The other day, while listening to the radio, I heard an ad from the gas industry that said gas provides energy whenever you need it, even when the sun is not shining — inaccurately implying that the energy from solar panels cannot be used at night. The ad ended with the industry’s catch-phrase “Think about it.”
Well, millions of us are thinking about it, a lot. We know that our energy future will shape humanity’s future and Earth’s future.
We think that continuing to rely on fossil fuels — including gas — is a road to assured disaster, the scale of which we have begun to see in huge fires, prolonged droughts and super storms occurring with increasing frequency. In spite of rhetoric from antiscience denialists, evidence of environmental and climate impacts from fossil fuels is mounting. We think that to avert bigger catastrophes caused by fossil fuel pollution and extreme climate change, we must change direction away from fossil fuels as rapidly as possible.
We know that economical renewable-energy technologies exist now that can meet a large portion of our power needs. We think that because humans are highly inventive, more and better green technologies will come quickly, and more quickly if we prioritize their development.
We think that instead of investing hundreds of billions of dollars and more years into dirty climate-damaging fossil fuels, we should be putting that investment now into clean renewable energy.
We think there are more jobs in clean renewable energy than in fossil fuels, that sustainable jobs in clean energy will be around long after jobs in fossil fuels have gone bust, and that jobs in clean energy are steadier and far healthier than daily exposure to the dangers and poisons of fossil fuel production, transportation, storage and inevitable pollution clean-up.
We think the oil and gas industry should stop obstructing renewable energy, stop treating our environment as a dumping ground for its pollution and stop corrupting our political environment to serve its interests. And they should stop calling gas “clean” when in truth its production and use causes dangerous pollution, and its climate impact is as bad or worse than that of coal.
We think it is time to recognize that to retain a habitable planet, we need to bring the era of fossil fuels to a rapid close. To avert radical climate change and environmental disasters, fossil fuels need to remain in the ground.
We think it is great news that commitments to divest financially from fossil fuels now total more than $2.6 trillion, from $50 billion just one year ago, a 50-fold increase in one year. We think this is evidence that leaders of major institutions in the U.S. and around the world are thinking seriously about our energy future and taking decisive action to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to clean renewable energy. We think this gives hope and inspiration that our children and their children will have a better future.
There is no Planet B. Think about it.
Doug Henderson is a natural resources management professional with over 30 years of experience in the United States, Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands. With a background in natural resource economics and management, he has worked with government agencies, international organizations, NGOs, the private sector, and local stakeholders in more than 20 countries. He hangs out near Allenspark as much as possible.
This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.
