Absolution, Deceit and Renewables

Boy who rides to school daily on Greyhound
 bus, Washington Court House, Ohio, 1943.

It’s been a while since the Automatic Earth featured an article from Energy Matters, the site run by our longtime friend Euan Mearns, Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Aberdeen, and his co-conspirator Roger Andrews, a British engineer/geophysicist, semi-retired in Mexico. But I read a piece by Roger yesterday that I like, because it allows me to rant against all the false claims emanating from countries and companies about the share of renewable power in their total energy consumption.

Roger focuses on the railway system in the Netherlands, run by NS, which recently claimed that it operates on 100% wind power. This is of course, if you know anything about electricity generation and the grid, a preposterous claim, and that the company has the guts to make such a claim can only serve to prove how little the general public knows about the topic. Or they wouldn’t dare. Green is still so sexy in certain circles, and actual knowledge so poor, that companies like the NS feel no scruples about stretching their ‘greenness’ into absurd theater territory.

Google does something similar. And you might be inclined to think that the topic is so important for both the companies and the people they seek to please with their claims that grossly exaggerating the numbers would be out of the question, but not so. Instead, “Google announced that it will purchase enough renewable energy to match 100% of its operations in 2017”. And that is not the same as running on renewables, which is what is being suggested (in carefully cherry-picked terms).

Read The Automatic Earth story - “Absolution, Deceit and Renewables.”

2017: Change Can Be A Bitch

Alexandria, Egypt 1962.

Automatic Earth is primarily about the economy which, stripped of all its finery, therein is the root of climate change.

Writing on yesterday’s edition of Automatic Earth, Raúl Ilargi Meijer said: “What we can say at this point in time is that the changes 2016 delivered were urgently needed. There are many people out there who just want to turn back the clock, and change everything back to how it was, but they can’t, and that’s a good thing, because the way things were was hurting too many people.

“2016 will go down in history as the year when a big divide between groups of people in the western world became visible, a divide that had until then been papered over by real or imaginary wealth, as well as by ignorance and denial,” he writes.

Read the Automatic Earth story - “2017: Change Can Be A Bitch.”

A war footing? Tough, but necessary

Many have argued that the best way to mitigate the difficulties associated with climate change is to adopt a “war footing” and apply it to how we live.

Writing on Automatic Earth, Raúl Ilargi Meijer said an image of 1920s pawn shop got him thinking and the conclusion on a war rations book became the theme for an article – “If You Don’t Need It, DON’T BUY IT!”.

He wrote. “The once was a time, and it’s only 70 years ago, which means there are plenty of people alive today who also were then, when the US government actually and actively urged its citizens NOT to buy things they didn’t absolutely need”.

Great event, but little good news

It is difficult to report any good news from Sunday’s “The Automatic Earth” Melbourne workshop.

Theo Kitchener's simple explanation
 of where we are now and how
we should respond.

The April 21 workshop at the Fitzroy Town Hall was in itself good news, but the subject and the message from the keynote speakers hardly fell within that ambit.

Organized by the Melbourne based “Doing It Ourselves”, the day-long workshop featured international energy and finance commentator, Nicole Foss, the Australian Director of the Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, Geoff Mosley, the co-founder of the Beyond Zero Emissions, Adrian Whitehead, and the founder of “Doing It Ourselves”, Theo Kitchener.

More than 150 people enjoyed the sumptuous welcome of their hosts with a generous level of food opulence that defied the less than comforting reports from the speakers.

Foss talked at length about the convergence of the world’s worsening climate, the implosion of economies all around the world, worsened by the apparent naivety of governments which appear to be comfortable bedfellows with the international fossil fuel companies.

She is learned in energy of all stripes, has a particularly sharp understanding of international law and intimate knowledge of the world economy, explaining at the Fitzroy forum the fragilities of the world’s economy, how it is likely to collapse and how people should protect themselves though holding cash and by building resilience into their lives.

Mosley explained the rigours and benefits of the Steady State Economy and how it would stand to benefit communities and nations preparing to establish a system that might allow them to survive the collapse that Foss considered inevitable.

Whitehead, who was instrumental in creating the Greater Otway National Park and helped stop construction of the Naas Valley Dam on the ACT, could see only societal collapse and most of his address was how people should prepare to address that disarray.

Kitchener is a self-described “apocaloptimist” and so brought a sense of good news to the workshop was eager to see people apply the tools they could use to encourage a positive social and environmental transformation.

She said: “We have tried everything possible and that hasn’t worked and so now we must try the impossible”.

Her “Doing It Ourselves” website includes a 12 minute video that explains the unfolding difficulties and possible responses - http://www.doingitourselves.org/.