“The ‘energy transition’ tag is a misnomer. Radically reducing fossil-fuel energy will represent an energy and an economic revolution.” The great @HelenHet20: (1/x) engelsbergideas.com/essays/the-geo…
“When the first UN Climate Change Conference was held in Berlin in 1995, fossil fuels constituted 86 per cent of the world’s primary energy consumption. By 2019, that proportion had fallen by just two per cent.”
“In 2018, the increase in fossil fuel production was more than three times higher than the increase in renewables. The following year, the annual increase in fossil fuel energy consumption was slightly under that of renewables.”
“The economic and political narratives that dominate collective life in Europe and North America leave us ill-equipped to deal with the energy troubles ahead.”
“Many professional economists do not take energy seriously as a fundamental economic problem let alone a political one.”
“Some climate activism is divorced from the energy conditions of human existence, its proponents unwilling to grant that the laws of physics apply to energy prospects as much as to the climate.”
“Our cognitive struggles with energy matters extend to our concepts of historical time. Both the dread of a coming apocalypse and a faith in endless human innovation and moral improvement appear hardwired into western culture...”
“...first from Christianity, and then its secular offshoot the Enlightenment.”
“When confronted with collective existential questions, western minds reach rather easily to millenarian fears and hopes.”
“But the temptation to make energy a Manichean struggle either between good and evil or science and unreason is decidedly unhelpful.”
“There are Enlightenment optimists who cannot entertain doubt that technology will, God-like, prevail in establishing a new energy paradigm, regardless of the relationship between their certainty and physics.”
“There are moral optimists who trust that, as human beings move from using dead sunlight to living sunlight, collective life will be ethically regenerated. These cannot be the stakes.” (X/x)
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