Well, it's been way too long since I've posted here, for a few reasons… For one, I've been pretty preoccupied advocating for, then starting, a new high school dance program (another story for another blog); for another, I've been meaning to take up and expand on that third precept (not buying any new stuff you don't absolutely need) but felt I needed to do a lot more research first to be able to put my thoughts in any authoritative order — and got stuck with that same time crunch (but I have been reading some Herman Daly and will post some tidbits soon).
But — it would feel negligent not to take some notice of the big, highly-touted climate demonstrations over the weekend… Unfortunately, my main impression is disappointment over the rhetoric I've heard leading up to the rally. Every time I hear some activist interviewed, I invariably hear plenty of happy talk about how "we already have the technology" to run the economy "sustainably"… It seems that no one, from Bill McKibben on down, is ready to be the grownup and tell us the real truth — that we can't hope to save a habitable planet without radically changing the way we live. We are so obsessed with finding a magic techno-fix for the climate crisis — one that will let us continue to self-identify as "consumers" — that even our environmental leaders can't bring themselves to talk about just plain using less (a lot less). Yes, renewables are important — but only when coupled with a serious program of energy austerity; otherwise, all those renewables only make it possible for everything to keep growing even more.
I keep hearing mention of Germany as an example of scaling up solar power — how on some days, Germany gets as much as 75% of its electricity from solar! What is not mentioned so much is that Germany's GHG emissions have kept right on increasing over the past few years, even while it was adding all that solar capacity. Others have pointed to Spain as a leader in wind power — while glossing over the fact that Spain's GHG emissions keep rising as well, right along with all those wind turbines. Not long ago, the San Francisco Chronicle printed an article about the giant Ivanpah solar plant in the Mojave desert: not only does the facility incinerate every bird, butterfly, or other flying creature who strays into the path of its beams; but a UC Riverside study found that the emissions savings from the plant are minimal at best, and may even be negative because of the lost carbon sinks in the pristine desert habitat that was destroyed to make room for all those mirrors. Yet we keep building (and subsidizing) these monstrosities because we just can't face the fact that we cannot keep growing indefinitely on a finite planet. A "green" energy source that will allow us to keep using all the energy we want (rather than what we actually need) without harming the environment is as fictional as a free lunch or a perpetual motion machine.
The one activist I have recently heard mention the necessity of austerity is Naomi Klein: in her recent book, she writes about how much time (and, just by the way, how much GHG emissions) it would take to scale up to replace our fossil fuel-based economy with one based on renewables. And she says that the only thing that "doesn't require a technological and infrastructure revolution is to consume less, right away." Yet so many seem so reluctant to think about that part of the equation… Making the fossil fuel companies the only villain in this lets us all off the hook.
