Climate change: It's about the overshoot, dummies

Great piece here by "shale oil bear" Art Berman.

Several things of note, in brief, that deserve you looking in detail.

One, he puts climate change in the frame of humans' larger "overshoot" that's leading to the Sixth Great Extinction, has put nearly 8 billion people on our planet at this current time, has crowded the wild-urban interface to help contribute to the rise of COVID, and wildfires threatening people elsewhere and more.

Second? Renewables won't come immediately to the rescue. He notes energy pivots don't happen that fast in general plus, like it or not, renewables are less energy-intense than oil, or even coal. We pivoted from wood to coal, then coal to oil, in part because once we could extract these newer hydrocarbons easily enough, we realized they had a greater energy density than old ones.

Third, as sidebars to one and two? Berman says the global economy could become poorer, not richer, and that "net zero" is itself part of the "overshoot." He needs listening to, because of renewables being less energy dense than oil, if nothing else. Sorry, tech neoliberals, but salvific technologism, as I call it — the tech cavalry riding over the hill to the rescue — doesn't always happen. And, that's why I wondered before, rhetorically, about environmentalists who won't mention the "n-word."