversity, use of materials, coloniality, etc.). For this reason, we need to achieve radical changes in both social and energy systems at the same time. There are no shortcuts. This is very complicated, but the complication is not in moving toward really renewable energies, which will happen in any case, no matter how tortuous the road may become. The challenge lies in steering the transition towards really renewable energies that are, in addition, emancipatory (RR+E). The journey will be made while our current system is falling apart. When an old order breaks down, others emerge, and amid that chaos, new opportunities will open up for us if we have enough collective organizing capacity. We will face the difficulty of having no time to plan the transition. But there will also be cracks in the mechanisms of social control that we can take advantage of. In order for new worlds, driven by the RR+E energies, to emerge, it is essential to build concrete projects that set them in motion. Without such projects, the transition will simply be impossible. But for these projects to take off, it is necessary to promote social imaginaries that make the RR+E energies visible. There are already plenty of economic and political actors defending the hyper-technological renewables. The time has come to shift our discourses toward technics that will enable us to change the energy matrix while also achieving an ecosocial transition. Article, with notes
eh....i dunno about all that, if we had a never ending supply of energy (think French nuclear or x biz backed fusion), the energy business model would essentially cease to exist. The monopoly of oil companies that aim to suppress competitive sources and control supply makes the businesses viable. Think SW for instance. The internet made VHS/DVD/records/blockbuster/cds/etc... obsolete by allowing endless distribution of content. The aforementioned capacity of growth was destroyed by another entity making content ubiquitous. One can do this through gov backed industry (Venezuelan gas), or private enterprise (NFLX/GOOG/AMZN). As I understand it, these were the discussions w/energy when nuclear plants were first going up.