In which Richard Heinberg explains why it is impossible to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by simply building wind turbines and solar panels without a significant simultaneous reduction in industrial activity and energy consumption, and why that doesn't mean we shouldn't build those wind turbines after all, with as a bonus a ten-minute TEDx talk by Heinberg on our obsession with growth and why it is unsustainable.
“We’re at a crisis point. A sacrifice is needed. Only a sacred cow will do. Economic growth is our society’s most sacred of cows. And guess what? The cow is sick anyway.”
Richard Heinberg
“Here's the good news though: it's not extracting more and more raw materials and energy from the environment that makes us happy. It's the quality of our relationships, our sense of continuity between past and future generations, our connection with our community, with the people around us. That's what makes ús, that's what makes life worthwhile. We can have more of those things without degrading the planet that we live on.”
Richard Heinberg
Wind turbines in the North Sea, off the coast of Great Britain, June 2018
Audio version of this blog post, read by me.
Dear Friends,
In the previous two posts I let Nate Hagens and Richard Heinberg do the talking, with images and text to explain why the narrowing of all the ecological crises we find ourselves in to only a 'climate crisis' is an approach that leaves out a great deal.
That, of course, is a common thread in this blog and in the musings: the all too narrow view with which we look at these crises, and the way in which that narrow view leads to wrong conclusions and to solutions that are mostly going to cause more problems.
The convergence of crises in our biosphere is literally the illness of a living being of which we are a part, and that illness has to do with many aspects of the incredibly complex being that is our biosphere: yes, also the carbon cycle, but equally or much more so the water cycle, the endless variety of life forms on this planet and the problems many of those life forms face, the sixth great mass extinction already underway which is our doing, the worldwide loss of forests, grasslands, wetlands, kelp forests and so many other natural “organs” of our planet that help keep the living being of our biosphere in homeostasis or balance. . the list goes on and on.
And the narrowing of this complex issue to 'just' an issue of 'climate' or CO2 leaves an awful lot out.
And within that narrowed focus on the CO2 cycle, we simplify things even further, and reduce the complexity of that carbon cycle, which is actually inextricably linked to the entire water cycle and the entirety of relationships and interactions between living organisms and ecosystems in our biosphere, to just a measurable, simple linear equation of input and output that we are going to 'solve' by purely technical means. Quantification is the message.
This is a vision that a significant portion of the 'green' movement and political parties have also thrown their weight behind, also hoping to win other parties over to the Green New Deal and the idea of a continuation of our current economic system by 'greener' means. Something that is not possible, as was clear from Nate Hagens' presentation.
This week I share a second, short text by Richard Heinberg originally published on the site of Resilience, one of the 'broadcasting channels' of Post Carbon Institute, the organization co-founded by Heinberg. You can read a bit more about both of these institutions, both of which are highly recommended 'resources' and sources of information, in the previous blog post, as well as about Richard Heinberg himself.
In this short text, Heinberg gives a brief but poignant explanation of one of the reasons why we are not succeeding in reducing global CO2 emissions, despite the year-on-year increase in the addition of ‘rebuildable’ energy (why 'renewable energy' is a misnomer is explained by Nate Hagens in 'The Great Simplification'.
A chicken is renewable -if you also have a rooster- and a tree is renewable, windmills and solar panels do not renew themselves but have to be rebuilt ).
There are several reasons why that reduction in emissions is not happening: for example, because all that “rebuildable” energy serves the production of electricity, and electricity makes up only about twenty percent of global energy consumption, a fact rarely mentioned in the whole discussion around it. Nate Hagens also mentioned that in his keynote address, as well as the reasons why we should not hope to electrify that other eighty percent in the near future.
Another reason is economic growth, that sacred cow of our society that we like to believe we need so much in order to create “prosperity”. Economic growth makes us need more energy every year, and the hunger for energy of this “superorganism” means that all the “rebuildable” energy that is added every year cannot even keep up with that energy hunger of economic growth. It was just announced that China, the world champion in the construction of wind turbines and solar panels, had to also open a whole series of coal-fired power plants, as economic growth of five percent coupled with increasing demand for electricity for computing made it necessary.
But there is another reason that is often overlooked: building wind turbines and solar panels requires not only a lot of raw materials and precious minerals, but also a lot of energy - and that is energy from fossil fuels. Making all the cement and metal and plastic for all those thousands of wind turbines, as well as installing them - often in difficult places such as in the middle of the sea - requires a lot of energy that cannot be supplied by the “rebuildable energy” itself.
Consequently, you get the paradoxical fact that the more windmills we build, the more fossil fuels we have to use in order to build them. And since we have to drastically reduce our use of fossil fuels in the coming decades to prevent further climate derailment, we can't invest that fossil fuel energy in the construction of those (necessary) windmills without at the same time saving energy elsewhere - and saving a lot of it.
But I leave the floor further to Heinberg, who makes that point very clearly in the elegant and short text.
It is one of the things we need to see much more clearly. If we want to start making better choices, we need to start seeing more clearly where we stand and what our situation really is. We have to let go of the delusion that we are dealing with a purely technical problem that we are going to solve by purely technical means. And that is not doomsaying, but intelligence. Intelligence is sometimes defined as the ability to solve problems. But to do this, it is essential to first correctly perceive and define the problem. Otherwise we will only create more problems.
And that does not mean that there are no solutions, only that those solutions can often be found elsewhere than where we are currently looking, and that we must replace the glasses with which we look at those problems with other glasses.
Some of the facts quoted above are staring us in the face só hard that the fact that they are not really noticed indicates that we are collectively in denial, something I also mentioned in the essay 'Never Mind The Cops'. That electricity makes up only 20 percent of global energy consumption, and yet we think we can save ourselves by 'rebuildable' electricity sources whose construction also requires lots of fossil fuels.... It is the squaring of the circle, and unfortunately few people seem to notice that. So: the glasses we look through need to be replaced rather urgently. (And by the way, the same problems are just as evident in the case of nuclear power, which is all but ‘carbon-neutral, contrary to what is often thought).
Below Heinberg's short essay, you will find a video featuring an (equally short) talk by Heinberg for TEDx Sonoma in June 2013, titled ‘The Story of More’.
And so even though this lecture dates back nearly 12 years, it is no less timely for that. You will hear some things that Nate Hagens also cited in ‘The Great Simplification’. But as they say, repetition is the mother of education, and we will have to hear certain things many times before they really sink in. Especially when it comes to sacred cows, we can be hard-learners. And economic growth is, as Heinberg says, the holiest cow of all in our world today.
Richard Heinberg
Why We Can’t Just Do It: The Truth about Our Failure to Curb Carbon Emissions - resilience
By Richard Heinberg,
originally published by Resilience.org, March 23, 2023
We all know what needs to be done: reduce carbon emissions. But so far, we members of global humanity just haven’t been able to turn the tide. The latest IPCC report documents that carbon emissions are still increasing, despite all the promises and efforts of the past few decades. The report tells us there’s only a narrow (and rapidly shrinking) pathway to averting climate catastrophe. That path requires us to cut emissions 50 percent by 2030, and to reach net zero emissions by 2050. So far, we’re going in the opposite direction.
Why is this so hard? Because it would require sacrifice. Why would it require sacrifice? Let’s walk through the logic:
Lowering emissions requires reducing our extraction and burning of fossil fuels. But right now, 85 percent of our energy comes from fossil fuels, and energy is what makes the economy go and grow.
Replacing fossil fuels with low-emissions energy sources like solar and wind would still give us energy, but right now it takes fossil energy to build solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and all the other electrical infrastructure we would need to replace the fuel-based infrastructure we now have.
Renewable energy sources require energy investment up front for construction; they pay for themselves energetically over a period of years. Therefore, a fast transition requires increased energy usage over the short term. And, in the early stages at least, most of that energy will have to come from fossil fuels, because those are the energy sources we currently have.
Again, the only way to reliably reduce emissions is to cut fossil fuel extraction and combustion directly and immediately. As we have seen over the past decades, just waiting for renewables to replace fossil fuels is too slow. Global emissions increased last year despite a record nearly 10 percent growth in renewables.
So, if more fossil energy will be needed for the energy transition, but we need to extract less coal, oil, and gas overall, that means that, at least over the next couple of decades, much less fuel will be available for non-transition purposes—i.e., for transport, manufacturing, and food production, which are the mainstays of the economy.
That’s why we can’t just do it. That’s why, when governments get to decision points like having to approve or deny permits to drill for oil in Alaska, the decision often goes in favor of more fossil energy extraction.
(By the way: mainstream reporting on Biden’s recent approval of the Willow oil project has missed the fact that the approval probably had a lot to do with declining amounts of oil flowing through the Alyeska pipeline that delivers oil to the West Coast states; if the amount of flow declines much more due to the depletion of older oilfields, the pipeline could freeze up in the winter and become useless, depriving those blue states of a half million barrels a day of crude, which would be hard to replace.)
Our collective impasse in addressing climate change is the fault not just of greedy oil executives. Policy makers want to avoid any decision that would result in economic hardship. So, they punt in favor of business as usual, and as a result the pathway to averting climate doom narrows that much more.
At the same time, our fossil fuel supplies deplete further, giving us less of an energy cushion for building an energy system to replace the current one that relies on coal, oil, and gas.
The best answer is a managed reduction in fossil fuel extraction accompanied by a rationing system that preferentially directs declining fossil fuel supplies toward energy transition projects while distributing remaining fuel supplies to industry and households for only the most essential purposes. Programs would also be needed to offset the impacts of scarce energy on lower income households and countries.
Policy makers may find this unthinkable, because they have built their careers on the assumption that the economy must always grow, and that people must always be promised the opportunity to consume more. Yet until public discussion turns in the direction of managed energy descent and rationing, nothing will happen to avert climate hell.
Which is a shame for two reasons. First, of course, it condemns present and future generations to weather extremes and all the suffering associated with hotter and less stable conditions. Second, it forecloses the possibility of an energy descent in which hardships are fairly shared, along with opportunities for learning to live better with less. And such opportunities could be plentiful if only we were to look for them.
We’re at a crisis point. A sacrifice is needed. Only a sacred cow will do. Economic growth is our society’s most sacred of cows. And guess what? The cow is sick anyway.
Richard Heinberg
You can read the article here on the website of Resilience.
Thanks for reading and/or listening, and until the next installment,
All the best to you,
Filip
A ten-minute presentation by Richard Heinberg about our obsession with economic growth and why it is unsustainable.
