fairandfatalasfair

1. I’m not sure if this is meant to be passive aggressive but it is kind of coming off that way. I’m going to try to answer in good faith, because I know this is a real question people ask themselves, and it’s hard to read tone through text, but if I come across as a little irritated, that’s why.

2. The first step in solving a problem is recognising that it exists. Pretending that renewable energy is ready to go doesn’t get us any closer to solving the problem. Identifying the reasons why it’s not ready to go at least gives us a direction to work in.

3. It does not follow from “renewable energy is not ready to go whenever” that “it probably never will be.” In fact, as I mentioned in my comment, there are a lot of smart committed people working on solutions to all of those problems, and they are in fact making progress. There probably isn’t going to be a single “silver bullet” solution - rather, transitioning to green energy will involve a process of improving energy storage, broadening transmission networks to allow “trading” of green energy, and using social and legal incentives to change the behaviour of energy consumers so that their energy consumption better aligns with the times of day when energy is most available. It’s not completely ready to go, but it *is* happening. It’s just not finished yet.

4. The thing about “so I guess we should all just kill ourselves then” is that it’s shooting ourselves in the foot before we’ve even started. We might not be able to solve these problems, but we won’t get the chance to find out if we just throw our hands up in the air and decide not to bother trying. We’ve only really begun to understand climate change in the last 3 decades, and we’re already making progress on fixing it. Can I guarantee that we’re going to succeed? Of course not. But I’m not going to go off myself because a guaranteed failure on my own terms is better than an uncertain chance of success.

Write your representatives about what they’re doing to support green energy. Advocate for transmission infrastructure to facilitate “swapping” clean energy. Find out what times of day the cost of electricity in your area drops to zero and run the dishwasher or laundry at those times instead of whenever is convenient. Plant a tree.

5. One of the things that I think about when I feel like the world is going to hell in a handbasket and there’s nothing I can do about it, is the idea that things have always been this bad. If you could go back to almost any point in human history, you would find a world no less full of serious existential threats than we have right now. My parents grew up with the looming threat of nuclear war. In the 1300s the black death wiped out half the populations of Europe. The impeding end of the world as we know it is not a new thing. That we are alive today is because of people throughout history who decided to live anyway - to bet on the uncertain chance rather than giving up out of the gate. It’s a miracle we made it this far, but since we have, we might as well keep going.