This is relevant to the energy crisis now facing Europe as a result of THEIR sabotage of the NS pipelines, primarily, as well as to questions about climate change and action to reduce emissions. It’s an article by Yasha Levine, from his blog I think, forwarded by a friend. I’ll copy from his email::
Scary German aristocrat lady for a green transition.
The background to all this talk about “securing access” to mining and “working” with “new partners” is that the EU is basically dependent on China for most of the precious metals it needs for its fabled “green” transition. But now, after having been burned by its reliance on this cheap Russian gas, many in Europe have been freaking out about China. Here is yet another country that Europe sees as an adversary and it also controls access to vital resources that Europe needs for its next-gen energy plans. So there’s bee a scramble to diversify Europe’s reliance on these dirty and destructive mining operations and that’s what a big part of von der Leyen’s speech is about: getting its own supply from other places and showing China the finger.
All this imperialist jockeying for rare metals is great on its own. But what interests me even more here is the bigger politics of tech and “green” energy. If you spend even a bit of time looking in the issue, it won’t take long to realize that all this talk about “net zero” and “green” is just a whitewash continued growth and a new resource extraction race.
No one is talking about changing society or using less energy or even just deaccelerating growth a bit. All people want to do is switch out one energy input and replace it with another — pretending we can keep running things as they were and expanding forever.
There’s nothing net zero about this approach because this new “green“ energy has to be built from scratch and requires constant inputs of metals and minerals — resources that have to be mined and processed shipped around the world using fossil fuels. All this comes with huge energy and environmental costs—not just in terms of green house gasses and other types of industrial pollutants, but the continued degradation and destruction of the natural environment.
Christopher Ketcham just published a great essay about our current obsession with restricting our environmental concerns to greenhouse gasses — while focusing on “net zero” growth and the developing “green” tech, the kind that I guess Ursula von der Leyen has in mind. As he correctly points out, this hyper-focus is basically ecocide denial. It’s also an attempt to keep our extractive, consumerist status quo alive:
When it comes to effects on wildlife, climate change is more like a mule, slow and plodding. Yes, a warmed atmosphere is projected to be a significant factor in the extinction crisis in future decades, but what’s destroying species today is habitat fragmentation and loss, overhunting and overexploitation, agricultural expansion, pollution, and industrial development. It isn’t climate change that caused a 69 percent loss in total wildlife populations between 1970 and 2018, according to a World Wildlife Fund study published this year. The cause is too many people demanding too much from ecosystems, or human overshoot of the biophysical carrying capacity of the Earth. Overshoot is a product of both excessive numbers and rising affluence. Access to the things that create what we call quality of life, like indoor lighting and temperature controls, especially air conditioning; more diverse dietary choices, especially meat; and greater access to transportation, especially air travel — all signs of rising affluence, all delightful if you are a human, yet all demand more energy and material inputs that involve scouring and denuding more wildlands and animal habitat to feed, clothe, house, and energize burgeoning humanity…
“There is at present no plan, in any country, anywhere, on a global or national scale, to address extinctions, biodiversity crash, and habitat loss. The dismal reality is that with a green build-out, we will be saving not the complex web of life on Earth but the particular way of life of one privileged domineering species that depends for its success on a nature-ravaging network of technological marvels.
So all this talk of net zero is just cover for not really changing anything at all — continued militarism and new kind of green colonialism: a rush to secure access to precious resources while denying access to your enemies. Technology will save us once again. A great green future lies ahead!
—Yasha Levine