Demand, Not Supply, Is The Key To The Clean Energy Transition

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I was reading the reports from COP29 in Baku recently, where members of the US Congress are making fools of themselves as they shill for the fossil fuel companies which pay to get them elected. Their primary message was that clean energy was too expensive and too unreliable. We need fossil fuels — especially coal and methane — to make certain there is enough baseload electrical generation — so-called “spinning reserves” —  to meet the needs of society.

Implied in those words are the ideas of the once and future king president of the United States. He likes to whine about how people won’t be able to watch TV or toast their bagels if the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. The subtext to his bleating is that we should do nothing to address the climate crisis if it results in the slightest inconvenience to people. Nothing says freedom like the ability to destroy the planet you live on. Of course, none of these fools realize enough sunlight strikes the surface of the Earth every day to power the needs of all humanity for a year. And it’s free! All we have to do is figure out how to harvest it, distribute it, and store it, and there never needs to be another ton of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere from the generation of electricity ever again.

The problem with that, and what strikes fear into the hearts of fossil fuel companies, is that clean energy does not put any money in their pockets. All their weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth about the virtues of fossil fuels are just a smokescreen to cover their real agenda — greed. The blandishments we hear about shareholder value disguise the fact that the shareholders fossil fuel executives care about most are themselves. Their gigantic compensation packages are directly tied to the share price of the corporations they run. Concern for other shareholders is non-existent in the C Suites of those companies.

Arguing that we need to transition to clean energy technologies clearly is not having the desired effect — carbon and methane emissions continue to increase every year. The decreases envisioned in Paris in 2015 are simply not happening. Maybe it is time to stop trying to raise the bridge and begin lowering the river instead. How do we do that? By lowering demand for fossil fuels.

Bill McKibben wrote this week, “In the next few years the main task of the environmental movement in America is going to involve pushing for a rapid transition to clean and renewable energy. We’re going to have to persuade people that solar and wind energy, and the devices that go with it, are what we want. And it won’t do sufficient good to argue on environmental grounds.”

Here are some ideas he suggests for countering the onslaught of new support for fossil fuels:

• Solar power is cheaper and those who oppose it know it. They are conspiring to make sure you keep paying them for energy when the sun provides it for free.
• Clean energy is more reliable and you can plug your EV into your home after a power outage and run it for a week.
• It’s the ultimate liberty to have your own power plant on your roof.
• It’s far better to have a wind farm in your county than to rely on Saudi Arabia (or Chris Wright).
• An electric car goes zero to sixty far faster than your antiquated gas model and it costs half as much to run. Because it has fewer moving parts, you don’t have to visit your mechanic nearly as often. You can drive right by the gas station.
• Oil companies are a scam, pushing antiquated technology to keep you hooked. They don’t care if you breathe dirty air as long as it makes them money.
• Their shareholders are getting rich while you pay for repairing roads and bridges every time there is a new climate disaster.

Using Clean Energy To Reduce Demand For Fossil Fuels

There is a lot of talk about personal freedom these days. Bill McKibben suggests having control over your own electric supply is the perfect expression of personal freedom. Solar panels on the roof or in the backyard, a storage battery in the basement or garage, maybe an electric car that offers bi-directional charging, heat pumps that heat and cool with two to three times the efficiency of conventional heating and cooling appliances, heat pump water heaters and clothes dryers, and induction stoves can all improve your quality of life while using less energy.

Sharing your experiences with others can help break down resistance to adopting clean energy strategies among your neighbors, friends, family, and co-workers. Saving money makes everybody smile. There are plenty of readers here on CleanTechnica who are reporting greatly reduced costs of electricity thanks to having solar panels on their roof or much lower operating costs for their cars because they run on electrons instead of molecules.

Efficiency Is The Key

What drives the clean energy transition is efficiency. What makes more sense to you, drilling for oil in Alaska, transporting it to a refinery in Texas, then shipping it by truck or rail to every city and town so you can waste three-quarters of it on your way to work, or harvesting electrons from your own roof to charge the battery in your electric car that is three to four times as efficient as a gasoline- or diesel-powered vehicle?

And what if you are joined by thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of other people doing the same thing? We don’t need to stop drilling and fracking. We just need to stop using gasoline, fuel oil, and electricity generated by burning coal or methane. If we do that, those fossil fuel companies will go out of business not because of any rules, regulations, carbon taxes, or government mandates, but because the demand for them will shrink to the point where all that drilling and fracking is no longer profitable.

China is giving the lie to the claims of the fossil fuel gangs. Soon it will have nearly 425 GW of clean energy from solar — more than twice as much as the US. In total, China has 1.4 TW of renewable energy from all sources. Do you think the fossil fuel companies haven’t noticed they have lost sales and profits because of how much clean energy China is producing? How much coal or methane does it take to generate 1.4 TW of electricity? If you said, “a lot,” go to the head of the class.

Think globally; act locally. The fossil fuel industry is terrified that people will stop using their products. Good. That means those of us who advocate for clean energy are winning. What we are seeing here at the beginning of the next reign of terror from the mugwump of Mar-A-Cuckoo is proof of just how scared these people are. Bill McKibben quoted Christopher Wright, the new energy secretary, who, in one of his first official acts, bashed the majority of Americans by saying “those uneducated rubes surely can’t be left free to exercise their own preferences through purchasing and employment decisions.”

Well, yes they can, Chris. And that’s exactly what we intend to do. You can frack all the wells you want, but if nobody is buying what you are selling, you will go broke, and the sooner the better. It’s up to us, people, so let’s put our shoulder to the wheel and get this clean energy transition done.