| Pity that most of this is still fuelled by oil, in one way or another; shoving that oil energy through several intermediaries does not actually decrease entropy. It's like the use of oil to make fertilizer to grow corn to make ethanol to supplement gasoline; would have been better to just burn the oil to start with, economically, environmentally, and in the long term politically, too. Corn subsidies in America wrecked the Mexican corn production market, resulting in waves of illegal immigration as poor farmers who don't know how to do anything else moved north to continue to ply their trade in a place where it is still profitable. Too many cleantech projects are catabolic: consuming more energy than they produce, while spreading the blame and consumption around and giving people a way to claim carbon credits. Might as well just call them 'carbon indulgences' for all of the emissions they actually save in reality. Only an economist could pretend that someone who owns a bunch of land doing nothing has an invisible commodity of carbon the government allocated for them to emit, that can be sold to a factory somewhere else that is actually emitting carbon, and pretend that it is somehow helping the environment to shuffle those dollars around. Somehow, production processes continue; with the exception of those that shut down, only to open elsewhere in the world where there are fewer regulations on environment and labour. The result is a lose-lose, where we no longer have the ability to actually decrease emissions, no longer have any of the economic advantages of the emissions, and of course no longer have any way to ensure the people working in those facilities get a living wage or any of the other benefits of the labour laws our ancestors fought for. Go ahead and take a CleanTech job, just remember, there's a 95% chance it's a circlejerk that doesn't accomplish anything at all in the real world besides spreading the problem around and grifting off of it in the process. |