Hi folks, I have some bad news and some good news.
The bad news is that renewable energy can't power the industrial consumer capitalist system built by fossil fuels.
The good news is that it can power an eco-socialist society.
This should not surprise us. Capitalism and fossil fuels came up together. Industrial capitalism relies on the exploitation of cheap fossil fuels as much as it relies on the exploitation of labour.
We can see this in the steam engine which ran not just on coal but on the blood and sweat of miners digging the coal. The same goes for the factories powered by fossil fuels and operated by human beings.
One of the reasons multinational corporations can exploit the cheap labor of workers in developing countries is because cheap fossil fuels keep the cost of transporting goods from these places relatively low.
So it makes sense that the fall of industrial capitalism should coincide with the dwindling of fossil fuels and the rise of renewable energy should correspond with a transition to socialism.
But I might have gotten ahead of myself. I think I need to make the case that renewables simply can't provide us the amount of energy that we have become accustomed to accessing on demand with cheap fossil fuels. Then I will move on to explain how we can reduce our energy consumption and still retain a lot of the advantages of our modern world.
In order to do this I need to quickly explain a pair of concepts that I don't hear people talk about enough: ERoEI—that's energy return on energy invested—and net energy.
ERoEI refers to the amount of energy it takes to get energy from a given source.
The best way to express this is with a net energy ratio. For example, conventional oil has a net energy ratio of about 25 to one. This means that for every unit of energy you put into extracting oil you get 25 units in return.
Coal has a net energy ratio that starts at about 40 to 1 and can go as high as 80 to 1 depending on different variables—that's why, despite it being incredibly dirty, we use it to run so many power plants. It has the highest ERoEI by far.
By comparison, photovoltaic solar panels—the technology everyone gets excited about—has a ratio somewhere between 10 and 20 to 1. At around 30 to 1, industrial wind operations have the best net energy ratio of any renewable.
I have taken these numbers from the Post Carbon Institute. ERoEI assessments can vary greatly depending on the source. People have vested interests in promoting or condemning different technologies, so your analysis can always overlook factors if you want to make a technology seem like it gives a higher return and pile them on; if you want to make a technology look like it has a lower net energy ratio.
I have chosen a set of numbers I think sits in the middle, so please don't quibble about these precise numbers in the comments.
Anyway, the fact that coal can generate four to ten times the amount of energy of solar means that we can't get as much energy from it. Yes, you could build more panels, etc., but you will always get less of a return, which means that more of the energy you get out of solar has to go back into building and maintaining it instead of using the energy to expand the economy.
If we move away from an economy that prioritizes growth, that is not a problem—but that economy is not one we have now. More on that in a bit.
In addition to a lower ERoEI, renewables have another problem that makes them unable to do for us what we do with fossil fuels: intermittency.
The sun does not shine all the time, nor does the wind blow constantly, so we need a way to deal with this. We can store the energy, but current batteries rely on finite materials, which puts a major barrier to us running our current system on renewables.
There's a lot of R&D going into other storage methods, some that don't use chemical batteries but instead store energy as heat or kinetic energy. Of course, this requires more energy and resources to build, further lowering the ERoEI.
Some people will use the intermittency issue to argue that we need to build more nuclear fission plants if we want to lessen the effects of climate change. I made an entire video on this topic so I won't go in depth on that here. But suffice to say that nuclear fission is incredibly expensive and impractical.
The externalities get overlooked by its proponents, and a new fleet of reactors would burn through the available fuel before the plants were ready to be decommissioned.
Plans for better, so-called next-generation designs are vaporware and have not been proven to work. Some of them might never work or make economic or logistical sense if they do—and we should not trust promises to the contrary from an industry that once promised energy too cheap to meter but now can't complete plants because they go as much as twelve hundred percent over budget.
The only thing that could allow us to keep using as much energy as we have become accustomed to is fusion.
The long-running joke with fusion is that it is 20 years in the future and has been for the last 50 years.
About five years ago Lockheed Martin promised they would have a working fusion reactor in five years. Of course, the company responsible for the flying deathtrap that is the F-35 did not deliver this, but I guess that counts as progress.
Fusion energy is now perpetually five years away instead of 20.
Of course, this only considers electricity generation and does not include things like heating or transportation.
At our current level of energy consumption, we would have a hard time running the electrical grid on renewables, but running a grid that also powers electric vehicles will require even more renewables.
So, given the intermittency and lower ERoEI of renewables, we simply need to use less energy.
For anyone looking to preserve our current way of life, this sounds like a disaster, but for the people who realize the problems with our current way of life, this presents an opportunity.
The U.S. has about 5% of the world's population but uses about one-third of the world's energy and about one-quarter of its resources.
There is no way we can bring the rest of the world up to this level of consumption—it is mathematically impossible.
We need to reduce ours.
If the left in the U.S. is serious about redistributing this planet's wealth, we need to come to terms with this.
At the same time, we need to recognize that for all our extra consumption, we don't get a better quality of life and in fact have a lower quality of life than people in Europe, where they use a bit less energy.
Many people will point out that a handful of companies use most of the energy and resources.
True, but we consume what they produce one way or another, whether directly or indirectly.
The exception to this is military hardware, which I will circle back to later.
Now, don't mistake what I'm saying—I don't think individual consumption choices will do enough.
Many of them I do because they are more enjoyable, others because I think I should get used to doing without unnecessary things that might not exist in the near future.
For instance, my family belongs to a really awesome community-sponsored agriculture project where I get amazing local fruits and vegetables. A big shout out to Poughkeepsie Farm Project.
We also eat vegetarian many days of the week and try to eat local, organic, in-season produce. When we do eat meat, it is non-factory farmed, often local.
This all cuts down on our carbon footprint. We are fortunate that we can afford this, but I realize there are all sorts of ways the system does not afford others the same privilege, which is why I don't think we should chastise someone for driving an SUV when there is no public transportation available and their employer expects them at work in the worst weather conditions.
Instead, we must change the system that forces us into this profligate consumption and realize that in doing so, we will have to give up some things we have become accustomed to.
This might seem like it requires sacrifice, and in some ways it will, because even positive changes can cause discomfort and anxiety. But in most ways, we will find ourselves living in a better world if we can manage this transition.
Still, this does require a recognition that we can't just swap out coal plants for solar panels and gas-powered vehicles for electric ones and expect everything to work out just fine.
Fossil fuels have normalized a level of energy consumption that is simply not possible with any other means we have. The long-standing problem of overproduction in capitalism results at least partially from the cheap fossil fuels that power its technologies, along with other characteristics of the system which demand constant growth.
This has created entire industries to convince people to consume more—we call this growth, but much of it is just waste that we need to cut.
Of all the ways to express what I'm getting at, the best comes from the world of science fiction. In Ursula K. Le Guin's masterpiece The Dispossessed, the main character describes much of the activity that takes place in capitalist societies as excrement. Unlike actual excrement, which you can compost to create rich soil for growing food, this concept represents pure waste in every way.
Though many people take some kind of pride or interest in their work, many work just to pay their bills and are at best indifferent to what they produce. A lot of people purchase goods and services only because someone in marketing, advertising, or sales—who needs a paycheck as well—sold it to them, or they purchase them because the demands the system places on them require it.
Work got you strapped for time? Try this new product!
A lot of these products end up in the landfill within a few months of manufacture. The packaging certainly does this.
This system creates waste not just through manufactured desires but through planned obsolescence and contrived durability—purposely shoddy products that require you to get a new one when it wears out unnecessarily quickly.
People commute to and from shit jobs that serve little purpose other than a paycheck. This wastes energy, resources, and lives while people spend most of their day engaged in ultimately pointless activities.
But even this is not enough—the system's requirement for growth demands we sell more stuff, faster and bigger. Hence the obsession with products that promise speed and convenience.
To put it more succinctly, capitalism turns everything to shit.
If we want to reduce our consumption and still keep the benefits of our technologies, eliminating the waste from the system seems like an obvious solution. We need to cut the shit out.
How do we do this? We simultaneously decarbonize and decommodify our economy as much as possible. This would require both a Green New Deal and a robust social democracy.
To start, we must decarbonize—to make our energy come from cleaner renewable sources. We must decommodify so the basic things needed to live don't cost anything and people don't need to contribute to the cycle of waste that keeps the old economy going.
So let's start with decommodifying.
The point of decommodifying is to give people a basic standard of living so they don't need to engage in economic activity for the sake of economic activity.
If people don't need to worry about housing, healthcare, food, childcare, education, and transportation, they don't need to drive back and forth to work creating or selling things nobody really needs that go right into a landfill.
A universal basic income, on top of Medicare for All, social housing, free childcare, free public education, universal food stamps, and free public transportation could provide this.
It would save tons of resources and energy while giving everyone a basic standard of living. It would also free up people's time to work in the new ventures made possible by a Green New Deal.
Let's face it, a lot of jobs that people do today don't create anything useful. A lot of jobs, especially white-collar ones—though not exclusively—are make-work gigs of one form or another.
David Graeber has talked about this in his articles and book on bullshit jobs. Other jobs, like many of those in finance, sales, and marketing, have a purpose under our current system but don't actually create anything we need.
Because of our technology and system of production, the things we actually need don't require that many labor hours to produce. So the idea that everyone should work a 40-hour week in order to prove they are worthy of the basic necessities of life just doesn't make sense—especially when most of these jobs don't make the food, consumer goods, and housing we all need.
Sales, advertising, and marketing only exist to move the overproduced commodities capitalism creates. People do these jobs because they need to eat and companies need to sell their goods and services, but in a world where we don't need to justify our existence with a paycheck, they could go away tomorrow and nobody would miss them. Everyone would be better off if these jobs did not exist.
This would free people up to work in the new green economy, which will require more human labour than industrial consumer capitalism does. And when I say labour I don't mean driving around to sales meetings or sitting on the computer killing time between actual work, or creating a piece of software that will fry everyone's brain when they become addicted to it.
I mean the kind of physical labor that middle-class people like myself get discouraged from doing as if it is beneath them.
After cutting out the energy wasted manufacturing products to satiate consumer capitalism's desire for continuous growth, and the energy wasted running the offices where the white-collar corporate bureaucrats and salespeople work, and the energy wasted commuting to and from these jobs, we still have some places we can make cuts.
The biggest one: the United States military. The United States military is the single largest polluter in the world. If we want to reduce our carbon footprint and save energy, we need to get rid of our empire and scale down our military to a tiny fraction of its current size.
Considering much of this military functions to make sure the oil keeps flowing, that fits nicely with some of the other changes we need to make. We can put the money we save towards making a green economy, along with higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans. We can fund a Green New Deal.
What will this Green New Deal look like? It will no doubt have many components to it, but here are a few areas I find important:
Of course, there will be subsidies for renewable electricity generation—in the case of private homes getting outfitted with solar panels and wind turbines. This should happen at the point of sale instead of as a write-off, which only benefits the people who have the cash to lay out in the first place.
But there are a few key areas we need to fix. The first is not as sexy as solar panels or high-speed rail but literally hits very close to home: home heating, cooling, and efficiency.
Existing buildings should get retrofitted with technologies to make them more efficient where possible, and new buildings should get built for efficiency from the ground up by using principles developed by the appropriate technology movement—something like these Earthship projects you see on the screen right now.
If your home has insufficient insulation in the walls or poorly insulated windows, you should be able to get this taken care of regardless of your ability to pay for it.
Besides making homes less drafty, this will reduce heating costs, spew less carbon, and put people to work across the country.
We should also subsidize alternative home heating methods. Geothermal has come down considerably in price, but we should fully subsidize it as it can provide not only much more efficient heating in the winter but also cooling in the summer.
We should also promote passive solar heating of homes and water in the Sunbelt. Passive solar can provide all of a home's hot water needs, while elsewhere it can contribute a large portion.
I might have to do an entire video talking about these kinds of low-tech options, but you get the idea—we need to start working with the earth in more subtle ways.
Next, we need to change our food system. Modern agriculture uses way too many fossil fuels. A recent article in Current Affairs goes into great detail on this—even organic produce relies on fossil fuel for transportation, packaging, and such.
The article points out over 30 points at which a package of organic arugula needs fossil fuels to get it to your refrigerator.
We can fix a lot of this by producing more food locally and with less packaging and machines. In order to do this, we will need to subsidize more community agriculture programs instead of subsidizing fossil fuel-intensive monocultures and agribusiness.
This also means that more people will need to work growing food. This work can be hard—getting dirty. Working in a hospital is a lot harder than sitting in a climate-controlled office, but it can be a lot more rewarding and it does get you outside and connect you with nature at the same time.
If we organize it properly, there are enough people available that it won't be drudgery.
Finally comes transportation. This might be the most radical thing I'm proposing: basically, cars need to all but go away. We need high-speed rail, commuter rail, light rail, and streetcars wherever possible.
The remaining cars and trucks should be for moving large objects and people with mobility issues. Walking, bikes, and horse-drawn vehicles should replace cars for trips between light rail stops and more out-of-the-way destinations. But perhaps in the interim, buses and taxis can pick up the slack.
This will require us to restructure our communities, which are built around cars. But given this infrastructure requires so much to maintain but gives so little back, this is a good thing. Not to mention the fact that driving is a stressful, dangerous activity, and if I could get around another way I would.
Short of some kind of breakthrough, air travel will have to go away too. But I think it is worth pointing out how much ultra-fast travel exists to meet the demands of capitalism. If you get sufficient time off, then a leisurely train ride or boat ride is not a problem. The same dynamic applies to business trips.
That about rounds out what I wanted to say on this topic, at least without making this video way too long. I hope it will become a jumping-off point to talk in more depth about some of these things.
I have wanted to make this video for a while because I feel we need a vision for the future that provides hope but also addresses the real challenges we face—even as we acknowledge some of the things we are clinging to so tightly we should discard.
I put it off for so long because there are so many facets to it, but I realize I just need to make it and build on it in later videos.
You will probably find my proposals unrealistic, but as things get more dire, not making these kinds of changes seems way more detached from an understanding of the reality we face.
I want to avert the worst of climate change and keep the information networks, life-saving medicines, and labor-saving devices our civilization has produced. But if we spend all our energy producing and selling trash, that will not happen.
We need structural changes to accomplish this, but we also need to drop our addiction to the consumer habits capitalism sells us.
Yes, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but this understanding should not be used to justify whatever unnecessary and/or disposable product the system is currently trying to sell us—as is too often the case when I hear this phrase uttered.
If there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, why not consume less? Yes, marketers try to redirect this impulse, getting us to buy new greenwashed products instead of just not consuming. This requires a vigilance that most people don't have the time for, but I can't imagine an eco-socialist society that has the number of meaningless consumer choices we currently have.
If someone says there is no ethical consumption under capitalism as a way to call for systemic change, I'm all in. But if someone says it as a way to keep using some product they did not want until a marketing department convinced them they had to have it—well, I think we on the Left need a bit more discipline.
I find this topic difficult to talk about because it is tough to sell people on the idea that consuming less can actually give them more.
Earlier I mentioned my CSA and trying to eat local organic in-season vegetables. I don't see this as depriving myself of tomatoes in winter. Compared to a tomato that comes from my garden or my farm share in the summer, an industrial tomato does not taste like anything.
If I could leave you with one thing, it would be that consuming less can actually be a lot more enjoyable.
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I'm Greg Belvedere. Remember: all generalizations are stupid, so never speak in absolutes.
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