The Green Growth Delusion Advocates of “Green Growth” promise a painless transition to a post-carbon future. But what if the limits of renewable energy require sacrificing consumption as a way of life?
by Christopher Ketchum, Truthdig
A tree is surrounded by solar panels in Los Arcos, Spain, on Feb. 24, 2023. (AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos, File)
In the annals of industrial civilization, the Green New Deal counts as one of the more ambitious projects. Its scale is vast, promising to reform every aspect of how we power our machines, light our homes and fuel our cars. At this late hour of ecological and climate crisis, the Green New Deal is also an act of desperation. Our energy-ravenous culture cannot continue producing carbon without destroying the systems that are the basis of any advanced civilization, not to mention life itself. Something must be done, and quickly, to moderate the pressure on the atmospheric sink while powering the economic machine.
The consensus on the need for scaling up renewable energy is rarely disturbed by a disquieting possibility: What if techno-industrial society as currently conceived — based on ever-increasing GDP, global trade and travel, and complex global production and distribution chains designed to satisfy the rich world’s unquenchable appetite for bigger, faster, more of everything — what if that simply cannot function without energy-dense fossil fuels? What if, despite the promises of Green New Deal boosters, it is impossible to make sustainable the current system that provides billions of people sustenance, shelter, goods?
This possibility is not mentioned thanks to the dominance of “green growth.” This is the idea that the organizing principle of our civilization — endless growth of economies and populations — can be decarbonized swiftly in a way that will involve no material disruption. Green Growth holds out the promise of transitioning from fossil fuels directly into something like an earth-friendly utopia without a hitch and without meaningful sacrifice. This is the sales pitch offered by Green New Deal proselytes such as Ezra Klein, The New York Times columnist and podcaster who brings a relentless optimism to the belief — the faith — that renewables can underwrite business-as-usual.
In a 2019 episode of his podcast titled “How to solve climate change and make life more awesome,” Klein laments that “conversations about climate change are pretty depressing [but] decarbonizing doesn’t mean accepting a future of less — it can mean a more awesome, humane, technologically rich, and socially inspiring future for us all.” His guest, Saul Griffith, inventor and clean-energy advocate, agreed that “[o]ur cars could be just as big, only electric. The American Dream could be better than ever.”
Undergirding this vision of a bigger, greened American Dream is the work of a Stanford professor of civil engineering named Mark Z. Jacobson. In a series of major journal articles and studies, Jacobson has sought to demonstrate that the current world economy can be made to run entirely on a combination of wind, water, solar and geothermal energy. He has received plaudits and rousing applause from, among others, Democratic New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, co-sponsor of the 2019 Green New Deal resolution in Congress, who has anchored her proposals with Jacobson’s “roadmaps“ to a zero emissions society. New York state senators, meanwhile, have proffered a bill for renewables transition that explicitly “builds upon the Jacobson wind, water and solar study.” In 2016, climate action guru Bill McKibben said, “I’m convinced by the careful work of Mark Jacobson and others that [100% renewables] is possible.” More recently, in a March 2023 issue of The New Yorker, McKibben enthused about the ongoing “good news” from Jacobson and like-minded green-tech experts. “We have the technology necessary to rapidly ditch fossil fuels,” promised McKibben.
Less likely to appear in the pages of leading magazines are those with a more skeptical view of Jacobson’s assurances about building carbon free societies within a few decades. But these are far from marginal voices. When a group of scientists writing for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences took a close look at Jacobson’s wind-water-solar plan in 2017, they found it was based on “errors, inappropriate methods, and implausible assumptions.”
Curious as to whether renewables could “power the future,” professors in design and mechanical and aerospace engineering at Monash University in Australia concluded in a 2016 study that estimates for the technical potential of renewable energy were all over the map. The academics, Patrick Moriarty and Damon Honnery, argued that “values at the lower end of the range [of technical potential] must be seriously considered… future [renewable energy] output could be far below present energy use.”
Moriarty and Honnery revisited the subject of renewable energy potential in a 2020 report published in the journal Energies, reiterating that “a future world entirely fueled” by renewables could end up being “a lower-energy one.” Moriarty then teamed up with seven co-authors — climate scientists, sustainability experts and engineers — to look at “energy descent as a post-carbon transition scenario.” The team concluded that “[d]eep uncertainties remain about whether renewables can maintain, let alone grow, the range and scale of energy services presently provided by fossil fuels.” As Moriarty and Honnery put it in their 2016 paper, the “prudent course” in a renewables-only future “would involve major energy reductions…we will likely [need] to re-evaluate all energy-consuming tasks, discarding those that are less important.”
How much demand would we have to shed in a post-carbon energy descent where renewables power civilization? “At a rough guess,” Moriarty told me in an email, “I would say 50% or more.” He approached the issue with the practical mindset instilled from decades as a civil engineer. If half of current energy use must be cut to reach true sustainability, Moriarty suggests a good start is ending global transport and trade as we know it. In other words, he said, “globalization will have to end.”
Ted Trainer, a lecturer at the University of New South Wales and founder of The Simplicity Institute, has reached a similar conclusion. “The limits to renewable energy have been almost totally ignored as a topic of study,” he writes. Elsewhere, Trainer notes that this topic is ignored with special fervor among the “technically sophisticated…participants in green and left energy camps.” The Ezra Kleins of the world adhere to what Trainer calls the “tech-fix faith,” which is marked by the assumption that there’s “no need to shift from…present energy and resource intensive lifestyles and systems, or from an economy driven by market forces, the profit motive and growth.”
Then there is the legendary energy and systems theorist Vaclav Smil. An emeritus at the University of Manitoba and author of more than 40 books on energy, environment and industry, Smil has declared the “rapid-speed transformation narratives” in the renewables field to be so full of “magic prescriptions” that they are “the academic equivalents of science fiction.”
“Heavy doses of wishful thinking are commingled with a few solid facts,” Smil writes in his 2022 book “How the World Really Works.”
To understand this mismatch, it is necessary to look closely at how we use our prodigious amounts of energy. The picture is very different from the one found in Green New Deal presentations full of high-speed rail projects and windmills.
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