The False Solution Of Renewable Energy Harvesting Technologies
How will climate change and the destruction of the natural world affect the future? No one knows for sure, but the most-likely outcomes do not look good unless we do something radically different from what is being done now.
Many people assume “renewables” are automatically good. The reason is simple: most of us know very little about how energy actually works — and much of what we’ve been told is wrong.
Society is in a terrible predicament. Not only is the planet becoming too hot for human civilization to flourish, but over-consumption of all forms of energy is destroying Earth’s ecosystems — the true basis of wealth and the foundation for all life’s prosperity. Substituting “renewable” energy for fossil fuels will not fix this. In fact, it may worsen the problem by enabling continued growth of the human enterprise, which is the primary source of our predicament. Climate change is only one of growth’s many serious consequences.
A human-centered worldview misses the big picture. Humans cannot simply be takers; we are part of a living system that must be maintained, or we go down with it. Any plan that accelerates growth and energy use is doomed to fail. An Earth-centered perspective recognizes that humans are part of a larger system with limits that cannot be engineered away.
This position highlights four areas that negate the purpose and need for renewable energy harvesting infrastructure:
Limits to Growth
Supply Chain Bottlenecks
Lack of Efficiency
Unsustainable Lifecycles & Wildlife Ecocide
Everything takes energy to produce or do — from trains to planes, from food to crude, from playing to praying. This includes wind turbines and solar panels.
All human activity within production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services relies on energy. This is the economy. If the energy supply shrinks or stagnates, the economy becomes a zero-sum game where companies and nations must collapse for others to survive.
Energy is the economy. Whether you call it green, blue, or settler-colonial blood red, there is no economic activity without energy expenditure.
In a capitalist system, when profit margins fall into the red, the system destabilizes. Every transaction — from hair salons using electricity to restaurants burning natural gas, to agriculture, mining, and transportation powered by diesel, to metallurgy and cement production requiring coal — demands energy.
Some argue that Western states have moved beyond fossil fuels by becoming “service economies” or by using weather-dependent sources. Yet these societies still consume steel, concrete, plastics, electronics, paper, and food — all produced using massive amounts of fossil fuel elsewhere.
Globalization has merely outsourced manufacturing, accelerating the one-time drawdown of Earth’s natural life-support systems. Falling coal, oil, and gas output — whether due to depletion or decarbonization — will create the illusion of climate progress even as the economy collapses in the absence of energy.
This system, based entirely on ecosystem exploitation and extraction of nonrenewable natural life-sources, is inherently unstable and ultimately destroys the conditions of its own existence.
The global economy demands constant growth regardless of long-term environmental consequences. Wind and solar energy offer a “solution” to a problem seldom discussed: growth requires increasing energy consumption.
Renewables do not replace carbon energy — they add to it.
Since 91% of global energy comes from fossil fuels, any increase in total energy demand requires more coal, oil, and gas.
Large-scale adoption of renewables frees more fossil fuel to be used for:
mining
manufacturing
transport
construction
AI datacenter expansion
This means more emissions, more depletion, and more industrial output, even if fossil fuels’ percentage share of electricity declines.
There will be no energy transition.
The only real transition available is less energy consumption.
Avoiding catastrophic climate change requires ceasing fossil fuel combustion — yet the shift to battery-intensive, metal-hungry renewable systems only increases fossil fuel use.
Renewables do not transition the world away from ecologically destructive resource extraction. They expand it — dramatically. Yet this expansion is legitimized through narratives of “clean energy,” “climate action,” and “innovation.”
This intensified extraction will become more destructive, expensive, and geopolitically unstable. Benefits to society will diminish while wealth inequality increases among resource owners and corporations.
Calling solar panels and wind turbines “clean power” is greenwashing. Their supply chains require:
massive fossil fuel inputs
large-scale habitat destruction
destructive mining for rare minerals
global shipping and manufacturing
We cannot delay reducing energy consumption; failing to do so will be fatal to life on Earth.
As renewable infrastructure expands, large grid upgrades are required — transmission lines, substations, transformers — which themselves depend on fossil fuel and mineral extraction. Transformers are custom-built, slow to produce, and vulnerable to electromagnetic disruption from solar storms or weapons.
AI systems are increasingly used to manage the growing grid complexity, yet renewable expansion has not stabilized electricity prices. Since 2020:
US industrial electricity costs increased 25%
European industrial costs increased 50%
As global coal, oil, and gas reserves decline — and as deindustrialization spreads — the world may be unable to replace or recycle aging solar and wind equipment. Remaining fossil fuels may be insufficient to rebuild the infrastructure needed to extract more.
Wind and solar are essentially a more complex method of burning coal, with a material intensity 500× higher than gas turbines. Their future deployment becomes physically impossible long before they become sustainable.
Embodied Energy
Wind turbines and solar panels have very low or even negative net energy return once mining, refining, manufacturing, transport, installation, maintenance, and disposal are included. This is why they require government subsidies, transferring public funds to corporations.
The real finite resource
The true limit is not oil — it is Earth’s livable atmosphere.
Our CO₂ waste dump is full. No amount of remaining oil matters if ecosystems collapse.
Because renewables are intermittent:
Solar’s capacity factor is ~13% globally
Wind’s is ~25%
This means we must install 8× more solar and 4× more wind than required for steady 24/7 power — plus massive storage systems.
Electricity is only 20% of global energy consumption, yet the electric grid loses enormous amounts of energy. The US grid loses 59% before electricity reaches the consumer.
Grids were built for fossil fuels, not renewables. Transforming them is expensive and complex.
As of 2024:
87% of global energy comes from fossil fuels
13% from nuclear, hydro, biofuel, and renewables
A decade ago fossil fuels were at 89%.
At this rate, by 2050 fossil fuels will still supply ~80% of energy.
Energy Density
This is where renewables fail most dramatically.
| Energy Source | Approx. Energy Density |
|---|---|
| Diesel fuel | 13,000 W/kg |
| Lithium-ion battery | 240 W/kg |
| Solar panels | ~20 W/kg |
| Wind turbines | ~6 W/kg |
This orders-of-magnitude gap cannot be “innovated away.”
Thus, renewables require staggering quantities of material — steel, aluminum, copper, concrete, glass, rare earth metals — causing unprecedented ecological harm.
To meet the US’s current electricity needs with wind alone, 12% of the continental US would need to be covered with wind farms. To provide total energy consumption: 72%.
Storage Limitations
Pumped hydro is the only storage type capable of multi-hour gigawatt output, and it requires specific geography. Large cities would require storage on a scale far beyond current lithium-ion capacities.
Solar panels and wind turbines last 20–30 years, with declining efficiency. Their materials:
are largely non-recyclable
require high fossil fuel input
generate toxic waste
ultimately end up in landfills, leaking harmful substances like arsenic
Recycling is always incomplete and always consumes energy. Composite materials cannot be fully separated, just as you cannot reconstruct a cake from its ingredients.
We face centuries of toxic leakage, even if mining stopped today.
Cleaning the world’s abandoned mines would cost trillions.
A 2023 ecological study concluded:
“Current interventions are resource-intensive, slow-moving, and focused on symptoms rather than the root cause: maladaptive human behavior.”
Increasing technological complexity increases systemic fragility — as seen in the 2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout, where grid failure led to transportation paralysis, communications outages, emergency service failures, and the deaths of eight people.
This is the most indisputable harm:
Renewable energy harvesting machinery kills wildlife.
Humans + domestic animals = 96% of mammal biomass
Wild mammals = 4%
One-third of North American birds lost in 50 years
Offshore wind farms kill 100% of plankton drawn into cooling systems
Phytoplankton generate ~50% of Earth’s oxygen and form the base of the marine food chain. Their decline — 1–2% per year — is catastrophic.
Wind and solar infrastructure cause:
habitat loss
migration disruption
lethal bird and bat collisions
noise and vibration impacts
marine ecosystem collapse near offshore installations
This is ecocide.
Human survival depends on rejecting myths of infinite growth, human supremacy, and technological salvation. A sustainable future requires:
lower energy consumption
smaller populations
simpler living arrangements
biocentric values
self-sufficiency rather than centralized industrial dependency
Civilization’s centralized infrastructure — energy, food, mobility, health — is collapsing under climate disruption, supply chain breakdown, and ecosystem destruction. New grassroots structures must emerge.
This is not a technological problem; it is a cultural and psychological one. Changing course requires abandoning the Civilizational Lie — that growth is progress and humans are separate from nature.
“Destroying the planet to save it is illogical.”
Much love to all Blue Earth Defenders.
Acknowledgement to B The Honest Sorcerer and Steve Bull.