The Fairy Tale Is Over

Those following the more pragmatic conversations on the topic know that, if there ever was a chance of keeping this planet habitable, it wouldn’t be through solar panels and electric vehicles. These technologies would come at an incredible carbon and ecological cost, if they were ever to be deployed at the massive scale required to power 8 billion energy-hungry humans. The utopian myth of offsetting emissions while we continue to ramp up our energy use has stood the test of time, but only as a fairy tale. It was an irresistible, incredibly attractive fairy tale which would have allowed us to have our cake, and eat it as well. But it has miserably and spectacularly failed, as one after the other, renewable energy projects were only used as energy top-ups used to service an escalating energy demand, rather than replacing fossil fuel-generated energy. As a result of unchecked economic growth, population growth and toxic “green growth” of renewable technologies, carbon emissions as well as energy use continue to climb. In addition, renewable technologies themselves have come and continue to come at a tremendous carbon emissions and ecological destruction cost, simply as a result of their manufacturing and installation process. Scaling them up further will not solve the problem, in much the same way that adding more lanes to a highway does nothing to solve traffic issues in the long term. The math has been done, and the climbing emissions are there to prove it. The Green New Deal has already failed. The solution lies somewhere else..

George is an author, researcher, chemist, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons or enjoy his books