SOLAR PANELS AND WIND TURBINES ARE NOT LEADING TO ANY LESS CONSUMPTION OF FOSSIL FUELS
“We live in an economy that is constantly growing, and society keeps finding new uses for this energy.” --Julia Barnes
From my interview with Julia Barnes. For the entire interview, please click on the link.
*****
HART HAGAN: In the beginning of the movie (Bright Green Lies) you're narrating and you have this quote that I want to read and I would like for you to respond.
You say:
“People rarely question the solutions they are taught to embrace. But with all the world at stake we must start asking the right questions. There's a push for a 100% renewable world, and after the research I've done for this documentary, I want no part of it. I did not become an environmentalist to protect my way of life or the civilization in which I live. I became an environmentalist because I am in love with life on this planet and because the life I love is under assault. This film is for those whose allegiance is with the Living World, those who would do whatever it takes to defend it and protect it from those who would destroy it.”
HART HAGAN: In context, what you're saying here is that so-called renewable energy is part of the industrial systems that are assaulting the life that you love. Can you say more about that?
JULIA BARNES: Yeah. Absolutely. I think so many of the things that have been put forward as solutions to our environmental problems are just more of the same. It's more industry, more extraction. I mean things that they call renewables like solar panels and wind turbines … they're made of finite materials that have to be extracted from somewhere, and that place was home to some humans or non-human people who lived there.
And that place is going to be destroyed in order to extract and make these things. What we see in this push for a mass production of all of these new technological gadgets is that this is not something that helps the natural world.
This is more harm to the Natural World. This is an expansion of mining, an expansion of a lot of the things that environmentalists--if they saw it--I think would naturally be against it. I mean these are horrible destructive scars on the landscape, and it's being done for what?
To produce industrial electricity--to power the very system, the very gluttonous way of life that is destroying life on the planet--it just doesn't make sense on so many levels. And it certainly doesn't make sense even on the level of climate, which is what these things are being promoted as being a solution to. We're not seeing that happening in the real world.
We're not seeing that the energy that is being produced from solar panels and wind turbines or hydro or biomass or any of these things that are called green energy is leading to any less global production or consumption of fossil fuels because we live in an economy that is constantly growing, and society keeps finding new uses for this energy.
It's taking and eating up anything that you can throw at it. So there's been this assumption that these things will displace fossil fuels on a one to one basis and it's really important for people to understand that this is not what's happening in the system that we have. That's not how it works
HART HAGAN: You interviewed Richard York, who has been studying displacement. When you have a new energy generation technology, you expect that that displaces the old energy generation technologies. And it turns out that that's not so true, right?
JULIA BARNES: Richard York is the one who coined the term the displacement paradox, which kind of describes this situation. He looked at the data, not just current but going back to the whole history of energy usage.
So people originally may be burning wood for energy and then say you had coal and what you find is that these things tend to stack on top of each other, that each time a new energy source is brought online, it's not like you see this huge decrease in a previous source of energy that was being used. You just see it's growing and it's growing and it's growing and so the graph just goes up.
Each [energy technology] is growing and expanding as new ones are being added. So it's really contradictory to the rhetoric that we hear, about how these technologies would work, supposedly to displace other things. That's not what's happened historically and that's not what's happening now with the addition of energy from solar panels or wind turbines to the grid.