The Renewable Energy Transition Is Failing
Richard Heinberg
Senior Fellow at Post Carbon Institute | Author of Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival, Our Renewable Future, The End of Growth, and others
Renewable energy isn’t replacing fossil fuel energy—it’s adding to it.
Despite all the renewable energy investments and installations, actual global greenhouse gas emissions keep increasing. That’s largely due to economic growth: While renewable energy supplies have expanded in recent years, world energy usage has?ballooned even more —with the difference being supplied by fossil fuels. The more the world economy grows, the harder it is for additions of renewable energy to turn the tide by actually replacing energy from fossil fuels, rather than just adding to it.
The notion of voluntarily reining in economic growth in order to minimize climate change and make it easier to replace fossil fuels is political anathema not just in the rich countries, whose people have gotten used to consuming at extraordinarily high rates, but even more so in poorer countries, which have been promised the opportunity to “develop.”
After all, it is the rich countries that have been responsible for the great majority of past emissions (which are driving climate change presently); indeed, these countries got rich largely by the industrial activity of which carbon emissions were a byproduct. Now it is the world’s poorest nations that are experiencing the?brunt of the impacts ?of climate change caused by the world’s richest. It’s neither sustainable nor just to perpetuate the exploitation of land, resources, and labor in the less industrialized countries, as well as historically exploited communities in the rich countries, to maintain both the lifestyles and expectations of further growth of the wealthy minority.
From the perspective of people in less-industrialized nations, it’s natural to want to consume more, which only seems fair. But that translates to more global economic growth, and a harder time replacing fossil fuels with renewables globally. China is the exemplar of this conundrum: Over the past three decades, the world’s most populous nation lifted hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty, but in the process became the world’s biggest producer and consumer of coal.
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Project Origination Platform in Renewable Energy | Executive Director
9 个月Debunk 1
Enabling Equitable R.O.I. for All Parties in the Energy Sector.
9 个月Richard Heinberg, a mutual LI connection exposed me to your thought, and after reading it, I thought I am not sure how familiar you are with the tech known as, Transactive Energy? And TE's value in relation to the energy transition. TE is a concept America's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) lab was mandated to develop following the passage of the EISA of `07 (Energy Independce and Security Act). There is now (since 2012) an open-standard framework to guide the implementation (of anyone) who would like to deploy the solution. Happy to disucss the benefits, my email: [email protected].
Independent Renewables & Environment Professional
9 个月All efforts will be for naught if we lose, or significantly shrink, the Amazon rain forest basin. I believe it might be possible to “rehydrate” the basin using many hundreds of atmospheric vortex engines, spread all over the margins of the basin, optimized as ventilators. Even if the cost would be several trillions of dollars. By increasing the cloud cover, much of the incident heat can be rejected back into space before it gets there, providing increased rainfall. Jerry Toman
Culture, Ecology, and Sustainability at New College of California
9 个月That’s why if we #AbolishTheStockMarket and create a new financial system like the Gaia Ptoject (www.karenumland.com) we might stand a chance