The Climate Generation series has brought much-needed reflection, history, and vision to this blog, and I’m excited to be a part of it.
The internet: our movement is like this
Some back-history on my journey: I started out organizing in the public high school system in Hudson County New Jersey in 2004 trying to connect big-picture energy and climate issues with daily life in the inner city. I met up with some cool folks who were helping launch the Energy Action Coalition during the summer of 2005 and immediately launched into campus and regional level work when I headed to college in Minnesota a few weeks later. I’ve done project work on campus around energy efficiency and green roofs, developed cool campus innovations like the Clean Energy Revolving Fund that led to a powerful campus carbon neutrality strategy while developing state and regional networks in Minnesota and the Midwest. I started reconnecting to the national climate movement in 2007, and have been closely involved ever since. Simultaneously, I’ve also been focusing intensively on community level work across the Twin Cities and Minnesota, helping launch intergenerational community energy efficiency and green manufacturing initiatives that build a green economy. Through that work, I helped found and am now helping lead The Summer of Solutions, a nation-wide program that trains youth leaders in sustainable community development while pioneering innovative green economy solutions in communities across the country.
In the process, I’ve learned a lot, seen so many successes and victories, gotten inspired by more leaders than I can name, and been an agent for inspiration for many more. I keep meeting new people in new places, many of whom don’t identify as “the youth climate movement” but that nevertheless are part of our Great Work. I think this movement is vaster than any of us imagine, and deep beyond our wildest dreams. I think it’s just beginning. I’m glad you are part of the journey.
In this post, I’m going to highlight three priorities that I have noticed the movement struggling with over the past years and that I think we need to focus on intensively as we move forward:
- Embrace Community Power (Energy-wise and Political)
- Think For the Century
- Show the Solutions
Check it out!
Embrace Community Power
Several recent authors in this series have emphasized the need for finding space in our movement for diversity, whether in the age of the people who form it, the scope of tactics and strategies that we use, and the range of backgrounds, privileges, and oppressions that we have faced. Diversity is more than simply just or fair – it’s a strength. And it’s a strength not just because decision-makers look at us and say “look, this movement represents everyone” – it’s also a strength because each and every one of us has different skills, perspectives, and communities. Together, we can network, influence, and motivate the world. That process is not going to happen top-down.
Community power is often dismissed for being small and local. As long as it stays at that scale, it will be stunted. I think part of the problem (not denying real challenges to mass-scale networking) is that we have only imagined community power at the small-scale and marginalized scope. We certainly reached scale with community power with information (the internet, and more recently user-generated content of web 2.0) – I think we can and must do the same with both our energy system and our organizing approach. I say this not just because it’s a cool idea, but because I’m quite solidly convinced that if we fail to do so, we will perpetuate the problems we are trying to solve. In our energy future, we must embrace community power or we will end up advancing further environmental injustices, alienating communities that we must embrace, and create infrastructure dead-ends that will create barriers to long-term green economy solutions.
Case Study #1: Electricity Generation:
Many of the policy mechanisms that climate advocates are promoting (Renewable Energy Standards, federal transmission funding, Production Tax credits) promote large, centralized clean energy generation over community-based energy. This is rationalized through the argument that energy production in a few certain areas (especially the Midwest for wind and the Southwest for solar) is more economically efficient, a justification that ignores the line losses and financial, social, and ecological costs of high-voltage long-distance transmission. In rural America, this means that local people are prevented from owning clean energy generation (large corporations are leasing all the good wind sites in the Dakotas well in advance of energy development) while being forced to submit to eminent domain for massive transmission lines. This is a justice issue and an example of local people being shut out of the economic opportunities of a clean energy economy. But it’s also a strategic failure by climate advocates – this approach actually incentivizes dirty energy generation and promotes a concentrated form of clean energy generation that requires coal, nuclear, natural gas, and other “reliable” sources – deceptively described as “baseload” – to back it up. This way of managing a national energy grid – in a centralized, top-down fashion with no access or ability for the grassroots to compete – limits the potential for clean energy to at most around 30-40% of our grid. That’s a lot more than we have now, but it sets us up for investing hundreds of billions of dollars in a dead-end that in the meantime props up dirty energy. Though it has generally been ignored in the US (Europe is a big leader in this field, and my state of Minnesota is a national pioneer), community-power has been shown to be much more economically beneficial to local people, more energetically efficient, more sustainable, and – if interconnected through a smart grid – create the potential for a fully sustainable electrical system. It is also feasible as a national-scale solution to our energy challenge. Choosing a central-station approach to a clean energy future plays into the hands of dirty energy – it’s neither moral nor strategic. If you need more background on this issue, please check the links I’ve included. There are a lot more stories of grassroots activists trying to open up the energy field to community actors and hold open the door for real solutions where these ideas come from.
Case Study #2: Campus Carbon Neutrality:
The American College and University President’s Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) has become a common instrument for securing campus carbon neutrality commitments from schools. Yet, as you probably know if you’ve worked with these types of policies 0n campuses, most colleges that have signed are not doing the best of jobs on implementation. There are certainly a handful that have shown what is truly possible – Jamie Henn identified the success at Middlebury as part of his great Climate Generation Post on going big in 2010 – but there are far more stagnant commitments than success stories. I think this says a lot about whether we imagine change as being top-down, or bottom-up. As I suggested in my September post about Macalester College’s plan, success in this realm comes not from getting the big policy win and then letting the implementation figure itself out. Instead, it comes from innovative examples of implementation that change in real life the way people imagine and engage the problem, that leads to a growing community of support and ultimately the anchor of policy that institutionalizes implementation. I feel like we’ve done more chasing the big wins that look good on paper than is useful, and less of the base-building for concrete changes that shift power in the real world than is necessary. It’s great to proclaim victory when a policy is signed, but if no capacity for effective implementation is built, we set ourselves up for failure on what really matters.
Let me repeat that more simply: effective implementation will not simply follow from policy. Truly effective policy will only derive from implementation that gets us to transform the problem and re-imagine the opportunity.
Case Study 3: Movement Building
Who is our movement, and who leads it? Our typical name “youth climate movement” seems pretty exclusive. As Meg Boyle (incidentally one of my first contacts with the movement) highlighted, what about the old folks (whether 27, or 40, or 70)? What about the people who think that what we are really fighting for is economic recovery and social justice? What about the folks who get a bit uncomfortable calling themselves a movement? Then there are all the race, class, and gender issues to work through, as Liz Veazey highlighted, and more beyond that. Moreover, who of that movement gets a real say in what happens? We are all “leaders” by name-tag at PowerShift 2009, but who shapes the course of the movement? To what degree is it strategic to all tread the line of marching orders announced from the center, and to what degree is that wasting grassroots talent, energy, potential, and strategy. In my opinion, it’s the top-down nature of much organizational decision-making that makes the grassroots work that does sprout up anyway so fragmented and marginalized. At the grassroots level, there are a lot of local groups who want to do a lot of different things, and they are acting in an uncoordinated and low-visibility way because the systems for coordination and synthesis higher up ask for tailoring of central strategies rather than synthesis of what is already on the ground. I think we have all the pieces for a movement many times larger and more meaningful than PowerShift and PowerVote – but the pieces are not being synergized into a whole.
If we chose that track, I think we would see ourselves as a movement where youth are catalysts and innovators, but labor leaders, community advocates, small business people, employees, and farmers all have a role. I think we would see a movement that harnessed its diversity strategically, understanding that decision-making and coordination come from many directions. Literal grassroots form an almost impenetrable mat that hold down the soil not because anyone directs them to act a certain way, but because they all interconnect together. We need to teach both decentralization of leadership and the skills and tools of interconnection and synergy that can hold us together.
We need to see the parallel between reshaping the landscape of power in our energy economy and reshaping the landscape of power in organizing – in both cases from central control to innovative networks. In other words, it’s time to dig deeper into what PowerShift means.
PowerShift must come to mean shifting what powers our economy (dirty to clean) and who has power (old to young), but also a shift in what power (both political and energetic) is and means. Andrew Munn reflected on this challenge in his Climate Generation post - how do we shift not only what people and technologies embody and conduct our power (both political and energetic), but also how power is imagined, established, and used. Some theorists have characterized the shift in the imagination and structure of power that we are engaging as “From Empire to Earth Community” (David Korten) or from “ideology” to a “movement of movements” (Paul Hawken). I think a good analogy is shifting our concept and usage of power from “machine” to “ecosystem.” We should understand and embrace our work as the shift from central-station to networked ways of powering our economy, and the shift from centrally-managed to highly networked ways of movement building.
If you buy that argument, it suggests that we need to shift priorities, focusing less on a movement that is loud, fast, and big, and more on a movement that is exponential, inexorable, and self-sustaining. The latter should create the former in a sustainable and creative way. Forcing the former may undermine what is really important.
Think for the Century
Young people are traditionally characterized as impatient, and I fear our movement risks living up to that stereotype.
It took the Industrial Revolution 250 years to get us this far into this mess, and we’re not going to get out of it tomorrow. Yes, if we do not act quickly, we risk passing a point of no return (if we haven’t already passed it). But acting quickly does not get us to an end point where we’re done, it gets us on a beginning point of a societal transformation that will need to carry EVERYONE along with it, and will last our lifetimes, if not longer.
Impatience can make us look like a bunch of hot and fiery (or rebellious and naïve) young folks whose work is unsustainable. This can sap our energy over the long grueling struggle to come and indicate to our opponents that our passion is a non-renewable resource, meaning it can be exhausted over time. Unsustainability isn’t just against our principles and our vision, its fatal.
If we expanded our time horizon, we would find less surprise and disillusionment at things that don’t work out the way we want them to, less burn-out, and more planning for life-long leadership. This kind of patience does not mean inaction, it means working for the long haul, and focusing more on the decade-scale victories instead of the weekly, monthly, and yearly ones (those are important, but if they weaken our ability to reach the longer term, they’re not smart). The victory here is a slow-burning change in how very large global systems work. This work is neither reform nor revolution – its evolution. As such, it is far more fundamental in its transformative nature, and it takes time.
A recent Grist post focused on the idea of the Urgency Trap that I think is a common crutch for our movement. I’d encourage you to check it out, and then think about how it applies to this century.
I think the past decade (2000-2009) did a pretty good job of mainstreaming awareness of the problem. I don’t mean just the climate problem. I also mean the energy crisis problem, the terrorism problem, the economic stability problem, and even to a certain extent the racial and economic injustice problem. The decade was punctuated by events that announced we were in a new era – 9/11, the Iraq War, Katrina, spiking energy costs, the financial crisis, and the launch of the Obama administration. All of these events changed our understanding of this nation, this era, and the future. I would argue that this past decade did a very good job at Stage 2 – getting everybody to see there is a problem.
If we follow Sara Robinson’s argument, which I generally do, this stage will be followed by a period – Stage 3 – where tweaks are made to the system without really solving the problem. What happened in Copenhagen, and what is happening around “clean coal”, nuclear, and corn-based ethanol is unsurprising, in fact we should anticipate it. Since we know that this social movement really does have a deadline (though uncertain), we should aim to move our entire society on to stages four and five as quickly as possible as long as we do the really hard work of bringing the vast majority of society along. We also must be sure that WE are not simply making tweaks at the edges by pursuing changes that don’t really change things – actually being able to identify and implement effective solutions will make us the credible voice that can lead society forward.
Even once we reach those final stages, implementation of change will take a long time. Reorganizing cities, rebuilding an energy grid, and reinventing agriculture takes decades. While we should definitely be willing to work with existing leaders and people of all ages, we shouldn’t count solely on existing leadership to carry this implementation. We need to be generating the wave of community organizers, engineers, technicians, financial specialists, farmers, grassroots entrepreneurs, artists, policy-makers, and teachers ready to take leadership of the green economy. We need to ensure that we are finding our own ways to plug in for the long term. We are in a design challenge for the civilization that can survive and thrive in the 21st Century.
Show the Solutions
This one is pretty simple: get the real work done and show what is possible.
This sounds obvious, but I think we risk missing it anyway. Let’s take green jobs – a frame that has grown to epic proportions in our movement - as an example. I think it’s a great idea, but I also only think it’s a great idea when it happens.
This is a pretty big focus of the networks of community leaders I work with in Minnesota. Okay, where are all these green jobs we keep talking about? The stimulus money sounds great, but that mostly went to short term and one-time “shovel ready” projects or temporary 18-month boosts in a job market supported by federal funding. I’ll go into more detail in a future post, but in the weatherization and efficiency sector, this is setting us up for a short-term boom followed by a bust with only marginal progress in the middle. Massive training programs for green jobs have been funded, but except at a very small scale, especially in these short-term programs that aren’t very viable in terms of long-term careers, the jobs aren’t there. This gets even scarier when you consider that if this pattern continues to happen, the whole idea of a green economy starts to be dismissible as a hoax to make the idea of clean energy and climate action sound good. We can’t afford to let that happen. So we need to dig deep into reality.
Calling for green jobs and efficiency and renewable energy will not save us. Even securing incentives doesn’t get you there. We need to generate the demand for the green economy products and services, we need the businesses and value-creation ideas that make these solutions self-sustaining and long-term. We need to set up green industry centers, develop community organizing strategies that build the demand for home energy efficiency, start market-scale food production in our cities and get clean energy cooperatives started that we can own. It’s great to say that it works. It will be believable by the general public if we can show that it works. We have to make it happen.
We have already succeeded in establishing that there is a problem, though I think that we use way too small a frame (too often solely climate change) for defining a problem that touches everyone’s lives through the economic and energy crisis, social disparity, and health. Conservative pollster Frank Luntz concurs – the nation has accepted that there is a problem but is unsure and fearful of several approaches to solutions. Interestingly, he suggests focusing on “energy independence, good health, American jobs, and accountability for businesses and corporations” and shying away from obtuse debates about policy mechanisms like “cap and trade” a conclusion echoed in a recent ItsGettingHotinHere post by Mark Kimbrell. I think this also demonstrates that while the connection between awareness of all these problems has not necessarily been made, people are starting to make the linkages. The more we can emphasize HOW climate solutions will also be energy solutions, economic solutions, justice solutions, health solutions, and better community solutions, AND then actually do it, the stronger we will become. Playing the frame of 2nd-wave environmentalists preventing pollution won’t cut it.
Creating the solutions would be a pretty good thing for the young people we supposedly represent too. Green economy solutions are the economy of the future, a way to sustain action after college and into careers, and make clear that this movement isn’t just something cool we can do on the side, it’s our lives.
I would rather go to business leaders, politicians, and the communities we seek to engage and say “We’re building X that is a solution for all Y reasons, will you join us by doing Z” as opposed to “Will you do X for us for Y reasons”. The former takes ownership, makes clear that we just don’t think sustainability makes sense, we know it first hand, and makes it clear that the green economy bandwagon is leaving and its time to jump on or be left behind. Plus, it understand that power is a community phenomenon, not just one that the big powerful people on top (politicians and energy companies) give to us, and that we’re in this for the long haul.
If we believe in a sustainable future, let’s keep it real. Eyes on the stars of a century-long vision is critical, but let’s get more feet on the concrete. And while we’re at it, let’s be a community to live, work, and build power together.
It’s Getting Hot In Here: Climate Generation is a month-long series reflecting on the state of the youth climate movement. As we pivot into 2010, the series will provide a forum for discussion on the history of the youth climate movement, recent victories and setbacks, potential for growth in capacity and influence, and how to orient the movement in the post-Copenhagen landscape. Please join youth leaders for posts on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and early evenings.
I’m thrilled to have such a comprehensive summary of all the reflection going on in the movement and on the site.
I’m also thrilled at your description of Luntz’s framing proposals. The question is what those proposals look like in practice. Building that popular vision of a healthy, sustainable, just world is going to require more communication tools than we usually use. Those are the examples that I want to read about.
Great post
I read the report you link to, from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. I have to say that I don’t trust its findings because they use a very simplistic model, and the results are just not realistic.
They state clearly that they do not account for the intermittency of wind or solar power generation. That is a serious oversight. During the recent snowstorm that covered much of the US, neither wind nor solar would have yielded anything useful, yet demand was far higher than normal. A smart-grid wouldn’t have helped, there was nowhere else for the power to come from. Unless our backup sources could supply us for a couple of weeks, we’d be in trouble when that happens.
They then state that natural gas can be used as a backup to provide power when wind or solar are not available, but they do not consider the cost (capital or environmental) of doing so. One report that does analyse such factors in detail is available at http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/01/09/emission-cuts-realities/. They consider several scenarios, wind with backup-gas is their option-4.
They show that, under realistic conditions, the use of gas backup effectively wipes out the CO2 savings of wind. This is partly because using gas in backup-mode is far less efficient than using gas for baseload. The rapid, variable response that is needed makes a big difference.
It’s important to use realistic models for calculations of how much we can do with renewables, there are a lot of hidden gotchas.
Baseload is NOT some deceptive term. Electricity is used 24/7. Peak loads are about 1/3 of total electric generation. I know a lot of folks would love a “mom and pop” electric cooperative run entirely on renewables. However, places with not much sun or wind need more controllable sources of electricity. It is a question of physics not just sociology.
Timothy – These are valuable thoughts, and I hope our movement heeds them. Your post brings a practical approach to many of the concepts and critiques I presented in mine. Here are a couple of things I’m interested in.
You identified the need for networking our solution communities. As you know, I’m working on facilitating economic solutions in extraction dominated communities in Appalachia. Do you think there are ways to network beyond the sharing of ideas? For instance, economic transactions between solution communities on a regional or national scale to begin creating a self-reinforcing alternative economy? We would need to structure such transactions in a way that they bring more communities into such a network, and doesn’t become a networked isolationism.
As you recognized, our movement does have a deadline for climate change, but we don’t know when it is. How do we reconcile the work of long term transformation with the need to mitigate the damage being done today? And how do we do it without falling into an urgency trap? I think my post said something along the lines of “As a movement, we must adopt tactics that directly halt destruction of the biosphere and create momentum towards reshaping the flow of power in society,” but even that is still a general statement which gives the impression of being a resolution, but is just a restatement of the problem. I think you are right on when it comes to our long term strategy, but I’m still hung up on the necessary changes in the near term.
Thanks Timothy!
Couple responses:
For Tony Wildish and rmarg: It is precisely because renewable energies are not controllable that we need a smart grid. The ILSR folks do not include intermmittancy or interconnectability in their study because it is not the purpose of their study. They also do not suggest that ONLY wind and sun should be used – the full scope of renewable energy and efficiency opportunities is far greater, more complex, and more locally customized (which further back up my central arguments) – they are simply saying that JUST a few technologies gets us so far towards a vision of energy that is currently being dismissed as impossible. There are things that they do not address. That does not mean that there are no solutions for these obstacles. Real-time Demand Side Management, which could become a major revenue generator for ordinary people like us, can make a huge difference by modulating when energy is used to match intermittency (this also gets away from the “baseload” concept. So can smart grid storage systems that are in the works (there some cool ideas about backing up the grid using plug-in electric car batteries, as well as air compression storage, water pumping, and hydrogen, I’m skeptical of the latter). Also, the argument is not for zero interconnection between regions – that is essential for back-up, but rather about maximizing the back-up of various sources with each other and synergizing them in a relational manner. These are not all the alternatives, so saying that JUST the things I have mentioned will not save us is accurate, but not a counterpoint to the underlying argument. In fact, part of what I am pointing to is the assumption of single solutions characteristic of our current energy system (a control based model) is less relevant than a multi-faceted, relational energy network model. More importantly, as I argued, the alternative (mass centralized energy) is not a viable solution as I have demonstrated, and it is further deeply unjust and causing all sorts of problems.
For Andrew:
I think communities can and must interconnect in very real ways, not just in idea sharing. I think some of these flows should be financial (especially around creating economies of scale for production, distribution, and marketing of clean economy production). I think it is more than that though. As movement leaders, we should think like entrepreneurs about all of our resource flows – money, ideas, skills, people, natural capital, social networks, and political will. I’m very excited about cooperatives for that purpose, and not the “mom and pop” cooperatives that others might dismiss, cooperatives that truly cooperate across space and diversity.
Eg. what if all around the country we started efficiency cooperatives that started using the efficiency and weatherization expertise that is bubbling up out of the stimulus and the innovative business models like the one’s I’ve mentioned, and started organizing neighborhoods as owners and producers of the clean energy future (I’ve started doing this locally). What if we linked these efforts with members in Appalachia in the alternative economies work you are doing, and found ways to share the stories of folks fighting MTR with neighbors who are part of cooperative efficiency organizing. We could (hypothetically) develop groundswell among the rural electrical cooperatives (currently staunch advocates of dirty energy and opponents of top-down climate and clean energy regulation) to support community-based economy models. We could (hypothetically) coordinate strategically to shift where these rural cooperatives are politically while advancing the media message backed up by real hard proof that there’s a better way than coal. And we could (hypothetically) do this as a part of a coordinated campaign with teams opposing MTR. Hypothetically, we could pool members resources to invest in community projects (there are a remarkable number of groups I’ve worked with where the wealthier individuals want to cooperatively invest with poorer folks to make the whole neighborhood more efficient, and I can imagine the same with regional economic development). Simultaneously, we could shift the political landscape by getting some of the actors currently supporting coal industries which blow up Appalachian mountains, but who also have innate interests in community-based energy, to support the clean energy revolution because it’s in their own economic best interest.
I’ve mapped out this imaginary scenario in a binary, so of course it ignores the folks in Michigan trying to retool the auto industry, and the Navajo green jobs initiative on the reservations, and urban renewal models like they’re doing in the South Bronx, and …
Where I’m going with this is:
1. I entirely agree with you that we need to be using the green economy to make concrete improvements in people’s lives not in the “let’s help you” way but in the “let’s work together” way, and in doing so, build new social, economic, and political power and shift the existing alignment of power.
2. If you’re initial response to my hypothetical (which is an intentionally poorly hidden invitation) scenario was “there’s no way we could centrally coordinate all that!” my response would be, Exactly. That’s why we need a network model for a movement instead of a control-based model. This means institutionalizing thinking like a network. Ie, I don’t have to know everything that’s out there, I know a piece and I will act in a way that creates opportunities to adopt, adapt, and riff off of what I am doing, instead of simply trying to get my piece done. And we both keep throwing it out to the universe and listening to what else is being thrown out by others and create synergy where we see potential. There’s also a need for synthesis and capacity-building entities (like the Summer of Solutions) that actively interconnect, build power, and train leaders in that network model. Increasingly, this network will become intentional about how it targets different actors, amplifies different changes, and directly and practically connects. It also means sharing and spreading awareness of network strategy, and if that changes movement response to cap and trade and clean energy standards, and small business incentives, and who is really going to create jobs, that’s progress. Just understanding and committing to a network strategy, for energy and for our movement shifts our conception of power and reorients what we are fighting for. So we should spread that.
3. To draw from my own experience, the Summer of Solutions would never be able to grow as vibrantly or as powerfully as we have if we simply recruited people to do “our stuff”. We ask people who are already doing amazing stuff to do their amazing stuff through our infrastructure, and create additional structure, resources, tools, and insights to be even more amazing. And there’s freedom to define their course, space for people with entrepreneurial ideas to expand them by implementing with new partners, and start to build the momentum needed to attract bigger resources. The networks of youth activists, that are even starting to link the community leaders, green businesses, and other non-youth nationally, are more than just idea sharing. They are coordinating and amplifying a message, and slowly organizing a far vaster network of resources that sooner or later can be integrated, synergized, and deployed.
4. I think (in addition to building the movement through concrete on the ground improvements) this also answers the urgency trap issue. We CANNOT move fast enough or big enough by trying to mobilize big, fast, and loud in a centralized way. It is not big enough, fast enough, or loud enough. We will be the best at sweeping and rapid change if we take the time on the fundamentals in order to sustain exponential, inexorable, and self-sustaining. If this strategy sounds ludicrous, keep in mind that it was the basis of Obama’s landmark 2008 campaign (whatever you think of his evolution as a president since): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zack-exley/the-new-organizers-part-1_b_132782.html
When as fast as you can go is not fast enough, it means you need more people in the game. This means going deep, and empowering people to create while training them to work together.
This is still abstract, but hopefully it suggests some direct options
Timothy, the fact that they ignored intermittency means that their model is not a complete enough to be useful. It’s just too simple a model. If your model is too simple, your conclusions are not likely to be useful. You cannot get the right answer by doing the wrong math.
The devil is in the details with renewables and smart grids, and using an overly simple model does not allow you to make robust conclusions. The fact that they chose to ignore something doesn’t make their result any better than if they’d simply forgotten to include it.
Other people have made more realistic models. David MacKay has published his model in Sustainable Energy – without the hot air (free ebook there if you want it). His model considers the space, efficiency, and physical limits of deploying renewable energy in the UK. Conclusion, it’s not feasible.
Barry Brook and others over at bravenewclimate.com have done much more realistic studies. They consider intermittency and storage systems, and various forms of backup. They also consider the cost of the materials, the rate of deployment, and all the other things that are traditionally ignored when people talk about renewables.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to renewable energy. I just don’t think it can do the job. The reason I think that is simple. I’ve seen lots of calculations, some say it can do it, some say it can’t. The most realistic calculations are unanimous, renewables cannot power a big nation.
Tony – if renewable energy cannot power a big nation, perhaps we need to reconsider our modes of economic and political organization. Modes of economic and political organization are variables based on environmental conditions. That’s something we forget much too often.
Timothy – Thank you for your responses. I agree, the best path forward for a movement capable of transformations is back to basics. And spot on in your point on the success of SoS. My post made something of a case for a different strategy because we need to base our big picture goals on the realities of our institutions, etc. A point I should have made more strongly is that while I stand by the need for such radical departures in long term thinking, we don’t need to drop everything we’re doing and start something new, we need to recontextualize our actions into a transformative framework.
Even if the US were to reduce our per capita electric demand to that of Switzerland (i.e., 50%), that is still ~500,000 MWe. That is still too large to use an all renewable grid. You will need a baseload technology of some kind. And that level of eletric reduction is unrealistic as the US population is larger and so requires a larger and more diverse economy than Switzerland.