Something is starting to shift.
Millions of people are waking up to what the fossil fuel lobby has spent decades trying to hide: clean energy is cheaper, safer, and doesn't need a single bomb dropped to keep the lights on.
Headlines from various global papers.
ARAB NEWS:
The strategic significance of renewable energy.
DR MAJID RAFIZADEH
March 26, 2020 14:36
Bloomberg:
Iran War Is Pushing Consumers to Break Up With Fossil Fuels.
EVs, solar panels, induction stoves and heat pumps, now cheaper than ever, are becoming more attractive as the conflict upends oil and gas markets.
The Guardian, Explainer:
What does the Iran war mean for clean energy transition?
Here's what to know about how the current crisis could shape the expansion of renewable energy.
Clean energy may not require "bombs" right now-- but since all tech is based on finite resource pools scattered across the globe, that will not always be the case.
Infinite growth, required by capitalism, means resource conflict. Always. It is inescapable.
@kitkat_blue @greenpeace Growth is basically over. We hit the global ecological growth limits decades ago, it is only a matter of time until the world economy begins to collapse. A global economy of the current volume, measured in sheer material throughput, say t/s (metric tonnes per second) or something like that, can never become sustainable; we're not only using non-renewable resources at a rate that means we'll be running out of several key resources of the modern Industrial Age within decades at best, we're also using renewable resources like timber faster than they can actually grow back.
There is no way in hell the world economy is staying at its current size for very much longer, let alone grow very much bigger. Cloud computing, SAAS, "intelligent" assistants, huge computing centres, all of those things are just driven a bunch of investors in desperate need of a new market which is still growing because everything else is more or less saturated. But net growth is basically over, no matter what we do. Some fake growth might still happen, some weird financial trickery which makes the numbers go up, but in the real world where materials and energy are transformed and transported, there will be less and less of everything for some time, and while the shrinkage of the economy might eventually end, it won't grow again. Some sectors might grow for a while, like solar panels or heat pumps, but eventually those markets will become saturated and/or the economy as a whole won't be able to produce very much anymore due to global resource constraints.
The things that the model used in Limits to Growth predicted are basically already shaping our present. Every day we inch a little bit further towards the end of the Industrial Age. I don't expect us to need any kind of Butlerian Jihad because we will probably lose the ability to produce anything resembling a modern computer at some point within the next 200 years, and computers will become rare and expensive again long before that. We haven't just hit Peak Oil, we've hit Peak Everything. Our machine civilisation won't become much more complex before we will eventually fail to sustain the technological complexity, since we aren't well on our way to make our technologies sustainable yet. If we had our rough pathway towards sustainability figured out in the 1980s and had seriously begun to phase unsustainable processes, practices, behaviours, lifestyles, by 2000, we could have avoided the collapse of this civilisation, but that window is probably closed already.
The future will be radically different, it will have entirely different cultures, most of today's modern cultures will simply vanish along with the world in which they existed. Now is the time to fight for what kind of world the survivors will be able to build from the rubble, if there are any survivors at all, which is far from certain, given the ongoing Sixth Extinction.
Basically, we need to end Capitalism before it collapses all by itself because if we let it go on until the very end, it might damage the biosphere to the point where all large vertebrates vanish, and we are large vertebrates. The sooner the global economy collapses, the better.
@greenpeace I would say that oil doesn’t need any bombs. The bombs are due to a few humans, mostly psychopaths. Clean power is great but it does not solve our other power problem: the power-hungry psychopaths.
