Key take is that renewables are the right answer to the wrong question. We shouldn’t ask ourselves how we can perpetuate our current infinite growth economy, that will never work, even with renewables. We need de-growth, a steady state economy in balance with what the Earth can provide, anything less will result in major issues.
Unless we can mine other planets or asteroids, but we’re far away from that so we need to do more with less. We need to apply the same type of thinking as we do for our planned moon and mars bases, we need to plan based on the carrying capacity of the environment and our needs.
Currently we have a utopian economy, or maybe a better term for it is a Mordor economy where we blindly consume with little to no regard for the social and environmental consequences.
We need to make our logistics more efficient, localization rather than globalization. We need to make products last longer by making them modular, and thus easy to upgrade, repair and recycle as I discussed in my Fairphone episode. We need to change our economy to a more sustainable one, instead of this this profit motivated, planned obsolescence oriented, focused on short term profits with long term waste as a result in this infinite growth economy.
If the current economy was inside your body then your doctor would likely diagnose you with cancer. Cancer is infinite growth and if you’re unfortunate, it will only stop when the host of that cancer dies. Oh, and by the way that’s us, all of us, in case you were not paying attention.