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Most of us want to get there, a future beyond fossil-fuel and a carbon intense atmosphere but new voices suggest that contrary to much simplistic messaging the journey will not be easy. Ravaged natural environments are the, for most, invisible results of the energy sources the "developed" world now depends on for its digital devices. There ARE alternatives to our largely fossil-fuel/gasoline based economy including sun, wind, wave and “rare metal” based energy sources but in the last instance, they are, unfortunately, as pointed out by Guillaume Pitron in his 2020 book "The Rare Metals War", themselves often highly fossil-fuel based and damaging to the environment that "green" economics strives to save. Simply put, it takes lots of conventional energy to produce green energy. The only real solution, as stated by globally celebrated Canadian environmental economist Vaclav Smil, author of “Energy at the Crossroads” and other alarm sounding texts, is to reduce consumption and for the largely consumption-based economies of "developed" countries like Canada that challenge is huge. “Green” economics is convenient shorthand for a way out of our carbon drenched world but no one should be ignorant of the massive challenges to growth-based economies, from unemployment to education and culture. A major, ironic, not to say self-defeating, complication of the challenge is that the fossil fuel replacing and "rare metal" based digital devices and batteries by which “green energy” is to be enabled are themselves dependent on massive excavation and tailings residues. We must “question more” as one alternative media source has it, but more than that we must consume less if we are to survive. There is no alternative to that alternative.