A short essay by me on green energy:
Regarding the green energy movement:
I often hear that the motive for green energy is to leave a better world for our children, but how many captains of industry and heads of state actually give a damn about children? Serious question. How many millions and maybe billions of actual here-and-now flesh-and-blood children with their ribs and spines and hips jutting out from under parchment skin could we have fed with the trillions and trillions of dollars spent ostensibly to provide a perfect planet for the paper-angel children that may not ever be?
So I don’t think children are the motive for this movement. Then what is the motive? Current people don’t matter and future people are a rhetorical phantasm, so since the Movement centers around unseen things and untestable predictions, I conclude that it is either religious (God not required) or aesthetic (objectivity not required). Or a religion with an aesthetic holy grail. Both are irrational. It is certainly not centered around science.
Irrational belief is my most generous interpretation. Many causes start out naively before someone realizes they can harness them for an unrealized but nascent authoritarian potential. That’s where the dogma and punishment for transgressions and heretics comes in. Here comes the compulsion to make others believe as you do and act as you would have them do. It often evolves into an of two strata, but that’s no revelation.
In summary, how far we willing go in the quest for a tree-less tree to provide energy for an Eden-less Eden when a real tree is right in front of us. This is somewhat of a metaphor, but not entirely.
Maybe the quest has long since ceased to be about the tree.