Dear Dennis. With deepest humility and respect and admiration for your rationality and sincerity, I write this response to your opinion editorial published recently in The Daily Star (Oneonta) and the Briar Creek Times (BCT).
I agree with you wholeheartedly on one thing: “Let’s be smarter tomorrow than we were yesterday.” But intelligence manifests in various ways. Indeed, the facts you present in your essay are unassailable. But… they all seem to pertain to a ‘business as usual’ scenario with regard to social behavior. For example, “Solar peaks midday when everyone is at work. People return home at dusk and gas power plants kick into high gear.” True enough, pre-Covid, but probably not true for most of us this year. I think we’ve learned that not only work patterns, but all manner of social interactions can radically change—with intent. Could it be that some (most?) of us, in our heart of hearts, don’t want to return to business-as-usual; that we knew all along that the path we were on was self-destructive? And if we don’t return to those familiar-but-destructive patterns, might that not have effects on energy demand?
It sounds so dire… “if New York had to rely on wind and solar alone, it would need a battery about two hundred times larger than the biggest battery anywhere—costing over $30 billion—just to survive one sunless, windless day.” Again, true enough assuming a ‘business-as-usual’ energy demand with all the wasteful, inefficient behaviors and practices so prevalent in our society. Energy use is like automobile use—if we build highways there will always be cars to fill them; if we build batteries, their capacity will always be taxed to the limit. History has proven that we cannot build or ‘grow’ our way out of problems like this. So what if… instead of advocating for nuclear or batteries, we decided to change our behavior?
Traditionally, this is the point where most people throw up their hands and declare, “Well, that’s not going to happen.” But now, I think Covid has changed people’s notions of what’s possible and what isn’t. The psychological problem is that deeply radical change is just so scary. Our imaginations are seriously challenged, which is hard work. We’d rather not think about it, even at our own peril.
So… to take the edge off, let me toss out a few ‘radical changes’ that might ‘degrow’ energy demand. What if… we all worked less for the same weekly paycheck? How about a 4-day work week? 3-day? What if… we all stopped moving around so frivolously? Could we walk, or bicycle, or plan shared rides to access the services and people we need? Could we stop flying altogether? Connection to place—staying put—is the cornerstone of community. What if… we all invested in energy efficiency rather than energy generating infrastructure? $30 billion would go a long way toward upgrading the insulating envelope of every single residential home and apartment building in the state. What if… we shared stuff, instead of buying stuff? Weren’t we taught this in kindergarten? What if… we all had a universal basic income? Like Spain is trying. What if… we abolished the military to pay for it? Like Costa Rica since 1948. Maybe these things would make us feel more secure rather than less? So that we wouldn’t feel obliged to constantly compete against one another in an apparently ‘hostile’ world trying to kill us?
At this point, many people will tell me I’ve gone off the deep end. So be it. Because I believe in my heart-of-hearts that we are better than what we’ve become; better than what we’ve been indoctrinated into by a tragically flawed, cannibalistic system called capitalism. Yes, “Renewables alone won’t solve our climate crisis.” But neither will growing nuclear, or natural gas, or any other energy source if we cling to business-as-usual. Our ONLY hope is to change ourselves, to ‘degrow’. Or, to use a French idiom I learned about in the same issue of the BCT, “‘Mettre de l’eau dans son vin’… or ‘putting water in one’s wine’, meaning to weaken or mellow your demands or ambitions.”
