For solar PV especially, it was a dream from decades ago that finally seems to be coming true, getting progressively better at power generation as the technology improves on itself.

In the bigger picture, it still has its limitations, though. We still need to mine for PV and battery ingredients, and that traps us in a paradigm where no matter how good it gets at the point of use, the embodied energy of production is going to escalate as mineral resources increase in scarcity.

What’s worse is that instead of displacing fossil fuel consumption, we end up having a layer of renewables on top of the same amount of fossil fuels. Part of this is because of the requirements to maintain a base level of grid electricity generation, and part of this is simply the perpetual incentive to consume more. Sure, we’ll see the fall of the petrodollar in the next 20 years, but then what? We’ll still be trying to squeeze modern life out of a burning and increasingly polluted world.

It’s possible, especially now, to imagine a world (or at least a lot of small replicable parts of a world) where there is an adequate quality of life that includes computers and modern medicine, but does not meet the needs of the present at the expense of the needs of the future by exhausting finite resources. Unfortunately, our civilizational trajectory has been resolutely pointed in the opposite direction for at least 400 years, since the advent of capitalism or possibly even earlier.

An adaptive approach would be to redesign our society to reduce all waste to a point where our new consumption is trivial. That means doing away with the arbitrary distancing we put between everything (mandatory minimum density), it means preventing some of the redundancy of private ownership, it means going most places on a bike and riding a train a couple times a year for travel, it means getting most of our heat energy from wood/biomass, it means building with clastic and/or organic materials in a way that will last centuries, it means eating less than 50 kg of animal products per person per year (or ideally 0), it means only manufacturing things that can be composted or recycled, it means maybe 100W of residential electricity consumption per person. In other words, it means making everything labor-intensive and localized again, annihilating most global markets and de-alienating virtually all labor. We could use our high-tech green energy resources within the scope of our mineral resources, in a way that resource depletion happens on a scale of geologic eons, instead of decades.

The material technology is not going to save us from problems that require social technology to solve. Not just capitalism, but our very civilization is on its last legs. Our challenge is to create an alternative before it implodes.