Our governments have Ministries for those typical things: Commerce and Industry, Treasury, Energy, Education, Internal Affairs, Defence, etc. , but the actual importance of Energy on our lives is not clearly seen.
Energy Policies won’t work if we still believe that we have cheap fuels; we don’t from various reasons:
- The work done by a litre of petrol can not be done by humans or animals or gadgets -plus sun and/or wind- for the same cost of 1 litre of petrol.
- We don’t include cleaning-the-mess cost in the price of oil. For a weird reason, we think somebody else -and with no budget- has to clean the planet, the water, air or dirty lungs.
- We don’t include in the cost of oil, the deaths of people in areas of conflict like the Middle East, due to the oil wars.
From the very moment we kill for oil, we are giving this a huge cost despite the dollars payed per the litre of fuel.
The Sun and the Earth are both responsible for the generation of Energy that we, other living beings and a variety of processes -like evaporation, condensation y photosynthesys- require and actually use.
Food necessary for life requires Energy, so Food is Energy for those who consume Food. Energy then transforms from invisible to visible and does real work.
The payments we get from our work are linked to a long chain of tasks where fossil fuel is required as a source of Energy. If we stopped those tasks due to lack of fossil fuels, we would find ourselves without work, without income and would require urgently other means to survive otherwise we would die of hunger.
This means that replacing fossil fuels with renewables is not expensive at all because renewables protect life and avoid conflicts; while fossil fuels undoubtly create wars and conflicts. (a renewable fuel that causes conflicts is being misused by definition, i.e. using food to be burned as fuel)
Saying that “renewables are expensive” is a statement made to extend the life of oil -and to extend oil wars and conflicts too-, because even if renewables are twice or 3 times more expensive than -the supposed price of- oil, renewables have many attributes of great importance, that compensate by far, for the apparent higher cost:
- Create more jobs than Oil does to build, install and maintain solar, wind and water generators
- Sun rises for all of us while Oil resides under the soil of just few countries. Similar equality is for wind power.
- Don’t pollute.
- No wars or fights to invade areas where energy is.
- More awareness about the importance of caring for the environment as we all participate to obtain energy from the sun and wind.
- Cooperation among countries becomes necessary to exchange goods for power and to make sure the flow of energy is not affected by wars and conflicts, so renewables stimulate peace and permanence, we are just to shy to accept it.
We are getting to the end of an era which was marked by fast economic expansion mainly due to the huge amount of energy we have been able to tap from oil, which was formed millions of years ago with the work of the Sun, air, bacteria and that of the Earth, oil that we have been able to deplet in roughly 200 years, rather 80. We found this easy because we did not make any effort to inyect all that energy inside oil and certainly we did not know how to use it correctly.
Now when there is still some oil left, we have the opportunity to make a peaceful transition. Let us forget the false premise that renewables are expensive. They are not in fact as we have seen. To make such transition each one of us can do something practical with sun and wind. It is difficult for those who have never tried something in this field before but it is surprising to see that it is done already in poor countries because they actually don’t have an alternative and time ago they decided to make use of renewables.
Sustainability Foundation 