My local beaches on the Yorkshire coast have some of the biggest wind farms in the world.
We’re never going to reduce energy consumption. It’s a balance between gas and wind here, just pick how many wind turbines you want, and burn gas to fill in the gaps.
Your ruined horizon is my safer future for my kids. I like seeing them there. I wish there were more.
I think there is reason to think that we will reduce energy consumption.
US energy consumption per capita peaked in 1975 and has trended down even as population has increased. There's going to be a peak in global population, likely before 2100 (and it keeps getting revised sooner, not later).
So it stands to reason that as we become more energy efficient (already happening) and we start to have fewer people on earth (likely to happen in your/ your children's lifetime) that overall consumption will in fact go down.
I mean, I think on an infinite timescale we probably will. A middle-class lifestyle today requires less energy than 20 years ago, simply because things have gotten more efficient (if you buy a fridge or a washing machine or a central heating system or a lightbulb today, it's using significantly less energy to do the same thing). But not _soon_. And part of the shift is very much from non-electric to electric power usage (gas heating -> heat pumps, petrol cars -> electric cars, diesel trains -> electric trains, etc etc). Energy use per capita will peak (may already have peaked) _long_ before electricity use per capita.
Every generation thinks they're building a safer future for their kids, including the boomers. If you want to talk about safety then you need to take sustainability seriously.
In the US, "Boomers" made the environmental movement mainstream, created the EPA, started cleanup of superfund sites, and passed the clean water and clean air acts. There are waterways where I live that are swimmable for the first time in generations because of the Boomers. It's not an either/or proposition.
Boomers didn't create the EPA, that was the Greatest and Silent generations. Boomers were no more than 25 in 1970 and hardly in power. Some of them may have been in the activists pushing for change but they didn't actually pass the legislation.
We’re never going to reduce energy consumption. It’s a balance between gas and wind here, just pick how many wind turbines you want, and burn gas to fill in the gaps.
Your ruined horizon is my safer future for my kids. I like seeing them there. I wish there were more.