I accept that the cost of being green must be measured against the cost of doing nothing
Without accurate costing of net benefits we are all living in cloud cuckooland
Where is all the electricity going to come from ?
The cost of doing nothing has been badly underestimated. After the disasters of 2023 (and those temperature records keep on smashing), I think we've headed into a new danger zone. Effects which were forecast for late this century are already happening. If we look at the assessments made 10, 20, 30 years ago, the most pessimistic scenarios are now coming true. So now I look at the most pessimistic forecasts being made right now, and I expect them to be proved correct. Emissions are still rising, the fossil fuel industry is as powerful as ever (see COP), new oil, gas and coal is being extracted and burned. Effectively we HAVE done nothing. Talking about "net benefits" is not the right language, what we now need to do is reduce losses, but also, get ready for it to be much much worse than we imagined.
The science is clear and explicit. Burning fossil fuels needs to stop now. We can't wait until the energy transition is ready. Your question about the electricity is spot on. There isn't enough, there won't be enough, we just have to get by with less.
There's also a sociological aspect to this. After decades of globalisation, neo-liberal capitalism, consumerist hyper-individualism, China's merging of authoritarianism with industrial excess, deregulatory zeal in the west, no-one is prepared to even think about energy austerity which, realistically, is what we should be doing. The only thing that will change that is the onset of an apocalyptic level of climate disasters. Something like, in a single year: a global crop failure which causes multiple famines in places without food security, and massive food inflation followed by a recession everywhere else; co-inciding with a major city being burned down or destroyed by a hurricane; a heatwave in a sub-tropical zone which kills 100,000 people in a fortnight. Maybe a city like Sydney could see its dam levels drop below 10%. I have no crystal ball, that's just a hypothetical list, but I am trying to prepare for something of that scale to happen in my lifetime, (I'm 60) and maybe in the next ten years.
No-one will enjoy load shedding and petrol at $20 a litre, but with all of that apocalyptic disaster, they're more likely to accept it. We actually needed load shedding and $20 a litre petrol 20 years ago.
Did you read this far? Thanks for indulging my futile doomist rant, here in the warm beating heart of capitalism! Good luck to all humans.
Expand
(20min delay)