After a long time, I returned to a workshop on energy, specifically to the IV Lazio Energy Forum organized by Legambiente right in the center of Rome. And that alone was worth the trip.
I had been invited by Francesca Brunetti, who I had met as a young researcher and who is now a professor and enterprising director of the CHOSE laboratory - Center for Hybrid and Organic Solar Energy at the University of Tor Vergata.
Two things struck me: the first is that thanks to an association we talk about energy in operational-technological terms and not in financial terms, as this topic is instead addressed in decision-making positions. The second is the incredible amount of laws that in the titles favor distributed energy and self-production but in reality are just an endless list of procedures and obligations capable of wrecking even the most expert.
The experience accumulated over the years, and the temporal gap that separates me from these meetings, allows me to have a global vision and to perceive the real changes. And I must say that I don't see many changes other than the fact that the word sustainability has lost its effectiveness and has moved away from its original meaning.
When I taught sustainability at university, I always represented it with a triangle whose vertices were the economic, social and environmental aspects. The balance of these was the proof of the real sustainability of a solution and its immediate practicability.
After 10 years the economic part has become financial and has taken over the other two, social imbalances have widened, and the climate of international tension has brought the focus back on technologies of the past. Numerous small industries have closed down, giving way to gigafactories (and the American name is already a program) that remind me of Marc Augè's No-Places.
It is not surprising that the general sentiment on the web about the word sustainability is increasingly negative and that people are starting to associate this word with new imbalances that affect their wallets, draining wealth towards financial capital.
And yet, small sustainable technologies have invaded our lives: now cheap solar panels are available in shopping malls and small distributed production is an unstoppable reality. Garden lights, country pumps and even the balconies of many houses in the city are dotted with solar panels which, however, are associated with the word convenience and not sustainability.
Choices of distributed energy are made only for practical and economically convenient reasons, losing the poetry of environmental sustainability.
I think it is time to better analyze the meaning of the word sustainability because if the life of individual people has become more ‘sustainable’ (separate waste collection, renewable energy, getting closer to nature, etc.), the system in general has become less sustainable.
It is time to study a new semantics that can differentiate truly sustainable individual choices from a rapacious, suffocating greenwashing.
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