When it comes to comes to climate change, energy and electricity are largely synonymous as outside of semantics like primary energy vs useful work we need to replace fossil energy with electricity, and that is not degrowth.
Although not as fast as I would like, I also would not call the growth of renewables in the last decade extremely slow, especially when the rate of that growth has been accelerating so quickly.
Fossil fuel energy is growing because globally energy demand has been growing even faster, and this has been driven first and foremost by more equitable access to energy. While poorer nations still have far lower per capita energy demand, they do have a lot of people who want the energy to protect themselves from the effects of climate change.
This growth in demand will however will level out as the poors get acess to sufficient energy, aided in no small part by the lower overall cost of green technologies, however I and most of the energy analysis I’ve seen don’t expect the buildout of renewables to stall with it but rather rapidly eat into fossil fuel generation.
Is this happening as fast as it could be if we all worked together, no. Is it still well on its way to happening, well it arguably already has for an increasing portion of the world. This is all in direct contrast to the articles thesis that green energy cannot ever actually replace fossil fuels.
When it comes to comes to climate change, energy and electricity are largely synonymous as outside of semantics like primary energy vs useful work
The article clearly understands that. Otherwise a lot of the numbers would be wrong.
While poorer nations still have far lower per capita energy demand, they do have a lot of people who want the energy to protect themselves from the effects of climate change.
The best way to do that is to reduce the impact of climate change, by staying well below 2C.
Fossil fuel energy is growing because globally energy demand has been growing even faster, and this has been driven first and foremost by more equitable access to energy.
No we need to provide everybody with a good quality of life. That is not the same as current Western levels of consumption. Just as an example. The green growth way would mean replacing fossil fueled cars with EVs. The degrowth way would be to rethink city planning to allow people to walk, cycle or use public transport in that order. That actually would lower electricity consumption as well, as refining oil also requires electricity. Also it reduces the number of cars, which need to be produce requiring energy. However it still should meet everybodies need of transport. Obviously it requires changes in road layout, some large houses need to be turned into multi family to increase density. Garages turned into tiny houses, attics being converted. That ends up reducing energy consumption for temperature control as well and less space means less junk being bought.
There are more ways to do that. Mainly around sharing things(liberaries, public transport), quality gurantees so products last longer and cutting material consumption at the top(private jets, mansions and so forth).
That also comes with advantages. With less consumption, less production is needed and that means less work. So things like a four day workweek or earlier retirment would come with that as well. We still have some awesome technology allowing us to work less after all. Also bullshit jobs are just waste destroying the planet, while making peolple suffer to keep up the facade of keeping everybody in a job.
And yes it means building up infrastructure in poor countries. Clearly there is a minimal level of consumption needed for a good life. However current consumption in the rich countries is well above it.
Yes, the article was generally pretty clear that energy is synonymous with electricity, which is why it’s core thesis that renewables fundamentally cannot replace fossil fuel energy is such a wild assertion.
Yes we need to provide a decent quality of life, and that can be done with far less than north amarican standards of energy consumption, but the massive increase in energy consumption we’re seeing in India and China arn’t due to western levels of decadence, but rather the proliferation of things like air conditioning in places with fatal heat waves and the like.
Indeed illustratively these places are known for their abundant, frequent, and highly used mass transit systems and walkable cities. Their energy demand is still growing at an significant pace, not shrinking. As given their sheer size these are the nations which have a far larger impact on climate change, these are the places where degrowth needs to have the largest impact.
It’s also worth noting that even if you just want to apply degrowth to US cities in the method you suggested, well we know from examples like the Netherlands that it can be done and car centric cities converted into a place with just half of all residents own a car. We also know from that example that it took fifty years of dedicated government support and heavy local support to get that far. Meanwhile even L.A can take a decade and millions of dollars to not build a bus lane.
To note the obvious, we don’t have 50 years to get the US to moderately decrease emissions, and when accounting for things like construction emissions the gains are pretty small when compared to say electrifying Amaricas railroads or steel foundries.
This is not to say that things like walkable cities and such arn’t really nice things we should be doing, just that like many degrowth ideas they are both too slow to implement, to marginal an impact, and two specific to certain areas to really move the needle on weather we hit 2C, 2.5C, or 3C.
This is all of course tangential to the topic we’re actually talking about, which is wether or not electrification and building renewables is pointless when it comes to fighting climate change because they are apparently incapable of ever replacing fossil fuels.
When it comes to comes to climate change, energy and electricity are largely synonymous as outside of semantics like primary energy vs useful work we need to replace fossil energy with electricity, and that is not degrowth.
Although not as fast as I would like, I also would not call the growth of renewables in the last decade extremely slow, especially when the rate of that growth has been accelerating so quickly.
Fossil fuel energy is growing because globally energy demand has been growing even faster, and this has been driven first and foremost by more equitable access to energy. While poorer nations still have far lower per capita energy demand, they do have a lot of people who want the energy to protect themselves from the effects of climate change.
This growth in demand will however will level out as the poors get acess to sufficient energy, aided in no small part by the lower overall cost of green technologies, however I and most of the energy analysis I’ve seen don’t expect the buildout of renewables to stall with it but rather rapidly eat into fossil fuel generation.
Is this happening as fast as it could be if we all worked together, no. Is it still well on its way to happening, well it arguably already has for an increasing portion of the world. This is all in direct contrast to the articles thesis that green energy cannot ever actually replace fossil fuels.
The article clearly understands that. Otherwise a lot of the numbers would be wrong.
The best way to do that is to reduce the impact of climate change, by staying well below 2C.
No we need to provide everybody with a good quality of life. That is not the same as current Western levels of consumption. Just as an example. The green growth way would mean replacing fossil fueled cars with EVs. The degrowth way would be to rethink city planning to allow people to walk, cycle or use public transport in that order. That actually would lower electricity consumption as well, as refining oil also requires electricity. Also it reduces the number of cars, which need to be produce requiring energy. However it still should meet everybodies need of transport. Obviously it requires changes in road layout, some large houses need to be turned into multi family to increase density. Garages turned into tiny houses, attics being converted. That ends up reducing energy consumption for temperature control as well and less space means less junk being bought.
There are more ways to do that. Mainly around sharing things(liberaries, public transport), quality gurantees so products last longer and cutting material consumption at the top(private jets, mansions and so forth).
That also comes with advantages. With less consumption, less production is needed and that means less work. So things like a four day workweek or earlier retirment would come with that as well. We still have some awesome technology allowing us to work less after all. Also bullshit jobs are just waste destroying the planet, while making peolple suffer to keep up the facade of keeping everybody in a job.
And yes it means building up infrastructure in poor countries. Clearly there is a minimal level of consumption needed for a good life. However current consumption in the rich countries is well above it.
Yes, the article was generally pretty clear that energy is synonymous with electricity, which is why it’s core thesis that renewables fundamentally cannot replace fossil fuel energy is such a wild assertion.
Yes we need to provide a decent quality of life, and that can be done with far less than north amarican standards of energy consumption, but the massive increase in energy consumption we’re seeing in India and China arn’t due to western levels of decadence, but rather the proliferation of things like air conditioning in places with fatal heat waves and the like.
Indeed illustratively these places are known for their abundant, frequent, and highly used mass transit systems and walkable cities. Their energy demand is still growing at an significant pace, not shrinking. As given their sheer size these are the nations which have a far larger impact on climate change, these are the places where degrowth needs to have the largest impact.
It’s also worth noting that even if you just want to apply degrowth to US cities in the method you suggested, well we know from examples like the Netherlands that it can be done and car centric cities converted into a place with just half of all residents own a car. We also know from that example that it took fifty years of dedicated government support and heavy local support to get that far. Meanwhile even L.A can take a decade and millions of dollars to not build a bus lane.
To note the obvious, we don’t have 50 years to get the US to moderately decrease emissions, and when accounting for things like construction emissions the gains are pretty small when compared to say electrifying Amaricas railroads or steel foundries.
This is not to say that things like walkable cities and such arn’t really nice things we should be doing, just that like many degrowth ideas they are both too slow to implement, to marginal an impact, and two specific to certain areas to really move the needle on weather we hit 2C, 2.5C, or 3C.
This is all of course tangential to the topic we’re actually talking about, which is wether or not electrification and building renewables is pointless when it comes to fighting climate change because they are apparently incapable of ever replacing fossil fuels.