I agree with you generally. Cheap energy has pulled (and will continue to pull) hundreds of millions from suffering, and so far it looks like clean energy will do that with more equity than the first industrial revolution. But we also need a paradigm shift. How many other unsustainable behaviors are tied to our energy use? Say we found an energy source that was clean, free, perpetual and infinite. What would the world look like with unlimited energy? Here’s a concrete example:

“In the 1970s, technology and economic incentives led to more efficient home heating and insulation in America. What did we do with that ability? Use less energy? No. We built bigger houses.” -Michael Nelson & John Vucetich

So technology that could have saved energy, money and the environment instead led us to lose our sense of community, develop farmland into subdivisions, and consume more resources. If we frame the clean energy future around peoples’ quality of life and health, I think the global warming “debate” is almost irrelevant.

Hope you’re well,
-joe

Almost the whole of Africa is filled with cheap labour, cheap land and an abundance of heat, and yet no one seems to consider the idea of investment in solar energy there. Despite what it would do for those nations, despite the advantages to western nations reliant upon Oil. Im not saying this is the best solution but I am saying that there needs to be political will before anyone will even consider some of these ideas which to the layman seem so obvious.

In the US however, as we have just seen with further proof, following the courts decisions on allowing corporations even more opportunity to affect national feeling through a larger money spend on political issues, the Corporation is King. Politicians are running scared of corporations (how did we let that happen?), And the corporation appears not inerested in what the layman can see, or what the starving african needs to survive.

After all he used planes in 9/11