What the loving fuck is this article
“Tamping down on demand” is an interesting way of describing what amounts to the irreversible deindustrialisation of the continent and the impoverishment of millions of its people
Irreversible? Impoverishment? What are you talking about (I looked for poverty figures year by year for Europe and couldn't find them, but I sort of suspect that there's not a sudden spike to the tune of millions in poverty recently, and I don't think it's because of transition to cleaner energy if there is one).
as a consequence of self-sanctioning of cheap Russian gas, oil, and mineral resources
Faaaaascinating
Yes, sanctions damaged Europe's economy, particularly Germany's. But this is a little bit of a creative take on what happened and why and what the implied solution is.
Glad to see the global warming denier's trick of picking your favorite point on the graph and then drawing a line from it to the present day is seeing new adoption. And, like I mentioned, there's a fairly relevant factor that might be involved in Germany's industrial-sector issues aside from wanting to use wind power.
The cold fallout from Europe’s economic self-harm has also been felt here in the UK
That's why the UK is having economic issues? No other pressing decision that might have influenced their economy; it was just from wanting wind power?
But having – probably permanently – burned our bridges with the Russians – along with around 75 percent of the world’s non-western states
What the fuck are you talking about
Which sounds great until you remember that wind and solar provide the only low-carbon energy growth. Nuclear power plants are being retired faster than they can be rebuilt
(I actually agree with the foolishness of avoiding nuclear power plants because they're not "green"; that's pretty much the only thing in this article where I will agree with the author)
(That said:)
Furthermore, since wind and solar provide a tiny fraction of the energy provided by fossil fuels, even a tripling will barely dent our need for coal, gas, and oil.
I'm pretty sure this is just bullshit. Like the other points, he throws out qualitative assertions without bothering to talk about the numbers, and in this case I'm actually pretty confident that the numbers don't agree with the assertions.
Green growth was always a myth which – either through delusion or design – the European elites tried to sell to the masses. However, anyone paying attention could see that climate change was just one of the looming crises for the twenty-first century, and that energy and resource depletion would be a greater and more proximate problem for an industrial and financialised civilisation which has no steady state
So we can't possibly continue using nonrenewable energy, for two big reasons, not just one (which, again, is a statement I actually agree with). But, we can't possibly transition to renewable energy, because that would be a delusion. And instead of trying and turning the power of the modern industrialized world towards that goal (which he poo poos by severely slanting the fairly-significant level of success that's achieved to make the whole thing sound hopeless), we should give up and get ready to all start farming sheep and dying young again. Got it. Makes perfect sense.
(Also Ukraine is all the West's fault. I only bring that up because he kept mentioning Russia and sanctions and blaming semi-unrelated problems on the sanctions.)
The piece is generally good, although I'd take issue with the statement that there's no historical precedent for decline such as we are about to see. The main difference is in the global scale and population numbers in civilization now as versus previous known collapses, e.g. the Roman Empire, the Lowland Mayans, the "Bronze Age Collapse" and so on. But in all those cases, very high population densities were achieved that pushed the limits of their carrying capacity as much as ours do now. And other trends not unlike our context, cultural decadence, mass migration, falling birth rates, etc all made their appearance as well.
Also the "life expectancy not exceeding thirty" claim is commonly repeated but is mistaken. The number was obtained because they did not omit infant mortality from the statistics, whether out of an intention to mislead or simple error I'm not sure, which was much higher in premodern times. Once that is accounted for, Europeans of the so-called "Dark Ages" lived to between their 40s-50s and occasionally 60s. It did represent a falloff of life span but not quite so drastic as is claimed here.
In America I see complacency continuing, because I've learned from experience that as long as an oil boom is in progress, you cannot get Americans to accept energy descent as a concept. It will take another Great American Oil Bust like in 2015-20 to wake them up a bit. Even then I don't know whether Americans can accept the reality of limits, because they have a natural optimism that is hard to pierce.
