The Old Fossil Fuel World is Dying, and the New Renewable World Struggles to Be Born

We need to think about the kind of world we would like it to be.

Photo by Martin Neuhold on Unsplash

I was in third grade when I learned that we will run out of fossil fuels and burning them is making our climate go haywire. But I was told not to worry, we do have renewable, climate-friendly sources of energy: solar, wind, hydro-power, etc.

However, more and more people are realizing that switching to renewable energy isn’t so simple. Germany, for example, has taken the lead in transitioning to renewable energy from solar and wind. However, we saw how the withdrawal of relatively cheap natural gas supply from Russia in 2022 threw the country into an energy crisis.

One of the reasons that this happened is because wind and solar have problems with intermittency. We need to fill the gaps when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. These gaps are filled by fossil fuels, which are available to burn at all times and easy to transport wherever we need them. We don’t have better alternatives being produced at scale. Yet.

But perhaps an even bigger problem than intermittency is sourcing raw materials. Mining expert, Dr Simon Michaux, recently published a daunting report published by the Geological Survey of Finland (GTK) indicating that we don’t have enough minerals on Earth to replace the current fossil fuel fleet with renewables.

There have been some criticisms of Michaux’s work. But those critics have drawn more critics, and trying to find out who’s right made me fall into a rabbit hole of one article, tweet, and Reddit post after another of people debunking or defending Michaux’s work.

Here’s what I make about all of this. We all know that we need to transition to renewables fast. And not just because of climate change, but because fossil fuels will run out soon. The Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere at Stanford University estimates that at the current rate of consumption, we will run out of oil by 2052.

So even if Michaux’s work is not perfect, it’s still important. This became clear to me when reading through an article by journalist, Nafeez Ahmed, who said this when critiquing Michaux’s work:

“Michaux also wrongly assumes that it is necessary to replace “all fossil fuel-based vehicles with Electric Vehicle Technology (EVT)”, and therefore derives his figures for EV batteries from the need to replace the entire existing total fleet of 1,416,528,615 vehicles including cars, trucks, lorries and so on.

However, in 2017, Tony Seba and James Arbib of RethinkX released their groundbreaking analysis showing that the economic dynamics of the EV disruption would lead not only to the disruption of the internal combustion engine (ICE), but also to the disruption of private car ownership.”

Private car ownership is a pretty big deal to many people. It’s not easy to give up the idea that we won’t get to own cars anymore in a world powered by renewables.

I don’t think Michaux made the wrong decision by doing the math on this. We need to know the cold hard numbers telling us about the materials we would need to replace the current fossil fuel system with renewables. We need the cold hard numbers on the amount of energy we would need to accomplish this.

Then we need to ask where we will get the energy and materials. Are we going to disrupt natural ecosystems in the process? How can we prevent breaching ecological overshoot? How are we going to honor the desires of people on whose land the resources are? How are we going to make the energy transition equitable?

Answers to these questions can help us realize that the world powered by renewables might be very different from the fossil fuel-driven world we have right now. And maybe it can be a better world if we are intentional about it.

So what kind of world can it be? Maybe this passage from The Politics of the Solar Age which Hazel Henderson wrote in the 1980s can help our imagination:

“The Solar Age signifies much more than a shift to solar and renewable resource-based societies operated with more sophisticated ecological sciences and biologically-compatible technologies. It entails a paradigm shift from fragmented “objective” reductionist knowledge and the mechanistic, industrial worldview to a comprehensive awareness of the interdependence of all life on earth-what is now well known as the Gaia hypothesis: that our planet is a living organism and we humans are participants (not just observers) in its evolutionary unfolding.

Thus, the Solar Age is also a new Age of Light with our human technologies learning ever more from Gaia’s own genius in capturing and utilizing the daily flow of photons from the sun; from Gaia’s mighty cycling of all elements, water, atmosphere, soils, plants and animals; and the myriad ways of cooperating with each other and joining the overall symbiosis of these planetary processes in a new age of enlightenment. This new Age of Interdependence is one of mutual development — far beyond the narrow concepts of economic growth or development.”