Bill McKibben’s Far-Too-Sunny Outlook for Solar Power
We can also, theoretically, create shortcuts of green hole through space-time. But that does not mean that we can really do it, regardless of 2050. Even the forms of electrification at hand will require an unprecedented construction of lithium-ion grids and batteries, currently the most effective way to store and transport renewable electricity. These batteries will in turn require to search millions of tons of heavy metals, in particular nickel, copper and, in particular, the cobalt of the Democratic Republic of Congo. While expressing “not a little sympathy for those who moan at [prospect of] However, more mining exploitation “, he defends the race for renewable energies mines by calling the climate displacement” the largest colonization scheme of all time “:
We must work hard to temper the tragedies that accompany all kinds of extraction. But we do not live in an equitable world – we live in a world that very quickly changes towards hell, a hell that will be the most difficult for people with the least power. Only quickly getting around can leave this hell, but quickly moves, inevitably means negligence. It is a difficult call; I’m so afraid of the climate crisis that I can bend too far.
McKibben can also look too far in his insurance that we “have the things” necessary to build the panels, the grid infrastructure and the batteries required by the renewable program. “We may be a bit short of tellurium, but I predict that we will find it,” he wrote. He quotes a 2023 study – including the main author, Seaver Wang, directs the climate and energy program at the Breakthrough Institute – to show that the crucial minerals necessary for the Net -Zero “do not go beyond geological reserves”, but omits a counter -habitant research, like a 2024 Cornell -university of the Michigan study which found an exchange of these crucial minors – United States, not to mention the planet.
In 2007, only one year before launching 350.org, McKibben published a bio-regionalist leaflet called Deep economy: the wealth of communities and the sustainable future, which challenged the scale and ideology of the consumption economy oriented towards growth that has propelled humanity into a state of overcoming. In this document, it has enabled “strong growth economy focused on technology” as an “spirit of the mind” which “allowed us to avoid difficult choices” and ignored basic biophysical reality that “we do not have the energy necessary to keep the magic [of growth] Going. “This book is not an aberrant value in its corpus, but one of the many who understand the problem of our civilization as a question of transplantation of its viscera only to appreciate its hormonal glands and to conquer its dependencies.
