Archive for November, 2022

Technology and markets

November 26, 2022

It is often suggested that a ‘free market,’ or lots of investment (say within a developmentalist framework), will produce the technologies we need. To me, this seems like baseless propaganda which is harmful to our future.

Technology is not a whim

Firstly, Technology does not come along simply because we need it, would like it, or there is a market for it. There are physical limits to what can be achieved, at a certain level of technical development, at a feasible cost, and within a relatively short time frame. There are plenty of technologies which we need and which there would be a market for, that we don’t have: for example fusion energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) which works at a level which makes a difference.

CCS is a perfect example of this, as we need it, it would lower the levels of emissions from fossil fuels, and enable drawdown and storage of CO2 from the atmosphere. There is a market for it, as it would make Fossil fuel companies happy as they would not have to face competition from renewables, it would make governments happy as they don’t have to do anything or fight powerful corporations, and it would allow everyone to keep on doing what they are doing now. The trouble with CCS is that despite 50 years or so of corporate and government investment, it basically does not work, at the levels we need it to work, and there is no evidence of any breakthroughs.

Despite recent minor breakthroughs fusion energy also seems to be a long way off being useful. It cannot be relied upon to save us in the time frame we need it to be available.

Markets are political

Secondly, any market, or form of development, involves politics and the likelihood of capture by existing power bases. Fossil Fuel companies will keep providing fossil fuels until it get uneconomic to provide them. To make them economic they will obstruct attempts to move out of fossil fuels: they will buy politicians, they will buy regulations, they will buy think-tanks to justify the use of fossil fuels and attack action on climate change. This is how markets work. Paradoxically, the ‘freer’ the market the more it seems to get constrained by those who are successful in the market, and the more society becomes plutocratic. So a capitalist free market (which is what people usually mean by ‘free markets’) is likely to be a destructive market, as NOT offloading costs from poisoning, pollution and eco-destruction involves a reduction of profit, and that is bad.

Finitude is important

Thirdly, the world is a relatively closed system for humans, with the exception of energy coming from the sun. We simply cannot keep extracting, over-extracting and polluting for ever without facing severe challenges, whether this extraction comes from business or from state controlled development. Sure we may get planetary colonies in the next 50 years, but that will not save most (or even many) people. and off-planetary environments will be even more hostile to humans than destroyed planetary ecologies. Space colonies will not save the world if we keep on destroying it in order to build them. Capitalist free markets, and development, seem to require growth, increasing extraction, increasing energy, and increasing profits to keep functioning. If this is the case, then capitalism and developmentalism will eventually destroy nearly everything, because of the effective closure of the system, even if they did produce useful technology that delayed the end point.

Conclusion

These factors, along with the idea that the market will produce whatever technology we need, seems to be why capitalist and developmentalist states have spent the last 30 years talking about climate change, and doing nothing.

The ideology has helped the capitalist elites to win, at the cost of you and your children’s future.

This means that if we want to survive,

  • We have to act locally where we have input; local renewable energy now. Preferably controlled by communities looking out for the communities, and providing local resilience for when climate change damage hits.
  • We have to campaign nationally and support climate action and ending eco-destruction, and phaseout of fossil fuels despite the problems that will generate
  • We have to realise that, as they are now, capitalism and developmentalism are not our steadfast friends. Those systems need changing.

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Who wants to ban fossil fuels?

November 25, 2022

I keep reading people on the Right alleging that people on the Left want to ban fossil fuels NOW. I wonder who they are talking about?

Most people who think climate change is a crisis caused by the burning of fossil fuels, seem to want to phase fossil fuels out, to stop the potential destruction of large scale society.

If we banned fossil fuels now, we would destroy large scale society equally as well as they will by burning them. So extremely few people in the world want to stop completely now. I’ve not met any, or heard any, anyway.

The main political questions humans face are more like:

  • Do we need more oil, gas or coal fields?
    • (Probably not, as it seems we have more than enough to destroy us already. So the idea of more new fossil fuels has a lot going for it.)
  • Do we need to keep up taxpayer subsidies of fossil fuel companies?
    • (Probably not. It just encourages them, and postpones the phase out. They are powerful and rich companies and do not need subsidies or bigger tax breaks)
  • How quickly should we phase out fossil fuels, before the emissions make destruction become irrevocable?
    • (We don’t know exactly, but the best estimates are a lot faster than we are doing now)
  • What should we do with Underdeveloped countries who want to reach western standards of military power, and prosperity?
    • (This is very complicated, but trying to help them generate plentiful low emissions energy, rather than trying to sell them more fossil fuels, could be a good start)
  • Do we have to lower standards of living in the West to lower emissions and avoid destruction?
    • (Quite possibly. But maybe not as much as people think – living in the 60s was not that horrible and produced a lot fewer GHG emissions, even other forms of pollution were high. We may need to redistribute some wealth to do this, and that will be bitterly resisted)

So something like these are the real questions.

Saying that people want to ban fossil fuels now, is just a way of escaping these more difficult questions, by proposing something that sounds horrible so people will react by running away, and not thinking.

The proposition acts to obscure reality and prevent action.

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Are human rights and morality real, or social?

November 24, 2022

There is no morality, or rights anywhere written into the universe.

As humans we don’t like this, for fairly obvious reasons. The obvious point is what is to stop someone from killing us, if there is no morality or agreed on rights?

However, the only arguments in favour of human rights and morality, come out of ‘human nature’ and pragmaticism. There are no universal axioms of morality.

‘Human Nature’: Empathy

Basically ‘human nature’ involves competition and co-operation. We appear to have a natural longing for relative equality of treatment, or fairness, as well as a longing to do the best for ourselves (whatever that is – it is not written into the universe either). Most people quickly discover as children, that the opposition between co-operation and competition is not a real opposition. A functional human being normally does better for themselves, and enjoys themselves better, through co-operation. We can compete with others through co-operation with a ‘team’ or ingroup.

This and ‘empathy’ leads to morality. We feel others’ pain, and unfairness to others, and usually do things about it, to fix things up (the more, the better we know the person and like them…) Perhaps we don’t feel others’ pain as strongly as we feel our own pain, but most children feel for others. There are few societies in the world in which what is considered in-group injustice is not condemned, even if secretly because it is too dangerous to do otherwise, and people support their own ingroups’ morality pretty fiercely.

The point is that empathy can be extended or limited by conventions around social categories. Out-groups can be separated from normal morality, as is clearly happening politically in the US where people in the ‘other’ political category receive little in the way of empathy, and much in hostility. Empathy can also be extended or limited by experience of someone’s behaviour and this can also feed into social category separation, as again is happening in the US and elsewhere.

These dynamics of separation and connection are not stable, and change moralities.

Pragmaticism

Humans have morality for pragmatic reasons; in that societies work better with some kind of morality. Everyone knows what to do. People can co-operate with reasonable security that they will not always be completely ripped off. Hence things appear to function better than they would without it. Societies survive, the more agreement there is that the morality, expresses human nature and has good results.

However, no system of morality can always guarantee that only ‘good’ will result from ‘good’ actions. We live amidst a complexity which can undermine our intentions, so we have to pay attention to results, and sometimes adjust our behaviour.

Conclusion

Human rights etc don’t exist, but they arise from normal human processes and their pragmatic benefits.

This does not mean that all moralities are necessarily ok…. but its hard to have a moral argument which does not rely on either a view of human nature or of the consequences of not having the morality.

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Nuclear is an abandoned tech which might have been useful

November 14, 2022

It is often alleged that people on the left are completely responsible for the decline of nuclear energy. However, people on all sides of politics can be cautious about nuclear energy.

Cost overruns are common.

They are expensive when treated commercially. The UK Hinckley reactor has to be supported by a large electricity price, which of course distorts markets and supports other expensive, and polluting, sources of energy.

Reactors tend to take a long time to build, usually longer than estimated. So people figure, perhaps incorrectly, that they will not cut enough emissions in the time we have left to keep the temperature increase within bounds. We have about 10 years carbon budget left (and after that nothing), if we want to stay under 1.5 degrees.

  • see Georgia Power’s Vogtle project: the cost has increased by 140% since construction began in 2011, and is more than six years behind schedule.

Reactors face problems with heat. They need water for cooling and, in France recently, had to be shut down because the rivers were too low and the water too hot. This is clearly a problem as global temperatures continue to rise.

The small reactors (SMRs) we have been promised for a long time seem uncertain. The Australian CSIRO recently tried to find reliable data on their energy production and cost, and failed completely. I’ve recently read an article which said that they were being used in China, and were wonderful but it had no evidence or references for its position. A report written for the Australian Conservation Foundation states.

The small reactors that do exist are in Russia and China, but these projects have been subject to serious delays and cost blowouts. While there are hopes and dreams of ramping up SMR production, the mass manufacturing facilities needed to produce the technology are found nowhere in the world.

Wrong reaction: Why ‘next-generation’ nuclear is not a credible energy solution 5 October 2022: p.3

I have been told Japan has a working SMR, which uses ceramic coated fuel pellets, and is very safe. However, I have failed to find anything about this. One pro-nuclear site wrote:

Japan’s problem is that it does not have a viable SMR design that is ready to come off the drawing boards. This raises the previously unthinkable prospect of importing an SMR via licensing from a country that has one ready to go.

Japan is behind the technology eight ball in terms of developing  its own SMRs. The Nuclear Regulatory Authority has no policy framework for dealing with them. In addition to being notoriously sluggish in reviewing reactor restarts, so far in its history has not reviewed and approved a single application for a new reactors of any kind or size.

Thorium Reactors failed when people initially tried to build them, and don’t seem to be much better nowadays.

Japan’s PM Kishida Launches a Major Push for Nuclear Energy Neutron Bytes 27 August 2022

The Institute for Energy Economics & Financial Analysis has reported on an as yet unbuilt set of SMRs in Utah (to be completed in 2030) being built by UAMPS (Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems) and NuScale Power Corporation. It states that the original energy price was to be US$55 per MWh, but recent presentations have suggested it would be between $90-$100 per MWh, despite “an anticipated $1.4 billion subsidy from the U.S. Department of Energy and a new subsidy from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) on the order of $30 per MWh”.

However there seems to be lots of government support for the idea throughout the world, and the IEA also states:

In the IEA’s global pathway to reach Net Zero Emissions by 2050, nuclear power doubles between 2020 and 2050, with construction of new plants needed in all countries that are open to the technology. Even so, by mid-century, nuclear only accounts for 8% of the global power mix, which is dominated by renewables.

Nuclear power can play a major role in enabling secure transitions to low emissions energy systems 30 June 2022

Ordinary energy generation reactors lead to the capacity to build nuclear weapons, and we probably do not need more distribution of them – the world is already unstable enough.

As far as I can tell, there is still a problem with the waste, although some people say that problem has been solved, but until these imagined solutions are in standard operation we cannot tell for sure.

While they are mathematically safe and low risk, the problems when reactors do go wrong can be major and long term. The more reactors we have, the more likely we will get a major problem.

Commercial building of reactors, can lead to shortcuts and dangers, to meet deadlines and keep profit.

People generally do not want a energy producing reactor near them, so they have to be built away from residences, and that adds to costs and energy loss. They also seem to have to have water for cooling, so this also restricts where they can be built.

Where I live the Right seems to have become strongly in favor of nukes only after leaving government. This is probably because, while in opposition, they don’t risk having to say where the reactors will be established and alienating voters. While in government they did hold some inquiries which concluded that nuclear was not practicable, but they are clearly free to ignore that when they don’t have power. My guess is that, for them, it is a way of trying to inhibit renewable electricity and keep coal and gas going.

Furthermore it is probable, although I don’t know for sure, that fossil fuel companies agitated against nuclear and slowed down research and improvements, in order to keep their monopoly on energy – this would be another reason why parties heavily dependent on fossil fuel money and sponsorship, did not promote nuclear as much as they might have done.

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Against Libertarians and Neo-liberals again

November 13, 2022

There are significant problems with modern formulations of ‘free markets’ by libertarians and neo-liberals. This is another attempt to express my discontent with these positions

There is no evidence that capitalism can exist without government. It has not done so, so far.

  • Libertarians are not real anarchists, as they ignore the power differentials in capitalism or assert that with real free markets the State will collapse – a bit like communists insist that after the dictatorship of the proletariat the State will collapse, sometime in the future, and that imagined collapse justifies whatever is happening now.
  • Capitalist markets have never existed without a State.
  • Some libertarians and neoliberals try to avoid this problem essentially by asserting trade is capitalism, and that therefore lots of Stateless capitalist societies have existed.
  • But there are many modes of exchange and not all of them are capitalistic.
  • If we accept that capitalism is trade, then communism is capitalism. Both systems engage in trade. Capitalism does not encourage free trade, but trade according to the rules of the rich elites.
  • Capitalism is a particular set of political organisations of production and restrictions on trade and property, that stops most people from being self-supporting and demands they engage in wage labour, favors hoarding by the rich elites, and suppresses opposition to those elites.

Capitalism promotes wealth inequality

  • Most libertarians and neoliberals celebrate inequality of riches.
  • They argue that massive inequality of riches is reward for talent alone. Power has nothing to do with the inequality.
  • But one possible part-definition of capitalism is that it is a system of exchange organised to benefit the rich elites and increase their power over everyone else who has to depend on them for survival because everyone else has to engage in a market controlled by those rich elites.
  • The fundamental social relationship in capitalism is not liberty but obedience to a boss who is wealthier than you are. Capitalism is about submission to wealth.

Riches buy power

  • Riches can buy all forms of power, especially if riches are considered good in themselves. they can buy control over: Violence, Communication, Information, Energy, Religions, organisational power and so on.
  • Riches can also buy liberty for those who have riches.
  • Therefore the more unequal the riches the more unequal access there is to power and liberty.
  • Libertarians and neoliberals support liberty for rich people, and the rights of rich people to not be hindered in any of their activities, including those which impinge upon poorer people.
  • At the extreme point, the legal system (courts, judges, lawyers, police etc) is up for sale to the highest bidder, so there can be no challenge to the rich at all.
  • In neoliberal or libertarian capitalism your rights are what you can pay for.

Capitalism tends towards plutocracy

  • Humans tend to collaborate with each other. You could not have corporate capitalism if this was not the case.
  • Therefore it is likely the hyper-rich will collaborate to either set up government in the unlikely event that there was no government previously, or take over the government if there is a government.
  • Once they take over the government, they will promote government for their collective interests, and collective liberties, and suppress other needs or other liberties which conflict with theirs, or their riches. This is what people often do.
  • They can stack government with their supporters, and make legislation which supports them and makes it harder for others. They can repeal legislation which impinges on their liberty, but keep legislation which impinges on the liberty of others.
  • As they control information and support generation of information which supports them, they will attack the best truth we have, if it conflicts with their dominance or wealth generation for themselves.
  • They suppress other modes of power which are not capitalistic. Which means there is little in the way of division of power – capitalist States tend to become mono-powers, and encourage capitalistic organization for everything.
  • Capitalists will set up plutocracy, and curtail the liberty of other ‘classes’. It is very hard to find a capitalist system in which this does not happen.
  • Indeed, we have had forty years of talk about free markets and we now have a straightforward plutocracy. The plutocracy is unstable, because it has ignored and suppressed inconvenient people and the working classes, and has suppressed the needs and dynamics of the ecology we live within. But corporations and their interests come first (although they may pretend not).
  • Libertarians seem far more comfortable with authoritarian capitalists, authoritarian religions, and State removal of the rights of workers than they seem comfortable with democratic socialists, or communal anarchists, who want to overcome the suppression of people in general. Given capitalists, in practice, use the State all the time, this comfort has nothing to do with getting rid of the State or increasing liberty.

The origins of capitalism do not reside in hard work but theft and violence

  • The libertarian, neoliberal and capitalist origin myth asserts that inequalities of riches (and the other inequalities these buy) arise from hard work and talent.
  • But capitalism arose in theft and oppression.
  • It started in aristocracy which depended on the taking of land, usually through violence or conquest.
  • Capital developed by stealing. People’s lives were stolen through slavery, indentured labour, truly terrible and often cheap but lethal working conditions, and so on. Land was stolen by ‘colonial’ violence from people who already used the land as in India, the US, Australia, and in the UK by theft of commons. It originated in the theft of treasure from India, and South America, or more accurately in the South American case, from British pirates stealing from Spanish treasure ships. It originated in massive cheap pollution, poisoning and environmental destruction which stole people’s lives and health.
  • Wherever it was arrived, capitalism stole property and self-sufficiency from people and turned them into wage laborers, depriving them of basic liberty.
  • Capitalist colonialists would often impose monetary taxes on people to force them to engage in otherwise meaningless wage labor, and submit to the colonial forces.
  • There is no reason to think that this is no longer the case, and that capitalism is now not structured by riches inherited from that violence, or that if violence and ecological destruction can be got away with profitably it will not be engaged in.
  • Libertarians and neoliberals are really good at seeing that ordinary people can co-operate to inhibit the market and they seem to want to suppress such movements. However, they are pretty useless at seeing the normal violence of capitalism or the ways that capitalists can cooperate to interfere with the market, both with the State and outside the State, for their benefit and power.
  • Libertarians often seem to define their “non-aggression principle” to exclude normal capitalist violence and suppress real rebelliousness, or demands for recompense for capitalist theft as aggression, probably because they support the establishment more than then people.

People are not just driven by profit or power

  • While in actual life libertarianism and neoliberalism reduces everything to profit and the liberty of the wealthy humans have many other drives
  • Libertarianism and neoliberals essentially dismiss these drives. If it does not make money, its of no value or use . If it does make money it is of value of use.
  • We may example: not very good art, non-capitalist religion, co-operation, care, love etc are all downplayed by libertarians and neoliberals in favor of the market.
  • It might be that everything worthwhile in life comes from outside the capitalist market and is destroyed by that market, as everything is reduced to money and profit.

Capitalism damages people

  • Historical theft and violence continues to damage people today, as colonialism and its racism, class distinctions and so on continue to affect peoples lives and allocate life chances. This does not mean people cannot triumph against huge obstacles, but they face those obstacles and structural inhibitions, because of previous and continuing capitalist theft and violence.
  • It has already been stated that capitalism damages and poisons ecology. People need functional ecology to live well, so damage to ecology damages people.
  • Capitalism encourages obedience and submission with the threat of being dumped into poverty.
  • Capitalism requires most people to have no relationship to what they produce, or to take no reward in what they produce, and have no control over what happens to what they produce. This is what Marx called alienation. It harms people’s involvement in their own lives.
  • Capitalism encourages machine production, and therefore, for most people, discourages craft production or the development of holistic skills and the use of their body and mind and feelings etc. This damages them. Adam Smith while encouraging division of tasks and labour, recognised that it inculcated mental and ‘spiritual’ stultification.
  • Capitalism encourages exhaustion, not just of land, but of people through overwork, media saturation and so on. This lessens their ability to respond to life and problems, or to reject capitalism.
  • People can nearly always be replaced, as they have no intrinsic value. This also damages people and shows they are of no real worth, as bosses cannot be bothered to treat them like ‘human beings’.
  • Possibly all the major problems in the West have been generated by capitalism and its markets.

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Drax and woodchip energy

November 8, 2022

This is basically a paraphrase of an article in the New Yorker with a few additions. The Millions of Tons of Carbon Emissions That Don’t Officially Exist: How a blind spot in the Kyoto Protocol helped create the biomass industry. By Sarah Miller December 8, 2021, because its really important and even by my standards is a bit long – although naturally this version grew as it went along. But please read the original.

Drax 1

The article is primarily about the wood chip powered energy production in the village of Drax, in Yorkshire, by the Drax Group. The huge Drax power station used to be a coal fired energy generator, but is, or has, now translated to “sustainably sourced biomass,” or wood pellets, so as to enable “a zero carbon, lower cost energy future (p.4).” It also:

can be at the heart of the green economic recovery in the North. Scaling up BECCS at Drax could support thousands of jobs during construction at its peak and contribute significantly to the local economy, according to a report from Vivid Economics, commissioned by Drax.

Drax: 3

BECCS is Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. We also learn from the Drax Report that:

In the US, EU and in the UK, policy makers have continued to regulate biomass in the context of global and domestic efforts to meet net zero. In the EU, the European Commission’s Green New Deal proposed a new biodiversity strategy and re-opening key legislation such as the REDII and EU ETS. In the UK, the Government announced it would begin work on a new bioenergy strategy – to be published in 2022. In the US, the EPA has been actively considering the carbon credentials of biomass.

Drax

So Drax supposedly has all the benefits of low emissions, contributing to the economy and jobs, and being backed by officials.

Ok back to the article

In 2019 Drax “emitted more than fifteen million tons of CO2, which is roughly equivalent to the greenhouse-gas emissions produced by three million typical passenger vehicles in one year” (Miller). Of these emissions 12.8 million tons were “biologically sequestered carbon.” We might need to bear the ‘sequestered,’ or stored, in mind, as like the BECCS it may not be happening. Emissions increased the next year.

Draz receives heavy subsidies from the UK government….

The thinktank Ember calculates that, from 2012 until 2027, when Drax’s ROC subsidies end, it will have collected more than £11bn in government payouts.

Lawson Energy bills may rise if government gives Drax more support, say MPs. The Guardian 20 September 2022

It was possible during the energy crisis of 2022, that the British Government could get locked into another agreement, to keep power prices down, that would subsidise Drax for even longer.

Drax said in July that profit before tax had jumped to £200m in the first half of the year, up from £52m in the same period a year earlier, aided by high electricity prices. It upgraded annual profit forecasts, and has signed a deal with National Grid to keep its coal-fired operations open through the winter.

In the past 12 months, its stock has risen 63% to 709p, valuing the company at £2.84bn

Lawson…Emphasis added.

Some History of Biofuels – Origins in bad accounting?

The issue here has its beginnings quite a while back when the Kyoto Protocol was being negotiated in 1997. The conference did not quite know how to classify wood burning. Burning wood is renewable up to a point. If you burn it, it eventually, grows back. For some reason the IPCC decided that “if they counted emissions from harvesting trees in the land sector, it would be duplicative to count emissions from the burning of pellets in the energy sector” (Miller),

William Moomaw of Tufts University, says that negotiators thought of biomass as only a minor part of energy production. It was small-scale enough that forest regrowth could theoretically keep up with tree harvesting of . He said “At the time these guidelines were drawn up, the I.P.C.C. did not imagine a situation where millions of tons of wood would be shipped four thousand miles away to be burned in another country,” (Miller). Officially loss of biomass did not count. Beverly Law of Oregon State University told Miller, “The wood biomass energy claims of carbon neutrality are incorrect and misleading… It can worsen climate change even if wood displaces coal.”

In 2009 the EU passed the Renewable Energy Directive to enforce the guidelines set up in Kyoto, asking nations to reduce emissions by 20% or more by 2020. Many European States decided that the cheapest and easiest way to go was to switch coal plants to woodchip plants.

Scot Quaranda of Dogwood Alliance, and activist forest-protection group says “Countries had to meet their renewable-energy targets,… There was no way to do it without gaming the system and counting biomass as carbon neutral.” If so then an error in the mode of accounting has had considerable effect.

In 2017, the E.U. spent six and a half billion euros on subsidies for biomass plants. Last year, Drax got about $1.1 billion from the British government. “The governments can claim they are compliant, while former coal companies that would have been dead get rich on government subsidies and selling electricity—much of which, with proper planning, could have come from wind and solar,” Quaranda said. “The forests are destroyed, and the world burns.”

By 2019, biomass accounted for about fifty-nine per cent of all renewable-energy use in the E.U.

Miller

Another journalist writes:

Europe gets 60 percent of its renewable energy from biomass fuels, a process that uses wood scraps, organic waste and other crops to generate heat and electricity in specially designed power plants. U.N. rules allow the European Union to write off the emissions as carbon-neutral, so long as sustainable guidelines are met, even though burning the fuel can release more warming gases into the atmosphere than coal….

[As a result] Many countries are significantly underreporting their emissions to the United Nations, leading to a massive undercount of what is actually released into the atmosphere

Birnbaum E.U.’s big climate ambitions have the scent of wood smoke The Washington Post. 10 Nov 2021

At the Glasgow COP there was little conversation about the problems of biomass, and Frans Timmermans, the European Commission’s executive vice president for the European Green Deal said:

To be perfectly blunt with you, biomass will have to be part of our energy mix if we want to remove our dependency on fossil fuels….. I do admit that it’s quite complicated to get this right…. [Europe would] try to use the biomass that is not at odds with our environmental and climate objectives.

Birnbaum emphasis added

The Dogwood Alliance estimate that at least sixty thousand acres of trees—trees that would have otherwise sequestered carbon—are burned each year to supply the plants, and the amount is growing. Global demand for wood pellets is expected to double by 2027.

What is more, there is apparently no “binding governmental or industrial oversight for replanting trees at all”, which if true means that forests can be cleared for other purposes, the regrowth does not happen, and everything is ok by the regulations.

Problems with biofuel

When President Trump’s EPA administrator Scott Pruitt said that the E.P.A. would declare the burning of wood from managed forests for energy production to be “carbon neutral” several scientists wrote to him saying:

Mr. Pruitt’s declaration contradicts some basic facts. Burning wood from forests to generate electricity is not carbon neutral when the direct emissions from combustion, plus emissions from soil and logging <transport> and processing the wood, are considered. Scientific studies have shown that it will worsen the consequences of climate change for decades or through the end of this century. This was not a decision based in science, but in politics, a giveaway to the forest products industry. 

Pruitt Is Wrong on Burning Forests for Energy

They pointed to scientists in Europe who had written to the EU:

Even if forests are allowed to regrow,… using wood deliberately harvested for burning will increase carbon in the atmosphere and warming for decades to centuries…. even when wood replaces coal, oil or natural gas.

Pruitt is Wrong

And then resumed, pointing to the time and delay factor which usually seems to be ignored:

regrowth takes time, a century or more for native forests, assuming they don’t fall victim to wildfire or disease. And regrowth never occurs if the land is developed or converted to pasture or farmland.

Moreover, throughout the many decades before the replacement forests can grow enough to remove the extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the previously added gas will thaw more permafrost and melt more ice, make ocean acidification worse, accelerate global warming, speed sea-level rise, increase the incidence of extreme weather, worsen drought and water stress, and hurt crop yields — effects that will persist for centuries or longer.

Pruitt is wrong

Biomass harvesting can have other ecological effects, such as increasing water run off, furthering floods and silting up rivers. They conclude that through the use of woodchips

British taxpayers there are paying electricity providers to make climate change worse.

Pruitt is wrong

Drax: Selling the project and CCS

Back to Drax. Miller gives an account of a tour of the establishment. The tour guides made a big deal of wood being natural, and the wood coming primarily from timber waste products (such as sawdust) in the USA and Canada. Given the quantities of wood involved (one mill requires fifty-seven thousand acres per year) this seems implausible, especially when many of the wood mills are owned by Drax. “Some of this activity is in primary-growth forests—forests that have never before been logged” (Miller). And photographic evidence suggests forests have been removed.

Apparently “under international definitions, if a government or private entity cuts down a forest but doesn’t develop the land, it has not officially engaged in deforestation” (Miller). The rules seem confusing and not particularly adapted to reducing emissions.

Ali Lewis, the head of media and public relations for Drax, disputed the idea of gaming the system. “How can we be ‘gaming the system’ when the carbon accounting for biomass is derived from the principles set by the world’s leading climate scientists at the U.N. I.P.C.C., and we follow those rules to the letter?”

Miller

Drax also tried to start a carbon capture and storage project it called White Rose, which does not seem to have eventuated. However, the tour guides apparently emphasised carbon storage as well.

“Before the carbon can even leave that big smokestack, Drax is intervening, and binding it with a solvent, and burying it in the ground… It’s a matter of balancing what’s being used with what’s being replaced. Wood is a sustainable material because they’re taking it away as they’re replacing it…. The solvent looks like really runny honey,”

Miller.

Miller asked them how much carbon they stored, the response was not clear at all, but:

Almuth Ernsting, the co-director of Biofuelwatch, an international anti-biomass-industry N.G.O., told me, “Drax has never actually stored a single pound of carbon.”

“With government support, the first beccs unit at Drax could be operational in 2027 with a second in 2030,” a Drax spokesperson told me.

Miller

As usual CCS projects deliver sometime in a possible future. It not only had troubles with activist organisations, but financial and political organisations.

The climate thinktank Ember has argued that Drax’s CCS plans could cost people paying energy bill £31.7bn over 25 years, amounting to £500 a household. “The cost of supporting its future bioenergy plans could climb to more than the cost of subsidising Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant.” Drax claimed that the cost of retrofitting an existing plant would be much cheaper.

Shortly after the British Minister energy minister secretly expressed reluctance about biofuels (see below), the government announced a new discussion on biofuels and particularly BECCS, with Rishi Sunak telling the Yorkshire Post:

I created the £1 billion Carbon Capture and Storage Infrastructure Fund as Chancellor… As a Yorkshire MP, I am excited about the opportunities and jobs that Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage could bring to our region, as well as its potential for sustainable power generation. 

Bocott-Owen Bid to create thousands of jobs at Drax Power Station in Yorkshire to be greenlit by Government. Yorkshire Post 18th August 2022

The Yorkshire Post adds that ‘Whitehall Sources’ told them that:

Drax’s implementation of the new technology would be key to the UK’s future energy security.

“BECCS is the only sustainable way to continue biomass in the way it removes emissions from the atmosphere.

“[Drax] is by far the single largest renewable energy generator in Britain, it is critical to energy security and without it we’d have to import that electricity from abroad or burn more gas….

“It’s a no-brainer from the Government’s perspective. But of course it will take time, and no decisions have been made just yet.”

Bocott-Owen Bid to create thousands of jobs at Drax Power Station in Yorkshire to be greenlit by Government. Yorkshire Post 18th August 2022

Problems for Drax

Not all relevant organisations are positive about Drax.

Greenpeace discovered that Drax Biomass exceeded limits on chemical emissions at its wood chip plants close to residential communities in Louisiana. These included “volatile organic compounds (VOCs), a class of air pollutants linked to cancer, breathing difficulties and other health effects.” Drax agreed to two payments of $1.6m each with the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality to settle claims against two of its wood pellet plants, without accepting liability. The previous year “Drax had been fined $2.5m for air pollution violations in the neighbouring state of Mississippi”

In October [2021], Drax lost its place on the S. & P. Global Clean Energy Index, as did Albioma, a biomass company in France, after analysts expressed skepticism about the true carbon neutrality of their operations. But Drax doesn’t appear to be at any risk of losing its government subsidies

Miller

Luke Sussams, a Jefferies equity analyst, had argued that:

bioenergy was unlikely to make a positive contribution to climate action because of “uncertainties and poor practices” in some parts of the timber industry regarding the sources of wood, forest management practices, supply chain emissions and high combustion emissions…..

“We argue that bioenergy production is not carbon neutral, in almost all instances. This casts doubt on whether bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is a net-negative emissions technology. The widespread deployment of BECCS looks challenging,”

Ambrose. Drax dropped from index of green energy firms amid biomass doubts. The Guardian 19 October 2021

A spokesperson for Drax defended the company arguing that:

“The world’s leading authority on climate science, the UN’s IPCC, is absolutely clear that sustainable biomass is crucial to achieving global climate targets, both as a provider of renewable power and through its potential to deliver negative emissions with BECCS.”

Ambrose

The Government hesitates

Kwasi Kwarteng, perhaps better known as Liz Truss’ Treasurer and supporter of unfunded tax cuts for the wealthy, was energy minister in August 2022. He had a recording of a private meeting leaked. In the meeting he apparently said:

I can well see a point where we just draw the line and say: This isn’t working, this doesn’t help carbon emission reduction, that’s it – we should end it. All I’m saying is that we haven’t quite reached that point yet… There’s no point getting [wood] from Louisiana – that isn’t sustainable … transporting these wood pellets halfway across the world – that doesn’t make any sense to me at all.” 

Carrington Burning imported wood in Drax power plant ‘doesn’t make sense’, says Kwarteng. The Guardian, 11 August 2022

Other MPs apparently agreed.

One MP at the meeting told Kwarteng: “It can take 100 years to grow a tree but 100 seconds to combust it. So, unless we actually have a measure of how much CO2 is being released in the same period of time as is being sequestered by new growth, it seems to me ludicrous to say that this is carbon neutral.” Another MP said: “It’s cutting down huge numbers of forests and it’s not defensible.”

Carrington Burning imported wood

In public Mr Kwarteng has stated: “The government is fully behind biomass energy to provide more power in Britain.”

The European Academies Science Advisory Council earlier had said that burning wood in power stations was “not effective in mitigating climate change and may even increase the risk of dangerous climate change”.

Drax is more than biofuel

Drax bought the gas power stations owned by Scottish Power, when the Scottish company went fully renewable.

Drax was also planning the “biggest gas power station in Europe [which] could account for 75% of the UK’s power sector emissions when fully operational”. The British Planning Inspectorate recommended in 2019 that the station not be allowed as it:

would undermine the government’s commitment, as set out in the Climate Change Act 2008, to cut greenhouse emissions [by having] significant adverse effects.

Carrington Legal bid to stop UK building Europe’s biggest gas power plant fails. The Guardian 22 January 2021

The minister refused the advice. And a court case to stop the project was lost. However, a Drax spokesperson stated “the gas plant project was not certain to go ahead because it depended on Drax’s investment decisions and on securing a capacity market contract from the government.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Business, Enterprise and Industrial Strategy said:

“As we transition to net zero emissions by 2050, our record levels of investment in renewables will meet a large part of the energy demand. However, natural gas will still provide a reliable source of energy while we develop and deploy low carbon alternatives.”

Carrington Legal bid.

Drax later scrapped plans for the Gas energy. However, according to the article the company may still build another four small-scale gas plants for use during times of peak electricity demand.

The Real Problem?

Miller concludes by pointing to the real problem; the economy. It needs to grow and make profit and provide jobs and consume massive amounts of energy.

Even as we watch economic growth literally killing us, it is what we talk about before we talk about anything else—we are told, over and over, that we must run to it for help. The truth is that if the economy is not entirely unmade, the debates over the folly of biomass, over what counts as renewable, over whether or not a tree can grow back faster than it burns—all of it will vanish into a great silence.

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Fragments of recent good energy news

November 4, 2022

You might not think there is any good energy news, with the current electricity price crisis which will probably result in not a few deaths over the northern winter.

However, the fossil fuel companies are showing major increases in their profit [1] [2] [3] [4]. While this is a boon if you are an investor, it may also be good for the transition as, for once, increasing profit is getting attention – perhaps because this hurts other companies as well as ordinary people. The fossil fuel companies could well appear to be profiteering in this price crises and rejoicing in the expected deaths or, at best, doing nothing to diminish the number. This is not a good look.

The price of fossil fuel electricity is rising and perhaps encouraging renewables

The International Energy Agency states:

High gas and coal prices account for 90% of the upward pressure on electricity costs around the world. …

A key question for policy makers, and for this Outlook, is whether the crisis will be a setback for clean energy transitions or will catalyse faster action. Climate policies and net zero commitments were blamed in some quarters for contributing to the run-up in energy prices, but there is scant evidence for this. In the most affected regions, higher shares of renewables were correlated with lower electricity prices, and more efficient homes and electrified heat have provided an important buffer for some – but far from enough – consumers. ….

[It is possible that] New policies in major energy markets [will] help propel annual clean energy investment to more than USD 2 trillion by 2030 in the STEPS, a rise of more than 50% from today.

World Energy Outlook 2022 Executive summary

While it is still possible to blame Putin and ignore the profiteering, or indeed blame renewables, EU Executive Vice-President Timmermans and Commissioner Simson essentially supported the IEA, announcing that

Putin’s war has stoked an energy crisis in Europe that continues to have huge repercussions. In response, we have moved swiftly to secure alternative supplies, accelerate the rollout of renewables, and start reducing gas demand to ensure European citizens are safe for winter.

We need to understand that the pre-war situation with abundant, cheap fossil fuels is not coming back

First, [our action] brings a European reduction in electricity consumption of 10%. During peak-hours, electricity consumption must go down at least 5% so we avoid using the most expensive gas-fired power plants and bring down the price of energy. This will be mandatory, so that the targets are met by everyone

Second, our package proposes a European mechanism for collecting and redistributing the exceptional surplus profits and revenues that the war in Ukraine has brought several energy companies. This can generate up to € 117 billion for Member States to support European households and businesses who face unsurmountable energy bills.

Our dependence on Russian gas is down from 40% to 9%. Storage in every Member State is quickly nearing the required 80%, and the EU-average, as the President said this morning, is close to 84%. We are all saving more and more energy. And the pace of renewables being rolled out is steadily rising.

In the end, our green energy transition is the only way to rid ourselves of Putin’s energy yoke and it will create energy sovereignty in Europe. The era of cheap fossil fuels is over and the faster we move to cheap, clean, and home-grown renewables, the sooner we will be immune to Russia’s energy blackmail and anybody else who may think they can blackmail us with energy.

Opening remarks by Executive Vice-President Timmermans and Commissioner Simson at the press conference on an emergency intervention to address high energy prices

There is other evidence for the increasing build of renewables in the EU, despite increased costs. Bloomberg New Energy Finance announced that:

Surging energy costs are expected to help drive yet another record year for new solar installations in Europe. As households look to lower their energy bills, residential solar build in the region is forecast to hit 10.4 gigawatts in 2022, a 42% increase from a year earlier… This is projected to propel annual solar additions in Europe to an all-time high of 41 gigawatts this year, on the way to 93 gigawatts by the end of the decade. The momentum comes despite elevated prices for modules due to the raised cost of key raw material polysilicon.

Europe’s Energy Crisis to Support Record Solar Build. Bloomberg 8 September 2022

Capital is available

It also seems we have the money to get through transition, only its currently being invested in fossil fuels. The IISD has announced new meta-research (ie researching the research on pathways through climate change) which says we can probably stay under 1.5 degrees increase if:

  • 1) Global oil and gas production decreases by at least 65% by 2050
  • 2) No new oil and gas fields are started
  • 3) The planned investments in new oil and gas to 2030 were used to fully finance the scale-up of wind and solar energy needed.

In Australia, Beyond Zero Emissions in their Deploy report argue that:

81% emissions reduction is achievable by 2030 with an ambitious rollout of cleantech over the next five years, supported by targeted carbon drawdown. This can create up to 195,000 jobs and repower Australia’s manufacturing regions.

https://bze.org.au/research_release/deploy/

and that

Six technologies – all available today – will do the heavy lifting: solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, electric vehicles, heat pumps and electrolysers.

Deploy Report: Executive summary

The drawdown seems to be primarily agricultural, putting carbon in the soil – which does have some problems of easy measurement and validation. It would account for 10% of the decline total, so 71% decline can be achieved without it.

The Australian e-news site RenewEconomy open a recent article with:

Brookfield Asset Management is a global giant with assets of around $A1 trillion. Andrew Forrest, Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar are Australia’s three richest men. All are committed to accelerating Australia’s green energy transition. A shortage of capital is not the problem here.

Parkinson Tens of billions are ready for Australia’s renewable revolution: Can regulators and rule makers keep up? Renew Economy 10 November 2022

Brookfield is also bidding for Origin Energy and promises to spend $20 Billion on on wind, solar and storage in the next eight years. Which suggests a possible rapid transition in the Electricity field, although Brookfield’s bidding partner wants Origin’s gas.

My guess is that this quick transition would be even more possible, if we stopped subsidies and tax breaks for fossil fuel companies. This stoppage could be justified by their current high profits…. Not that any Australian government would probably survive that attempt.

Mike Cannon-Brookes seems to have got people interested in renewable energy onto the board of AGL a major Australian gas company and electricity supplier. see also here.

The Australian Government has announced a National Reconstruction Fund which may help the manufacture of renewables in Australia, but its a bit vague at the moment.

The Wiring problem is being faced

But we do need wiring for the transition. In a tweet Jenny Chase from Bloomberg remarked:

We don’t need a technology breakthrough. Today, solar developers just need a grid connection and permission to sell electricity and they’ll be off building solar plants whether it’s a good idea or not.

Jenny Chase Twitter 23 October 2022

And the Australian government has just promised to make sure grid connections exist, through the Rewiring the Nation project:

The proposal would provide $20 billion of equity equally over 3 years, from 1 January 2023 to 31 December 2025 to create a new public non-financial corporation, which would be:
• responsible for building, managing and operating the Australian Energy Market Operator Integrated System Plan transmission network
• mandated to earn a rate of return that is sufficient to cover its financial and operational costs

Australian Parliamentary Budget Office. Powering Australia – Rewiring the Nation

Another Non-Government summary puts it this way:

Labor has promised $20bn to “rewire the nation” by accelerating the construction of new electricity transmission links between states and regions as the east coast power grid moves from running predominantly on coal power to renewable energy. Modelling for Labor by the consultants RepuTex suggested it would help lift renewable energy generation from about 35% to 82% by 2030.

Murphy & Morton ‘Rewiring the nation’: Albanese and Andrews governments to jointly fund renewable energy zones. The Guardian 19 October 2022

In the UK something similar was announced, but the political confusion make it harder to be optimistic.

National Grid announced this summer it was making a £54bn upgrade to the electricity network, the biggest since the 1960s, to help connect offshore windfarms more easily and enable battery storage facilities to connect up to store renewable power, a crucial issue in the industry

Lawson ‘Everything has changed, nothing has changed’: what’s stopping green energy. The Guardian 15 November 2022

Likewise in the US, a much smaller amount of US$13bn has also been announced to modernize the U.S. power grid using allocations from the infrastructure law. This is claimed to be the “biggest federal investment in transmission and distribution in U.S. history”.

the administration has also issued approvals for several interstate transmission lines that will span Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Arizona and California and unlock capacity of about six gigawatts

Budryk White House announces $13 billion in grid resilience funds. The Hill, 18 November 2022

Facing up to Full Renewables

This is a bit more recent, but the Australian Electricity Market Operator has announced a roadmap to prepare the grid to run on 100% renewables. AEMO expects 100% renewables going without fossil fuel backup going for intervals of time by 2025.

The Engineering Roadmap to 100% Renewables provides an overview of the engineering challenges and associated actions that will need to be undertaken to operate the NEM for the first period of 100% instantaneous penetration of renewables, and the actions required to satisfy more regular operation at 100% renewable penetration.
Responsibility for undertaking these actions and meeting the technical requirements identified in this report will ultimately be shared across many parties, including AEMO, NSPs, market bodies, market participants, and governments

AEMO Engineering Roadmap to 100% Renewables December 2022

Coal plants take many hours, or even days, to restart operation, so once taken offline, they can’t be relied on to meet immediate intraday energy demands, or provide system restart services.
Operating regularly with 100% renewable power also means reducing the need for regular reliance on gas-fired
generators to firm the electricity supply.
Operating a gigawatt-scale power system at 100% instantaneous renewable generation is a feat unparalleled worldwide.

The main obstacles are storage and renewable source “inverters, which don’t inherently deliver all of the same stabilising attributes that traditional synchronous generators provide to the power system.”

They also realise that “The human dimensions of this transition are as important as the technical requirements”.


Polling

Polling continues to show most Australians want action on climate change. This is possibly not a big deal as Australians wanted such action all through the last government’s reign, and where ignored or did not vote for it. However, the figures indicate there is support for action. Analysis of the latest Australia Institute Climate of the Nation Poll says:

Three-quarters (75%) of Australians are concerned about climate change, the same level of concern seen in 2021 and the highest since Climate of the Nation began. The intensity of concern has increased as well, with record high levels of those who are ‘very concerned’ about climate change (42%).

The top three climate impacts of concern are more droughts and flooding affecting crop production and food supply (83%), more bushfires (83%), and the extinction of animal and plant species (80%).

Climate of the Nation 2022

This indicate that Australians are actually aware of the levels of weather damage we are suffering from, and their likely effects on food and wildlife, despite the Murdoch Empire’s constant agitation against recognition of damage, or engaging in climate action.

Weather seems to be connected to coal based power by the resopondents.

79% of Australians believe that Australia’s coal-fired power stations should be phased out… 31%… think they should be phased out as soon as possible… 65% of Australians want coal-fired power generation completely ended within the next 20 years, including 38% who want it ended within the next decade…

64% of Australians support stopping new coal mines…. 73% think Australian governments should plan to phase out coal mining and transition into other industries…

ibid

Australians also seem to be losing faith in the ability of markets to solve all problems as

64% agree that failure by the market to prepare for a transition away from fossil fuels has led to electricity price increases, including 31% that strongly agree

ibid.

Conclusion

So while I still think we need more local action, and more overt political support, there are signs that things might be changing and people are thinking it might be entirely disastrous if we start showing our support for action…

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Introduction to the Introduction

November 3, 2022

I’m trying to write a book on problems with the energy transition and the use of ‘climate technologies’ such as carbon trading, carbon capture and storage, geoengineering, biofuels, nuclear, evs and so on.

This is kind of an introduction to the book’s introduction.

As well as being about the problems with the needed energy transition and the climate technologies we use to deal with climate change and ecological devastation, this book is also about some of my theoretical obsessions, such as:

  • The ways that attempts to order the world in a good way (however that is defined), generate the disorder that is feared.
  • The normality of unintended consequences, the lack of control over everything, and the need to look out for these normalities, in our lives and correct for them.
    • Despite everyone knowing about unintended consequences and their prevalence in life, this knowledge is not part of contemporary western social theory (including economics), or philosophy.
  • The realisation that everything is ecological, and interconnectedness, interdependency and lack of apparent harmony are fundamental to all life. No thing, and no one, exists by itself. Hence to perceive an action’s effects we have to look around widely.
  • This realisation implies the need for a politics which is experimental rather than dogmatic. We don’t know what a policy’s complete effects will be in advance – no matter how sensible and virtuous it appears to be.
  • The realisation that human conscious thinking is limited, and directed by the theories we have. This also tends to direct what we observe. We don’t perceive the world as it is, but through the tools we deploy.
  • To keep our modes of thinking and life, it is common for people to engage in defensive fantasy ‘solutions’ if the problem seems too big or overwhelming and potentially destructive of their ways of life. These solutions can even make the situation worse.
  • The need to listen to our unconscious awareness of patterning, and to be aware that processes which we cultivate unconsciousness of, sill exist and can harm us.
  • Forms of economic organisation can be destructive as well as productive, and we need to minimise destruction.
  • Wealth is not the same as riches.
  • Forms of economic organisation can lead to destructive power imbalances, and positive feedback loops, as the economy gets organised to feed the rich. The power and politics of neoliberalism is one of the fundamental problems of contemporary life, along with developmentalism.
  • Markets are subsidiary to ecologies, rather than ecology being submissive to markets. A market which destroys its ecology will almost certainly destroy itself.
  • Technologies involve social uses and social organisations, and they can also have harmful effects on people and ecologies if we ignore them.
  • Societies, and people, all face challenges and have to respond to them. How they succeed in this response, influences their future trajectory. Sometimes the challenges they face are self-generated and these challenges are particularly difficult to respond to, other than by avoidance of the problem. Climate change and eco-destruction are such challenges. The personal and social response are intertwined, hence they reinforce each other, either for success, avoidance or failure.
  • The obvious realisation that energy technologies, energy supply and its organisation are vital for forms of social life, what can be achieved and who is likely to dominate over others.

The energy transition is as much a matter of social and intellectual change as it is about technical phenomena. This is one reason why it can be scary. We don’t know the results.

While the book is sometimes bleak, and argues that many of the proposed technological solutions are fantasy avoidance solutions, it is also arguing that as many people as possible need to organise to face up to this problem, and this will bring some degree of personal and social health. We all have been waiting well over 40 years for governments and businesses to act, and they have delayed and prevaricated. We have tried the market for the last 40 years and it has not worked and it turns out that there are good reasons for this: markets cannot be separated from politics, corporate power or simply the power of established riches. Markets and Governments will not save us.

The problem also suggests we need a new way of thinking. This is implied in the theoretical outline above. To deal with the reality of eco-geo-social-technical problems, we have to be able to think, at nearly all times, in terms of: ecology, complexity, and unintended consequences; and be prepared to try processes out without prejudging.

We need a local action which helps us to build the communities we need to survive climate change, or uses the existing communities to build further resilience. There is an argument that local transition, is more likely to build appropriate local technologies, and that a clear local demonstration of concern is more likely to build political concern and emulation, than is a purely theoretical awareness of support.

The book attempts to draw attention to problems with the hope of advising action, and awareness of those problems. If people are forewarned, then people can act in more useful ways, and avoid distractions.

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Some fundamental Problems of Energy Transition

November 2, 2022

Three initial problems

Problem 1: Climate change is one part of a general mode of ecological destruction. It is not the total, and possibly not even the most important ecological problem we have. It may even distract us from the rest of the destruction. For instance we may do nothing about potential ocean death, or the decline in availability of phosphorus.

Problem 2: it appears that achieving contemporary ‘developed’ life, and military defense, requires massive energy consumption.

Problem 3: It is not yet demonstrated that capitalism can run with no ecological destruction, and no freeloading, or without growing ecological destruction, and without growing energy consumption.

Problems with the energy transition

Renewables make a tiny percentage of the total energy supply, although a reasonable percentage of electricity supply. They constitute about 5-8% of total energy supply if you don’t count biofuels or hydro, which are probably pretty much fixed.

While renewables are increasing, so are fossil fuels, and so are emissions and the amount of GHG (greenhouse gas in the atmosphere)

One big question is “How do we generate enough energy to manufacture the renewables we need rapidly?” as there is not enough spare Renewable energy to do this.

The answer is probably via fossil fuels – again new energy production may be needed, because we don’t have much spare. So the phase out may increase emissions for a while, and increase the problems.

Renewables are supposedly now cheaper to build and install, so this problem should diminish.

However, if we do “electrify everything” such as automobiles, then we need even more renewables, or else there is not that much point.

Emissions will not diminish if renewables (or other energy sources) do not replace fossil fuels, and emissions do not peak soon….. We cannot risk more emissions.

Reducing emissions, not only requires renewables, but probably requires some kind of degrowth.

Developing countries don’t want degrowth as it gives them less military power and prosperity, and developed countries won’t degrow because they think it will lose votes and corporate profits, and they keep promoting fossil fuels as the cheapest and easiest thing for developing countries, probably because they have been bought by fossil fuel companies.

However, life as was lived in the west in the 1960s say was ok, and released a lot less GHG emissions than we do nowadays. It was also incredibly energy inefficient, so we may well be able to attain that kind of life level for most everyone, if we wanted.

Renewables require minerals, and mining is ecologically destructive. The only compensation for the new mining being done is that coal, gas and oil mining are also ecologically destructive, and getting more so, as supplies get more difficult to find (you don’t go for tar sands, deep sea oil and coal-seam gas if you have better fields).

If open slather mining destruction is stopped, the price of minerals increases, and the transition slows.

At the moment we have masses of lithium, but like everything else it is exhaustible, and prices will increase, the greater the demand.

However, people are searching for other kinds of battery, such as weight driven batteries. I’ve certainly heard people say that lithium storage is not the way to go. (People are always talking about the endless creativity of capitalism, but for some reasons those people do not talk about it when it comes to renewables)

Many places have the prices of electricity tied to the most expensive source, which means that people rarely get rewarded for paying for renewables unless they have them personally. They still have to pay the price of fossil fuels, and deal with company profiteering. Fossil fuel profits are wildly up at the moment as there is no competition between fossil fuel companies. Fossil fuel companies have the dilemma of do we sell the stuff now while we can, or do we wait and slowly keep lifting the price. They need increased revenue to deal with the more difficult fields which they are likely to be left with. Gas fields are still relatively big, and easy, but we have seen the price of gas increase massively, which also suggests something like keeping production low and price high is happening.

The fossil fuel companies are incredibly rich and powerful, and will do everything to inhibit the transition, as it would mean the end of their riches and power. They are not making a transition at all – they are depending upon everyone failing to make the transition.

We can hope for improved nuclear or fusion tech, but this does not seem to be happening. Fusion is having successes, but they are small. I have seen reports that China is rolling out small reactors, but they typically have no data, and the CSIRO had no access to any real data about costs and electricity generated. Large scale nuclear appears to be slow, usually taking far more time and money than estimated to build, as well as its other problems.

AS climate damage increases, money and energy will be diverted away from the energy transition, into repair or preparation for the next set of damage. We cannot deal with cumulative catastrophe even now, never mind another 20 years.

As the problem seems insolvable people will invent fantasy solutions to help them cope with the reality. These will be theoretically feasible, but in practice which serve to keep fossil fuels going with the hope we can easily solve the problem soon. Things like carbon credits, carbon capture and storage. This can be called saved by imaginary technology.

Another way forward, is to give up on national action and encourage villages to be self supporting on solar or wind, and just accepting that sometimes the energy will be low.

It is very possible that the amount of low emissions energy will not increase at the rate we need, and that the amount of fossil fuels being burnt will also not decrease at the rate we need. We may need to degrow, and to value other things. But that does involve changing society.

But we need to keep active.

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