Darley touches briefly on alternative sources of energy, such as hydrogen, solar and wind, but discounts them as full-scale replacements for oil and gas because their implementation is too expensive.
Nonsense. Darley seems not to realize that hydrogen, which must be produced, is not a source but a storage medium for solar energy (of which wind is itself a natural "storage medium"). Much worse, by saying that harnessing solar energy by means of wind turbines or photovoltaic panels is "too expensive," he denies that there exist today huge quantities of unused or misused resources that could be put to work right away--at little or no sacrifice of socially necessary consumption--to provide for all increases in electricity production while reducing steadily the proportion of electric power derived from fossile fuel and nuclear sources. And this doesn't even begin to hint at the cost reductions to be counted on from economies of mass production and from the scientific/technological progress always produced by a very rapidly expanding new sphere of production. If solar energy is too expensive for private capitalists today that is merely one (more) illustration that the capitalist mode of production has become a heavy fetter on the growth of the social forces of production. The solution is not rustication, it is economic planning in preparation for the socialist transition to communism.
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things...It consents and does not consent to be called Zeus."
Herakleitos of Ephesos
