Sorry, No Green Revolution

BTW, the world economy is imploding.

Open pit mine with a diesel burning bucket-wheel excavator, among the largest land vehicles ever built. Photo: Tyna Janoch, Pixabay.

It was Earth Day a few days ago, and a lovely one where I live in an older suburb of Buffalo, NY. The sun came out after months of gray, some days as dim as night, and trees were flowering in pink and white celebration of sudden warmth and blue skies. Yellow tulips startled my eyes and everywhere trees were awakening — some with small, dark buds impatient for release — others unfurling in youthful saturated yellow greens. Soon the colors will mature into cooling shaded canopies, providing homes for returning birds. Mischievous squirrels will scrabble catch me if you can circles on their trunks. For a few moments, I felt myself breathe out, and my shoulders dropped in relief.

Then I remembered I was idling in traffic on a paved road eight lanes wide. The spell wasn’t completely broken, but reality tightened my shoulders again. Bird song is now barely a whisper in my neighborhood — I remember the joyful dawn cacophony of the past — and the town has replaced the maple tree at my curb the squirrels chased on with a stump. The weekly street cleaner droned by dirtying the air in favor of clean pavement over a clean Earth as I cleaned human indifference from under the bushes, fast food wrappers, plastic bags, chunks of styrofoam and airline size booze bottles of despair.

We have made such a mess of our planet and her state reflects the state of our misled minds and toxified bodies. I wonder what humanity would be without the discovery of fossil fuels. Certainly not nirvana yet with our endless propensity for violence, but perhaps the window of opportunity to become enlightened would have been extended. Population was a mere one billion in 1803. It has been fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution that enabled overpopulation, overconsumption, and wild overestimation of the wisdom of reshaping every facet of the planet to suit us, when it is her health that determines our fate.

So why does this writer say no green revolution when so many talk about the miracle of electrification, including most environmentalists? Who is he to say this? Surely, he must be wrong you reasonably think. After all, renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels we’re told. However, the photo above tells the story. No form of energy aside from passive solar comes without a price. This is embodied in the immutable first law of thermodynamics. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another. Heat and pollution are two of those products.

While there are multiple other reasons a green revolution won’t happen starting with the false promise of the words themselves, the most damning one is extremely practical, the availability of diesel fuel.

The Green New Deal, long dead, compromised, inadequate

Not long ago, we were promised The Green New Deal. The name quite obviously was inspired by FDR’s New Deal that lifted the country out of the Great Depression. Biden watered that plan down to “Build Back Better,” which was further weakened in the final result, to the Inflation Reduction Act by Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and our now full out fascist Republican party.

While it had strengths, The Green New Deal fell badly short of the greater vision of degrowth conceived in 1972, and the Inflation Reduction Act was the final, entirely inadequate result. Regardless, even in its best form the Green New Deal still didn’t recognize The Limits of Growth.

As I wrote in The Inflation Reduction Act: Climate Change Farce:

The bill is a shadow of Build Back Better, which when originally proposed was a $2.2 trillion plan to expand education, fight poverty, lower healthcare costs and tackle climate change. The House passed a $1.75 trillion version of that plan which was defeated in the Senate in 2021. What’s left as in investment in the country is a $490 billion bill signed into law August 16. My primary interest is in the bill’s impact on climate change and domestic energy production.

We were led to believe by driving EVs, throwing up some wind turbines and building out solar energy we could solve climate change and have life continue as usual.

What do politicians do for a living? Lie.

The elephant in the room: diesel fuel

Photo: Ferdi Rizkiyanto

Much of the US economy has been powered by the fracking boom for the better part of the last two decades. I won’t go into all of its downsides here, but they obviously include continued and accelerating release of CO₂ and CH₄ into the atmosphere and hundreds of billions of gallons of water use. This water is lost forever from the toxic chemicals also needed to force oil out of shale layers in which drilling involves going down and then sideways for miles. This energy-intensive technique for extracting oil provides industry evidence that large, easy to extract oil deposits are played out.

If cheaper, easier to harvest oil was available, that’s where drilling would be.

Furthermore, US shale oil is light, sweet crude which can’t be processed into diesel, and diesel is the entire backbone of mining, hauling and installing “renewables” which are as vulnerable to failure of EROI as oil. Bulldozers, excavators and giant hauling trucks don’t run on 87 octane pump gas.

Skyrocketing carbon dioxide levels from CO2levels.org

Skyrocketing methane levels from methanelevels.org

Don’t take my word for it. Cold-blooded capitalist natural resource “investors” Goehring & Rozencwajg have warned the Permian Basin fracking boom has peaked and is declining here and here. The International Energy Agency (IEA) warns of the decline at the global level meaning the same — increasing oil prices which drives inflation across every economic sector.

Art Berman, an oil geologist of over four decades argues:

Oil is likely to surge to extreme highs in 2026, but that does not mark the beginning of a long-term structural bull market. It’s a wartime spike inside a debt-saturated global economy. The higher prices go, the more they tighten credit, weaken growth and destroy demand. Oil is more likely to peak with the crisis and then follow a weakened global economy into a longer period of softness.

Whether demand for oil grows or softens almost doesn’t matter. It’s the key resource that has driven economic growth in the US since discovery of first oil on American soil. The Drake oil well was dug to a depth of just 69.5 feet in 1859, practically garden shovel territory. If the economy isn’t running on oil due to lack of demand because high prices and shortages are driven by fading EROI or Iran’s justifiable wrath, the results are the same, global recession at the least. Some fear a worldwide depression.

With the combination of nitrogen fertilizer loss from the Middle East and component feedstock LNG at planting time, the drag of higher fuel prices (or their disappearance at the pump altogether) and resulting higher energy prices in general, across sector inflation including the basics — food and cost of shelter — the voluntary, mindless consumption economy that has led us here will be stultified. It’s an economic model that needs to die, and we have been repeatedly warned for 50 years. We should have been working to degrowth. Now we’re getting it the hard way.

Asian countries and Australia appear to be particularly hard hit with fuel shortages and Europe is suffering as well. Affected refineries in Asia are creating jet fuel and diesel shortages. In India, service stations are running out of gas as panic buying ensues. Australia, also running out of gasoline at the pump, has just a few weeks of fuel left on hand.

Europe is suffering too, here’s a map of diesel shortages in France. Given the essential importance of diesel, LNG and nitrogen fertilizer, what’s your opinion? Recession or depression? Thankfully, unlike politicians, economists never lie, and Wall Street never parties right up to a crash.

Source article for graphic here.

Last word: overshoot

Climate change is just one manifestation of the overarching problem of overshoot. Doubtless, climate change is our most immediate threat, but attempting to resolve it without considering all nine planetary boundaries is akin to a bandage when a tourniquet is needed. The magical clean energy we were promised — the “green revolution” was naive hope at best, or a cynical lie of political motive. It fails to address the cold reality that EROI on fossil fuels approaches which will end the build out of renewables (which are finite) regardless of Trump’s regressive policies. It also fails to acknowledge the enormous harms of mining equal to that of oil drilling.

The Iran War — no, the illegal assault on a sovereign nation — may be an act of foolishness or a calculated attempt to bring the world economy to its knees by a fascist, racist government gleefully abducting legal citizens off the street in the tens of thousands and building prison camps for the gestapo called ICE to imprison them in. Frighteningly, this latest act of terrorism (we cannot forget Palestine) may push the globe over the edge or less likely foment needed changes that will require great risk.

Given the gravity, will you fight or roll over?