The Big Misconception About Clean Energy

I am highly skeptical of the basic premise here, for several reasons: 

1) There are many ecological pitfalls that come with a drastic increase in renewable energy production. For example, shifting massively to solar energy could radically alter global precipitation patterns, because it would affect the amount of solar energy that gets absorbed by the planet. Another major issue is that renewable energy products require huge quantities of metals, and mining these metals has meant and will continue to mean more biodiversity losses and resource conflicts. This is just scratching the surface. Look, fossil fuel combustion is absolutely disastrous, no doubt about that. Air pollution caused by fossil fuel use alone accounts for roughly 8 million premature deaths worldwide every single year, and that's before we even get to global warming and all of its complex effects. But I think we should also be highly suspicious of the notion that shifting to wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear will somehow solve our ecological challenges. It might solve some of our problems, but it would introduce other major ones that are just as serious as the ones we're facing now. 

2) It's not clear at all that shifting to more renewable energy will produce higher living standards, the expressed goal of this video. As the energy thinker Vaclav Smil has pointed out, renewables have very low power densities and would require huge amounts of land if we want them to power our civilization the way fossil fuels do. That could disrupt agricultural production and everything else you can imagine. Germany tried a major push towards renewables and largely failed, with people facing higher energy costs and a host of other problems related to the underlying infrastructure. The vast majority of the world's energy use still comes from fossil fuels, and no major country that has experienced rapid economic growth has done so without heavily using fossil fuels. On the flipside, continuing down this path will mean certain doom. 

3) So what's the solution? Here's a bonkers radical idea if you want to give yourself a jolt: it has virtually nothing to do with technology. What we need is a radical reorganization of our economic system. We need to end neoliberal capitalism and transition to a different system that puts people before profits. Concretely, we need policies like the following if we want to both save human civilization and improve living standards for the vast majority of people: 

Universal employment guarantee backed by state funding and organizing 

Free and universal healthcare, childcare, public education, and college 

Ecological restoration: rebuild and reconstitute vulnerable areas harmed by economic activities (promote tree and forest growth, natural solutions for reversing dead zones, etc) 

Make investments in improving energy efficiency 

Subsidize expansion of renewables 

Build more public transportation 

Targeted socialization in key industries (like finance, defense, oil and gas, meat and dairy, health care, recycling) 

Reduction in work days without loss of compensation (from 5 to 4), along with policies and incentives to reduce rebound energy effects from additional free time 

Imposition of financial constraints on individual and corporate wealth, to slow down capital accumulation and thereby weaken a major source of demand for energy services 

End government subsidies for oil and gas industries