The New Ecozoic Reader No. 5

This issue of The New Ecozoic Reader presents two very different pathways for the transition to 100% renewable energy. Are they compatible? Can they stop global warming in time? This issue ends with a position paper by CES that addresses the compatibility of the two pathways.

Technology is an extended tool that humanity can use for good or ill. How can we put technology in service of humanity and the global ecosystem to help secure a liveable [sic] future on Earth? We must transition to 100% renewable energy (RE) systems globally. This article describes how 100% RE systems can provide reliable energy globally 365×24 for power, heat, transport, and industry. We should reduce our energy consumption via energy efficiency and energy sufficiency measures in parallel so that we will need to build less RE capacity and can shut down fossil fuel combustion faster.

It is no secret that the current configuration of our global energy system is leading us to the edge of the abyss. Irreversible loss of the stable interglacial climate supporting civilization as we know it looms large and although it receives substantially less attention, so does the rapid depletion of nonrenewable energy resources. The repercussions of the indispensability of fossil fuels within Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) culture (to use Bill Rees’s term) are evident in frayed communities and ecosystems around the world impacted by unprecedented stressors and rates of change. If allowed to proceed unchecked, these nonlinear and accumulating harms threaten to overwhelm us.

“Mitigation of the present ruinous situation, the recycling of materials, the diminishment of consumption, the healing of damaged ecosystems—all this will be in vain if we do these things to make the present industrial systems acceptable. They must all be done, but in order to build a new order of things.” —Thomas Berry, “The Determining Features of the Ecozoic Era”