This is the introduction to an article I wrote for the current issue of the American Solar Energy Society's flagship magazine, Solar Today, Spring 2025
You can read the full article here.
The American Way of Life depends conspicuously upon energy, not just for heat and light, but transportation, information, and fabrication. What we call “work” today consists mostly of operating machines. Our world is embodied energy.
“Energy” is a state of dependency: the dependency of a society that necessarily eschews physical labor and is addicted to the “ghost in the machine.” Energy independence policy therefore has an incoherent quality. President Trump called for “drill baby drill” as an energy independence strategy. President Biden called for new transmission lines and grid investments to “bring about” centralized renewable generation-based energy independence.
Americans with solar net metering systems believe they are energy independent, yet eligibility for their systems is capped at a small fraction of system load and depends on ratepayer subsidies. This means net metering customers, a small minority, remain dependent on payments forced on the majority of people who will never be included. This has brought political backlash: energy independence needs a coherent strategy.
So How Can We be Energy Independent, Actually?
Our relationship to energy is central to energy dependency, not merely the technologies that create energy. Focusing on technology creates a false two-dimensional economic theology: a belief system that worships technological idols: a faith that this or that kind of machine will make us energy-independent. This makes us morally dependent on technologies alleged to be independent. No technology will free us, because it does nothing to alter our, unconscious relationship to energy. The pageant of false idols continues: one political party’s idol is the green grid, the other’s idol is domestic gas, oil, and coal, and another’s is nuclear. Our policy discussions are stuck in mental quicksand, with no direction but down. That is why climate change continues, ultimately reaching the point of no return as energy demand
continues to grow.
Climate change is a metric of our society’s over-dependence on energy, just as the proliferation of slavery was a metric of Liberal English hypocrisy in the 18th century. What is different from slavery is that everyone today, rich and poor alike in differing degrees is part of the cause of climate change. The energy industry is the most guilty for lobbying against climate action, but all people use electricity, methane, gasoline, and diesel. Our clothes are made of petroleum, and our books and newspapers are being replaced by electronic devices. Acknowledging the consequences of energy dependency is hypocritical until we can find a way out: a path to economically achievable physical energy independence.
To solve an addiction, you have to face the nature of the problem. Historically, energy replaced slavery. Political support for abolition in the 18th and 19th centuries came from morally outraged people who owned no slaves. But today, all people depend upon energy. And energy is an automatic, invisible slave that does what you want the moment you demand it. You neither see nor are responsible for your slaves and beasts of burden: park them, turn them off, put them in the garage. Energy is morally laundered. You don’t smell the smoke. Miles away, machines churn, and millions of tons of copper cable ripped from dead mountains deliver silent obedience across a poisoned, dying landscape. CEOs promise carbon-free this and that so you don’t have to feel guilty flying in their airplanes or buying their products, falsely mitigated and sold at a premium to virtue-signaling elites.
States sanction certificate trading systems - Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) and Carbon Credits, - so that climate-destroying products may be sold as legally “mitigated” in profoundly dishonest marketing messages to an increasingly confused consumer, undermining public consciousness of real problems
and real solutions. Academic carbon models from the best universities treat all carbon as equal, and reduce all carbon sources to the consumer. A false equivalency of all carbon sources wags the finger at farmers as somehow equal to tourists, and small local farmers more “carbon intensive” than export-oriented
megafarms. This kind of analysis is one-dimensional and unholistic to the point of being absurd - and is promoted by the biggest polluters on earth, eager as they naturally are to shift the blame. It has also alienated voters, divided society, and tainted climate action and climate-friendly technologies as “elitist.”
Real sinners are comforted by these sanctioned lies. Markets present a fiction of independence and sustainability that has poisoned the American mind and made actual energy independence remoter still, seemingly unattainable to minds so long deceived that they have lost the power to believe anything. Energy marketers are notorious fraudsters. “Renewable Energy” providers pollute the land with deceptive products that promise “community” this and “sustainability” that, undermining the language itself.
To find our feet and solid ground, wecneed to follow principles and resist temptations to cut corners.
Energy independence is not just a renewable energy supply. It is a different system of energy that depends less upon supply. We need to meaningfully reduce the use of non-local sources of energy: Local Power.
(continue reading at Solar Today)
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