To make climate progress, we need to balance the economy with sustainability

One thing the pandemic showed us was how much energy humans consume, and how freaked out we are when that consumption slows down or totally stalls. A colleague told me that the air above Wuhan was the clearest it’s been in decades when the outbreak pretty much shut it down. That dependence on more and more energy use is really the main problem affecting many issues in our society, from homelessness to physical and mental health. And the two-party U.S. political system is a part of the problem. Both sides want to grow the economy, and the only difference seems to be which side gets the money. Every change of administration just funnels the tax dollars into the friends, associates, lobbyists, political backers, and pundits from one side or the other.

So while one side denies human overuse of energy is a problem, the other side thinks we can somehow replace all of the hydrocarbon-based energy with solar panels and wind. The myths of electric cars and recycling are just that: myths. Because electric cars need recharging from utility power (most fired by fuels) the emissions just go up from the power plants instead of from the cars. And And the whole battery industry is based on mining more and more metals. Much recycling just puts mare and more energy into everything we do, from drinking water to buying groceries; remember drinking fountains?

And let’s not fool ourselves by attacking the petroleum industry. Petrol is pretty handy stuff, nice compact energy. I used to live off the grid, and it was pretty good to fire up that little generator in the middle of winter or middle of the night. Think about boats, planes, trains and trucks; they are all wonders of human technology. But we’ve gotten to the point that everything is based on the Gross National Product. Well if it is based on energy consumption from hydrocarbons, the GNP is really a measure of gross national pollution.

We can’t just retool factories from one energy source to another, we have to actually consume less. Mass transit is a great idea, but here in Anchorage we’ve been cutting it and cutting it, so you better have a car if you want to get around with any kind of ease. We’ve been promoting automobiles like crazy. Check out C Street sometime; we all roar up to the next stoplight. For any out-of-towners, welcome to the racetrack we call Anchorage.

So what’s an earthling with technical knowledge supposed to do about it? For starters, let’s teach our children that petroleum is solar energy from photosynthesis going on in the oceans, and coal is solar energy from terrestrial plants (that’s why it has so much ash). Most energy we use is just old solar energy that’s been stored underground. But we are using it up very fast, and it seems with no end in sight. Life during the pandemic harkened back to an earlier time when we didn’t have to travel thousands of miles to see grandma. Here in Alaska, many people just went to fish camp for the summer. So when people wonder what a solar-based economy would look like, I think the pandemic-era economy is a pretty good example. But of course the government went crazy to save the economy, and here we are again.

The younger generations are having to deal with this overconsumption mess, and we’re not teaching them the basics of photosynthesis and combustion. All humans need to realize that we are using up the ancient solar energy, much faster than we are getting the new stuff every day. Once we understand that basic idea and teach it to our children, they might have a better chance to actually deal with it. But all we seem to teach them is that energy use is good, and that more energy is better.

That brings me to a story. Let’s say that the president decided to save energy by growing vegetables, and encouraged people to take mass transit. And many people did grow their own vegetables and took mass transit. So the economy went down because we sold less food and fewer cars. And that’s great, isn’t it? Or isn’t it? We cannot imagine that’s great, because we have been taught all our lives that the economy has to go up. So the question is, why does the economy have to go up? One of our presidents had the saying, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Maybe the new saying should be: “It’s not the economy, stupid, it’s the planet.”

Mark Martinson has worked on a variety of projects throughout Alaska, and currently teaches chemistry part-time at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He owns a solar energy consulting business, ‘Energy Consult.’

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