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Renewables con - in depth analysis by Iain Davis

How not to decarbonise:
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Another superb analysis from Iain Davis (after his free to read pseudopandemic book) :

" SDG7: The Impossible Energy Transformation

The alleged purpose of the United Nation’s (UN’s) Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7) is to “ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.” The real impacts of its implementation couldn’t be more different. Renewable energy is neither renewable nor sustainable and the SDG7 energy transition is only making the problem of energy poverty worse…"

cheers

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Here’s what I suspect will really happen:

1: None of these castles-in-the-air ‘trading’ systems will survive for long, since they’re all strictly in the moonshine category of human imaginings. (aka ‘Sunbeams from cucumbers’…)

2: Wood will indeed become the main, true replacement fuel of the post-fossil-hydrocarbon-splurge era. But this will be much more like historical patterns of timber harvesting, from self-renewing forests; self-renewing because human activity on the Earth’s land-surface will reduce drastically, as Peak Hydrocarbons delivers the non-negotiable energy-availability-reduction of the post-peak backslope.

3: The enforced energy reductions of the post-peak backslope will be one of a range of factors which, acting together, will bring about the natural resolution of humankind’s current fossil-hydrocarbon-splurge-driven population overshoot (whatever we decide to do or not do about it). As less energy is available, less people will succeed in breeding children who successfully continue the propagation process; that is: our intergenerational replacement birth rate will go - just a little - negative. Not a terrible apocalyptic process, but a slow, scarcely noticeable decline.

4: Once our numbers are down again to something around what they were some centuries before the present, the very old process of powering all our - much reduced - individual heat-energy demands by firewood harvesting from self-managing and self-renewing forests will become feasible again: Haul it out of the forests from where it dies and falls, with muscle power, and cut and split it to usable shape likewise, all done almost exclusively with hand-tools.

5: Electricity, especially grid electricity, will become much more of a niche product: not universally available at all times, and driving much less of our daily life activities.

6: The whole AGW hysteria will become a historical curiosity; an intellectual fad, also useful as a gangster-cap racketeering tool (the whole ‘carbon credit’ bollocks), which passed its sell-by date, and eventually faded from fashion.

7: ‘Renewable’ electricity generators such as wind-mills and solar harvesters - of the modern techietechie kind - will prove to be a complete blind alley, which delivered net zero, or even net negative benefits, to human society whilst they were in fashion. Some windmills, watermills (also ultimately solar powered) and passive direct solar harvesters such as trombes, akin to earlier, simpler-tech generations of these technologies, will come back into use; but only as supplementaries to the main sources of day to day heat energy: wood, and directly absorbed solar irradiation (by such means as photosynthesis, natch!).

8: We shall become accustomed to the idea of just living on this one planet, as we were previously accustomed; and of cherishing it instead of trashing it, if we want to survive.

9: Once again, the life of the mind and of the imagination will become one of our main ways of using our time on Earth (and of travelling to the far reaches of the universe), they requiring so much less energy to do, yet producing such stupendous results (one of my always-favourite examples being the great, astonishing Ciaccona which ends Bach’s D Minor Partita for solo violin). Add this to lifestyles able to pull together a reasonable if modest supply of life’s basic necessities, and you have something long-term sustainable for human society; a global society finally reconciled to the real-world imperatives of the planet.

Notice, btw, that Alina’s instrument was perfected several centuries ago, by craftsmen working only with exquisite hand-tools, and with a literally transcendental grasp of their craft. I have an old luthier friend who still does exactly this right now… :slight_smile:

PS: 10: The Earth’s climate will continue to oscillate its mean temperature up and down cyclically, responding to long, long-term cosmological cycles in the Solar System’s eons-long circle-dance. We shall have warmer times, and considerably cooler times, again. And - as before - life (humankind included) will cope, as it always has.

And eventually the Sun will reach that part of its life-cycle where it expands and swallows the Solar System, and we immortal souls will depart at last from Mam Gaia’s planet, to continue our work of assisting Big Mind’s Great Purpose (of surviving entropy and growing towards love) on some other holodeck…

(Just call me The Prophet Elijah, Mark 2! :smile: )