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celebratedrecluse wrote (edited )

It is good to see people openly discussing the problems of green technology. Resource extraction of precious metals for the construction of electrical infrastructure is going to be an even more enormous industry, and they stand to benefit from silencing discussion from the get go so they can portray themselves as the saviors of the environment, and ultimately humanity, from fossil fuel climate change.

Let's get into the weeds on this technical issue however. What are these minerals being used for? What makes them necessary to the standard green technological plan to solve climate change? Is this integral to a world which uses electricity, or is it integral to a world which is contained in this standard green-revolution plan?

These minerals are being used overwhelmingly for the construction of batteries. These batteries are necessary for a variety of reasons-- mobile technologies, such as automobiles and smartphones, require them; producing renewable energy such as wind & solar is a variable enterprise depending on weather, so the energy must be generated as is convenient and stored until necessary.

But what if we didn't use smartphones, and instead relied on less portable technologies? Is it really necessary to create so many electric cars, or perhaps we could create light rail & reduce our artificial needs to take transit? Perhaps we could grow food closer to our homes, instead of having it shipped in from so far away on trucks, EV or fossil fueled alike?

Then, the standard narrative goes, we still have the problem of the electrical grid itself. If we are not generating power with natural gas, oil, coal, etc, then we are reliant on good weather and optimal environmental conditions. Regardless of that, the sun doesn't shine for half the day. And more importantly, the grid itself is so large that electricity simply ebbs away from the wires over long enough distances. What could possibly solve this mess of problems?

I saw an article the other day about a researcher in Canada who has developed a paint-on, self-repairing electricity-generating coating, which turns sunlight into electrical power on demand. If, instead of creating giant centralized power grids, we distributed technology such as this to the specific places that need it, we address many of these concerns at once.

Now, this won't solve every problem associated with green energy production & distribution, but it will solve them better than the current model. We need to be pushing for technology such as this to be open sourced, to reduce the harm caused by this necessary shift to green energy. We need to take, frankly, an anarchist sensibility to the production, for that production to be the least harmful version of itself. Specifically, the production, consumption, and distribution of this power needs to be decentralized, and work ad-hoc instead of storing and shifting around huge reservoirs of energy.

In order to get there, we need to first admit that we don't need the current levels of energy surplus that we are accustomed to. It's okay if you can't drive where you need to go, perhaps you can take public transit, or rideshare, or better yet walk or bike there. It's okay if my phone dies, when the sun comes up the solar-coated case will charge it just fine-- until then, i should probably go to sleep instead of going on reddit.

We need to get used to using less, not just absolving ourselves of any need to question the cycles of consumption and production we are complicit in through some technological messiah. This stuff is incredible, and I support it being realized-- but it's not the most important part of the solution. The most important thing is reducing our dependence on a network of resource extraction, manufacture, and waste which we have little control over, and which won't be able to be sustained for much longer anyway, no matter how ya slice it.

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