https://quillette.com/2022/03/07/washington-post-and-npr-ign…
some of the biggest media entities in the world have no clue about—and apparently no sympathy for—the rural Americans, from Maine to Hawaii, who are fighting to protect their homes and neighborhoods from large wind and solar projects. Nor do the reporters have any sense of the amount of renewable energy—and, therefore, the massive amounts of land—that will be needed to meet America’s voracious appetite for energy and power.
a new report* by the Texas Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers has determined that the grid’s market design coupled with excessive subsidies for wind and solar were central to the near-meltdown of the state’s electric grid. An analysis by energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie found that the worst of the Texas blackouts coincided with a days-long wind drought across much of North America.
https://www.noemamag.com/why-we-have-to-give-up-on-endless-e…
Sustainability efforts are scaling and speeding up — but the treadmill of global economic growth is still faster.
there is scant evidence thus far that decoupling economic growth from resource use is both possible and sustainable.
A major study published in 2021 that looked at both production- and consumption-based emissions from 2015 to 2018 in 116 mostly high-carbon national economies found that only 14 of them had been able to decouple GDP growth from both types of carbon emissions growth.
the 2021 study also found that 22 countries that had managed to decouple between 2010 and 2015 had actually recoupled again after 2015. In other words, decoupling requires both pressure and vigilance.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects a 50% increase in world energy use by 2050, which renewables will only be able to partly cover, thus leaving the world in still worse emissions shape than it is today.
Of the three core concerns of liberalism — liberty, private property and industry — the attachment to industry is strongest. Liberalism champions freedom and liberty relentlessly, but it has always quietly tolerated dispossessing and even enslaving some as the cost of enabling others.
Humanity’s desire for more & more will be our end. And going to Mars will not fix things; it just keeps the “ecological Ponzi scheme going more than another few decades” and spreads humanity’s pollution to the universe.
Has the time arrived for a degrowth economic policy? LOL Not likely.