Renewables: The Next Fracking?

[GliderGuider]

The latest column from John Michael Greer. Apparently there are no sacred cows in his world either.

Renewables: The Next Fracking?

Broadly speaking, there are two groups of people who talk about renewable energy these days. The first group consists of those people who believe that of course sun and wind can replace fossil fuels and enable modern industrial society to keep on going into the far future. The second group consists of people who actually live with renewable energy on a daily basis. It’s been my repeated experience for years now that people belong to one of these groups or the other, but not to both.

Debates between members of these two groups have enlivened quite a few comment pages here on The Archdruid Report. Of late, though—more specifically, since the COP-21 summit last December came out with yet another round of toothless posturing masquerading as a climate agreement—the language used by the first of the two groups has taken on a new and unsettling tone.

Climate activist Naomi Oreskes helped launch that new tone with a diatribe in the mass media insisting that questioning whether renewable energy sources can power industrial society amounts to “a new form of climate denialism.” The same sort of rhetoric has begun to percolate all through the greenward end of things: an increasingly angry insistence that renewable energy sources are by definition the planet’s only hope, that of course the necessary buildout can be accomplished fast enough and on a large enough scale to matter, and that no one ought to be allowed to question these articles of faith.

(GG: Here you will find a nice deconstruction of the biofuel craze of the past decade.)

Equally, renewables are by no means as environmentally benign as their more enthusiastic promoters claim. It’s true that they don’t dump as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as burning fossil fuels do—and my more perceptive readers may already have noted, by the way, the extent to which talk about the very broad range of environmental blowbacks from modern industrial technologies has been supplanted by a much narrower focus on greenhouse gas-induced anthropogenic global warming, as though this is the only issue that matters—but the technologies needed to turn sun and wind into grid electricity involve very large volumes of rare metals, solvents, plastics, and other industrial products that have substantial carbon footprints of their own.

And of course there are other problems of the same kind, some of which are already painfully clear. A number of those rare metals are sourced from open-pit mines in the Third World worked by slave labor; the manufacture of most solvents and plastics involves the generation of a great deal of toxic waste, most of which inevitably finds its way into the biosphere; wind turbines are already racking up an impressive death toll among birds and bats—well, I could go on. Nearly all of modern industrial society’s complex technologies are ecocidal to one fairly significant degree or another, and the fact that a few of them extract energy from sunlight or wind doesn’t keep them from having a galaxy of nasty indirect environmental costs.

Thus the conversation that needs to happen now isn’t about how to keep power flowing to the grid; it’s about how to reduce our energy consumption so that we can get by without grid power, using local microgrids and home-generated power to meet sharply reduced needs.We don’t need more energy; we need much, much less, and that implies in turn that we—meaning here especially the five per cent of our species who live within the borders of the United States, who use so disproportionately large a fraction of the planet’s energy and resources, and who produce a comparably huge fraction of the carbon dioxide that’s driving global warming—need to retool our lives and our lifestyles to get by with the sort of energy consumption that most other human beings consider normal.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. I might be that cynical too, if I didn't know that there is constant innovation underway in

terms of both collectors and batteries, and that many of them involve developing technologies that don't include 'very large volumes of rare metals'. Because we don't have infinite sources of rare metals, and so researchers keep looking at ways to use common, non-toxic substances instead. As to solvents and plastics? Welcome to the world of modern manufacturing. Most everything manufactured goes there, there's nothing special about making components for renewables that isn't going into most everything out there that wasn't hand carved from wood by a third world sweatshop employee.

He's right in the end, though, we do need to do serious work on reducing consumption, and not just in energy, but in food, 'consumer goods', and everything else. And we can work on that politically, since it came about politically. American overconsumption is largely a direct result of economic policies that subsidize cheap goods.

[The2ndWheel]

2. The only question with reducing consumption is

Why then do we want cheap energy? Since it takes energy to get energy, if we wanted to reduce consumption, the more efficient way to go about that would be to not try to come up with some cheap energy innovation. Consume what's readily available(which requires energy anyway), and don't go for more(which requires even more energy). But of course we want more, as that's what human progress is about.

As long as we have 7+ and counting billion people on the planet, and every person deserves their fair share simply by being a human being, we'll keep increasing consumption before we don't. Well, we'll increase it voluntarily until we can't. If energy is too expensive, then consumption will be decreased for us.

[GliderGuider]

3. Here's a description of the "innovation approach" I heard yesterday.

"It amounts to looking inside the canoe for a solution to the problem that the canoe is about to go over a waterfall."

[NNadir]

5. Maybe you'd like to inform me of the scientific journals that you read...

...that cause you to "know" this.

We are half a century into the claim that "new renewable technologies" would save the world. January 31 of 2015, we just recorded the fifth highest weekly comparison with the same week of the previous year ever, 4.35 ppm.

When exactly is this new technological success with so called "renewables" likely to kick in?

In the last 10 years alone, close to two trillion dollars was spent on so called "renewable energy."

Where's the results of the grand victory?

Your glib remark about "solvents and plastics" suggest that you may not know very much about industrial chemistry and even less about its sustainability, and even less than that about the environment in general. I don't know where you get your confident information on this topic - it may be from Bernie Sander's campaign literature, I don't know - but here's where I get mine: Industrial and Chemical Engineering Research. I've downloaded every article of every issue for the last five years. Your source for what you "know?"

I don't see anything, not a single paper, that convinces me that so called "renewables" will ever be "renewable." Right now the grand solar energy adventure has assured us that for many generations to come, a huge portion of the Chinese population will be eating rice contaminated with cadmium. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment July 2015, 187:408 This is the situation while the solar industry, after sucking a trillion bucks out of the world economy in the last decade alone, remains a trivial form of energy, incapable of producing even 5 of the 560 exajoules humanity now consumes.

Imagine if someone tried to make this toxicological nightmare a significant form of energy. That, won't happen, of course. There isn't enough money on the entire planet to make solar energy a significant source of energy, which is the result of half a century of ever more delusional attempts to do so. It's a grotesque failure, and unless we give up our absurd denialist attachment to "knowing" that what is not working is working, we are guilty of destroying the future.

[pscot]

4. Population is still increasing

Global energy consumption is still increasing. Global CO2 releases are still increasing. And th Planet is rapidly warming. There's no global consensus about how to deal with any of it. Population can't even be discussed. Really, this entire conversation seems moot. If putting solar panels on your roof makes you feel good, by all means put up solar panels. Just don't delude yourself into believing you're going to save the planet by doing so. It's going to take concerted, even draconian action by the major global powers and that's clearly not happening. Even Obama's modest efforts in that direction are being hamstrung by the corporate flunkies in Congress. Nobody's thinking outside the canoe.