Ugo Bardi about the future of Europe. And some comments about his optimistic views on renewable energy.
I’m part of a clutch of Peak Oil proponents Downunadahere who are avid readers of the Archdruid John Michael Greer. Your mate Simon S. is part of our mob. (“Mob” in the Australian slang sense of “group,” not “mafia.”) Except these people are so Green that they’re “brown,” as in they sneer at the thought of 100% reliance on renewables. One of the guys, who runs his home on solar panels, completely off the electric grid (and harvests rain for his house/farm water, too) is gob-smacked by plans to phase out the massive dirty coal plant that powers this city of 5 million. He, and Simon, and the others, don’t “love” coal, and they have redirected their lives into ways that ready themselves for the Energy Descent. But they know that won’t work for the masses.
Sadly, as the world goes over Seneca’s Cliff, a lot of humans won’t be walking around at the bottom of it when events level off. It’s going to be awful on the way down. The amount of suffering will be the worst thing since when the asteroid hit 66 million years ago to wipe out the dinosaurs. (Which I still believe did it, even if you’re in the vulcanism camp. Could it be BOTH, as in the asteroid disrupted the Earth’s rotation somewhat or did something else to alter plate tectonics that caused a magma hellmouth to open? But that’s another topic...)
The ones who make it through the Dieoff WILL have a peasant lifestyle. Hopefully with enough retained scientific knowledge about how the universe works that they’ll be smarter than Roman, Indian and Chinese peasants were in the year 0 A.D. It won’t necessarily be a bad life. No one in the Year Zero was saying “I might as well just kill myself because I can’t fly in an airplane to the other side of the world and watch funny cat videos on my handheld brain device.” They didn’t even know such things could exist! Perhaps, in the New World of the Afterscape, there will be new forms of community and satisfaction that we Technosapiens cannot imagine now. Maybe we will own nothing, but our neighbourhood collective will share everything, and we will be happy. The Cliff is coming, and renewables might “bend the curve” of it a bit. But as the econo-speak boys put it, I’m going “long peasant.” "
"Let's start by this simple fact: renewables produce electricity. Electricity only accounts for about 20% energy consumption. Even if you get a 100% renewable electricity grid (impossible btw) you are still left with 80% fossil fuel energy usage, most of which can not be electrified. We won't even get into the peak of all resources and metals needed to build renewables or the fact that renewables are ONLY cheap whilst oil is cheap, because they depend on oil throughout its lifetime."
My final comment: Let's look at the issue from a higher perspective, with a holistic glance, let's say with the eyes of an alien species visiting the planet for the first time. And then the question arises: "Is civilization really ultimately desirable? Whatever we power it with? Is it desirable, this enormous megamachine that we call civilization, spewing poison, poisoning and killing everything in its way? This megamachine that is so horrible that it even changes the climate, making climate too hot for us and the planet? Those who tout that renewable energy will save us, haven't really thought this through. I mean, if we really would be able to power civilization with 100% renewable energy, wouldn't it just make us continue the poisoning and killing of life, driving us for example to cut down all our forests in the world, which we are about to do right now? Wouldn't it just make us fish out the oceans, further kill all the microlife in the agricultural soil, wouldn't it make us overpopulate the earth, make us drain the aquifiers, make us produce more plastics and crap that pollute the oceans and the rivers and all the rest of nature.
All in all, would not the continuation of civilization with the help of 100 % renewable energy just make us further overshoot the earth's carrying capacity, and drive us to collapse and extinction anyway?
Wouldn't the transition of all technology to renewable energy need all the remaining fossil fuels to be done and completed, however cheap the renewables are? Observe that such a replacement takes decades and require enormous amounts of energy. We have never before tried such a replacement of a higher quality energy source with a lower energy source.
Bardi writes in a comment that renewable energy is already cheaper than fossil fuels. But isn't it cheaper only because of subsidies? And is it really cheaper than conventional oil was twenty years ago? It might be cheaper than fracking oil and heavy oil from offshore oil production, but not cheaper than conventional oil from current Saudi oil fields.
Maybe civilization was not such a good idea, that it would be better if we lived as wild indigenous people.
I also recommend Alice Friedemanns book "Life after Fossil Fuels. A reality check on alternative energy" (2021) which I read recently. It gives the alternative energy salvation a death knell.
