I recently read Alan Weisman’s Gaviotas on the bus. Numerous tweets resulted from the first few chapters and now this post. Weisman relates the story of how the 1973 oil embargo and ensuing energy crisis played a crucial role in the attention heaped upon Gaviotas, a settlement in the llanos (savannah) of Colombia. The town strove – and still does to this day – to create a sustainable “topia” (as opposed to utopia, which Weisman relates in the book literally translates to “no place”) by developing appropriate technologies that rely on renewable sources of energy and stewardship of resources.
We are experiencing a similar disinvestment in renewable energy. Cheap natural gas has created an energy vacuum, one that has sucked the renewable energy dream down its virtual tubes. While I understand that renewables continue to gain market share, we’ve been hoodwinked, yet again, by a nonrenewable salesman hawking modern day snake oil. Natural gas has numerous advantages (it’s cleaner burning than coal, it represents a domestic source of energy in the US, it currently is cheaper than dirt, and it is plentiful).
Unfortunately, natural gas also has stunted the demand for renewables. Once seen as a bridge to renewable sources of energy, it’s more of a giant energy, uh “block” (this is a family friendly site after all). Or, it’s the longest bridge in the history of energy. sadly, as was seen in Gaviotas, we’ve been here before.
For Gaviotas, the end of the 1973 crisis was a blow to their work. Interest in renewables waned and they struggled to become financially solvent. As a testament to their ingenuity and resolve, Gaviotas continually reinvented itself, developing new “sustainable technologies” that allowed it to continue its work of creating a future based on renewable energy sources.
What if the oil embargo hadn’t come to a quick cessation? The return of cheap energy was nearly a death for the renewable energy sector once before, and it may well stunt its growth once more. Perhaps it is but an exercise in imaginative thinking, but maybe, just maybe we would’ve been on the path to a future powered by renewable energy, not backsliding once again to the shrinking safety of nonrenewable energy.
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