Renewable energy will grow at record speed the coming years. Even though it will banks invested in the fossil energy sector will be reluctant, fossil energy companies will push back by lobbying and existing laws will help them slow down the growth. In general the financial system, having profited greatly from CO2 emission rights, and allways eager to try and sabotage another solution, are simply not the partners for a greener future. Banks will become all but obsolete as stored energy reserves will become much less important than it is now (coal, oil, gas are all stored energy). Without stored production capacity (capital in a way) who needs banks?
The ‘right’ exists to protect the status quo
To accelerate this proces further it seems the left is playing the wrong game. Those that like to think of solutions in the real world, instead of short term solutions to a lifestyle need, like ‘I want to own a big house’, who generally are found on the left side of the political spectrum, make a mistake when trying to plea with the right side. The right side of the political arean is happy with the solutions it knows, and usually unable to follow any argument for change. The resistance is not intellectual, it is simply ideological.
The right usually chooses between two options : If it is a problem then of course someone is to blame, someone has to be found that solves it. If it is not a problem for the right the right is optimistic. Optimism, trusting that things work out well, is a very effective way to get rid of a problem. So migrants are problem, they are to blame, climate change is not a problem to the right, it will be ok. Bank failure is a big problem, the ‘economy’ is to blame. Joblessness due to that same ‘economy’ is a challenge the jobless will find a way to deal with. A left wing person will try to argue with a right wing person, and get nowhere, although the right wing person gets a chance to frustrate the left wing person and may do so for as long as it is fun. Don’t argue with a right wing politician!
Since capital is now fossil fuel, available for credit, capitalism as we know it needs to be replaced by a new system
What the left should do is make a clear separation between what is for the left and what is for the right. Right now the left lives in a society structured by right wing principles, a fossil fuel based globalized economy. What it wants for the sake of the planet is a renewables based economy with distributed energy and storage, distributed local production. Such a society is much safer to live in and can even have positive effect on the CO2 concentration (lower it). If cleaning up the climate was something the economy would do by itself we would not have the problem in the first place, so climate action on the scale needed will never fit in the right wing economic philosophy.
If the people owning solar panels realize they are insurgents in a fossil credit economy, if they buy storage for their power they will be invisible to the banking system in providing their basic needs (not food, but it gets there). If they grow organic on debt free land they would be totally outside the grasp of the banks (which is why the right lobbies for many restrictions on farming and growing). If they realized they are politically active in doing what they do, solar, wind, organic farming even insulating one’s house or planting a tree. These actions with real economic impact are what defines the Left, the ‘constructors’, relative to those that want to import, burn consume, pillage, raid nature and all its resources because there is no direct tangible consequence.
A philosophy of exclusive focus on the market does not marry with that of the farmer
The ‘constructors’ should own the storage, the grid, the factories that use the power, the trains, the busses and cars. The renewable energy system now feeds in to a happy go lucky we are all the same system which is fundamentally pro fossil and is slowing down the change. How many billions of gallons of oil will be wasted just because some individuals get a good life out of it is mindboggeling, the harm this will do equally so. Destruction has been ongoing for a century now and we have passed the panic point. We should panic.
Do not reason with the right, your reasoning will teach them how to exhaust and discourage you
What we should not do is plea with the conservatives, those that think and feel we need to move to renewables asap should unite under one political flag and not focus on the divisions in some of their beliefs. The big switch has to be made by a united group, not a divided group of which many still haven’t understood the flaws in economic thinking. If one looks at a parlaiment, it should be clear who is a constructor and who isn’t so even on the rightish end of the spectrum one can vote for a person that wants to end the fossil fuel era and who will vote that way in all cases.
Constructor :
- 100% Renewables ASAP, no burning, so no biomass. No nuclear.
- Growing storage for industry and homes
- Grid becomes publicly owned, no financialization of energy markets
- Carbon tax which will NOT be spend on fossil fuels directly or indirectly
- Renewable energy producers will receive credit to sell depending on the economic contribution of the energy. Tax office keeps taxes. (See Euro, Auro and Joule).
- Extra economic climate action, so climate action which will not be economically exploited.
- Persecution and shut down of pollutors, confiscation of fossil resources so they can be allocated most efficiently to the construction of renewable energy sources.