When green beliefs bump up against solid reality

Sooner or later, we’ll have to accept that wind and solar destabilize grids

It’s a beautiful dream: a green grid, run on resources that can’t run out, costing next to nothing, polluting not at all. Environmentally conscious people the world over were won over by this vision — who wouldn’t want to displace the ugly, deadly power technologies of the 20th century with this sleek, clean future?

Across the developed world, greens have been pushing hard to make renewable grids a reality. But brutal old reality will jolt us out of this dream. Evidence is piling up that weather-dependent power energy sources are a dead end — too expensive and unreliable to be the backbone of a stable power grid. Places like California and Germany have gotten to a point where each new wind turbine or solar panel you add to the grid makes it more unstable.

Many in the green movement are not ready to let the dream go. Decades spent building a green halo around wind and solar power have turned them into shibboleth technologies: people now identify with them on an ideological level. To question the wisdom and virtue of renewables is to commit green apostasy.

But why should solar and wind be so irresistible to greens? How could an industrial technology come to command such reverence? What’s the source of the instinct to sacralize them?

Emmet Penney’s essay, How Nature Became the Environment, helped bring order to my ideas about this. He notes that environmentalism was born not so much to protect nature — there was already a movement for that, conservationism — but more as a rebellion against capitalist alienation. A sense began to grow after World War II that too high a price was being paid for material abundance, and a backlash against industrial capitalism gathered pace.

Environmentalism grew in opposition to the biblical idea of man’s dominion over nature, treating it as an ideology that had spun out of control. There’s a strong streak of anti-rationalism here, a distrust of the whole project of using reason to master nature for the good of humanity.The project of trying to tame nature came to be seen as humanity at its hubristic worst, engineering its way to disaster.

One outcome was an ongoing distrust of complexity, a rejection of the engineering mindset that believes all problems have a solution. In this environmentalist frame, long causal chains are suspect, and human intervention in nature is guilty until proven innocent.

Environmentalism is an ideology, but it’s also a sensibility. Deep suspicion of rationality is central to both. From an environmentalist standpoint, the simpler the process, product or service, the more “natural” it is. The less humanity intervenes to alter the natural world, the more virtuous it is.

This, I think, is why solar and wind are irresistible to environmentalists. As a finished product, they use very short causal chains. The sun hits a solar panel, and an electromagnetic field is generated ipso facto. You can see the wind turning a turbine. The power is just there waiting to be plucked. For the environmental sensibility, the simplicity and passivity themselves are the point.

Of course, this is a comforting mirage. Once you understand the vast industrial operations required to mine, process, and transport the materials needed for renewables, you grasp that their green halos are unsustainable. A huge deal of environmental damage results from creating these ‘clean’ technologies—but we’re seldom shown the dirt. What we’re fed instead is the fantasy of a technology that can power our societies without harming the natural world. It’s a false belief, but a fantastically popular one.

Orwell once noted that “intellectually, it is possible to carry on this [kind of] process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality.” In our case, that solid reality is coming in the form of expensive energy subject to volatile prices. Before long, the bump may come in the form of blackouts, constrained economic growth, and all the societal problems that entails

Too much psychic energy has been poured into the fantasy of clean power for environmentalists to see the light all at once. They will continue to double down on a hopeless program for years to come, as they’ve been doing in Germany, Britain, California and elsewhere. Sooner or later, their false belief will bump up against solid reality. Because solar and wind can’t sustain a modern power grid. Just the opposite: the more capacity you build, the less stable the grid is.

Ideologues are tenacious, but reality is more tenacious. When it triumphs, we will have to accept that there is only one source of available low-emissions power s that is cheap and reliable enough to sustain a modern society: nuclear energy.

We’re not there yet. But we will get there.