The big misconception about clean energy

“Our home is burning. Rapid climate change is destabilizing our world. Our emissions will not fall quickly enough to avoid runaway warming and we may soon hit tipping points that will lead to the collapse of ecosystems and our civilization.

While scientists, activists and much of the younger generation urge action, most politicians are not committed to do anything meaningful while the fossil fuel industry still works actively against change. Humanity cannot overcome its greed and obsession with short term profit and personal gain to save itself.

And so, for many the future looks grim and hopeless. Young people feel particularly anxious and depressed. Instead of looking ahead to a lifetime of opportunity they wonder if they will even have a future or if they should bring kids into this world. It is an age of doom and hopelessness and giving up seems the only sensible thing to do”.

~ said those who profit the most from this crisis

 

But that is not true! You are not doomed! Humanity is not doomed!!

“This planet is threatened with destruction,” “half of humanity is leaving in the danger zone now,” “be mindful and conserve as much as possible.” “The new climate change report which the UN released today provided the starkest warnings yet.” “See therefore I cannot read the news because then I feel helpless and powerless. There is a constant fear at the back of our minds” and other many similar statements we get to hear whenever we try to know about climate change, which just makes people more depressed to seek more information about this and go into a denial mode altogether.

What people get wrong about energy? Is the idea that to slow climate change we must use less of it forever? We have dedicated things like earth hour where everyone just goes on and switches off their lights and other electronical appliances in order to save energy/ conserve energy for our climate for one hour once a year. Saving energy is trending also people are saying that what we are in for is a long struggle towards a smaller and less comfortable life. That the reason to care about clean energy is just to try our best to prevent catastrophe. But that is not true. In fact I have realised it is a backward way of looking at things. The goal is not to use less energy or even to just replace fossil fuels. The goal is vastly more energy (via clean sources), to help more people live better lives and to make it all clean!

Consider that If most of our energy comes from fossil fuels (and it does), then we are in kind of a trap. Then Using less is the only real option to slow climate change and throughout our journey in the initial stages like 1980s and 90s we did not really have the technology that would allow us to replace fossil fuels. This tied our hands as there was not much, we could do but to just conserve energy and use less of it. Besides, until recently, people did not really know enough give a shit about climate change and we really owe Greta Thunberg really a lot for forcing the world to pay attention to it seriously. Also, to get people to care, many scientists and policy makers used what I now think of as “the stick.” Which is

1. We need to use less energy

2. terrible things will happen if we do not

3. Sharp focus on efficiency improvements

4. Policy Changes (Paris Accord)

All these things combined or all these things in bits and pieces did slow down the energy use in some countries where people could. Also keep in mind that throughout history, western countries have used way more energy than most other current emerging economies.

Throughout many sources that I have read or the documentaries I have watched just go onto mention that “Energy=Fossil fuels” and both are bad for our climate. But is this really the case? Is there some way we can view this problem via a different angle?

It turns out, conservation is not good enough environmentally, right? We need zero carbon sources of energy. But if you can have a net zero economy, then there is no need to conserve!

See, we cannot stop humans from innovating, we cannot stop them from trying to make lives more comfortable. We all have studied in basic economics that the human wants are unlimited and, we cannot stop countries from growing and we cannot stop humans from innovating, and we cannot stop them from using energy then how come we will stop climate change. The point is we must make that energy cleaner the goal is not to eliminate energy, but the goal is to make the energy cleaner which allows the humans to get a comfortable life, make progress without having the need to conserve energy because it is clean and is not doing any harm to the climate. All I mean is just replace all the renewable sources of energy with a non-renewable and polluting ones like Fossil fuels.

Some climate activists from Vox have recently put forward the concept of ‘energy diet’ and before you start thinking much let me tell know it does not say that we need to drop the usage of more fossil fuels. This concept means that we need to wildly increase our clean energy ambition.

When we see the potential of clean energy, it becomes much more compelling to say, we need to make the steps that will unleash this. And you need to paint for people a picture of like say “why and how is my life going to get better.” It is possible that if we do this right, in the future the equation “Energy is bad, fossil fuels are bad” might look different. And hence our thinking should be different too.

So why does it matter how we think about energy use? I have thought about this question a lot and I think the answer is: The way we think about things mow shapes what we can accomplish in the future. Let me speak for myself for few moments to explain this to you. I can use a vision that not just what will go wrong if we fail, but what could go right if we succeed. I think its time to talk about “the carrot” of clean energy. Why we should all hope and work for it, for more than just to avoid catastrophe.

Look at this chart, to be honest whenever look at such charts, seeing an increase in energy usage overtime used to give me a guilt trip. And in the context of climate change, it is. But in the context of improving life for human beings, it really is not.

This is when the world started using astonishing technologies like electricity, and flushing toilets, and refrigerators. So, the first and most important goal is that we need to get everybody there. To the quality of life that most people in rich countries take for granted. Realistically, we just cannot do that without using more energy, which we cannot do using fossil fuels, with speeding climate change. This is already one of the biggest fights on the global stage over clean energy. Richer countries like the US, who used fossil fuels to radically redefine comfortable life for their citizens, now looking at poorer countries and saying, well sorry you cannot do that because…. Climate change

We must look at all clean energy technologies. Taking the present day as like a ceiling and then saying, well okay we are going to conserve. That is not the right solution for developed countries, but it is a terrible solution for emerging countries, and this is not a solution that these countries are going to accept. The sooner we can get more zero carbon energy sources, the sooner this fight no longer even makes sense. And if we do that, just imagine how we can continue to improve everyone’s lives if energy no longer mean harmful emissions.

The moment I imagine the vision of a future world with abundant clean energy, I felt myself begin to imagine a world of Utopia too (in climate terms at least). Honestly, while researching this, I felt a lot more motivated to do the work that it takes to get there. So, for the next minute, just let me describe to you that we could do and let yourself imagine what could go right.

We are now in a world where you can invent a lot of things that work, but the problem is they are really energy intensive. It would be useful to be able to capture carbon dioxide, especially to do what is called direct air capture. This is what trees do. We can make machines which can do this, hydrogen too can be a zero-carbon solution to a lot of problems. We could use vertical farms and feed everyone locally to our cities. With these vertical farm designs, you can use drastically less water. You could produce incredible amounts of crops at much greater efficiency with much less pollution, but you need to use much more energy because the sun is free, but lamps are not You can take saltwater and make it drinkable. These are tools that we have, they are science projects that function, but they are not usable commercially because energy cost is too much. But if we can get more energy and we can get it from clean sources then we can do these things.

This is not just a story “Huh, one day we will have clean energy and then we can do all this cool stuff. This is not even a story of how we might get there, although am working on more articles on that!” This is a much simpler story with a perspective shift I wanted to share with you before we get to those articles. This is a story about ambition, about the sheer audacity that it is going to take to reach where we want to reach. Human history is a story of finding easy to use little more energy to make life a little bit better. And it is on us to keep doing that in a responsive way. The goal is not less energy, its more and we can only have more by going clean.