The world economy does not like renewable energy, it does not understand it. The problem is that renewables can be owned by you and me or local companies or municipalities. This means the energy can used to do stuff, but no money needs to change hands. This in turn leads to banks losing control over their economy. I say ‘their’ because it is a fact that the world economy is created by banks, run by banks, protected by banks, all in service of banks.
Banks fight the dying of their light, which was their role in distributing and allocating fossil fuels. Renewables will mostly be generated where they are needed. The proponents of more grid are trying to make it so energy can come from far away, once again requiring the use of money to trade it, but smart people will reject the creation of a long distance energy market as a waste of prescious time to fight climate change.
There is little hope for many countries though, as the political system seems to reject anyone who does not first look at economistic interests (meaning the security of banks). If you don’t you just don’t get elected, you are not taken seriously. Even if you do you still use the same money as everybody else, you can not differentiate that you want to use renewables to do what you want to do. This also means that banks can lend to competitors of renewables, directly or by lobbying governments, while not lending to people who drive growth of renewables or their supporters.
The best way to solve this problem is to split the economy in two : A fossil/nuclear one and a renewable powered one. I wrote about a way before, which would be to create a separate currency the Joule (renewable) vs the Euro for fossil/nuclear. A third currency would be for labour (the Auro) but this may be unnecessary seeing the speed of automation and development of AI.
Why would you create a Joule economy next to a Euro economy? The reason is that in the Joule economy products and services payed with Joules are priced vs the availability of renewable energy (either directly or stored in batteries). The emission of Joules into the (what I call) Roboeconomy.com is different from a bank writing out a loan (after having concluded all the money+interest will be retured eventually), which is quite simple and introduces many risks (inflation, delflation, bubbels etc.). Instead the amount of Joules will be given to the owner of the renewable energy source, based on the analysis of what will be done with it. At the same time part will be ‘taxed’ and given to the people living close to the renewable energy source. This means the government manages this allocation of Joules. It can not just create them, because the capacity of renewable energy sources is hard limited.
Unlike with fossil credit (Euro,USD etc.) there is no global competition for who can get the most and produce the most, which for example causes a lot of oil to go into China now that used to go into the US manufacturing base. Instead every region has locally allocated Joules and get distributed Joules as a basic income. The people in the region must use the Joules to make stuff to serve their needs. The products can be bought with Joules, so the Joules can be used to produce them, mine the raw materials, transport what is needed to where it is needed by the producers.
In a Joule based economy the more renewable resources you have the better. But if you place a factory in the middle of the desert, say one that makes sneakers from synthetic molecules made in chemical processes powered by renewables, those sneakers have next to no real cost and no Joules payed from other regions will help produce it, because the energy those Joules represent is not available in the desert. This seems different from the situation with fossil fuels, but it is not, because say to produce a sneaker from oil in a factory in China, someone has to bring the oil to the plastic factory and then the plastic to the sneaker factory, at the cost of fuel. This logistic challenge associated with fossil us usually hidden from view, until the trucks go on strike or the ships get stuck in the Suez Canal.
The introduction of the Joule currency could happen by government initiated local renewable energy projects the currency is part of. The local governments can also invest, as can companies. The currency then gets distributed to the people involved as well as to the owners of the energy source (who get rewarded for their maintenance and intiative). It would make sense to start with essential services like bakeries, fertilizer factories, logistics companies, etc. These can then buy energy with the Joules allocated with them and earn Joules or other currencies with their products and services.
The economy would become split as banks would have nothing to do with the Joules, while the communities would enjoy basic products and services from their own Joule economy. This is like people in Spain not paying for gas in the winter, because the sun keeps them warm without it. The economies would never meet, but could if people wanted to replace their fossil credit Euros for Joules and owners of Joules would want to buy Euros, for instance for a plane ticket. As regions would not really compete but take care of themselves for most basic needs, there would be no ‘global market’, production of goods and services could however increase as more renewable energy capacity was build and these products could be shared with regions with energy shortages.
As you can see the Joule based Roboeconomy would be completely different from the fossil credit (Euro, Dollar etc. ) based ‘world economy’. The world economy could not sabotage the Joule economies because these would not want or need fossil credit or fossil fuels. They could exist side by side in the beginning, like we now have homes that require no energy between homes that still burn gas. This system can help us transtion without banks or fossil being an anchor dragging us back..