When people look back nowadays to medieval philosophy, they often dismiss it with the derisive remark that it was concerned with debating “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin”. The sense is of an era whose thinkers engaged in sterile intellectual gymnastics founded on flawed premises. It’s an unfair characterization, which reveals more about the modern people who say it than the medieval objects of their contempt. Still, sometimes I wonder if there are aspects of our contemporary intellectual chitchat that might invoke angels-on-a-pin type dismissals from people in the future.
One candidate could be the notion that our civilization is on the brink of an energy transition from polluting fossil energy to clean renewable energy that will save it from the depredations of climate change, energy descent and other gathering crises. This is relevant to my present blog cycle concerning food synthesized industrially from microbes, because it’s clear that this technology will only be feasible long-term at scale with cheap and clean renewable energy at levels probably an order of magnitude, maybe even more, above existing global energy consumption. The main pushback of substance I’ve had to my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future is that this era of clean energy abundance indeed is upon us, making manufactured food feasible and confining my arguments for agrarian localism and a small farm future to the dustbin of history.
I doubt that, and in this post I’ll try to elucidate some of those doubts.
To frame the question in wider terms first, there have of course been civilizations before modern times that ultimately fell. It might be wise to learn some lessons from them, and not imagine that our present one is impervious. Our existing global, modern civilization got going around the 15th century, built initially upon intercontinental trade connections, sailboats, slavery, colonial conquest and plantation agriculture. I’ll call this ModCiv 1.0. We’re now living in a successor global modern civilization to ModCiv 1.0 built on fossil fuels, which I’ll call ModCiv 1.1.
The idea of an impending energy transition is that we can now ditch the fossil fuels imperilling our world through climate change and create another successor global modern civilization that looks a lot like ModCiv 1.1, but built on renewable, low-carbon energy – ModCiv 1.2.
Quite simply, I don’t think this is possible. The best hope (and I fear it’s a slender one) is to build a different kind of civilization, a solar civilization, which I’d hope would certainly use renewable forms of electricity generation to tap the sun’s energy, but would be unable to furnish primary energy at the fossil-assisted levels achieved by ModCiv 1.1, and would tap energy mostly via plants. I’ll call this SolarCiv 1.0.
SolarCiv 1.0 would have less energy freely available than we’re accustomed to in our present ModCiv 1.1, at least in the rich parts of it. Therefore, it would be fundamentally an agrarian civilization where production of key energy, soil fertility, food and other material necessities would be locally oriented. In my books A Small Farm Future and Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, I’ve tried to start imagining what SolarCiv 1.0 might look like and what kind of problems it would face.
Originally, I’d planned to write a thoroughly researched and quantified analysis of renewable energy futures to substantiate my doubts about the feasibility of ModCiv 1.2. But life is short, and I think my time is better spent addressing myself to the more realistic scenarios of SolarCiv 1.0 than getting trapped into debating ModCiv 1.2 talking points. I’ve spent a lot of time substantiating the energetic implausibility of microbial food quantitatively, only to find people airily ignoring my analysis in favour of vague optimism about ModCiv 1.2 or even personal attacks on me. Maybe this is a clue that the debate isn’t really about numbers and material realities at all, but deeper beliefs about how we wish things to turn out – a question of eschatology more than evidence … or a question of angels and pins.
Anyway, I do provide some quantification in what follows, but I’ve decided to frame this post more in the form of a request. If the renewables proponents for ModCiv 1.2 (or RPs, as I shall call them – an acronym I recall from my rock-climbing days: a handy bit of tech to have in a sticky situation, but not something you’d really want to bet your life on) are sure we’re on the cusp of ModCiv 1.2, presumably they have some solid numbers to back this up, and in this post I’ll be asking to see those numbers and/or other evidence across various dimensions of the issue, not all of which are discussed as much as I believe they should be.
Some Energy Basics
So let’s get started. Figure 1 shows global primary energy consumption (in exajoules) since 1965 by energy type. To move from ModCiv 1.1 to ModCiv 1.2 the thick blue wodge of fossil energy needs to dwindle pretty much to zero in a matter of decades, while the thin slivers of other colours – principally, for various reasons, the yellow solar sliver – needs to expand and more or less take its place.
Figure 1: Global primary energy consumption
(Note: the underlying source for these figures and all others in this post is the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy, https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review).
As Figure 1 shows, this isn’t happening. People talk about ‘the energy transition’, but as yet it’s a future hope, not a present reality. There are some complications to this that I’ll come to in a moment. But it’s worth just pausing to look at the shape of the graph and contemplate the enormity of what needs to happen.
Since I got interested in this issue about a quarter of a century ago I’ve been watching the global fossil energy consumption climb year on year as shown in Figure 1 (barring the Covid and financial shocks), with people proclaiming all the while that the transition out of fossils and into renewables is eminently feasible and just around the corner. Which leads to my first question:
Q1: Giving reasons, state when you think a global transition out of fossil fuels will begin, and when will it end (transition completed)?
It’s worth noting incidentally that various papers proposing the feasibility of a transition to a completely renewable energy system (like this one and this one) seem to operate with a completion date of around 2100, which might be too late in view of climate and other dynamics. My punt is that at some point in the next few years we’ll probably see fossils plateauing or dropping a little, while the low carbon sources increase, and there will be a lot of cheerleading about the arrival of the energy transition. However, the arrival is less important than the departure of the fossils – if they don’t disappear, fast, year on year, we have a problem.
I said earlier that renewables need to expand to take the place of fossils ‘more or less’. ‘More or less’ because – as RPs like to point out – there’s a lot of waste heat with solid fuels that can be avoided with electrical alternatives (petrol engines vs electric engines, for example). Therefore, a solar civilization may not need to consume as much total energy to do the same work as a fossil-fuelled civilization.
But the problem with electricity is that you can’t store it (except through tricky subterfuges like turning it into chemical energy in batteries or in hydrogen or methanol, which come with their own costs, including energetic ones). Plus, renewable electricity availability fluctuates in the short and long term with the vagaries of wind and sun, meaning that you need to build a lot of energetically-inefficient storage or extra generating capacity which in good times is unnecessary, with energy wasted (‘curtailed’ in the jargon) – probably a bit of both.
Another issue is that while electricity is more efficient than fossils for some uses, for others it can be less efficient – particularly where the fossils act as chemical feedstocks as well as sources of energy. These uses are non-trivial in terms of the global economy, including things like manufacturing metal alloys, cement, plastics, fertilizer and other agrochemicals. And all this is before we’ve even begun to consider the extra electricity that would be required to produce manufactured food, which I calculated in Saying NO… could amount conservatively to about ten times the existing supply of solar electricity just to meet global protein needs, if that’s a route ModCiv1.2 wishes to pursue.
Yet another issue, albeit straying here from energy basics into geopolitics, is the impetus in poor countries with relatively low energy usages to increase their energy use as a means to improve social wellbeing. Not only does this seem ethically right, but if it’s thwarted there’s a good chance it’ll lead to global political instabilities that could challenge the basis of ModCiv 1.1 and its chances of a smooth transition to ModCiv 1.2.
Therefore, if the aim is to preserve a high-energy global civilization of the present kind, but with more evenly distributed energy use (thereby securing political stability), then total global energy use will probably need to be much higher than today’s, where regions like East Africa (primary energy consumption: 4.9 GJ per capita) sit alongside regions like North America (primary energy consumption: 235.6 GJ per capita).
So, putting all this together leads to Question 2:
Q2: In view of the relative electrical efficiencies and inefficiencies involved in a renewables based ModCiv 1.2, and also considering the increased energy demands of poor countries, what do you project as a viable global annual energy consumption in ModCiv 1.2 compared to the present global figure of 604 EJ?
Geopolitics
Since I just mentioned geopolitics, let’s consider that some more.
Table 1 lists the world’s ten biggest energy-consuming countries. I also give their proportionate reliance on fossil energy consumption, and their fossil energy production rankings. Between them, these ten countries account for 66% of global energy consumption (the top five account for 56%). To put that another way, the future of global decarbonization pretty much rests in the hands of five governments.
Table 1: Energy consumption/production by country
| Total primary energy consumption (EJ) | Fossil fuel consumption as % of all energy use | Oil production (country rank) | Gas production (country rank) | Coal production (country rank) | Solar generation growth rate per annum 2012-22 (%) | |
| China | 159.4 | 82 | 6 | 4 | 1 | 61 |
| USA | 95.9 | 81 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 37 |
| India | 34.5 | 88 | 22 | 23 | 2 | 46 |
| Russian Federation | 28.9 | 86 | 3 | 2 | 6 | 89 |
| Japan | 17.8 | 85 | – | – | 32 | 30 |
| Canada | 14.1 | 64 | 4 | 5 | 12 | 21 |
| Brazil | 13.4 | 50 | 9 | 30 | 25 | 167 |
| South Korea | 12.7 | 83 | – | 33 | 37 | |
| Germany | 12.3 | 76 | – | 44 | 11 | 9 |
| Iran | 12.2 | 99 | 8 | 3 | – | 100 |
I could write a lot of words about Table 1, but I’d like to hear what other people – particularly RPs – have to say about it. Trying to keep it quantitative, my question is this:
Q3: Given the global balance of political, economic and military power between the largest energy-consuming and energy-producing countries, what are your estimated odds for all of them transitioning to low-carbon energy sources within the next three decades?
No doubt there are different ways of interpreting the fact that most of these countries have increased their production of solar electricity disproportionately compared to the global annual average from 2012-22 of 29%, while the top five in particular have also generally increased their consumption of fossils. One reason could be that these countries are more interested in increasing their energy resilience than any great enthusiasm for transitioning out of fossil fuels as such. Maybe some of the positions taken at the recent COP28 meeting are consistent with this? In 2022, the world increased its solar generation by 29%, but 38% of that global increase occurred in China alone, a country uniquely placed to achieve it and which has some obvious reasons for trying to achieve it that aren’t especially consistent with ModCiv 1.2 goals.
It seems likely to me that there will be some hard geopolitics in the coming years around access to critical resources, energy chief among them. Smaller players in this global scene – like my home country, the UK – will likely be scrabbling for allies, and also for whatever local energy sources they can get their hands on, including any local fossil reserves. So, non-quantitatively –
Q4: What are the grounds for thinking that many countries will not open or re-open local fossil fuel resources in the context of future energy geopolitics?
Almost finally on this topic, a transition to renewables would involve a shift from the geopolitics of fossil energy location to the location of other critical minerals like lithium and copper, which are also unevenly distributed across the world.
Q5: Are there likely to be high costs or supply chain disruptions arising from monopolies in the supply of critical minerals for renewable energy?
Finally finally on this topic, one pushback I’ve had from RPs is that if we fail to transition to ModCiv 1.2 this won’t be because it’s technically unfeasible, but will only be because of political factors. To me, this is suggestive of the techno-determinism our thinking has become mired in. By the same token, Napoleon failed to become world emperor ‘only’ because of political factors. When it comes to the fate of human societies, political factors are the ‘only’ thing there is, pretty much.
Critical minerals
Talking of critical minerals as I was, let’s move straight to Q6 –
Q6: What will be the average annual financial and energetic cost in the long-term of furnishing the minerals necessary to transition to ModCiv 1.2 at the level specified in Q2 through mining and extraction of new material and through recycling existing material?
Just to expand on the question briefly, I see a lot of graphics online like this one purporting to show that the mineral requirements for renewables are much less than for fossil fuels, the implication apparently being that minerals are not a limiting factor to a renewable transition.
But that graphic is meaningless. For a start, it doesn’t indicate the absolute quantity of minerals that are available. Nor, assuming that enough minerals are available to support ModCiv 1.2, does it indicate the costs of extraction, smelting and processing them into the final products. A proper answer to Q6 is needed.
Grids
Given that ModCiv 1.2 will probably involve an increase in electricity consumption (subject to the answer to Q2) from its current level of 105 EJ to something equivalent or more likely considerably in excess of the current total global energy consumption of 604 EJ, this implies the need to build higher capacity electricity grids. And also probably to extend them into rural areas where the inhabitants previously relied on solid fuels. Either that, or amplify energy inequalities between grid-connected folks and rural off-grid people, which could be interesting politically. Anyway, bigger grids mean higher grid costs in terms of money, energy and materials, albeit offset against lower costs for fossil energy distribution.
The International Energy Agency says: “To achieve countries’ national energy and climate goals …. means adding or refurbishing a total of over 80 million kilometres of grids by 2040, the equivalent of the entire existing global grid …. At least 3 000 gigawatts (GW) of renewable power projects, of which 1 500 GW are in advanced stages, are waiting in grid connection queues – equivalent to five times the amount of solar PV and wind capacity added in 2022. This shows grids are becoming a bottleneck for transitions to net zero emissions.”
Q7: What would be the net costs (financial, energetic and material) of increased grid capacity and penetration, and of overcoming existing grid bottlenecks?
Q8: What would be the social and/or political implications of the geography of grid penetration?
Cost
I’d now like to take a closer look at the issue of cost. It’s arisen in several of the questions, and it’s also a favoured talking point of RPs along the lines that the cost of installing renewable generating capacity has plummeted, supposedly making ModCiv 1.2 now economically feasible in a way it previously wasn’t.
It could be unwise to assume that the cost of renewables will continue to fall. Yes, that’s been the case with technical innovations and with increasing supply as the proportion of solar electricity in the energy mix has climbed from a lowly 0.7% back in 2011 to fully 2.5% today. But material, technical and supply limits may kick in as that proportion makes the precipitous rise that will be required over the next few decades if we’re to achieve ModCiv 1.2.
One study estimates that most of the costs of a renewable transition will apply at the higher levels of renewable substitution – 70% of them occur in moving from 60 to 100% renewables. There are also costs involved in the recurrent decommissioning and replacement of old capacity which haven’t yet been fully figured into the relatively young industry. It seems that the rate of decline in the cost of new solar capacity is already beginning to slow and level out, while photovoltaic panel costs are increasing due to the rising price of polysilicon in China. Could these be straws in the wind for longer-term trends?
Q9: Giving reasons, estimate the cost trend for installing new renewable capacity worldwide if the global energy economy greatly increases solar electric capacity over the next few decades.
But what kind of cost? The cost of energy facilities is typically given in the form of a levelized cost, which is basically a version of what economists call ‘marginal costs’. In other words, they address the question of how much it would cost to install another kilowatt or megawatt of renewable generating capacity within the present energy economy. But that’s not the question before us in building ModCiv 1.2. The real question is what is the total cost of building it, or maybe what is the average annual cost of building it over the next few decades that remain available to us to build it.
I’ve already hinted in the previous discussion at many of the considerations that will have to go into that total cost figure. In summary, the total cost of a renewables transition will involve the cost of:
- Increasing renewable capacity worldwide, probably at the very least by installing new capacity equivalent to the entire present solar capacity of the world each and every year for the next 25 years – and probably quite a lot more to ensure it’s sufficient to cover seasonal cycles, curtailment etc.
- Disinvesting in and decommissioning existing fossil fuel infrastructures
- Creating cradle-to-grave renewable infrastructures from the installed renewable capacity: mining raw materials, manufacturing the generating equipment, decommissioning and replacing old equipment
- Increasing grid capacities and penetration
- Manufacturing critical materials currently reliant upon fossil hydrocarbons for energy or feedstocks, including metals, cement, fertilizer, agrochemicals and plastics
Figures for the levelized or marginal cost of installing new renewable generating capacity really don’t convey much useful information about this task, whereas figures for the total cost do. So:
Q10: Estimate the total cost of creating a mostly renewables based ModCiv 1.2 within a realistic timeframe encompassing all those cost pushes, and any other relevant ones.
A final point. However low the cost of renewable generation is, it’s unlikely ever to approach the cost of plain sunlight, which is zero. This establishes a cost hurdle that I doubt manufactured microbial food will ever surmount in any version of civilization, whether ModCiv 1.1, ModCiv 1.2 or SolarCiv 1.0.
Peer review: or, the return of the dancing angels
I haven’t seen many convincing efforts to answer Q10 in the energy literature. To be fair, it’s not an easy calculation to make, but it’s hard to take the RP case for ModCiv 1.2 very seriously until somebody has a decent go at it that charts a plausible course from here to there.
One person who’s had a go at it and concluded that there isn’t a plausible course is Simon Michaux, who I cited in my book. Some aspects of his analysis have been questioned, which is fair enough – people make mistakes, and there are almost always grounds for questioning aspects of every analysis. But some of the pushback he’s received – and I’ve received for citing him – strikes me as questionable in itself. Not so much a case of critiquing and refining the analysis as dismissing it so as to duck the awkward reality of Q10.
One of the criticisms of Michaux is that his analysis isn’t peer-reviewed. Now, I’m all in favour of peer review. I’ve both published and refereed peer-reviewed articles myself and I’ve sat on editorial boards of peer-reviewed journals. There’s a lot to be said for communities of scholars holding themselves to account in this way, and a peer-reviewed article does offer some basic level of quality assurance – a bit like buying an organically-certified product in a supermarket.
But the process isn’t magic. The fact that various scholars have opined in peer-reviewed articles that ModCiv 1.2 is possible doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. We have at most a few decades to implement it, in reality and on the ground, with a hell of a lot of photovoltaic panels, copper wiring and heavy industrial infrastructure that needs to be going in right now. After that, the possibility will most likely be out of our hands due to climate change and intractable geopolitics. And we haven’t even started down the road yet. At present, we only seem to be talking about it. I hear lots of talk along the lines that ‘the literature’ says ModCiv 1.2 is possible. But when you consult the literature, you read a lot of this kind of thing:
“All in all, there appears to be reason for moderate optimism that material criticalities will not represent an unsurmountable roadblock towards the transition to 100% RE systems. However, it is also clear that it will be a formidable challenge to ensure the timely availability of resources while simultaneously minimizing the negative impacts of extraction on humans and the environment. This needs to be a focus of upcoming research.”
I don’t particularly mean to criticise this paper but, at this late stage in the game of ModCiv 1.1, if where we’re at is only ‘moderate optimism’ in a whip round of opinion among experts who think formidable challenges are possibly surmountable but there’s a need for more research, then it’s surely plausible to think there are grounds for moderate pessimism about the prospects for ModCiv 1.2 and a need to switch focus to bringing SolarCiv 1.0 into being.
Are we merely imagining our way to the salvation of ModCiv 1.2 through a thicket of peer-reviewed opinion about the theoretical promise of solar electricity? If so, that brings us to:
Q11: How many PV panels can dance on the head of a pin?
New Current Reading
Michael Boxwell Solar Electricity Handbook (…appropriately/inappropriately enough)
Jennifer Grayson A Call To Farms
Manda Scott Any Human Power
Comments
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They’re leading the way with emissions–China and India, you mean–because they’;re catching up, the “West/North” already built its infrastructure, Also, India and China each have in the neighborhood of four times the population of the US, so total emissions isn’t a fair comparison–AND, in China’s case, it gets charged with the emissions from making a high percentage of the goods used in the North. As for the autocracy/democracy comparison, I think that’s fairly meaningless, as the literal meaning of Democracy is “the people rule” and I don’t know if there is any country on Earth that is genuinely democratic. In fact, it looks to me like the leaders of Russia and China are sufficiently worried about public opinion to cater to their people’s needs, and consequently are quite popular. What the leaders of the US and other western countries–all self-proclaimed democracies–have to do is win elections, which is accomplished by spending more than their opponents, which is accomplished by giving the moneybags–mostly corporate–whatever they want. Which is generally NOT in the people’s interest. Consequently, they are mostly quite unpopular–but it doesn’t matter. They have to win elections, in which their opponents are limited to The Other Party–not popularity contests.
Copied and pasted moldy old second hand Chomsky book.
Anyway OK that’s good because what you’re saying is sustainability will be autocratic. Bit more real.
Several billion? How do you figure? I know the Rapture Ready crowd is a hefty percentage of Americans, maybe a quarter– but who else?
You don’t need to justify the statement that we will end up on renewables. It’s a truth.
And nuclear, current technologies, is non-renewable. End story.
https://www.withouthotair.com/
Chapter 24, p161 – Nuclear? (It’s a free download, well worth the read).
Even if something will be true, the point of arguing for its future truth is to convince others it will be true. And in the case of renewables-only, it does not even look like that will be true. And we don’t need nuclear to be renewable. For the crisis we are dealing with right now, it is plenty good enough that the fuels will be abundant enough for thousands of years.
I also don’t know why you would cite a source which flatly contradicts your position. Did you not read that chapter? Did you not know about MacKay’s views?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/03/idea-of-renewables-powering-uk-is-an-appalling-delusion-david-mackay
And by the way, he wrote that chapter back in 2009, so he didn’t know about molten salt fast reactors. He didn’t know they could be 200 times more fuel efficient for heat production than old-tech reactors, and closer to 300 times more fuel efficient for electricity production. And he didn’t do anything with the reject heat from electricity production. Methods to extract uranium from seawater have also improved at least five times since that book, and research continues. And where he says thorium can deliver 3.6 billion kWh of heat per tonne fissioned, the actual figure is 22.77 billion kWh of heat. And he said there is three times as much thorium as uranium, where the prevailing view is that there is three times more thorium than uranium. And he seems to have neglected to include our large supply of depleted uranium that we already have in storage. And many of the values he chose were heavily biased towards the conservative ends of the possible ranges. And considering how much the nuclear landscape has changed in the 15 years since he wrote that book, it is not a large stretch to suppose there could be many more discoveries and advancements over the next few hundred years. So as laudatory of nuclear energy as MacKay’s chapter was, it could easily have been strongly understated.
Think it through (from my POV you sound like a one-topic version of the splurging believer who clogs other threads) – just sayin”.
Nuclear does electricity; good at base-load, not too good a peak. And a little local heat. It also has – present and known tech – an unsolved waste problem.
And a high-entropy issue; it would add (in your version) a lot of low-grade heat to an already overheating world (as does burning fossil carbon).
So, are you advocating a BAU level of activity? Nuclear electricity driving tractors, diggers and aeroplanes? Or some more basic level of activity – presumably one which includes the ability to build/maintain grids?
And we are at the point where relying on ‘many more discoveries and advancements’ some unidentified time in the future, is invalid selfishness vis-a-vis future generations. Whatever we hand on, should be provenly maintainable, now. Then there is the form of entropy that is depletion/degradation – what are you intending to process/transport/trash, in what quantities and for how long?
As a final thought – nuclear plants are big finance. Not local by any means. Yet small and local is where we are headed, and big finance is a ponzi looking for somewhere to pop; ironically, because there isn’t enough low-entropy going into the system to repay the debt…..
Nuclear does heat as its native mode. Electricity is one of the things you can make with that heat, but hotter reactors will open up a lot more heat applications.
The nuclear waste “problem” is both tiny and non-urgent. We have several promising options in development, so we should wait to see what happens there before we go making hundred-thousand year plans which will likely be obsolete in just a few years. But so far as the future direction civilization will take, nuclear waste isn’t a large enough issue to make a difference.
Planetary heating from nuclear energy would also be trivial. Solar heating at the Earth’s surface is around 88,000 terawatts on average. Direct solar heating of the lower atmosphere is around 28,000 terawatts. Even if we imagine nuclear someday adding, say, 30 terawatts of avg. heat, that would barely be a rounding error on over 110,000 terawatts of solar heat. Also, nuclear heat could be used in ways that would actually promote net cooling. For ocean shore and offshore nuclear-electric plants, pulling the cooling water up from depth would help to increase the salinity and decrease the CO2 content in ocean surface waters (thereby increasing CO2 uptake from the air) as the heated water spreads out and intermixes at the surface. (Increasing surface salinity helps to support thermo-haline circulation—which also brings more low-CO2 deep-water to the surface.) On land, small, hot, air-cooled reactors could use the moving air and waste heat to power direct-air capture of CO2. In both cases, the CO2 removed will have a far larger cooling effect than any direct heating from the reactors.
I advocate developing our most promising clean energy and carbon removal and carbon recycling options. The more good and useful tools we have to work with, the better our chances will be for arriving at effective solutions. I do think we will probably need to remove hundreds of billions of tonnes of CO2 from the air in much less time than it took to emit it in the first place, but whether you count that as BAU is a matter of perspective. Overall, I’m expecting global energy demand to increase greatly well through mid-century. I think nuclear will directly power large ships, and I think electricity will see increased use in heavy mining and some freight rail, but I think the most likely support nuclear will have for aircraft and for hard-to-electrify applications will be through various forms of synfuel production, with recycled hydrocarbon fuels providing the most-ready drop-in replacements. I’m also expecting our trend towards increasingly living in cities will continue, as will our falling reproductive rates. I hope we will use less ag crops and trees for fuel, and I would like to see us move towards replacing whole-animal sources of meat with synthetic and vat-grown tissue meats, and I think inexpensive clean energy could facilitate that transition. I also think for more efficient water use, for less dependence on growing seasons and less vulnerability to increasingly-erratic weather, for better non-chemical pest control, and for reduced transport distances, housed or contained farming will increase, and I think cheap energy could help there as well.
My point about future advances and discoveries pertained to the long-term sustainability of nuclear energy–on the thousand-year timescale MacKay was looking at. But in our situation, I don’t think we need to worry about long-term sustainability, and having forms of nuclear good enough to last us centuries is within our near-term grasp.
There are forms of recycling we don’t do much now because the energy costs are too high, and cheaper energy might be of modest help there, but ultimately, I don’t foresee nuclear having much effect on the trash issue, either way. Solutions there will depend mostly on mandates and economics, with some technology approaches getting us more use out of durable goods and materials, and maybe faster breakdown for disposable materials.
All financing that is based on private banks is as extractive as a Ponzi scheme. Banks only create enough money to lend, and never enough to repay, and to cover the difference, they continuously harvest real assets, or they reap during bust cycles. This short-sheeting is by design, and it is how banks effectively tax everything–infrastructure, personal property, services, health, energy, communications, and even government itself. But the problem there lies in the economic system, not in the technologies. In the system we have, nuclear power will probably be a wealth-concentrator–providing energy services which mostly don’t last as long as the money paid for them—and only people with capital can build and run it. That part is not great. But on the other hand, the more successful it is at concentrating wealth, the more rich people will build of it. This is how rapid technology transitions happen.
Looking at the table
1. Global south – brown and yellow people – is leading the way with emissions. Bad for those race narratives we keep getting about climate justice=racial justice.
2. Autocracies are building out the solar just like democracies. Bad for the “democracy is essential to combat climate change narrative”.
3. The Rosebank oil field doesn’t feature at all as driver of global genocide in this table. That’s because it’s lost in the noise.
4. I expect these small facts to be ignored.
5. Given the size of Russia and the amount of wind that must blow over it, and the very big middle of nowhere that Russia has in which to locate turbines – when does Russian wind power make it’s oil and gas irrelevant?
Let’s do an autocracy comparison. I will rank them on solar growth.
A = autocracy, D = democracy
D Brazil 167
A Iran 100
A Russia 89
A China 61
D India 46
A USA 37
D Korea 37
D Japan 30
D Canada 21
D Germany 9
So, when people like extinction rebellion bang on about citizen’s assemblies and democracy etc. where’s the evidence that it makes any difference at all?
Not only is the development of solar slower in democracies, but they buy of their panels from China anyway.
“Maybe this is a clue that the debate isn’t really about numbers and
material realities at all, but deeper beliefs about how we wish things
to turn out – a question of eschatology more than evidence … or a
question of angels and pins.”
Several billion people expect the Earth to be destroyed as a precondition for them going to heaven.
You might think that would figure in talks about global sustainability, but it never does.
A website like this is devoted to making sure that divine destruction never happens. That’s anathema to a large chunk of the global population, who’s civilizations are constructed around a finite human timeline. To such people it’s not just resources that are finite, but time and mortality.
Talking about such things might mean a few seconds break in the global north guilt tripping, but nevertheless there it is.
Do please let us know what you think about Alcubierre warp drives.
The transition to renewables will cost many trillions of dollars. It will also strand many trillions of dollars of fossil fuel infrastructure. The transition to renewables makes no economic sense so it has to be politically driven. If the goal is to slow climate change all countries must participate, by force of arms if necessary. Then there will be the climate and economic refugees from the global South, over a billion of them. Who is going to take them?
Personally I already have 11,000 watts of solar panels and the space and funds to double that. What about people who don’t?
Great post and great questions! To the list of questions I would only add: “Explain the recent change in global geopolitics that now facilitates a transition to 100% non-carbon energy and explains why the transition hasn’t already happened?”
The rise in atmospheric CO2 and the need to decarbonize our energy supply has been known for decades, so a sudden awareness of the risks of climate change can’t be the answer.
Perfectly adequate solar energy technologies have been around for decades as well, so lack of ability to transition can’t be the answer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_plants_in_the_Mojave_Desert
When the need to transtion to non-carbon energy first became clear back in the 1970s or 1980s, the global population of humans was roughly half today’s numbers, making the project roughly half as big as it would be today, so the need to wait until the task becomes easier can’t be the answer.
The actual answer is really simple. It has always been cheaper and easier to use fossil fuels for energy and ignore the externalities than invest in an energy transition. Nothing of real substance will happen until that changes. But when that change does finally happen, it will be far too late, both for the transition and the climate.
Which brings up one more question for the RPs: “Given current atmospheric CO2 and global warming in the pipeline why isn’t it already too late for an energy transition?” https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?searchresult=1&login=false
This article presents a forced dichotomy between a renewables-only transition to ModCiv 1.2, or a new kind of civilization scaled down to the limitations of renewables-only energy. But no reason is given for the unstated premise that our future options must be renewables-only. Indeed, if that graph hadn’t included the inconvenient orange stripe, there would have been no indication in this article that nuclear power–and future nuclear potential–even exists. It also seems to presume that we will not be able to continue to get some of our energy from fossil fuels, when all we really need to eliminate, or offset, are the emissions. This looks like just more sterile intellectual gymnastics based on unfounded premises.
“In summary, the total cost of a renewables transition will involve the cost of:
Increasing renewable capacity worldwide, probably at the very least by installing new capacity equivalent to the entire present solar capacity of the world each and every year for the next 25 years”
Think about it. Whether powered by renewables or fossil fuels, our modern global economy requires at least 3% growth, year on year. That’s an exponential function, which means that whatever capacity/cost would be required this year, in about 25 years the required capacity/cost would be double that amount. When a large share of any renewable technology installed this year would be approaching its end of life. So, seems to me the first, most important and most fundamental task we humans should be working at is figuring out how to “transition” to a steady state economy.
One point about all of this has not been mentioned. If the ModCiv 1.2 people do achieve their goal of replacing the current profligate use of energy in the “developed” world with renewables–or nuclear, or fusion, or hydrogen, or fairy dust–and extend this largess to the “underdeveloped” world–this would be utterly disastrous. Perhaps it would fend off the worst effects of climate change–but what about species loss, plummeting biodiversity? What about the ravaging of one place after another for materials–usually places where poor people live, to source materials for rich people’s toys? And what about all the hideous new threats on the horizon if ModCiv lasts long enough for them to be realized? I refer to the burgeoning global police state, the new nuclear weapons build-out, the bioweapons labs all over, the robots equipped with lethal weapons, AI which apparently presents such threats that its developers are the ones in the forefront of sounding the alarm, monkeying with bioengineering…and if all this is to perpetuate Holy Eternal Growth Forever, a new round of problems when we bang up against new limits. No. We need to finally LEARN something, calm down and face our addictions. Ideally, we would be working to envision and then build a healthy, cooperative SolarCiv. But I’m afraid the Powers That Be and the corporate machines that own and order them around, will perpetuate ModCiv1.0 until it bites the dust, with quite a resounding crash…and that will lead to conflict and scarcity and dangerous toxic crap left over from ModCit 1.0 left all over with the chaotic world that follows not knowing how to, or being able to, safely sequester it all.