Haley Zaremba has written an article for Oil Price.Com telling us the truth, rather than fantasies, about the adoption of renewable energy.
She quotes: " “There’s a lot of lying to ourselves,” Jason Grumet, the head of the American Clean Power Association (ACP), was quoted by Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. “We don’t want to grapple with a very, very tough issue: How do we think about the extent to which some communities have been fundamentally antagonized and disadvantaged, which is absolutely true, and the fact that the world is going to boil if we don’t speed things up?”
The world is going to boil. Sure, it is. A few years back the worry was about "peak oil". As petroleum production entered its inevitable decline its subsequent rising price would wreak economic havoc, especially with the poor. That didn't happen. There is more oil and its by-products available than ever before and higher prices aren't due to scarcity but instead international disagreements. So the prophets of apocalypse need to come up with a different existential threat. Lucky for them it's invisible and probably beneficial, atmospheric CO2.
She covers the IMF's five challenges to the successful transition to renewable energy. Monopolies and destructive mining are part of the renewable process. Copper, for instance, with its rising price, is stolen from operating municipal lighting systems, a kind of mining in itself and recycled. The proliferation of AI and data centers, enormous consumers of electricity, will also be an impediment to energy transformation, even though there's been no public discussion on the wisdom of embracing AI. Why do people who have no conception of how it works arrive at the idea that it's a good thing if they consider it at all?
It may very well be that AI could become a greater threat to human happiness than a difficult to quantify and unpredictable change in world climate, if there even is such a thing. They're probably worrying about the wrong potential problem.
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