This paper published counterpoint articles last week, debating whether green energy is a “myth” or a “reality” (“GReen energy transition: myth or reality?” Ocr. 11). Both articles were written by mainland advocates, and both miss important issues.

The “reality” argument was that the oil industry is greedy and renewables are cheaper. The “myth” argument was that renewables are too expensive. Both ignore two more compelling points. The first is that electricity is not the only thing petroleum provides. The second is that the petroleum industry is not a simple thing you can turn down in an orderly manner.

Renewables (and oil) will continue to produce electricity for ground transportation and other direct uses. Today, we use renewable electricity directly from solar and wind. But when we get to the point of making products from electricity, things change. The reliability issues that are unavoidable with wind and solar become more critical for manufacturing and tech, and the demand worldwide for such secondary uses are greater than for transportation. Proposals for more windmills, and more square miles of solar panels just for transportation are already running into resistance everywhere. As ideal sites are used up, more and more windmills and panels will be required to supply the same amount of electricity on inefficient sites. And when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, unfathomable storage will be needed, and batteries won’t be the answer.

I tell people, “Do a ‘360’ wherever you’re standing and find one thing not dependent on petroleum.” It’s virtually impossible. Refining oil is what gives us the billions of products, not just fuels, that make up our world, and that depends on balancing supply and demand. It doesn’t take much to shut a refinery down because demand for one product drops. Some may say “good!” — but the way petroleum works, you cannot do that, only making products that are still needed.

Gasoline is the current example. Removing it from the product mix doesn’t mean it’s no longer there. It comes out of crude oil whether we want it or not. In the U.S., we consume 370 million gallons per day, down 4% in five years. There are no magic levers in a refinery that can push any product to zero. At some point, in order to produce the millions of other products (not just fuels) still needed, billions of gallons of gasoline will be flowing out of refineries with nowhere to go. It is an unresolvable problem, which only gets worse if products like jet fuel and diesel follow. Taking it to the extreme, demand for petrochemicals, the building blocks of everything we make and consume, will be all that is left. In order to get one gallon of those, roughly 100 gallons of crude oil will have to be processed and the other 90 gallons will have no use. Clearly, humanity can never go there.

So what’s the point? It is that planners — including Hawaii — need to walk back the idea that fossil fuels are going to eventually disappear, and start being realistic about a mix.

Gasoline is just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve spent trillions of dollars over 40 years promoting all sorts of renewable concepts, resulting in nothing new that is broadly usable. Here we are today with solar and wind, the most basic, partially scalable, sources anyone can think of. Everything else is incredibly complex, disruptive, energy negative or uneconomic at large scale. During all that time, we have spent nothing trying to figure out how to clean up and minimize our inevitable mix of petroleum and renewables. It’s about time to face these “realities,” which are not “myths.”

Brian Barbata is a former energy executive, a founding director of the Kauai Island Utility Co-op, and former owner of Hawaii Photovoltaics, LLC.