First, Thank you for providing this place to discuss reducing our energy use. Your idea to look at the issue at 3 levels makes sense to me. So does scaling back fossil-dependent activities. Alas, alas, manufacturing, operating and discarding solar PVs, industrial wind, battery storage...and EVs are all energy-intensive, mining-intensive, water-intensive, toxic-waste emitting processes. So, I don't see how re-configuring our economy for intermittency would help. In 2018, when I met Soumya Dutta (co-founder of India Climate Justice), he told me that if Westerners reduced our consumption by 75%, the planet could restore its balance. I wondered what on Earth I could do to move toward that. What came to me was to reduce my consumption by 3% per month. After six years of this effort, I notice that I need Many others to join in for this project to have any significant effect. Implementing this goal systemically would be Wonderful. Meanwhile, elections reveal that people actually want to maintain production and consumption as we've had for the last 100 years. So, now we get to wonder: How/can we make reducing production and consumption Attractive, Desirable??
H Katie thanks! - yes i really want to write more about that, i wanted to in this post, but it was too long already:/ in my view we all have to look at this problem at 3 levels - at a personal level, community level and at a systemic level - we need to work on all three simultaneously.
And at all 3 levels we need to look at reducing all our energy use where possiible - not just fossil energy use - as we will not have enough renewable energy meet all our current needs.
We also need to scale back activities and demand that are unavoidably fossil dependent - that means aviation, construction, use of petro-chemicals and plastics, and we'll have to replace industrial fossil based farming with agro-ecological methods.
it would help enrmously if we reconfigured our economy to be optimised for intermittency . i.e. we only do energy intensive things when we have plenty of reneable energy available.
obviously much if this can only be done at a systemic level - but if individuals and communities start making moves towards these kind of future, it moves our collective imaginations further towards what might be possible..... hopefully....
but it's going to be really tough, it will change everything - and we have to accept that we simply don't have all the answers yet ....
First, Thank you for providing this place to discuss reducing our energy use. Your idea to look at the issue at 3 levels makes sense to me. So does scaling back fossil-dependent activities. Alas, alas, manufacturing, operating and discarding solar PVs, industrial wind, battery storage...and EVs are all energy-intensive, mining-intensive, water-intensive, toxic-waste emitting processes. So, I don't see how re-configuring our economy for intermittency would help. In 2018, when I met Soumya Dutta (co-founder of India Climate Justice), he told me that if Westerners reduced our consumption by 75%, the planet could restore its balance. I wondered what on Earth I could do to move toward that. What came to me was to reduce my consumption by 3% per month. After six years of this effort, I notice that I need Many others to join in for this project to have any significant effect. Implementing this goal systemically would be Wonderful. Meanwhile, elections reveal that people actually want to maintain production and consumption as we've had for the last 100 years. So, now we get to wonder: How/can we make reducing production and consumption Attractive, Desirable??
Thank you for writing this, Allistair. Could you propose steps we might take to decrease our dependence on fossil fuels??
H Katie thanks! - yes i really want to write more about that, i wanted to in this post, but it was too long already:/ in my view we all have to look at this problem at 3 levels - at a personal level, community level and at a systemic level - we need to work on all three simultaneously.
And at all 3 levels we need to look at reducing all our energy use where possiible - not just fossil energy use - as we will not have enough renewable energy meet all our current needs.
We also need to scale back activities and demand that are unavoidably fossil dependent - that means aviation, construction, use of petro-chemicals and plastics, and we'll have to replace industrial fossil based farming with agro-ecological methods.
it would help enrmously if we reconfigured our economy to be optimised for intermittency . i.e. we only do energy intensive things when we have plenty of reneable energy available.
obviously much if this can only be done at a systemic level - but if individuals and communities start making moves towards these kind of future, it moves our collective imaginations further towards what might be possible..... hopefully....
but it's going to be really tough, it will change everything - and we have to accept that we simply don't have all the answers yet ....