Solastalgia, USA (Have you noticed there is a narrative?)

September 9, 2022

Solastalgia, USA (Have you noticed there is a narrative?)

In the proceeding work, I will attempt to remove a thorn from the side of the modern discourse on green energy. A narrative has developed over the progress of the modern era to derail reasoned discourse about green energy efforts to mitigate climate change. More recent derision from the public at large has diminished these efforts of denialism. It has become a more insidious narrative against the reasoned deliberation of the people, but it is weaker, too, and I will try now to remove it entirely. The occasion is a group of recent works by a reporter from the L.A. Times. 

The L.A. Times' Sammy Roth is on the road, per his braving the Reddit AMA gauntlet recently to report on the actual implementation of solar and wind energy infrastructure in the American West. You can find the facts to your heart's content on Google. For the moment I am interested in pointing out a narrative that has emerged as almost a sort of "catechism of unsolved controversies" that has come to strictly delimit any discussion on "green energy". 

This narrative was implicit in the way the Reddit public responded to the presentation of someone doing work on the modern history of green energy. I want to make it obvious to anyone that we are stuck in this discursive rut. 

The top line of the report on Sammy Roth's journeys is that the blueprint on how to build green energy transmission infrastructure is in place. It's a first draft, but it works. 

But thus starts this catechism of, if you will, inertial complaints. The top-line criticism is always that we will need batteries, and a lot of them, if we want to go all-electric. This unfortunately has turned into a concession to resource extractivism, because the only batteries we seem to be able to conventionally imagine are lithium-ion, like phone batteries. Extractivism has come, again, to implicate problematic imperialism, because places like Bolivia have the most of it, and, see with Google and skeptical eyes, the coup attempt on Bolivian president Evo Morales several years ago, in an attempt to "secure" lithium deposits for exploitation by US-based commercial interests. There are new attempts to extract domestic lithium in more friendly ways, and yet, construction materials for the green energy paradigm that we need to construct for the future, remain a source of controversy. However, more later on what may contradict some of this inertial problem. 

Once you get below the top-line concern, there are a raft of union issues. Unions and the working class no longer represent an inertial barrier to "green" energy writ large, as they once were portrayed. Mr. Sammy Roth mentions that Steelworkers Local 675, which staffs some California petrochemical power stations (and refineries) recently sought out research on the forecast for clean energy jobs, and they paid for it to be done. Overall, blue-collar workers are not standing in the way quite so much of the transition to green energy because their livelihoods are not at stake. (They had long before agreed that leisure time would be better too.)

But union issues continue to exist even at clean-energy businesses. Tesla, once of the largest companies doing the manufacture of green energy products, has had complaints made against it of really vile trade and employment practices. Green energy is not a magic bullet to stop the unfairness of the market economy. 

Another issue in this vein is an even deeper union concern. The example is, union jobs building large scale solar are better than jobs doing rooftop solar installs, which are often done now by the formerly incarcerated, just to paint that picture. The union jobs building the large scale solar installations pay better and have better working benefits, but, some research indicates that rooftop solar could have the most salutary benefits, and is needed more, being that it is more common sense and uses the existing power grid. These contentions are still very much alive. 

The first union slate in this narrative concerns very deep, contentious and new issues, about the jobs we could have, the jobs we do have, and the jobs we should have. 

But, while this increases the headache, from the builders of things themselves come some suggestions about how to avoid the resource extraction trap of lithium through diversified storage options. Energy generated from green energy could be stored economically in pumped hydropower, green hydrogen, and compressed air. This is not to mention thermal batteries to store heat (like heated sand silos that could store, distribute, and control the flow of heating for the winter). (I discussed this previously.). I also believe an older idea should have a Renaissance, if only to test it further: this is the inexpensive liquid-salt battery, which doesn't require anything more chemically complex than readily-available common salts, or even culinary salts, to hold a charge. This is to be contrasted with everyone's favorite mineral du jour, lithium, which is a rare salt. 

But when you dip deeper into the parts of the narrative that this stage opens up, the narrative becomes not just contentious, but fraught, with voices that appear like they are fighting for their lives. Although this may not be true, the tone is unreasonably apocalyptic. 

The first manifestation of this is prices. For instance, one report reports that rooftop solar could save Americans a total $473 billion but other reports say the cost of rooftop solar has to go up. Well, this is double-edged, because we need the jobs installing and creating rooftop solar to be better union jobs, however, people start to doubt the savings, even though the difference may be only pennies and they know that, because, what this all is exposing is that people are only very slowly accepting that these necessary innovations in the economy are an investment, and not short-term. But they should also start understanding that they are a safeguard, too. 

I read this following incarnation of narrative strife as the product of people thinking about existential panic, even though green energy itself is not an existential panic. Someone always brings up nuclear power, and asks why we don't put more money into that. Someone further always says very snidely something to the tune of "concerns about nuclear waste storage is an issue of scientific literacy." Well, when it comes to modern nuclear energy policy, someone haranguing you about scientific literacy is just begging you, or anyone, to hide the malfeasance. -- And now, that I've hit them so hard, let's get into the weeds, for the short time it will take to eviscerate them. The main product of Einstein and his journals was not the atom bomb, but the Theories of Relativitity. His greatest regret has caused more suffering than any other scientific spectacle in history. The pollution of nuclear energy is absolute. The philosophical imperative of choice, is only to reject such things, or, there is no morality, only barbarism. And this unequivocal fact completely accounts for the sycophantic but also manipulative tone of any living proponents of nuclear energy. -- If they appear categorically wrong to you, that is because they are, and science will not hide them from their comeuppance, which is coming. A discerning look will tell you that these charlatan "science communicators" have gotten worse, for the simple reason that some of them can't any longer be paid to spread climate change disinformation. 

But the spectre of scientific rhetoric loooming over the rhetoric of necessity has only become more haunting in recent years. The reason, being that every scientist now wants a piece of the pie of climate change mitigation. Nowhere else is this more relevant to our practical concerns than in the spectre of hydrogen energy. Hydrogen energy may appear to be so hopeful, however, remember always that government through hope is the mark of bad government. Mark also, that the "hope" of a hydrogen economy comes from Europe, the seat of bad governments. 

A skeptical look at hydrogen energy is what we owe ourselves. And it becomes all-too quickly revealed that hydrogen is far from a panacaea for our current problem, raising a troubling spectre, actually, that it is only alternative energy, and not green energy. Some hydrogen is "gray", manufactured from petrochem, other hydrogen is "blue," manufactured from filtered petrochem, and only some is "green", from electrolysis. And controlled burning of hydrogen, still pollutes. After knowing this, I wouldn't endorse hydrogen just like I wouldn't burn a candle made of paraffin wax. 

This narrative always metamorphoses thusly to the point that it needs an extreme reality check. And it is only individuals with the particular experience, who can utilize the main one with the most social relevance. The American West, for all its gains in the realm of energy, has not solved its water problem. The Oglala Aquifer is nearly depleted. Lake Mead and the Colorado River are running dry. But Water is Life. And yet, Hawaii's Oahu aquifer, the island's only source of drinking water, has been polluted by years of petrochem leaks. Mitigating climate change is not about pie-in-the-sky science projects; it is practical and it is gritty. We need projects that we can use, and that make sense; that are reasonable and properly understood; and that address the fundamental problems and not selfish opportunity. That are inconvenient in that we never thought we could do so much. We don't need sermons about elitism disguised behind scientific obfuscation. 

We need elegance of function more than we need elegance of form. There is a difference between grit and unsophistication. Of the forces in this narrative that try to derail the discourse on green energy, it can be said that their words cry out for a Superman to save them, but their meaning is that they desire the slow fool, and the hope with which bad governments lead; in short, that they want the solution that feels good more than the solution that works. And yet they believe it feels good, not even because it is the past, but because they are accustomed to the familiarity of a scientific hegemony that was, in the recent past of our country, a momentary aberration. 

As you can see, the narrative of any discourse on green energy in the Public, is quickly threatened by latent social forces that try to unmoor it into some fanciful, ungrounded, airy nothingness, that serves only their interest to the exclusion of the interests of all. This troubles us all, but the hard part is to name that problem so as to extricate it from its parasitical and destructive hold on well-meaning progress. And that is what I believe I have opened the space to do here, with the preceding.