‘Renewable’ energy is not renewable. It’s a Big Lie that’s helping accelerate environmental collapse by encouraging overconsumption. It externalizes and makes invisible the materials. ‘Renewables’ can only become renewable by a magic trick: Look! Look over here! The renewable wind. The renewable sun. Don’t look over there at the non-renewable materials, the mining, the ecocide, the Indigenous genocide, the manufacturing, the awful recyclability.

Even if ‘renewables’ were to magically become genuinely renewable, our environment would continue its collapse. Because the most environmentally destructive force on earth today is not the form of energy we use but how much we use energy and what we use energy for. Because we don’t have an energy production problem. We do have an energy consumption problem. We consume vastly too much energy and materials. With ‘renewable’ energy, we are accelerating a mining boom, a manufacturing boom, installation boom, land change boom, e-waste boom, but—most of all—an overconsumption boom. Right at the moment when we need to radically slow down, we are accelerating. We need to build brakes. With ‘renewable’ energy, we’re fast-tracking accelerator factories.

There is no Energy Transition. The history of energy is the history of addition. As coal took off in 19th-century UK, more wood was used as timber supports in coal mines than was burned for fuel in the country during the entire 18th century, historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz explained to Nate Hagens. You need materials and energy to produce energy. Coal production depends on wood, oil and steel. Wood demand is driven by oil and coal and silicon. Oil depends on coal, steel and concrete. Solar panels cannot be made without oil, coal and wood. In China, it takes two to three tons of coal to make one electric car. That’s why electric cars are ‘cheap’ because coal is ‘cheap’. While over in Europe, the UK is shutting down coal plants and setting up ‘green’ biomass plants where it burns old-growth forests from Canada—producing even more CO2 than if they had simply burned coal. Why? So, they can greenwash that they no longer burn coal. It’s a scam.

I was a true believer. I installed solar on our roof in rainy Ireland in 2010. The same year I also installed a heat pump—one of the first in the country. The sales pitch from the solar man was that I’d have ‘free’ hot water. All I needed to do to get this ‘free’ hot water was to pay €3,500. It was a magic trick. After you pay €3,500, it’s free, because the materials—after you pay for them—magically become ‘free’. Except they don’t. It’s small leaps of logic from ‘renewable’ to ‘cheap’ to ‘free’. It is such a dangerous cultural message during a time when we must convince people to conserve and consume less. And this is perhaps the most insidious part of the ‘renewable’ energy scam. In order to support the Growth Death Cult, it encourages a culture of ‘cost-free’ energy consumption. Burn as much energy as you want, once it’s ‘renewable’. At least once a week, I get into an argument with some tech bro who says that AI and data centers are fine once they use ‘renewable’ energy.