I agree with Saral Sarkar that people who care about the future of the planet and human society must collectively address several global crises. From my perspective, they include war (including the continuing threat of nuclear war), poverty and social injustice (including the capitalist economic system and resulting consumption society), and environmental destruction, of which human-induced climate change is indeed the major threat.
However, no individual person can address all these crises adequately. At present my two principal interdisciplinary fields of research and activism are energy and the steady state economy. However, if I attempted to write about eco-socialism, my writings would contain many gaps in knowledge and misunderstandings. I have to say that Saral’s critique of renewable energy has similar shortcomings.
First, as a former theoretical physicist, I have to point out that there is no contradiction between the Second Law of Thermodynamics and a global 100% renewable energy (RE) system, so long as the Sun continues to shine. The energy for mining the raw materials and building the RE hardware can in future be renewable and this transition has already begun. A mining company in remote Australia is currently building a solar farm to substitute for most its prolific diesel consumption and the Tesla gigafactory for manufacturing batteries will be completely powered by RE.
So, although the current generation of RE technologies is being made mainly by using fossil energy, the next generation will utilise RE to a greater degree and so on until RE systems are made entirely by using RE. I am part of a research group at UNSW that has just published the first of a series of papers showing that the additional life-cycle CO2 emissions from transitioning to a 100% RE system are tiny when we take account of the above RE breeding effect.
So, the answer to each of Saral’s four questions is ‘yes’. In subsequent postings I’ll comment on the issues he raises about EROEI (which is easy) and the use of non-renewable materials (which is difficult).