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The End Of Burning, The Start Of Burning
Fire is at the heart of our deeply emotional relationship to energy
One year ago I wrote about “the end of burning”.
I was musing on the transition to renewable power, and the pushback it gets from some people.
Some of the pushback is political and economic, of course. It comes from the fossil-fuel industry (and its paid-for defenders), who are desperate to keep profiting off more and more emissions, global warming be damned. These fossil-fuel firms love to sow fear-uncertainty-and-doubt about clean energy so they can continue hawking oil and gas. These motivations aren’t difficult to grasp: Greed and solipsism, mostly.
But there’s another part of the resistance to wind and solar that’s more subtle, because it’s cultural.
For some people, their dislike of wind and solar is very gut-level. It’s emotional; pre-rational. For them, there’s something about a world powered by solar panels and wind farms — where cars and bikes whiz by on electric motors, and houses are heated and cooled with heat pumps — that just feels wrong. It seems, in some inchoate fashion, more weak, more vulnerable: A diminishment of power.
What exactly is going on here?
