When people of Alex Boyd’s stature speak of energy transition without promoting degrowth, they fail to acknowledge the urgency of the climate crisis. The more we talk about renewables only, the more we covertly support the mindset of continuing consumption and waste, and thus instead of solving the problem, merely prolong it.
“A faster transition to a more sustainable approach” is just not enough. It is industrial talk, and fails to consider a totally sustainable approach. This is not vision, but a stop-gap.
The evidence is clear: infrastructure and technology cannot move fast enough. What’s more, “renewables” like solar panels, windmills, and batteries have short lives, two or three decades at best; on our present scale of consumption they would need more minerals and other resources than the environment and the ripped-off Global South can afford, even for the first round, let alone any replacements; and their manufacture depends on high temperatures and heavy machinery that require fossil fuels anyway.
Fortunately, at least half of all jobs are wasteful or toxic, so abandoning them we could be twice as well off, and buy time to develop other improvements, like improving energy efficiency, and developing renewables that are genuinely renewable, and farming that is really regenerative.
Best of all, doing less simply costs less. “Hefty investments” are not required for simple contraction; not back to the stone age, as a recent letter-writer wrote in a flurry, but to the sort of leisurely, mature, technologically advanced society that John Maynard Keynes dreamed of 90 years ago.
In addressing energy, you have to address economics, and how to share money so that people can do good work instead of stupid jobs.
Gavin Maclean
