If renewable energy doesn't displace fossil fuels, what's the point?
Are solar panels and wind turbines just more short-life toxic industrial crap, "consumer goods," for future generations to deal with, entirely supplemental to our current fossil fueled consumer economy? (In my book anything that lasts less than a century is short-lived. Short life is all right for clothing and food, but not much else, especially things that are not easily and efficiently recyclable.)
In the case of electricity, if you want to disconnect from the fossil fueled powered electric grid, it's easy. Go out and shut off the power at your main breaker. (Or quit paying your electric bill...)
Then what?
That problem is much the same at any scale you like, from your home, your community, your state, your nation, or this world civilization.
Shut off the fossil fuels, then what?
I'm some kind of Luddite. Instead of putting solar panels on my roof to power a refrigerator, why not just get rid of the refrigerator? Instead of buying an electric car, why not walk?
My wife does not agree about the refrigerator, and unfortunately in U.S.A. society anyone who doesn't have a car is not considered a fully functional adult unless they live in certain urban areas. (I have an adult niece and a nephew who don't have cars, but they live in San Francisco within walking distance of BART and Muni. They get around fine and rent cars when they need them.) Every community ought to be built to discourage car ownership. But how am I going to win elections on a platform of vastly reducing the market for automobiles? (I express my own disgust for our automobile culture by driving $900 cars with salvage titles. They pass strict California smog tests, they get good mileage, I don't drive much, but I'm still a hypocrite.) Do I feel sorry for unemployed auto workers? Yes. Do I want them building more cars? No. Maybe they could be doing something that reduces the environmental impacts of humanity, and something that makes them happy too. We ought to be paying people to experiment with lifestyles that have very low environmental impacts.
The nuclear advocates imagine a high energy industrial society with low greenhouse gas emissions, and their numbers largely pass muster. The solar and wind people claim a similar utopia, but their numbers don't work, except in combination with nimble natural gas power plants and gas derived fuels, which still leaves us with all those natural gas "reserves" eventually getting turned into carbon dioxide much faster than our ecoystem can process it, which leads to a much hotter planet than we might have had.
I'm not someone who get's terribly upset by nuclear power. Our industrial society dumps plenty of invisible non-nuclear waste into the environment of equivalent toxicity, much of it having a "half-life" of forever. (The composition of highway dust is frightening...)
So far as toxins in the environment go, I'm currently worried about insecticides that are probably about as damaging to the minds of our children as lead, possibly increasing the general levels of apathy, ignorance, and violence in our society.
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