Renewable energy

Renewable energies are one of the great battle horses of ecology. It is not so much the perforation of the planet as a gruyère that must worry us, but the release of all the carbon that has been trapped for 300 million years, leaving to the atmosphere the equilibrium where life as we know it has developed.

There were times when flying insects were gigantic, simply because oxygen concentration was much higher, and their metabolism could feed their muscles with enough energy. The vital and ecological balance depends much more on the balance of the atmosphere than can be felt, as things are stable over the centuries.

The worst at present is obviously the massive emission of greenhouse gases. Not only the CO2 that comes out of our engines that we believe to be modern – while they are only a poor adaptation of the steam machine, but also the methane released from the intestines from the masses of farmed animals supposedly indispensable for our metabolism, then the one that risks to emerge more and more from the permafrost or seabed as the climate warms.

The looting of fossil fuels, in the name of our need to move and cartage all along and across the planet before consuming it, in the name of our so-called economic needs, or our tourist aspirations. Unbelievable waste of which we pay not only the price per litre of oil, but irreversible ecological degradation…

So so much the better if our engineers and inventors are able to develop energy sources with a low ecological footprint, and if we govern ourselves to resolve to generalize them, without yielding to pressure from oil, gas or schistian lobbies. But this must not make us lose sight of the limits of these actions. The case of biofuels is exemplary. What has emerged for a few years as the ideal ecological solution, is an aberration further.

The process is the same each time: a new source of energy is put in place, a whole imbroglio of financial interests is added to it, and when one becomes aware of the new disadvantages, one no longer knows how to reverse. This overlaps the growth of consumption, due either to the exportation of our Western habits to backwards or to simple population growth.

Every effort must be made to replace renewable energy with polluting energy, the situation is extremely critical with the climate warming already under way and the vicious circles which risk aggravating the situation. But it is equally essential, in the longer term, to curb strongly population growth.

Any form of energy will remain more or less polluting. But to take an example: ten times less polluting energy than oil, used by consumers ten times as many as our third world emulations will be in the near future, with the increase in population, would represent more damage to the environment than the unbridled consumption of the Americans and Europeans combined.

We must therefore act on all the tables: to learn how to save energy as a good far more precious than the price at which we pay it, to replace polluting energy sources with devices as environmentally friendly as possible, and to reverse the demographic curve by clarifying the causes of the current proliferation of the human species…