"In essence, the promise of green energy depends on every country giving
up control over its own power grid, so the kinds of power generation
some countries say they no longer want, either because it's nuclear or
because of CO2 emissions, can be executed in countries that have less
scruples. You can't run a grid without sufficient baseload, and you
don't get baseload from wind or solar ... I guess you can't go worry too much about democracy when power, both electrical and political, is at stake, can you? ... I've seen, firsthand, governments in Canada, France and Spain let people
invest in feed-in tariff solar plans only to have them unilaterally cut
mere years later because the big power companies lose money over them,
leaving people with huge debts and no recourse. Beware of Big Power ... So there you have it: a UK government that's getting increasingly
desperate, and trying very hard not to show it, lest its voters start
panicking. But everything they try looks doomed before they even begin.
Shale is such a shaky bet that it should be abandoned. More coal is not
hip because of CO2. More gas is grossly expensive because it must be
imported. More wind and solar can't keep the grid functioning without
either nuclear or CO2 producing fuels. And all the while there's the
threat of Putin pushing a button or turning a switch, or a ship blowing
up in the Middle East.Maybe the best way to try and make sure the lights don't go out is not
to keep them on all the time. And to redesign our communities and
societies in such a way that they need far less energy than they do now.
Instead of letting energy demand rise, we could try to make it
decrease. If we don't, the lights will go out at some point, guaranteed ... Both in finance and in energy, and certainly where the two come
together, the ever-accelerating drive towards centralization has become
such a threat to our lives, without us seeing it for now, that we don't
have a lot of time left before we'll all be left in the position that
crack addicts have vis-à-vis their dealers ... If we knew today what we'll know in 10 or 20 years, we might find
ourselves wishing that we'd have woken up from our crack induced stupor
sooner."
Zum Artikel von Raúl Ilargi Meijer, erschienen auf The Automatic Earth (25. Oktober 2013) »
Zum Artikel von Raúl Ilargi Meijer, erschienen auf The Automatic Earth (25. Oktober 2013) »
