Humanity’s transition from relying overwhelmingly on fossil fuels to instead using alternative low-carbon energy sources is sometimes said to be unstoppable and exponential. A boosterish attitude on the part of many renewable energy advocates is understandable: overcoming people’s climate despair and sowing confidence could help muster the needed groundswell of motivation to end our collective fossil fuel dependency. But occasionally a reality check is in order.
The reality is that energy transitions are a big deal, and they typically take centuries to unfold. Historically, they’ve been transformative for societies—whether we’re speaking of humanity’s taming of fire hundreds of thousands of years ago, the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, or our adoption of fossil fuels starting roughly 200 years ago. Given (1) the current size of the human population (there are eight times as many of us alive today as there were in 1820, when the fossil fuel energy transition was getting underway), (2) the vast scale of the global economy, and (3) the unprecedented speed with which the transition will have to be made in order to avert catastrophic climate change, a rapid renewable energy transition is easily the most ambitious enterprise our species has ever undertaken.
As we’ll see, the evidence shows that the transition is still in its earliest stages, and at the current rate, it will fail to avert a climate catastrophe in which an unimaginable number of people will either die or be forced to migrate, with most ecosystems transformed beyond recognition.
We’ll unpack the reasons why the transition is currently such an uphill slog. Then, crucially, we’ll explore what a real energy transition would look like, and how to make it happen.
Why This Is (So Far) Not a Real Transition
Despite trillions of dollars having been spent on renewable energy infrastructure, carbon emissions are still increasing, not decreasing, and the share of world energy coming from fossil fuels is only slightly less today than it was 20 years ago. In 2024, the world is using more oil, coal, and natural gas than it did in 2023.
While the U.S. and many European nations have seen a declining share of their electricity production coming from coal, the continuing global growth in fossil fuel usage and CO2 emissions overshadows any cause for celebration.
Why is the rapid deployment of renewable energy not resulting in declining fossil fuel usage? The main culprit is economic growth, which consumes more energy and materials. So far, the amount of annual growth in the world’s energy usage has exceeded the amount of energy added each year from new solar panels and wind turbines. Fossil fuels have supplied the difference.
So, for the time being at least, we are not experiencing a real energy transition. All that humanity is doing is adding energy from renewable sources to the growing amount of energy it derives from fossil fuels. The much-touted energy transition could, if somewhat cynically, be described as just an aspirational grail.
How long would it take for humanity to fully replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources, accounting for both the current growth trajectory of solar and wind power, and also the continued expansion of the global economy at the recent rate of 3 percent per year? Economic models suggest the world could obtain most of its electricity from renewables by 2060 (though many nations are not on a path to reach even this modest marker). However, electricity represents only about 20 percent of the world’s final energy usage; transitioning the other 80 percent of energy usage would take longer—likely many decades.
However, to avert catastrophic climate change, the global scientific community says we need to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050—i.e., in just 25 years. Since it seems physically impossible to get all of our energy from renewables that soon while still growing the economy at recent rates, the IPCC (the international agency tasked with studying climate change and its possible remedies) assumes that humanity will somehow adopt carbon capture and sequestration technologies at scale—including technologies that have been shown not to work—even though there is no existing way of paying for this vast industrial build-out. This wishful thinking on the part of the IPCC is surely proof that the energy transition is not happening at sufficient speed.
Why isn’t it? One reason is that governments, businesses, and an awful lot of regular folks are clinging to an unrealistic goal for the transition. Another reason is that there is insufficient tactical and strategic global management of the overall effort. We’ll address these problems separately, and in the process uncover what it would take to nurture a true energy transition.
The Core of the Transition is Using Less Energy
At the heart of most discussions about the energy transition lie two enormous assumptions: that the transition will leave us with a global industrial economy similar to today’s in terms of its scale and services, and that this future renewable-energy economy will continue to grow, as the fossil-fueled economy has done in recent decades. But both of these assumptions are unrealistic. They flow from a largely unstated goal: we want the energy transition to be completely painless, with no sacrifice of profit or convenience. That goal is understandable, since it would presumably be easier to enlist the public, governments, and businesses in an enormous new task if no cost is incurred (though the history of overwhelming societal effort and sacrifice during wartime might lead us to question that presumption).
But the energy transition will undoubtedly entail costs. Aside from tens of trillions of dollars in required monetary investment, the energy transition will itself require energy—lots of it. It will take energy to build solar panels, wind turbines, heat pumps, electric vehicles, electric farm machinery, zero-carbon aircraft, batteries, and the rest of the vast panoply of devices that would be required to operate an electrified global industrial economy at current scale.
In the early stages of the transition, most of that energy for building new low-carbon infrastructure will have to come from fossil fuels, since those fuels still supply over 80 percent of world energy (bootstrapping the transition—using only renewable energy to build transition-related machinery—would take far too long). So, the transition itself, especially if undertaken quickly, will entail a large pulse of carbon emissions. Teams of scientists have been seeking to estimate the size of that pulse; one group suggests that transition-related emissions will be substantial, ranging from 70 to 395 billion metric tons of CO2 “with a cross-scenario average of 195 GtCO2”—the equivalent of more than five years’ worth of global CO2 emissions at current rates. The only ways to minimize these transition-related emissions would be, first, to aim to build a substantially smaller global energy system than the one we are trying to replace; and second, to significantly reduce energy usage for non-transition-related purposes—including transportation and manufacturing, cornerstones of our current economy—during the transition.
In addition to energy, the transition will require materials. While our current fossil-fuel energy regime extracts billions of tons of coal, oil, and gas, plus much smaller amounts of iron, bauxite, and other ores for making drills, pipelines, pumps, and other related equipment, the construction of renewable energy infrastructure at commensurate scale would require far larger quantities of non-fuel raw materials—including copper, iron, aluminum, lithium, iridium, gallium, sand, and rare earth elements.
While some estimates suggest that global reserves of these elements are sufficient for the initial build-out of renewable-energy infrastructure at scale, there are still two big challenges. First: obtaining these materials will require greatly expanding extractive industries along with their supply chains. These industries are inherently polluting, and they inevitably degrade land. For example, to produce one ton of copper ore, over 125 tons of rock and soil must be displaced. The rock-to-metal ratio is even worse for some other ores. Mining operations often take place on Indigenous peoples’ lands and the tailings from those operations often pollute rivers and streams. Non-human species and communities in the global South are already traumatized by land degradation and toxification; greatly expanding resource extraction—including deep-sea mining—would only deepen and multiply the wounds.
The second materials challenge: renewable energy infrastructure will have to be replaced periodically—every 25 to 50 years. Even if Earth’s minerals are sufficient for the first full-scale build-out of panels, turbines, and batteries, will limited mineral abundance permit continual replacements? Transition advocates say that we can avoid depleting the planet’s ores by recycling minerals and metals after constructing the first iteration of solar-and-wind technology. However, recycling is never complete, with some materials degraded in the process. One analysis suggests recycling would only buy a couple of centuries’ worth of time before depletion would bring an end to the regime of replaceable renewable-energy machines—and that’s assuming a widespread, coordinated implementation of recycling on an unprecedented scale. Again, the only real long-term solution is to aim for a much smaller global energy system.
The transition of society from fossil fuel dependency to reliance on low-carbon energy sources will be impossible to achieve without also reducing overall energy usage substantially and maintaining this lower rate of energy usage indefinitely. This transition isn’t just about building lots of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. It is about organizing society differently so that is uses much less energy and gets whatever energy it uses from sources that can be sustained over the long run.
How We Could Actually Do It, In Seven Concurrent Steps
Step one: Cap global fossil fuel extraction through global treaty, and annually lower the cap. We will not reduce carbon emissions until we reduce fossil fuel usage—it’s just that simple. Rather than trying to do this by adding renewable energy (which so far hasn’t resulted in a lessening of emissions), it makes far more sense simply to limit fossil fuel extraction. I wrote up the basics of a treaty along these lines several years ago in my book, The Oil Depletion Protocol.
Step two: Manage energy demand fairly. Reducing fossil fuel extraction presents a problem. Where will we get the energy required for transition purposes? Realistically, it can only be obtained by repurposing energy we’re currently using for non-transition purposes. That means most people, especially in highly industrialized countries, would have to use significantly less energy, both directly and also indirectly (in terms of energy embedded in products, and in services provided by society, such as road building). To accomplish this with the minimum of societal stress will require a social means of managing energy demand.
The fairest and most direct way to manage energy demand is via quota rationing. Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) is a system designed two decades ago by British economist David Fleming; it rewards energy savers and gently punishes energy guzzlers while ensuring that everyone gets energy they actually need. Every adult would be given an equal free entitlement of TEQs units each week. If you use less than your entitlement of units, you can sell your surplus. If you need more, you can buy them. All trading takes place at a single national price, which will rise and fall in line with demand.
Step three: Manage the public’s material expectations. Persuading people to accept using less energy will be hard, if everyone still wants to use more. Therefore, it will be necessary to manage the public’s expectations. This may sound technocratic and scary, but in fact society has already been managing the public’s expectations for over a century via advertising—which constantly delivers messages encouraging everyone to consume as much as they can. Now we need different messages to set different expectations.
What’s our objective in life? Is it to have as much stuff as possible, or to be happy and secure? Our current economic system assumes the former, and we have instituted an economic goal (constant growth) and an indicator (gross domestic product, or GDP) to help us achieve that goal. But ever-more people using ever-more stuff and energy leads to increased rates of depletion, pollution, and degradation, thereby imperiling the survival of humanity and the rest of the biosphere. In addition, the goal of happiness and security is more in line with cultural traditions and human psychology. If happiness and security are to be our goals, we should adopt indicators that help us achieve them. Instead of GDP, which simply measures the amount of money changing hands in a country annually, we should measure societal success by monitoring human well-being. The tiny country of Bhutan has been doing this for decades with its Gross National Happiness (GNH) indicator, which it has offered as a model for the rest of the world.
Step four: Aim for population decline. If population is always growing while available energy is capped, that means ever-less energy will be available per capita. Even if societies ditch GDP and adopt GNH, the prospect of continually declining energy availability will present adaptive challenges. How can energy scarcity impacts be minimized? The obvious solution: welcome population decline and plan accordingly.
Global population will start to decline sometime during this century. Fertility rates are falling worldwide, and China, Japan, Germany, and many other nations are already seeing population shrinkage. Rather than viewing this as a problem, we should see it as an opportunity. With fewer people, energy decline will be less of a burden on a per capita basis. There are also side benefits: a smaller population puts less pressure on wild nature, and often results in rising wages. We should stop pushing a pro-natalist agenda; ensure that women have the educational opportunities, social standing, security, and access to birth control to make their own childbearing choices; incentivize small families, and aim for the long-term goal of a stable global population closer to the number of people who were alive at the start of the fossil-fuel revolution (even though voluntary population shrinkage will be too slow to help us much in reaching immediate emissions reduction targets).
Step five: Target technological research and development to the transition. Today the main test of any new technology is simply its profitability. However, the transition will require new technologies to meet an entirely different set of criteria, including low-energy operation and minimization of exotic and toxic materials. Fortunately, there is already a subculture of engineers developing low-energy and intermediate technologies that could help run a right-sized circular economy.
Step six: Institute technological triage. Many of our existing technologies don’t meet these new criteria. So, during the transition, we will be letting go of familiar but ultimately destructive and unsustainable machines.
Some energy-guzzling machines—such as gasoline-powered leaf blowers—will be easy to say goodbye to. Commercial aircraft will be harder. Artificial intelligence is an energy guzzler we managed to live without until very recently; perhaps it’s best if we bid it a quick farewell. Cruise ships? Easy: downsize them, replace their engines with sails, and expect to take just one grand voyage during your lifetime. Weapons industries offer plenty of examples of machines we could live without. Of course, giving up some of our labor-saving devices will require us to learn useful skills—which could end up providing us with more exercise. For guidance along these lines, consult the rich literature of technology criticism.
Step seven: Help nature absorb excess carbon. The IPCC is right: if we’re to avert catastrophic climate change we need to capture carbon from the air and sequester it for a long time. But not with machines. Nature already removes and stores enormous amounts of carbon; we just need to help it do more (rather than reducing its carbon-capturing capabilities, which is what humanity is doing now). Reform agriculture to build soil rather than destroy it. Restore ecosystems, including grasslands, wetlands, forests, and coral reefs.
Implementing these seven steps will change everything. The result will be a world that’s less crowded, one where nature is recovering rather than retreating, and one in which people are healthier (because they’re not soaked in pollution) and happier.
Granted, this seven-step program appears politically unachievable today. But that’s largely because humanity hasn’t yet fully faced the failure of our current path of prioritizing immediate profits and comfort above long-term survival—and the consequences of that failure. Given better knowledge of where we’re currently headed, and the alternatives, what is politically impossible today could quickly become inevitable.
Social philosopher Roman Krznaric writes that profound social transformations are often tied to wars, natural disasters, or revolutions. But crisis alone is not positively transformative. There must also be ideas available for different ways to organize society, and social movements energized by those ideas. We have a crisis and (as we have just seen) some good ideas for how to do things differently. Now we need a movement.
Building a movement takes political and social organizing skills, time, and hard work. Even if you don’t have the skills for organizing, you can help the cause by learning what a real energy transition requires and then educating the people you know; by advocating for degrowth or related policies; and by reducing your own energy and materials consumption. Calculate your ecological footprint and shrink it over time, using goals and strategies, and tell your family and friends what you are doing and why.
Even with a new social movement advocating for a real energy transition, there is no guarantee that civilization will emerge from this century of unraveling in a recognizable form. But we all need to understand: this is a fight for survival in which cooperation and sacrifice are required, just as in total war. Until we feel that level of shared urgency, there will be no real energy transition, and little prospect for a desirable human future.
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The fight for survival framing is the right one. Very few have that attitude yet.
Doomer-preppers do.
Given the long odds against any of the steps Heinberg proposes being implemented, doom is going to result from the horrendous overshoot of human population and resource consumption. This means that flight from the city and preparation for living without modernity is more sensible than ever. The "fight for survival" is going to be lost for the vast majority of humanity, including almost everyone now living in modern cities.
And while there are things governments could do to save more people from premature death, even discussing them would cause a lot of social unrest. Imagine a politician proposing that, since cities cannot be maintained much longer, a select group of people will be moved out of cities and situated on small farms from which they can provide for themselves. Riots would break out.
Modern civilization has been a nice ride for those that got to participate fully, but it has destroyed the prospect of a "desirable human future" for many generations to come. How many generations will depend on how bad the climate gets and whether we avoid some of the worst complications of modernity, like nuclear war. After modernity disappears, it may take several hundred years for things to shake out and life return to normal.
My reading of history is that loners will have a hard time if things get tough.
Chances of survival are better with a community.
Community and prepping are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, as you say, community will be essential for those who survive.
It would be nice if there were a collective effort to create sustainable communities, communities that were almost entirely separate from the context of modernity, but that doesn't seem to be happening except for a smattering of ecovillages here and there.
Agreed. Small, self generated refugia can be started without waiting for some central authority direction. Will they happen? Probably not enough, but it is something that individual could be part of.
https://un-denial.com/2024/03/19/by-steve-carrow-what-would-a-wise-community-do/
All such tools I've seen are targeted to the middle of the bell curve. When I take it, there are numerous questions that simply don't apply to me, and important, but un-asked questions, that would apply to me.
I can understand and appreciate that it would be targeted to engage the greatest number of people, but if those people are to "shrink it over time," it would be nice if there were more ways to categorize and measure the outliers.
The target audience seems to be people who live in cities and suburbs, yet that way of life is not sustainable. Prior to fossil sunlight, it took twelve people on the land to support one in the city; today, a single farmer supports some 700 city people. This will not continue!
And yet, simply asking if you live in a city, suburb, or rural area doesn't work, either. Many rural people choose to drive vast distances to do things that are "walkable" in a city. The pattern Christopher Alexander envisioned ("Interlocking city-country fingers") simply does not exist.
We need questions for:
1) How much of your own food do you grow?
2) Where does your personal human waste go?
3) If you eat meat or consume dairy or eggs, what practices are used to produce these foods?
4) How do you travel to work, to visit friends and family, and to attend cultural activities?
5) Do you live in a city, suburb, rural area, or a tightly-integrated rural community?
Until such tools become more comprehensive at the "low impact" end of the scale, they'll remain irrelevant to moving people closer and closer to "zero impact."
And yet, when I've taken that test, I'm told it would take at least two Earths to support my lifestyle. Which surprised me since our off-grid system uses a tenth the US average, we drive a small car, not much, I grow half our food, never fly–so out of curiosity I took it again, inputting the lowest possible answers, and it changed little. I suspect saying I live in the US is enough to assign me a large footprint regardless of lifestyle.
I suspect saying I live in the US is enough to assign me a large footprint regardless of lifestyle.
This is because the US invests huge amounts of energy in public infrastructure and government services.
I've read that a homeless person sleeping under a bridge has a higher energy footprint than most people in the Global South just because they "share" in the energy consumed building that bridge, maintaining the army that defends it, and all the energy spent maintaining other public infrastructure already built.
But this is garbage, to say you’re responsible for governmental decisions in which you play not the slightest part. Quite a lot is the US military, which is destructive of the wellbeing of US citizens, as well as everyone else.
You and I are peasants, but not quite landless peasants.
Most people have a precarious, unstable energy profile,
and that is not a matter of personal choice.
That's odd that your frugal life-style gave you 2.0. I scored 1.2, and thought that was too high!
I live in Canada, which due to our climate, generally has a larger footprint than the US. I bike a lot, and only drive about once a week, or 1,000 km a year. And also, all our electricity comes from hydropower… although it's "big" hydropower, which has a huge embedded energy cost.
As I said, such tools are shrouded in mysterious assumptions.
UPDATE Added second paragraph under Step Four.
Sadly, though this does give a route to a less damaging energy transition, it completely misses the point that modernity is not sustainable. Richard's comment, "The result will be a world that’s less crowded, one where nature is recovering rather than retreating, and one in which people are healthier (because they’re not soaked in pollution) and happier." Is wishful thinking. So long as we have modernity, we will have a world that is being continually battered by it. The only idea in that sentence, which seems sound, is that the world will be less crowded. Nature won't be recovering, as a whole, since modernity requires so much environmental damage, regardless of what energy system it uses. And people being healthier requires no pollution, not much less, as well as a truly natural diet. Perhaps people would be healthier than they otherwise would have been, but that is not the same thing. Whether they would be happier or not is unknowable.
See Tom Murphy's examination of the longevity of modernity for a good analysis of why it can't be sustainable. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/09/can-modernity-last/
We should not assume lightly that nature will provide for our luxury lifestyle in the West by other means.
I believe modernity is for 100/100 the result of the exploitation of fossil fuels.
ELECTRIFY EVERYTHING: I really doubt that Aljoša Slameršak paper. The problem is the more wind and solar in the system, the cleaner the mining. Then as we electrify everything – including mining and smelting – the amount of energy required to do the same work drops drastically. When we stop burning stuff like cavemen – we stop throwing away 60% of our energy as waste heat. We'll do the same work we do today with just 40% of the energy .
DOUBLING TIME: Renewables are growing exponentially – and the next doubling curve will see solar alone worth more than all other generation by 2031. The IEA says peak fossil fuel demand will occur around 2030 – and then begin to decline as a wave of aging coal plants are retired. Never forget how linear we think reality is, but how exponential many of our systems are.
MATERIALS: They can recycle all wind and solar to very high percentages. WIND AND SOLAR are not hamstrung by critical minerals or rare earths! Engineers have already cooked up alternative versions of wind and solar and EV and grid storage we need – all running on super abundant materials that make up a good fraction of the earth’s crust! Solar is silicon (which is 27% of the earth’s crust), aluminium (8%) and glass. Wind turbines are aluminium and iron ore (5%). There are now wind turbines that have magnets without rare earths.
EV BATTERIES: At 8 kg of lithium per EV, there’s already more than enough lithium for about twice the 1.4 billion vehicles we have today. (As a New Urbanist I must say the best EV is a subway system – and they don’t even need batteries.)
GRID BATTERIES: There is 38.6 Quadrillion tons of sodium in the oceans – and now we can make sodium batteries for the grid. (Even some EV’s!) They use no critical minerals – not even copper. There are also liquid flow, liquid metal, iron ‘rusting’ batteries and others that do not need critical minerals. Let alone OFF-river pumped hydro where sites are100 TIMES more abundant than we need to firm a renewable grid.
COPPER? We can recycle all our copper and use it more efficiently. Also, about 90% of copper’s roles can be switched out for aluminium which is 1200 times more abundant! More details here. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/materials/
CLIMATE OPTIMISM: We need to stare the realities of climate change full in the face – while still maintaining some optimism. There’s a sinister and unexpected twist in the battle for our planet. Climatologist Simon Clark explains that Big Oil are now sponsoring Climate Doomers – because just like climate Denial – it kills activism. Why would you bother doing the hard work of fighting to change anything if you believed there was already no point – one may as well just sit back with a beer and laugh cynically at everything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XSG2Dw2mL8
And see data Scientist Hannah Ritchie
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/climate-deniers-doomers
Climate scientist Johan Rockström said the maths shows we ARE going over 1.5 degrees – to which he said “Buckle up!” and that we’ll look back on 2023 and 2024 as ‘mild years’. But here’s the thing. Even he said we must maintain our courage and hope. He said there really are thousands of things we can do – and new technologies that can help in all fields. So I’m with Johan. There is hope. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vl6VhCAeEfQ
Hannah Ritchie defined sustainability, in a Ted Talk, as reduced environmental damage and giving every person on the planet a good life. That is, she defined it in a way that makes it a potentially achievable goal, when its real meaning is something that most people wouldn't want to achieve. None of the aspects above are sustainable and can never lead to a sustainable civilisation. We need realism, not unfounded optimism.
That's a big assertion – but I've only really mentioned the energy side of it. Read the "Earth 4 all" papers – a sister organisation to the Club of Rome.
Richard Heinberg himself compiled the Five Axioms of Sustainability . They boil down to not consuming any resource beyond its renewal rate and not damaging the environment/biosphere beyond its ability to assimilate that damage. Clearly, modernity needs to violate that first principle, at least, and so cannot be made sustainable.
That is also a huge claim. Maybe the modern world as currently practiced would do that – but I'm convinced that with substitute materials and practices we can give everyone on earth a convenient modern world, clean drinking water, good nutrition (maybe with a lot more Impossible Burgers and alternative protein), and walkable housing (in Ecocities) etc. Have you googled how much concrete we use a year? How much we could just eliminate via better design? What fraction we could substitute by using CLT wood products instead of concrete floors in skyscrapers? How many bridges we can make from CLT? What other materials can we use for roads?
That's just concrete – and there are dozens of ways to reduce use and substitute for other materials.
Substitute materials? Do you mean materials that grow on trees? And what practices? I’ve mentioned the essentials of sustainability yet nothing you’ve written addresses them. Again, no non-renewable resource can be used, because their renewal rates are all zero. Renewable resources can only be used at their renewal rates (preferably at less than those rates) but they will change slowly over time. As for environmental damage, it’s hard to imagine how the modern world, which you and I want to continue, can not cause environmental damage that the environment can’t rebound from in way that doesn’t further deplete renewable resources. Industrial scale energy is out of the question for sustainability.
Just doing less damage per person is not being sustainable, even if population growth halted and reversed, unless population got back to just a few hundred million people spread across the habitable portions of the planet.
See Tom Murphy’s examination of modernity’s sustainability for more detail: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/09/can-modernity-last/
I find Murphy quite frustrating to read – mainly because there's so much he writes about that I absolutely agree with. Yet every second paragraph I feel he has ignored something, and hear this enormous "Yes, BUT…!" protest brewing. He has an allergic reaction to any alternative premises to the ones he has selected – and he tries to present his arguments as mathematically certain. But only based on the premises he feeds into his models and arguments!
He is right that infinite growth cannot continue on a finite planet. Does this actually need to be said? He is right that modern energy systems grew the human population and gave us the power to plunder nature. Of course! That's all historically true and accurate.
He is just plain WRONG that fossil fuel energy cannot be replaced by the Energy Transition. There are too many peer-reviewed papers correcting all the old peaknik myths I used to push 20 years ago. Things that were TRUE at the time – but … iterative technological evolution and economies of scale have now solved.
ENERGY: The enormous expense to Overbuild them has crashed down now to the point that even with firming (from super-abundant off-river pumped hydro) is cheaper than coal. The world has over 100 TIMES the potential sites that an all-renewable grid could need. There are alternative brands of wind and solar and EV and battery and even electric generators that ALL can avoid using so called "Critical Minerals" on the minerals endangered list. These alternatives are super-abundant – and can be recycled. We will never run out. So that means reliable renewable energy from renewable materials – and electric generation to electric use means we will not throw away 60% of the energy as we do in today's thermal system. That means we'll do everything we do today on 40% of today's THERMAL value in fossil fuels! And that's without the growing awareness amongst youth that a there are better ways to live than a car-based suburban lifestyle. Ecocities and new urbanism are all the rage with the young people in my world. I might have mentioned my future son-in-law is studying a degree in it he's so passionate! It's a whole impact thing – from improved social benefits, to less toxic crap being producted, to smaller land impact. But that's just our cities – which only cover 3% of the land on earth. GRAZING LIVESTOCK covers 30% – and even uses an extra 4% of the crop lands to feed cows soy beans. Precision Fermentation and Seaweed protein powder can be fashioned into all kinds of alternative bacon, beef, and chicken products. PF is 10 TIMES more land efficient than soy beans – and this 'electric food' cycle can come from rooftop solar, desert solar, or even solar floating on water reservoirs. PF divorces agriculture from arable land. It could free up 30% of the grazing land back to nature at least!
There will be more mining. For a while. But even including all the waste rock, the entire Energy Transition will still move and crush less material than the 15 BILLION tonnes of fossil fuels we mine each year. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/energy-transition-materials
The whole 25 year project will emit about 4.5 to 9 months of today’s CO2 emissions – and it will stop fossil fuels FOREVER. https://www.energy-transitions.org/new-report-scale-up-of-critical-materials-and-resources-required-for-energy-transition/
Then they can recycle most renewable systems – even batteries – to about 95% or 97% efficiency. Mining activity after the Energy Transition will collapse!
But these are all technologies? What about that GROWTH THING?
IMAGINE THE WORLD OF 2100!
Imagine we get the energy transition finished by 2050 and most people are living in Ecocities and New Urbanism. Now imagine that we get the welfare policy settings just right. Experts say this would encourage first world “Demographic Transition” – which can lower the population naturally and slowly. By 2100 the population could be down to 6 billion!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/27/world-population-bomb-may-never-go-off-as-feared-finds-study
Now think about what that means? After a population peak near 9 billion – where the world is developed and people are living in Ecocities – it drops to 6 billion. That’s like China's “Ghost” Ecocities for 3 billion people that are no longer here. Think of the resources that can be recycled! The generations after 2100 would not only have their own resources to recycle – but a 50% bonus to wood and concrete and bricks and steel and glass and wind turbines and solar panels and EVERYTHING – enough of a top up to last generations. It could mean the end to most mining for a long, long time. Hopefully by then the shock of a declining population would have taught us a few lessons in new economic models.
That's a pretty optimistic view of the world.
As far as I can tell, there are no examples of renewable energy infrastructure being resources, built and recycled without fossil energy. This isn't to say it's impossible but surely that's an experiment that must be done before assuming that a total transition is possible.
Recycling can never be 100% and I doubt there are any examples of that, either, where the proportion is anywhere close to 100%. Even if humans could get over their addiction to economic growth, mining would still be needed and ore grades would continue to decline. The overburden would continue to increase and habitats would continue to be destroyed.
When it comes down to it, Murphy is right, and for a very simple reason. If non-renewable resources are consumed, it is unsustainable. So modernity would have to rely on renewable resources only to be sustainable. However, it would have to consume those resources only at (or, preferably, below) the renewal rate for those resources. Modernity would also have to limit environmental damage only to what the environment can assimilate but, even before climate change started to be a major environmental problem, modernity had already passed numerous critical planetary boundaries. So if a transition happened, it would continue the destruction.
On population, it may well get to 6 billion (still well into overshoot) through reduced birth rates, but those reduced birth rates will seriously distort the population pyramid with far more older people than younger people. That will have an economic and societal burden.
Whether the transition (a moving target as fossil fuel use continues to increase) is possible or not (I've only seen one paper that tries to show it is possible, looking at all aspects and I've seen others that show it is not), it can never make modernity sustainable (that is, can last indefinitely). On that, Tom Murphy is exactly right, however painful that realisation may be.
These statements are all too sweeping and broad to even begin to discuss properly. What can’t be recycled 100% – exactly? Specifically? Concrete? It can. Does every generation of concrete need a little top up of various chemicals or inputs? How about vast seaweed farms? Australian of the Year and climate author Dr Tim Flannery ran a special “Can seaweed save the world?” in which he showed that seaweed can be grown in a way that heals the ocean AND feeds the world while also providing all manner of feedstocks for the medical, chemical, and building industries. The potential is enormous! Solar or wave powered floating seaweed arrays can pump up nutrients from below 500m and grow seaweed even out in the 98% of the oceans that are ‘nutrient deserts’. Just 2% of the oceans could grow ALL the protein we need to feed a world of 10 billion.
STEEL: Why can’t we recycle the steel in wind turbines? What gets discarded?
SILICON and GLASS: There are new varieties of solar coming – and probably legislation from the EU soon to streamline requirements for ease of disassembly for recycling. Why are these impossible to recycle 100%?
GREAT BIG PERIODIC TABLE TO CHOOSE FROM: I’m not very technical – but even I winced when I read Vaclav Smil claim that future ‘green steel’ would be impossible because we could not replace coking coal with biomass. Biomass? BIOMASS? TREES for coking coal? Why on earth would we do that when we can just split water and use hydrogen as a reductant to flush the rust off and recycle our steel?
Until environmental pessimists can get their head around the vast alternatives in seaweed and Precision Fermentation to feed the world and heal the ocean, they can’t make ANY claims about what population is sustainable or unsustainable.
The T in I=PAT makes sustainability a moving target, dividing the harm of the other 2 impacts.
Having 100% of some material being recyclable is not the same as having 100% of the material in some product or infrastructure being recycled. It is impossible to recover 100% of the material that goes into a recycling process. It is inevitable that some will be lost in the waste of that process. That’s all I’m saying, and that means that there will be a continual need for mining and refining of resources. In addition, if the scale of such mining and refining is not large enough, it may not be economical enough to have such industries.
Building society from seaweed may be technically possible (I doubt it) but doing so would require energy and resources that didn’t come from seaweed.
Civilisation/modernity is unsustainable. It cannot be sustained indefinitely, so you should state how long a time you’d be happy for modernity to continue and show how it can be sustained for that long.
Again, Richard’s own Five Axioms of Sustainability show that no way of life that requires non-renewable resources is sustainable. There are other criteria but it’s clear that modernity is not sustainable.
Hi Tony, again – you have repeated the same assertion many times but without concrete examples.
Basically – ever since studying the substitutability of various minerals for the energy transition (which proves Simon Michaux's whole thesis wrong) – I've been been a lot more optimistic. The EROEI of renewables is now so good that we have enough energy left over to run all sorts of processes indefinitely.
As certain ingredients in the industrial ecosystem become scarcer – alternatives can be found. Or simply ways to do without that gizmo – to bypass it altogether. The five axioms are common sense – what is missing is an appreciation of the vast array of different ways of making things and helping society function. There's an awful lot I agree with Richard Heinberg on – but some areas where I think he's asking the right questions, but potentially coming up with too negative an answer.
Sure – I'm solarpunk all the way- prefering Ecocities and New Urbanism to suburbia. I'm also trending vegetarian – because we've got to feed the next 2 billion that arrive by 2050 without destroying the last of nature. Which is where various protein powders come in.
Dr David King was the chief scientific adviser to the UK government, and Dr Tim Flannery held the same position down in Australia. Both have done lots of work on how 3d seaweed and shellfish farms could feed the world WHILE ALSO restoring the ocean! Seaweed grows 30 times faster than any land plant – and does not use any arable land, fresh water, or fertiliser – or the embodied energy in delivering and maintaining all that.
JUST 2% OF THE OCEANS COULD FEED 12 BILLION PEOPLE while repairing the oceans.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/01/sea-forest-better-name-seaweed-un-food-adviser The seaweed powder can be a food supplement that goes in everything from dairy to bread. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666833522000302
The dried seaweed protein yield per area (in the ocean) is 2.5 to 7.5 times higher than wheat or legumes (on land). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7221823/ They also grow shellfish like oysters, scallops, and muscles in baskets under the seaweed lines.
OPTIONAL EXTRAS FOR THE KEEN:- 6 minute Youtube summary – the big ocean conservation groups sponsoring research into this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZW72i0DVqE
FREAKANOMICS interview seaweed pioneer Bren Smith: June 2021 – 43 minutes https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-the-future-of-farming-in-the-ocean-ep-467/
FARM EVEN THE NUTRIENT POOR OPEN OCEAN: Solar or wave powered floating barges could pump nutrient rich water up from 500 m down.
https://theconversation.com/how-farming-giant-seaweed-can-feed-fish-and-fix-the-climate-81761
20% OF THE SEAWEED BREAKS OFF AND GETS SEQUESTERED kilometres deep, trapping carbon for a thousand years. The more food we grow, the more carbon we sequester. https://www.jwu.edu/news/stories/magazine/2022/fall/sustainable-cuisine/index.html
So, your position seems to be that modernity can go on for longer than currently used resources can economically last because it's possible to substitute other resources for scarce resources, and that even if those other resources become scarce, more substitutes could be found. The problems with this approach include:
Eventually, there will be no resources that can do the job of the resources being substituted for, or not at the same scale.
There will be some critical resource that just can't be substituted for.
Environmental damage will continue as resources are mined and refined.
None of this is remotely counter to the Five Axioms of Sustainability. So long as we are in the real world, those axioms apply.
Hi Tony, nice to hear from you.
Not a growth modernity. But that's not necessary to model because the global demographic transition is coming by 2050 – and then with the right welfare policies we can actually bring that on earlier and get the population down to 6 billion by 2050.
But renewable energy from super-abundant renewable materials, yes! I am pretty confident that this is possible – and that's just from 18 months of googling "Can we make x without y?" EG: "Can we make solar panels without copper?" It turns out every so-called rare critical mineral Simon Michaux urged us to consider critical for the Energy Transition can be substituted! He didn't even know sodium batteries can be built with aluminium – not copper! I mean – honestly! He might be a good geologist – but his energy transition modelling was a prime example of "Motivated reasoning". He's a peak oil doomer from way back, hating on EV's that have ruined his peak oil manifesto for society.
Now – again – my favourite EV is a subway. I'm NOT a fan of the current capitalist consumerist model! Nor am I a fan of every horrid way mining is being done around the planet – from the mines of poverty like Cobalt mining in Africa that may as well be called 'blood cobalt' – through to some of the first world disasters like Rio Tinto blowing up an aboriginal sacred site . But it's a very big planet, and mining – compared to grazing livestock – impacts a tiny fraction of all that land. And it can be rehabilitiated. A dear friend is publishing a book about a rehabilitated quarry in Melbourne. It is simply one of the most astonishingly beautiful nature reserves in Australia – and it was a fully industrial site – and now sits in an unremarkable suburb of Melbourne. It's 'just' a council park – no entry tickets or anything – yet the quarry is full of water with thriving local ecosystems and wildlife.
So – being Bright Green – I urge our governments to monitor these social justice and environmental issues with mining. But don't kid yourself – the greatest threats to the biosphere are climate change and agriculture – especially livestock. Mining damage is way down the list – read some more Johan Rockstrom!
As we often hear, our choice of words is important. We need to stop talking about "renewable" energy if we are to understand the problem better and to focus on solutions. "Renewable" is a fuzzy, feel good term and one beloved by the corporate/tech world. The issue instead is transitioning back to a world where solar power, the constant, unlimited stream of energy from the sun, becomes far dominant over fossilized energy.
The term to use is "harvested" energy. Plants have employed solar energy for billions of years through photosynthesis, which takes carbon dioxide and water (and nutrients to add) and creates the sugars, etc., from which to construct vastly complicated materials and captures energy in chemical bonds. Of course, that makes us humans, and other life forms along the trophic chain, solar powered as well. Wind is solar powered, by the uneven heating of the atmosphere. Water through evaporation, rainfall, and on to hydroelectric power, etc. Humanity has been harvesting energy for power for a long time. Now we have solar panels, a technical solution to energy harvesting. There are more examples of course. In any case, harvesting and concentrating power are our challenge.
That said, we need to repeat non-renewable over and over in terms of fossilized energy. Once used, gone for all generations yet to come. A crime against future and present humanity to use this gift from the past for non-necessary human consumption.
I agree with most of this. I'd also like to highlight the use of the nonsensical phrase "clean energy" which is never used in its literal sense.
However, fossilized energy is not a gift from the past and it doesn't matter whether using it deprives future generations or not. No generation should have used, or should ever use, that fossilized energy by burning it.
The extraction of materials for renewables is not 'clean' – but as both the mining and refining and transport sectors all electrify they'll become cleaner. And after the first generation of renewables are built out and recycled – global mining will fall off a cliff!
If the extraction can ever be done at scale, in the places the resources exist, then it might be cleaner but it will still cause environmental damage and the refining will be dirty. All stages in the life-cycle of renewable energy are not clean. Cleaner is not the same thing as clean.
I do follow Richard Heinberg's works and admire them a lot. However I find a few aspects of this 7 step plan for transition unworkable not just because it may not be politically palatable today but also because I find it not holistic or coherent to comprise any sort of action plan that can effectively mobilize humanity towards any sustainable transition path. I would like to share some my reasons:
This transition isn’t just about building lots of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. It is about organizing society differently so that is uses much less energy and gets whatever energy it uses from sources that can be sustained over the long run.
I completely agree with this line of thinking as long as ‘organizing differently’ means not be entrenched in dominant current paradigm but rather rooted in a post-collapse alternative New Paradigm. Because sustenance of Globalized Industrial Civilization (GIC)- centralized State & market based order- cannot remain stable without high energy & material intensive systems tethered to growth & cheap energy. A new way of organizing will necessarily be very different from anything humanity (esp in Global North) are familiar with i.e. radically lower throughput, low -complexity and bioregional commons based governance
Step 1: Cap global fossil fuel extraction through global treaty, and annually lower the cap.
I think this may not be possible voluntarily because of the
– Catch 22 dynamics (we do nothing it leads to run-away climate change. If we strand fossil energy then we trigger a cascading collapse of GIC)
– Moloch dynamics (race to the bottom) that will prevent both solo action and any form of global consensus/treaty either among States or businesses because it is suicidal. It is like asking people to jump from the 'Sinking Titanic' without first showing them lifeboats. Unfortunately, we have not yet begun discussing 'lifeboats' let alone build one for enough people
Step 2: Manage energy demand fairly.
Now tell me which actor on the global or national stage has the power to enforce this austerity plan? International Relations landscape rooted in Structural Realism where National Interest is the sacred ideal, how do you expect it to materialize? So we can talk about it but not expect it to manifest voluntarily.
Also fancy market based 'solutions' (Quota rationing & TEQs) only work in times of prosperity and surplus and are jettisoned in the first sign of economic slowdown.
Step 3: Manage the public’s material expectations.
This seems doable as long as people can be encouraged and invited to explore the merits of alternative paradigm. So that they can gradually decouple from GIC and increase their reliance on local communities rather than State & Markets. There is no way material expectations can be managed as long as we continue to be tethered to Dominant current paradigm (DP) both in assessing our current state and active imagination of the future transitions.
Unfortunately there is no non-suicidal way for any or all actors (State & business) to opt out of GDP or Growth dynamics. It is literally a race to the bottom. This kind of collective suicide for the sake of posterity is not something we have inherited via evolution.
Step 4: Aim for population decline.
This is also doable with the same caveat — Population decline is unacceptable within the current paradigm (GDP & National Interest) but certainly an alternate paradigm can be consistent with a radical drop in population in the next few decades. Re-organizing differently (both pre & post collapse) will most likely lead to a massive decline in population till things settle which depends on how well humanity prefigure this abrupt collapse.
Step 5: Target technological research and development to the transition.
Yes I agree with this approach. We need a large pool of skilled engineers who can manage the 'salvage economy' post-collapse and re-purpose tech for the demands on low throughput, low complexity and local future transitions.
Step 6: Institute technological triage.
Once again this is wishful thinking as no single entity has the power control arms race or regulate exponential tech or surveillance capitalism…As long as State-Market based world order exist, these tools of security & dominance cannot be either taken away by force nor surrendered by anyone in good faith (because of the perverse market incentives and race to the bottom dynamics). These efforts to let go of destructive are noble but unworkable.
Step 7: Help nature absorb excess carbon
I agree – regenerative practices that improves and augments natural capital is the most vital strategy. But attempting to do this while GIC operates is like attempting to out-swim a rip current ….both are not possible together…GIC is cancerous and will eventually kill the host (Biosphere)…Cancer will and has to die for the host to recover.
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The seven steps in here are fine as far as they go, but I have to agree with @tonyprep:disqus and @stevecarrow:disqus that they are not enough and modernity must end. If we have more time than some of us think, these steps can help with backing away from our present perch on the precipice. And with regard to human population, according to Corey Bradshaw, who just appeared on The Great Simplification, 10 billion is already baked in, under the best of circumstances. According to Bright Green Lies by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert, the drilling, mining, and dams either underway or planned around the world assure that the damage will continue, at least until something absolutely stops it. The next book in my reading pile is Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Andreotti, who also recently appeared on The Great Simplification.
My husband and I, both in our late sixties, are working on our self reliance, growing veggies, trying (and failing) to grow potatoes, sweet potatoes and squash, cooking more from scratch, learning skills and improving at others, but we are limited by our suburban community. Back of the envelope, our suburb is overpopulated by at least two orders of magnitude, and it's not even particularly built up. The local government is embarking on a new comprehensive plan, and I'm trying to figure out what to recommend to them, but given the existing local overshoot, it's hard to say whether anything really helps.
Moving away to an ecovillage is not in the cards unless I leave my husband for it, which I don't want to do. I doubt an ecovillage community would accept an elder anyway, given the limited term of an elder's physical ability to contribute. I fear that the most likely scenario is entering old age in relatively good health and vitality, only to starve or dehydrate when post-peak fossil extraction renders chemical fertilizer obsolete and makes water utilities fail.
Even indigenous communities around the globe will struggle to get through the coming bottleneck because of the theft, displacement, genocide, global warming, ecocide, and contamination imposed on them by white supremacist development policies. I used to be puzzled about the noise about third-world poverty, wondering how the third-world peoples had persisted for so long, and whether they had thought of themselves as poor before the developed world labeled them as such. Well, they weren't poor. They were self-reliant, sovereign, and dignified until the white destroyers came along and made them poor. Or what was left of them after so many were wiped out.