The Leader of the Australian Coalition and opposition party made a recent speech I will be returning to. In this post I simply want to discuss a basic error that he opens with, which I think is dangerous.
He starts
Energy isn’t part of the economy.
Energy is the economy.
He attributes the remark to conservative journalist Chris Ullman and the statement could originate with Vaclav Smil, so this is a borrowed and considered statement, not a brain fart.
However, it is pretty obviously not true. Drop a nuclear bomb on Sydney, will any of that energy make an economy, improve Sydney’s economy or make Sydney’s people (as a whole) prosperous? No. It is more likely to immediately destroy processes than to immediately improve them.
Energy is not the economy, energy is vital to and limiting of economies.
It would seem vital to understand that economies and energy come along with:
- Social organisation, labour, relations of power and relations of access to energy. These influence the way social wealth is distributed and inhibited. Control over resources such as energy and riches, gives people and organisations power to influence and pattern markets and other parts of society.
- Available and directable energy. Unavailable and chaotic energy is rarely beneficial unless ordered and processed. As we have learnt recently, energy can be made unavailable to increase profits and lock in production.
- Time constraints. Food has to be eaten before decay. Building something might take too long for it to be useful, when compared to the speed of the threat arising. How quickly can two different processes adjust to change?
- Entropy, waste, pollution, increasing disorganisation, or illth. Economies always produce waste and usually produce ‘harms’. Economies can cause levels of destruction which overwhelm their ability to function. The more energy they have, the more destruction and alteration they are capable of.
- Transport of goods (requires energy), so they can be traded.
- Ecologies, land, food (which is energy), water, resources, and climate. It is best when the ecologies are working in a relatively harmonious systemic way, with humans and each other. A decaying ecology leads to a decaying economy. Ecologies are probably never completely balanced, but hugely unstable ecologies (often as disrupted by humans) are hard, and costly, to live within.
- The ways we socially think about and imagine energy, and the way it is used to benefit human life. We may tend to think some apparently unreal energies are real, and that some energy sources are more powerful than they are.
in summary, The Economy is not just energy, but involves a system of systems, which depends on other systems. We have to keep all those systems working reasonably well for survival
These multiple interactions are vital points for understanding an economy, but people generally seem to want to ignore them. The question is why is Mr. Dutton enthusiastic about ignoring them?
I think he tends to answer this in his next passage, which in summary states.
If energy is cheap then all is well. If it is expensive then:
Our manufacturers pay more to produce and package goods.
Our builders pay more to construct homes.
High power prices have inflationary impacts across the economy.
Higher costs are passed on to Australians.
You end up paying more for every product, good and service.
Cheap and consistent energy is critical for more affordable lives and a more prosperous economy.
This is only true if we reduce the complexity of the economy, and refuse to ask what are the consequences of this cheap energy production? What are the power relations in the economy – who gets cheap energy? How destructive is the energy production – what does its pollution do? How available and directable is most of the energy? lots can be wasted. What effects does it have on the rest of the energy system? Does it interfere with other needed energy? What effects, long and short term, does it have on ecologies? How do we think about that energy?
These points make the economy more complex but also more real.
Peter Dutton then asserts that nuclear power is cheap, available and low illth.
He does this by:
- Ignoring any costings whatsoever, or any need to pay back huge public expenditure through increasing the cost of electricity or something else.
- Ignoring the time taken for construction and development, and what the state of the electricity system will be by the time nuclear is constructed.
- Ignoring the issues and costs of waste, breakdown, servicing, decommissioning etc
- Ignoring the magical socio-psychological appeals of nuclear. Can 7 to 14 nukes really save Australia from energy problems? Will they both replace coal that is going out of business and provided the extra energy we will need by 2050? (No, they are not even enough to replace the lost coal, it is only because nuclear seems magically powerful that this question can be avoided).
- Dutton is still talking about SMRs which do not exist commercially and which are less powerful than standard nukes. This would imply these imaginings have a magical hold on him.
- Ignoring any other effects nuclear may have on the economy, ecology, or energy supply, and
- Discouraging low-cost low-GHG sources of energy, This discouragement will increase the use of gas and hence the production of GHG emissions.
Even assuming that his “hidden data” does make energy cheap. then a change in energy systems which does not reduce GHGs is not worth the money. So we need to know whether nuclear increases pollution and destruction and so on.
We expect a right wing politician to say the economy is society or that it is the important part of society because it makes business the essential part of society, but saying that we don’t need to think about the effects of different types of energies, involves ignoring everything important to human life and not being prepared for the potentially harmful interaction between systems.
Tags: climate change, complexity, economics, Energy, nuclear energy, politics, renewable energy
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 
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