[The Vector] Hermann Scheer – Continued
Article written in Le Monde Diplomatique, June 2006
There is both bad news and good news for world energy supply. The bad news? Oil is running out. The good news? Oil is running out. And not only oil: sooner or later, every type of fossil energy will run out – including fossil uranium ore which is needed to make atomic fuel rods. The reason why oil became the most used form of energy was simple: because it is liquid, making it easier to use, it became the 20th Century’s “Black Gold”. Yet even John Rockefeller, the first and best-known of the oil magnates, spoke prophetically of “the devil’s tears”.
It was always clear that oil would run out one day. But because people didn’t know when, they put the problem to the back of their minds. The alarmist mood among by state leaders today shows that they were living from day to day, whilst their countries’ dependence on the resources which were becoming depleted grew greater and greater.
Article in “The Yearbook of Renewable Energy 1995/96”
“Many people think the question of the share of renewable energies in the energy supply is merely scientific. The truth is: the discussion of the potential of renewable energies is an almost entirely political one.”
“It cannot be seriously denied that there is a natural renewable energy potential sufficient to satisfy forever the energy needs even of an increasing world population. Neither can be denied that there are numerous – already applied – technologies for using this potential. Therefore it is only a question of how many economic and political initiatives for the utilization of renewable energies are input until there is output completely meeting the energy needs.”
From one of Scheer’s last interviews, with Amy Goodman at Democracy Now (radio interview):
Scheer: The tragedy of our present civilization is that it became dependent on marginal energy sources. The marginal energy sources are fossil sources, fossil resources and nuclear, based on the raw material uranium. The gigantic energy potential is the renewable energy potential always all coming from the sun, including its derivates, like wind and the photosynthetic-produced—photosynthetically produced materials, organic materials, plants, hydro-base. And the sun offers to our globe, in eight minutes, as much energy as the annual consumption of fossil and atomic energy is.
But as long government think that it should be left to the energy companies, we will lose the race against time.
energy change in the United States must come from the local and the states level. One should not wait in America for the federal level.
Amy Goodman: Finally, Hermann Scheer, what gives you hope?
Scheer: That I could set an example in the political structure…it was possible to show a fast energy shift is possible. We have now, encouraged by that, inspired by the first big steps, by the first many steps, that more than a hundred cities and counties in Germany have decided to shift to 100 percent renewable energies in the run of the next five, sometimes ten, sometimes ten, sometimes fifteen years. And the number of cities who want to go this way increases from month to month. Now, this is a real democratic revolution.
If only the U.S. had a Hermann Scheer.
