Over 150 years civilization has built a highly complicated industrial system based on cheap fossil fuels. The cheapness of those fuels created a robust banking system and an industrial agricultural system. It fuelled urbanization and globalization. Moreover cheap energy sustained the illusion that resources are inexhaustible.

Now that fossil fuel emissions have cooked the climate and decimated biological diversity, our fearless leaders want to replace that entire system with one that is more mineral-intensive and complex.

They want to do so at a moment when economic flows have slowed down due to the rising cost of extreme fossil fuels such as fracked shale gas and mined bitumen. The whole process of replacing a declining system with a more complex mining-based enterprise is now supposed to take place with a fragile banking system, dysfunctional democracies, broken supply chains, critical mineral shortages and hostile geopolitics.

Meanwhile climate events are destroying infrastructure and producing great waves of homeless migrants from failing states.

All of these incontestable realities highlight the fact that our dreams of a renewable powered boom are illusory. We need a different conversation than fossil fuelled business as usual or a Green New Deal.