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Planet of the Humans: some comments

May 1, 2020

This is a movie which is probably worth seeing, but while it makes some important points it is also so obviously out of date, it can’t be recommended completely.

Another reason for not recommending it is that it is blithely depressing. The film gives no way forward, other than the useless fantasy of population reduction…

So onto the Bad Things.

All the data on real renewable energy is at least six years out of date, some of it is 10 or more years out of date. One of his main sources, Ozzie Zehner, published his book on the subject in 2012 and, going by his website, has not published anything else since 2014. Anthropologist Nina Jablonski is a physical anthropologist interested in the development of skin colours or pigmentation, not an energy expert or a student of technology.

No decent solar panels nowadays will be 8% efficient, or decay in 10 years. If you get panels like that now you have been defrauded. The Cedar Street Solar Array he instances for these figures and for being able to power 10 homes, was apparently built in 2008. Not the most recent farm and far smaller than more recent solar farms owned by the same organisation, which can supposedly power far more homes.

It is true that Renewable Energy (RE) technology does not last forever, but neither do coal or nuclear energy stations. Machines break down, wear out and in the case of nuclear become dangerous. The question is about life cycle emissions.

A study in Nature Energy in 2017 found that over the lifetime of the technology, the carbon footprints of solar, wind, and nuclear power are about one-twentieth of those of coal and natural gas, even if CCS worked. Another study from 2014 argued that:

a wind turbine with a working life of 20 years will offer a net benefit within five to eight months of being brought online…. It is likely that even in a worst case scenario, lifetime energy requirements for each turbine will be subsumed by the first year of active use.

The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory concluded (in an ongoing study probably started in 2012?) from a study of many publications on emissions life cycles that “The central tendencies of all renewable technologies are between 400 and 1,000 g CO₂eq/kWh lower than their fossil-fueled counterparts without carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).”

So, all this is not recent, obscure, or pathbreaking research, its been out there for some while. The obvious point is that there is plenty of reason to replace coal and gas with Renewable Energy (RE) – and gas emissions are usually underestimated because fugitive (escaped) emissions often seem much higher than recognised – largely because gas pipe systems, especially in cities, are old and complicated and hard to police.

While I personally am uncomfortable with the ways that the grid works, it is usually the case that companies who are claiming to be 100% renewable buy renewable energy, but do not have it connect directly to their places of work. They buy the power from renewable sources, which put it into the grid where it gets mixed up with other energy and the companies get their power from the grid. In other words, this is simply the way it works. It is not hypocritical to pay for renewable energy and take the energy from the grid, as long as the renewable supplier, and the system, is working.

The film does not interview any people about contemporary renewables, their costs or their consumption of materials. Its a bit like saying “with 64K memory, personal computers will never let you do anything like write a book,” and refusing to talk to anyone in computing to find things have moved on.

Not surprisingly the film’s discussion of electric vehicles seems to be set at the launch of the General Motors Chevy Volt in 2010. It is now no longer made. Not a Tesla, or anything else, in sight.

Generally people seem to agree that Electric cars, even if powered by electricity provided by coal, are now less polluting (particularly in terms of particulates) than petrol cars when being driven, and over the life cycle. [1], [2], [3], [4]. Even the US Department of Energy seems to agree. And it could be argued that you have to start somewhere to get better. However, as many have suggested, it would probably be better to work on a radical revision of the transport system to remove the need for millions of cars and the road systems that ruin cities.

Mining is not just a bad problem when it involves renewables. Coal mining, fracking, and oil and gas drilling are all deeply problematic and destructive of land, but this is not mentioned, perhaps just to make renewables look worse – with speeded up film no less. Another problem is that over the last 30 years the amount of coal and oil being burned has massively increased – partly this is because it has been encouraged and subsidised by Governments all over the planet. It takes a lot to replace that increase. Again there is no exploration of this, just an attack on renewables.

Despite the implied claims of the film, there is no evidence solar panels create deserts, or “solar dead zones”. Indeed there are suggestions that the shade of panels might be useful for farm animals and for growing plants, etc and the place were he made this point is now apparently generating electricity again.

Recent renewable developments tend to have storage, so they don’t need coal generators on all the time. Storage is being improved and researched. We may not need batteries; the New South Wales government suggests that by 2040, NSW could get 89% of its local power from solar and wind, backed by pumped hydro storage. Others suggest there are “22,000 potential pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) sites across all states and territories of Australia.” And, apparently surprisingly, back up coal, or gas, generators do not produce anywhere near the amounts of pollution produced by fully active generators – a point left unmade.

While it is absolutely correct that we are not replacing dirty energy with really clean energy at anything like the rates we need to survive, it now seems fully possible for Australia to get up to 75% renewable, or more, by 2025 if we wanted to, without huge amounts of trauma, and even cost savings to ordinary consumers. Even in 2017 some people (Andrew Blakers, Bin Lu and Matthew Stocks) from the ANU argued that it would be cheaper to replace Australia’s entire aging coal generation with renewable energy, than to build new coal.

Without massive government support, coal is largely collapsing. In Australia, coal stations are aging and uneconomic to run. It is only the Coalition parties who are interested in building coal energy stations, and no power company will do this without subsidy.

There is nothing obviously inherent in renewables which is stopping them from replacing gas or coal. That largely seems to a matter of established convention, politics, financial support from States, and regulations which expect the system to have the characteristics of coal supply. Consequently, we probably need a change in the economic system, and its power relations, to do this. We certainly need a change in government, and a willingness to stand up to well funded fossil fuel companies and their scare campaigns, and to films like this. However, it is not surprising that to build a new energy system, that initially we have to use the old one.

One of the problems that remains undiscussed by the film, is that the more renewables we have, the less economic fossil fuels become, and the more subsidy or price hiking they need to survive. And the more likely they are to try and kill off renewables.

The percentage of energy which is currently generated by real renewables across the world is tiny, but increasing in many countries with considerable apparent success. For example, in the third quarter of 2019, the UK’s renewables generated more electricity than their coal, oil and gas plants combined. Researchers at Stanford say they were:

surprised by how many countries we found had sufficient resources to power themselves with 100 percent wind, water, and solar power….
The entire renewable energy footprint [. . .] is on order of 1.15 to 1.2 percent of the world’s land. … In the United States, if you just look at oil and gas, there are 1.7 million active oil and gas wells and 2.3 million inactive wells. Collectively they take up somewhere between one to two percent of the U.S. land area. And that’s not counting the refineries, the pipelines, or coal and nuclear infrastructure.

Another study suggests that Europe’s untapped wind energy potential amounts to approximately 52.5 terawatts, or about 1 million watts for every 16 European citizens.

We are learning from the forerunners in the transition. Again you have to start somewhere, and the first in line will be the clumsiest.

The film does not make any useful comparison of renewables with coal, just vague assertions that it is as bad as coal and oil for climate, which is frankly no longer true, if it ever was. The points could have been made that renewables will not save us by themselves, or that there is a lot of capital sunk into opposing energy transition. It also could have clearly stated that not doing renewables will not save us either; indeed staying with fossil fuels will speed the destruction.

Good points in the film

The film is absolutely right that bio-fuel, woodchip burning, or waste burning is not renewable or green. It is frequently counted as renewable as you might eventually regrow trees or whatever, but this is now clearly false. Most people advocating non-algal biofuels are not interested in solutions to the problems we have. Current biofuels are net greenhouse gas emitters, displace people from land, produce deforestation or lower agricultural production; they are a complete waste of time. Alligator fat is an obvious waste of money and research, which I guess is why it was mentioned….

Biofuels are a problem in Germany, and the UK has “become the largest importer of wood pellets in the world in just five years,” and it is using biofuels to claim growth in renewable energy. However, according to the US Energy Information Administration in 2019, biomass apparently provided about 1.4% of US electricity. This is just less than solar which provides 1.8% and wind which provides 7.3%. So there is too much biofuel in comparison. However, if you wanted to complain surely we should complain that gas still provides 38.4% and coal 23.5% of the electricity, and that no green energy challenges these fossil fuels which are leading the world to disaster?

Those green organisations which supported biofuel and woodchipping were mislead, or distracted. As the film shows, this was not a popular ‘solution’ with ordinary members, who rightly saw it as not green. The odd thing is that this section alone, implies that if the film is making the argument that the environmental movement has been bought out, then that argument is probably incorrect.

While Bill McKibben did once support biofuel, he has not supported it for quite a while – another example that the film is out of date. He was not interviewed for the film other than in passing, or asked to address the question properly or recently. This looks like character assassination.

The film obviously did not bother to investigate those green groups who do not think renewables are the complete answer. In the words of another review

They too wish to ignore the groundswell of radical resistance building all over the world against cancerous capitalism…. this failure played right into the hands of those who don’t give a damn about the planet.

They don’t even look at the Drawdown people. Why did they behave like this? This refusal leaves the film with nowhere constructive to go.

The film points out that businesses lie continually. Absolutely correct. You can make the best ideas in the world totally destructive and false if the profit motive and psychopathic billionaires run everything. They destroy places and then move on, as a matter of course.

As a consequence, this is not a film which gives much leeway for the righteous to self-praise, even if that is what they are trying to use the film to do. However, the critique of business and markets is so low key, and so unintegrated into the argument the right can ignore them completely, or just pretend that environmentalists are corrupt.

Elsewhere the film makers mention the contemporary extinction crisis, and make the obvious point that green tech will not bring them back. But they do not discuss this in the film. And the reason that the extinction crisis exists is not primarily because we are starting to use Renewables.

The main real point of the film is that it is impossible to continue as we are doing. This is undeniable.

The Film’s Proposed Solutions

Degrowth and shut down of economic expansion. The film does not present any way of achieving this, except to imply it requires some kind of change in our life and values. We probably need to try and reduce energy consumption. This is not easy, but it is well worth discussing, and an extra five minutes of the film on this could have been useful. These cutbacks will take planning and research, but even that is not advocated. As a footnote the much maligned Bill McKibben writes:

I’ve written books and given endless talks challenging the prevailing ideas about economic growth, and I’ve run campaigns designed entirely to cut consumption.

But they could not be bothered to discuss this. In reality, the film raises the issue in passing to quickly move on to the second fantasy option – and this is possibly how people manage to ignore the film’s main useful message: infinitely accelerating growth on a finite planet is just not possible.

The film moves into fantasy, and its fantasy solution is:

Lowering population. This gets more discussion than any other solution, which is not much. However, if population decrease is the answer, in the time we have left, who are you going to kill? Without such discussion the “solution” is just words that absolve us of action.

Given that people in Australia and the US consume more resources per head than most other countries, we should probably start culling there…. but I don’t see him volunteering. Neither will I.

Yes, if every Indian and Chinese person comes to consumes like the average Australian we are all dead. But we cannot expect them to stop heading that way, if we won’t stop. Why on earth should people outside our countries take all the burden?

So lets start learning to consume less and work less, to try and prevent culling from happening through climate and disease.

And remember that takes working at changing social relations as well…. We didn’t end up where we are because neoliberals were scared of social engineering, whatever they said to the contrary.

A film like this could have tried to help us deal with the crisis. But it doesn’t. Indeed it feeds apathy, retreat and a sense that the problem is all too much. This is why I think people are so upset by the film. We don’t expect this deadendness from Michael Moore.

So what do we need to do, when we face destruction? How do we act, if our best attempts so far are not working?

That’s probably a topic for another post.

However, a steadily increasing carbon price with the money raised distributed back to the population so they lose little income, is an obvious policy which would incentivise lower emissions and allow business planning. Carbon trading is not so good, as it subjects the price to the vagaries of the market and price fixing.

It is essential to stop:

Using fossil fuels
Emitting pollution of all kinds (gas, chemical, particulate etc)
Having unprocesseable wastes
Deforestation
Over fishing
Poisoning of water supplies
Denaturing land through bad agricultural practices
Destroying fertile land for housing

[Another venture in a helpful direction:

Zachary King: Unconventional Optimism: Lessons from Climate Change Scholars and Activists ]

Tags:coal, Disinformation, renewable energy
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Bjorn Lomborg again

April 14, 2020

Revised 8 May 2020

I’ve been reading quite a bit of Bjorn Lomborg recently, for my research on climate technologies and their social consequences – and I’ve been reasonably critical of some of his writing and mode of argument (see [1], [2]). However, somewhat to my surprise I found it possible to extract an interesting, and relatively consistent position on climate and ecological problems from his work.

The main problem with Lomborg is that he almost always seizes on the most optimistic figures for the economic and other consequences of climate change, and never questions the consequences of current economic structures and drives. He is similarly cheery about the consequences of the current pandemic and the ways to deal with it. He always appears to try and diminish the problems. This ‘optimism complex’ (found in those supporters of renewables as well, who think transition is inevitable and easy) is a problem when the situation seems a lot worse than most people realise.

Another problem is that he appears to not ‘think ecologically’ ie in terms of complex systems. Thus he appears to argue that a few degrees cannot make that much difference – we can all survive 2 degrees no real problem. However, a minor change in one part of the systems can make massive amounts of difference as it courses through the systems, triggering other effects and compounding crises. For example, global warming will probably not just mean our highest temperatures are one or two degrees (the average) higher but much higher, and the high temperatures will not be separated out into single days which might not be too harmful, but over continuous days or even weeks. This significantly magnifies human and animal deaths, water and crop problems, so that they can become catastrophic. These failures then add to other stresses (say pandemic, flood, fire etc) on what should be manageable days. The more stressed the society, the more vulnerable it becomes, and the more catastrophic minor incidents become.

Finally he does not seem interested in any action which restricts air pollution, or emissions. It is probably right to be cynical about the bone fides of any position which claims to be about benefiting human life and which does not recognise air pollution as important harm.

However, this post is an attempt to summarise what I believe to be the strongest points of his underlying argument. The result may not be exactly what he would put forward himself, but seems worth considering. While I don’t agree with all aspects of this argument, and would be far more intense about the problems we face, it does seem to be a useful position, and I have put it as strongly as I can.

At the moment, the whole world faces a set of interlinked problems that cannot be solved by a narrow focus on just one or two of these problems. We have to approach these problems from many directions, and be generalists.
There is a climate crisis which needs to be fixed. It may not be immediate, and it may not be the primary problem we face today, but we do need to fix it. Now, I do think it is an immediate problem, but Lomborg tends to postpone it, as part of his optimism complex. However, let’s begin with it.
The current systems of climate talks, agreements and targets are not working. The Paris targets are costly and nowhere near strong enough, and we are failing to achieve them anyway. There is little point continuing on in the same way and keep failing.
We do not have anything like the amount of green energy we need. We may be increasing green energy enormously, but we have been increasing fossil fuels even faster, so the percentage of truly green energy remains tiny. According to the IEA, the OECD has 2.3% hydro and 2.6% of “geothermal, solar, wind, tide/wave/ocean, heat and other.” To this we can add 9.6% Nuclear and 6.1% of Biofuels and waste, if you really wish to classify these other sources as clean (IEA 2019 Key World Energy Statistics, p7.)
Governments should immediately stop subsidising fossil fuels, at all stages of production. This is a complete waste of money and time. It helps make the situation worse. If companies go bust, then they go bust; that is the market in action. Established companies which depend on bailouts and subsidy should not be supported, as their weakness indicates either bad management, poor financial choices, unwanted products, or some combination of the three.
Pollution and ecological destruction should not be free. At the very least, we need a mechanism to establish a carbon price to help fund research. Lomborg’s position is inconsistent and it’s easy to find counter examples, but I think his position moves towards this over time. I’d add that other ecological destructions should not go uncharged, and uncurtailed, either..
Green energy should not be subsidised. This might result from good intentions, but it is distorting and, according to the IEA, governments are spending way too much for the observable results. Strangely, while Lomborg questions calculations for fossil fuel subsidies he does not seem to question the figures he objects to for renewable subsidies. For example, does the IEA count feed-in-tariffs as subsidies when these could be considered the price paid for electricity generation? We need to be sure what is a subsidy.
Some of the processes receiving subsidy are not that green to begin with. For example, carbon capture and storage is a waste of money. It has no hope of solving the problem, and merely prolongs fossil fuels use.
In the US and Europe, wood burning is classified as green or renewable. This is also deceptive. Burning wood emits more CO₂ than coal, and destroys forests and wildlife. The forests may not be replanted, either and it is dubious planted forests have the bio-complexity and resilience of natural growth in any case. Biofuels take away land from agriculture, especially from poorer farmers, and they are largely energy inefficient with low EREI.
Green energy’ should mean every energy source without GHG emissions after set up, including small scale nuclear.
Currently, research into green energy does not receive anything like the money needed.
Instead of subsidising renewables, governments should put at least half that money (or “an annual global commitment of some $100 billion”), into research into green energy [1], [2], [3]. This could be funded from abolished fossil fuel subsidies, so it is not an extra cost. Government led research is effective, and stripped of commercial bias. It can also lead to ‘public domain’ patents, available to all, thus increasing economic productivity.
As we are on track for climate or ecological devastation in the long term, we also need to increase societal resilience.
Poverty and disease are major causes of suffering and decrease societal resilience Removal of poverty also increases life-span and productivity.
Most people who suffer badly from disasters [and climate change] are the poor. The better off people are the better able they can handle, or negotiate, disaster.
Poor people tend to be less worried about climate than about day to day survival. Action on climate often may not seem to benefit, or engage, them but action on their immediate problems can be embraced enthusiastically. However, it can be added, that given that some problems are already coming from climate change, we should not ignore this either.
One reason for massive fossil fuel use is that this easily available, well understood, and centralised form of energy is promoted as helping to lower poverty in the developing world. Without solving the poverty problem, we will not solve the pollution and ecological destruction problems.
There is little point having green energy if it seems to be as harmful to people in poverty, as fossil fuel energy generation and mining can be. We should probably stop coal mining were it hurts, or displaces, poor locals.
We need to keep the economy strong enough and organised enough to lift people out of poverty.
It is notable that Lomborg does not ask whether the current structure of the global economy enables a general lifting out of poverty without harmful consequences. For example does the increase in living standards in the ‘third world’ or ‘the South’ come at the cost of increasing inequality of wealth and power in ‘the North’, along with the decline of the ‘first world’ working and middle classes? Do current methods of raising living standards destroy ‘community’ and mutual aid? Yet the general idea of raising living standards and prosperity, as a help towards problem solving, increasing political participation and resilience, is important and requires more investigation.
These problems also stretch to his support for ‘Free Trade’. The problem is we don’t get really free trade. Neoliberal free trade, has tended to suppress government programmes aimed at providing the social amenities and common good which was not provided by ‘the market’ in the vague hope that they would be provided by the market. This amounts to a suppression of democracy in the corporate interest. Free trade negotiations also seem to have allowed the market to be regulated by the major players in the market to benefit, and protect, themselves. So care is needed here.
Another cause of instability and suffering is disease. TB, for example, is debilitating, and could apparently be eliminated with enough spending. The same is true of Malaria.
Governments also need to protect water and its flows. Improved sanitation and latrine technology help reduce disease, and no one can live without drinkable water. Convenient water also frees up time from collecting it. At the moment we seem to be damaging water at an increasing rate. In dry countries, like Australia, it seems obvious to me that projects which could harm, or restrict, the water supply, even in 200 years or more, should not be considered. It is easier to damage than to protect water supply, in particular underground water.
Research is needed into improving agriculture and food supply in the long-term. It is obvious that short term improvements should not be at the expense of long term sustainability. Although Lomborg does not seem to mention it, this may require research into regenerative agriculture. At the least we need to lower the emissions from agriculture and stop leeching soils of nutrients, salt rising, topsoil loss, and deforestation to provide new fields because old fields are exhausted.
Indoor air pollution from cooking, needs reducing. I would suggest solar cookers, where possible, as this allows wood to remain uncut and dung to fertilise the soil, but Lomborg goes for ventilation – this is also useful and cheap addition. Outside air pollution is also a problem. The World Health Organisation estimates 3.8 million people die per year from household pollution and 4.2 million people die from outdoor pollution. This requires reduction of burning, of coal, gas, oil and so on, but Lomborg seems largely uninterested in lowering this cause of death.
Another source of instability and poverty is the lack of effective birth control, [1], together with the lack of educational and economic opportunities for women. Again it is relatively easy and cheap to fix this – although it will encounter a lot of religious opposition and the amounts being spent seem to be declining.
By reducing the number of children, birth control helps provide better nutrition for existing children and this renders them more physically and mentally capable of education and resilience.
Education needs improvement and more accessibility, especially pre-school – but this is difficult as some dominant groups don’t want people to be well informed, or able to think critically or creatively; they just want them accepting and obedient. A critical and creative population is dangerous for incompetent, or unjust rulers.
It also needs to be added to this summary of Lomborg’s remarks, that any reform program that is actually going to deal with this whole series of problems which interact with each other and magnify each other, may involve a disruptive politics. Particularly when one of those serious problems, is the structure of power relations themselves, and those power relations will affect all attempts at reform.

These ideas seem to be worth considering, wherever they come from, as increasing disasters point to global systemic causes and effects, and they demand systemic strategies in response.

One final addenda. It seems common for people supporting Lomborg to say that:

Spending on green tech research,
Fighting poverty,
Doing our best to end TB, Malaria and other health issues,
Improving food and agriculture,
Improving access to drinkable water and protecting water supplies,
Lowering indoor pollution and
Boosting education, particularly for women,

is somehow incompatible with lowering emissions and pollution and reducing ecological destruction. They repeatedly imply it’s one or the other. However it is probably more accurate to say we cannot carry out Lomborg’s plans, unless we reduce pollution and ecological destruction. The poor end up with the harmful consequences of pollution and eco-destruction and usually live in the places which are most badly affected. We cannot, for example, reduce poverty when corporate or government interests are destroying local agriculture, and poisoning the water and air.

Tags:activism, Anthropocene, Energy, renewable energy
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Problems for Renewables: Apparent costs and ‘lock-in’.

January 18, 2020

Costs of building new renewable energy systems, are difficult to estimate accurately, as are the costs for fossil fuel and nuclear energy generation.

One of the problems of capitalism is that it functions through hype, exaggeration, advertising, PR and so on. The fight over information is part of the fight over sales and subsidies. Subsidies are frequently ignored as part of the costs, or claimed not to be costs, in order to make products look cheaper, or to keep the subsidies from people’s objection. People can also exagerate benefits of particular innovations, or promised innovations, to get research funding or for commerical purposes. This activity makes it more likely for people to hold off purchase, until a product is ready for market, or to purchase an existing product. Few decisions in this arena can be entirely rational, or based on guaranteed useful data.

This is to be expected. While communication is not possible without the possibility of deception, social systems can increase that probability or, possibly, diminish it. We have a problematic system. People have political and economic reasons to misrepresent all kinds of ‘facts’. In our system fake news about almost everything is absolutely normal – especially if the fakery is already established, or supports established power and energy relations. Consequently it is hard to get accurate figures on anything to do with sales of large projects.

We can only look at appearances, and these seem reasonably clear.

In Australia coal mines often depend on taxpayer subsidy. We build rail lines, roads, and offer them free or cheap water at the expense of farmers and towns. We don’t insist upon them rehabilitating the mines; just a few trees around the mine edge, to obscure the views of passers-by, might be enough, if even that much gets done. We don’t require there to be any expenditure to clean up the ongoing pollution they issue. They can destroy our water table and water supply and that is just considered bad luck.

The jobs provided by coal mines are minimal. Adani has a royalty holiday, and Barnaby Joyce even wanted taxpayers to give Adani 1 billion dollars for more or less nothing in return except loss of water from the water gift. As it happens, the IEEFA estimate that Adani is already “set to receive over $4.4 billion of tax exemptions, deferrals and capital subsidies from Australian taxpayers,” assuming a 30 year life for the mine.

In effect, with coal, we seem to pay people to take our minerals and destroy our environment. At the least they get a lot of earnings which are tax free.

Similar events seem true of coal based energy. Burning coal not only produces climate change but it also poisons people and ecologies. I guess we have been using coal for so long that we don’t recognise the dangers. As well, coal gets government support for it to be locked-in. In the US Trump is apparently trying to cut pollution standards to make coal more economic. Death and illness is of no concern.

In Australia, we also face the problem that most coal generation is nearing the end of its life, by 2030 55% of coal fired energy stations will be over 40 years old, and heading into unreliability. We need to build replacement sources of energy, or we will face large-scale shortages of energy. This is simply fact.

Renewables are now said to be, generally, either competitive with coal or cheaper than coal, although there is debate [1], [2], [3], [4].

In Australia, it’s obvious they are more than competitive, because the government has to keep talking about taxpayer subsidy for new coal energy, or talking about forcing people to keep old coal fired energy stations going. No one wants to build coal energy stations on their own bat. The government also appears to have guaranteed to purchase electricity from Gas, to get it going. On the other hand, heaps of companies in Australia seem to want to build renewable farms, and this is despite considerable regulatory inhibition and ambiguity. (The same appears true in the US where, according to Bloomberg, “a total of $55.5 billion were spent in the sector last year, an increase of 28%”, which is apparently a record). In Australia one of our main problems with renewables seems to be government regulation, the political power of the coal mining industry, and ongoing tax concessions and subsidies for coal. Some this regulation is left over from the kind of regulation which helped centralised coal development, and now promotes coal lock-in and hinders coal-exit.

If we balanced the competition by removing the hostile regulation and subsidies for dirty energy, it would probably help renewable growth.

Whatever the case might be here, countries which sell coal seem to be offering subsidies to third world countries to get them locked into coal based energy production, and slow down any renewable transformation. If places never use much coal, then they may not miss it. This is economic power attempting to structure the energy market to give it continuing markets and profits without having to change. Coal companies are fighting for their profits and that involves politics as part of their market action. We should assume that coal producers act similarly in Australia.

Another problem is that network costs are important. It is frequently objected that renewables require new grids and this is costly. A problem we face in Australia is private ownership of the grid by companies who are reluctant to invest in getting the grid to places where the renewable energy, which competes with their energy supply, can be built. This is a lock-in produced by ownership. Ownership also gives power to influence markets.

Existing fossil fuel generation has a legacy of networks which were largely paid for by the taxpayers and then sold on. This should diminish coal costs, and produce lock-in to energy generation at particular locations. However, given that coal energy stations are not being rebuilt or renewed, it does not seem to.

Other forms of energy have the same network problems, but they seem to be ignored. Every time a new gasfield comes online, pipelines have to be developed, and that does not seem a problem to those objecting to networks for new renewable sites.

If governments took climate change seriously, then building new powerlines in consultation with the industry, would probably be the way to go. It would be costly, but still less costly than doing nothing, and could probably be helped to be paid for by removal of subsidies for fossil fuels.

Storage is also a cost issue, but in some places you have to include storage as part of the development, so (in those cases) it is fixed in. Also if we spent more money on R&D we might develop simple cheap solutions (we might not, but we are more likely to). The Scotts are apparently using heavy weights suspended in deep pits. [see also] This works like pumped hydro without the need for water – which would be a bonus in Australia.

Another objection to renewables, in terms of cost, is that they are intermittant, so we have to overproduce to get a stable supply. But if we do over-produce, this is not necessarily a problem. Over production is useful as, for example, when excess power can be directed into making hydrogen as a portable back up fuel, and shut down when heavy demand returns.

People are still arguing that nuclear energy is cheap and effective, but often do not include the expenses of decommission in that cost. But as I have argued before, with nukes, the big trouble is that no-one in the West seems to want to build nuclear, because it is not economical, and most of the nuke companies have gone out of business, or gone out of the business.

The UK government had to guarantee massive electricity prices and taxpayer funded indemnity at Hinkley Point, because no one would insure it. It’s also running massively over budget.

While I could be wrong, I am not aware of anyone prepared to build fossil fuel or nuclear energy supplies, in Australia, without massive subsidy, guaranteed prices (as with the gas energy mentioned above) or even subsidy and diminishment of safety requirements. This indicates to me, that both of these sources are less economic than they once were, and this is before you add in the costs of the ecological destruction or climate change they generate. In practice Renewables are ready to go, especially with a little network planning, or admission that the market does not solve every urgent problem in the right amount of time.

Ultimately we cannot absolutely expect the kinds of service we have now. If we keep on with fossil fuels, and ecological destruction the situation is likely to become untenable – we are already destroying the Earth’s carrying capacity. We have to shift to another source of power. Nuclear does not seem viable. That leaves renewables, which are not yet built in anything like the required amounts, and which may not be continuous, although they can be made close to continuous.

Only thirty or forty or so years ago, power black outs were quite common in Australia, and we managed to live with them. So we can probably manage to live with them now.

Environmental ecology is an important part of the social and economic process. The environment currently keeps us going without much human input. If we keep destroying it through pollution, then it cannot. Everything depends on everything else. We have to either repair the environment, which costs, or make an artificial envionment which probably costs more.

So at all levels, controlled low-pollution production of renewables, seems like a reasonable solution, one that is actually favoured by markets as well as by environmental concern.

Tags:coal, economics, renewable energy
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Only 1.3%

November 23, 2019

Australia and Climate Change

It is frequently argued that Australia’s CO2 emissions are tiny, and that there is no point in Australia’s federal government acting to cut them. The Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, was making this argument the other day.

Faced with criticism over the recent bushfires, because it seems logical that increased drought and temperatures from climate change would increase bush fire danger and severity, he said

the suggestion that any way, shape or form with Australia accountable for 1.3 per cent of the world’s emissions, that the individual actions of Australia are impacting directly on specific fire events, whether it’s here or anywhere else in the world, that doesn’t bear up to credible scientific evidence either. Climate change is a global phenomenon, and we’re doing our bit as part of the response to climate change. We’re taking action on climate change. But I think to suggest that with just that 1.3 per cent of global emissions that Australia doing something differently, more or less, would have changed the fire outcome this season. I don’t think that stands up to any credible scientific evidence at all.

This lack of urgency for action, seems reinforced when the US, under President Trump, also pretends there is no problem. US emissions are huge, and we can have no obvious effect on those, and by comparison our general effect is small. We also cannot directly affect emissions in China and India, which are also significantly larger than our own.

However, there are significant problems with this issue. Australia does not have 1.3% of the world’s population. We have about 0.33%, so we are batting at just under four times our weight in emissions – which is impressive. We are also, as the Climate Council pointed out, when Mr. Morrison used the same argument at the UN, around the 17^th largest emitter in the world, ahead of 175 other countries.

We also reputedly have amongst the highest per capita emissions in the developed world.

Climate Analytics stated in their 2019 fact sheet that:

Australians emit more than twice as much per person as the average of the ‘Group of Twenty’ (G20) in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. This includes burning fossil fuels and other processes in industry, agriculture and waste treatment.

Figures released in August of 2019, for March 2019, by the Australian government show emissions rose 0.6 per cent over the previous 12 months, largely because of gas. So our emissions are not heading in the right direction for long-term survival, and Mr Morrison could be said to be engaging in deception if he implies that any targets we are meeting, are useful, or that we really doing our bit to save everyone.

Furthermore, none of these figures about emissions, factor in the emissions from exports of coal, gas or oil which are burnt elsewhere. We are about the third largest exporter of fossil fuels in the world, so we are responsible for their availability. We are also apparently going to boost our coal production by 34% over a decade. That is probably a conservative estimate given the potential of Clive Palmer’s mines in Queensland. Given that our emissions are not declining, then the actual, and future, emissions which can be attributed to Australia or to the burning of Australian products is likely to be considerably more than 1.3% and increasing.

If Australia is acting on climate, it is to make climate change worse.

By not attempting to ameliorate climate change, and not attempting to prepare for climate change (not being ready for early and large bush fires or drought) Australia is showing that it does not care about climate change, it will not protect its people from climate change, and that it will not object that strongly to other bigger polluters continuing to pollute. It puts no pressure on local industries or other Countries to reduce and it does not set a good example. Our actions help to make Greenhouse gas production normal which produces more climate change.

By making these choices, and encouraging coal mining in Australia, Australian governments are allying with the commercial and political forces which produce climate change. Our governments (of all persuasions) are apparently demonstrating that they care more for the profit of some companies, than they care about preserving the land, water, people’s health or maintaining a climate balance. They care more about maintaining profits than they do about ordinary people’s lives. Choices made, such as the mining under Sydney’s water supply, or the Adani mine in the Great Artesian basin, compound the problems of climate, by affecting water supply, and demonstrating further lack of concern.

It is sometimes argued that if we do not sell fossil fuels, then countries will buy them from other suppliers, and Australians will lose jobs. This may be true, but it hardly makes those sales moral or sensible – virtue can be difficult – and there are not that many jobs in mining these days either.

If we did decide not to sell fossil fuels then (according to orthodox economics) this would lower supply and increase the price, thus adding more incentive for other countries to move out of fossil fuels.

Damage to our ecology, agriculture and cities by climate change through sea level rise, massive storms and droughts will also cost us money – only most of it will be from the taxpayers and not the companies who profit.

By not being worried that Australians have one of the highest Greenhouse gas emissions per head in the world, Australian governments are further implying that a prosperous life style depends upon destroying climate and ecological stability, and that everyone destroying that stability should be encouraged, so they can become prosperous. This one reason why Australian governments probably promote the developmental capacity of coal (apart from making money for miners).

By being half hearted or indifferent to climate change they provide an exemplar and an excuse for the behavior of other countries (‘If wealthy countries in the West can’t be bothered, then why should less developed countries?’).

There is also truth in what the Prime Minister says, if we currently made half the emissions we do now, and nothing else had changed, then it is probable that there would be little difference in the current bushfires. But the question is would nothing else have changed over the last 20 or so years, if we had acted? Would we be as equally unprepared for bush fires? Would we have sacked so many people with experience in fire preparation in cost cutting escapades? Would other countries have not been influenced by Australia’s example, and cut emissions? Would we have been a more effective force at the UN, rather than prevaricate and support fossil fuels? Would we have sold as many fossil fuels? Would we have helped other countries to move out of fossil fuels?

If we had reduced our consumption, then everything would not be the same.

If we act to cut emissions and support transition to renewables then we provide an exemplar of behaviour which also might influence both other governments and corporate behaviour – at the least we would not appear hypocritical – and indeed the world might be different. If we had begun the work in 1990, or even 2008, then, even without support from other countries, it is probable the world would be in a much better space.

If we keep doing nothing, we keep increasing the possibility that events can get much worse than they would otherwise.

Tags:Anthropocene, climate change, politics, renewable energy
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Problems of Transition 07: Neoliberalism and Developmentalism

November 9, 2019

Continuing the series from the previous post….

Of these two political and economic movements (Neoliberalism and Developmentalism), Developmentalism is the oldest, but has since the 1980s been blended with Neoliberalism. As powerful movements and ideas, they can form obstacles to transition.

Developmentalism

Developmentalism can be argued to have its origin in the UK with coal-powered industrialisation and mass steel manufacture, which formed a reinforcing positive feedback loop; steel manufacture helped implement industrialization and also increased military capacity to allow plunder of resources from colonies. Industrialization helped increase demand for steel. Fossil fuel energy was cheap with a high Energy Return on Energy Input. This loop provided a model for the ‘development’ of other countries, partially to protect themselves from possible British incursion.

While the UK’s development was developed alongside and with capitalism, capitalism was not essential for development, as was shown by developmentalism elsewhere. The earliest deliberate developmentalism was probably in Bismark’s Germany, followed by Meiji Japan, neither of which were capitalist in any orthodox sense. Japan rapidly became a major military power defeating both Russia and China. Revolutionary Russia also pursued developmentalism, and after the second world war developmentalism took off in the ex-colonial world becoming the more or less universal model for progress, or movement into the future, and flourished in many formally different economic systems.

During the 1980s, but especially with the collapse of European Communism, and the birth of the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’, developmentalism became more strongly tied to international capitalism, and especially neoliberal capitalism. We can call this ‘neoliberal developmentalism’.

Neoliberalism 1

As I have argued elsewhere, neoliberalism is the set of policies whose holders argue in favour of liberty in free markets, but who (if having to make a choice), nearly always support established corporate plutocracy and appear to aim to destroy all political threats to that plutocracy.

Developmentalism and ecology

Developmentalism was built on fossil fuel use, and economic growth through cheap pollution and cheap ecological destruction. It also often involved large scale sacrifice of poorer people, who were generally considered backward and expendable in the quest for national greatness. Sometimes it is said that in the future succesful development will mean less poisoning, destruction and sacrifice, but the beautiful future may be continually postponed, as it was with communism.

Developmentalism was also often ruthlessly competative in relationship to other states and the pursuit of cheap resources. Developing countries often blame developed countries for their poverty, and this may well be historically true, as their resources were often taken elsewhere for little benefit to their Nation. Many developing countries also argue that they have the right to catch up with the developed world, through the methods the developed world used in the past. It is their turn to pollute and destroy. If this idea is criticised, then it usually becomes seen an attempt to keep them poverty ridden and to preserve the developed world’s power.

Developmentalism is related to neoliberal capitalism via the idea that you have to have continuing economic growth to have social progress, and that social progress is measured in consumerism and accumulated possessions. However, after a point neoliberalism is about the wealthy accumulating possessions, it does not mind other people loosing possessions if that is a consequence of its policy. Both the developing and developed world have developed hierarchies which tend to be plutocratic – development tends to benefit some more than others.

After the 1980s with the birth of neoliberal developmentalism, the idea of State supported welfare and development for the people was largely destroyed as developing States could not borrow money without ‘cutting back’ on what was decreed to be ‘non-essential’ spending. The amount of environmental destruction, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions also rocketed from that period onwards, despite the knowledge of the dangers of climate change and ecological destruction. The market became a governing trope of development, as it was of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism 2: The theory of Free Markets

In theory, ‘free markets’ are mechanisms of efficiently allocating resources and reducing all needs and values to price, or messages about price.

Theory does not always work, because large-scale markets are nearly always political systems rather than natural or impersonal systems.

Big or successful players in the market nearly always attempt to structure the market in their favour. Wealth grants access to all other forms of power such as violence, communicative, informational, legal, ethical, organisational, religious and so on. If there is no State, then successful players will found one to protect their interests and property. If there is a State they will collaborate with others to take it over to further protect their interests and property.

Everything that diminishes profit, especially profit for established power, is to be attacked as a corruption of the market and therefore immoral and to be suppressed. If people protest at not having food, or at being poisoned by industry, they are clearly immoral and not working hard enough. Political movements which oppose the plutocracy or its consequences may have their means of operation closed down, or find it difficult to communicate their ideas accurately through the corporate owned media. The market ends up being patterned by these politics.

For example, neoliberal free markets always seem to allow employers to team up to keep wages down, as that increases profit, and render Union action difficult as that impedes the market.

While these actions may not always have the desired consequences, the market, at best, becomes efficient in delivering profits, but only rarely in delivering other values. Thus people without money are unlikely to have food, or good food, delivered to them. Indeed those people may well be sacrificed to efficiently feed others who have both more than enough food and more disposable wealth, and hence who make more profits for the sellers.

Through these processes, there is an ongoing transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, increased by the power relations of plutocracy.

In plutocracies, it is normal to think that the poor are clearly stupid or not worth while, rather than they have lost a political battle, or been unfortunate.

Neoliberalism and ecology

If it is profitable to transfer the costs of ecological destruction onto the less powerful, and less wealthy, public then it will be done as with other costs. The cost and consequences of destruction will not be factored into the process, and this will give greater profit.

Even, leaving the natural world in a state in which it can regenerate becomes counted as a cost. If it is cheaper to destroy and move on, most businesses will do this, especially the more mobile wealth becomes. For example, I was told yesterday that on some Pacific Islands, overseas fishing companies bought fishing rights to sea cucumbers (which are extremely valuable given the prices I saw in some shops). They took all the sea cucumbers they could, threw the smallest onto the beach to die, and moved on, leaving the area more or less empty. They had no ties to the place, or to the regeneration of local ecologies. The whole ecology of the islands could collapse as a result of this profit taking, but only the Islanders suffer in the short term.

Likewise spewing poison is good for business as it is cheaper than preventing it. Neoliberal governments will support or even encourage powerful pollutors, if they are established members of the plutocracy, as President Trump is demonstrating nearly every day. These pollutors and destroyers have wealth and can buy both government support and politicians in general. They can pay for campaigns and propaganda. They can promise easy well paid jobs in their industry, and those people who were politicians and are now in the industry demonstrate the benefits of this position and are persuasive. Within neoliberalism, with wealth as the prime marker of success, the destructive business people are also considered virtuous and superior people, so the destruction they produce must also be virtuous.

In this situation, objecting to cheap ecological destruction, or proposing ways of preventing such destruction becomes seen as an attack on the powerful and on morality of the system in general.

One of my friends who studies neoliberalism, seems to be coming to the view that neoliberalism’s first political success came about in the 1970s through opposing the idea of Limits to Growth, and supporting ideas of capitalist expansion through endless technological innovation and creativity. This movement assumes that (within capitalism) desired, or needed, technological innovation will always occur, and be implemented, with no dangerous unintended consequences. This seems unlikely to always be true, and to be primarily based in fantasy and wish-fulfillment. It was also probably more attractive to voters than voluntary austerity. It allowed the continuance of ‘development’.

If this is the case, then neoliberals (rather than Conservatives) have been implicated in anti-ecological thinking from the begining.

The UK and Germany actually have Conservative parts in the mainstream Right, and they seem relatively happy with moving from coal into renewables – so we are not talking about every form of capitalism being equally destructive.

In Australia, neoliberalism is reinforced by the learnt dependence of the official economy on resources exports – whether agricultural or mineral, both of which have tended to destroy or strain Australian ecologies. Most Australians think mining is much more important to the economy than it is, expecially after all the subsidies and royalty and tax evasions are factored in. This visions of success implies that destruction is probably acceptable. Australia is big after all, and most people never see the sites of destruction, even if they have large scale consequences.

These processes have lead to a power imbalance in Australia, in which the mining sector calls the shots, and boasts of its power to remove prime ministers. It not only creates loyalty, but also terror.

Renewables, less cheap pollution, less cheap destruction of ecologies, less poisoning, are threats to established ways of ‘developing’, and to be hindered, even if they are ‘economically’ preferable, or succesful in the market.

In this situation, it is perfectly natural that other forms of economy, or activities which could potentially restructure the economy and disrupt the plutocracy, should be stiffled by any means available. In this case, this includes increasing regulation on renewable energy, suggesting that more subsidies will be given to new fossil fuel power, and increasing penalties for protesting against those supporting, or profiting from, fossil fuels.

In Australia, Labor is rarely much better than the Coalition in this space, as the fuss after the last election has clearly shown. It is being said that they failed because they did not support coal or the aspirations of voters to succeed in plutocracy, and they vaguely supported unacceptable ‘progressive’ politics.

Neoliberalism as immortality project

This constant favouring of established wealth, leads to the situation in which people with wealth think they will be largely immune to problems if they maintain their wealth (and by implication shuffle the problems onto poorer people).

At the best it seems to be thought that wealthy people are so much smarter than everyone else, that they can deal with the problems, and this success with problems might trickle down to everyone else. Thus wealth has to be protected.

These factors make the plutocracy even more inward looking. Rather than observing the crumbling world, the wealthy are incentivised to start extracting more from their companies and the taxpayers, to keep them safe. They become even more prone to fantasy and to ignore realities.

Conclusion

Developmentalism and Neoliberalism constitute the major forms of policy dominating world governance, and visions of the future.

In the English speaking world neoliberalism dominates. We have more totalitarian neoliberals (Republicans, Liberals, Nationals) and more humanitarian neoliberals (Democrats, Labour etc).

In the rest of the world, developmentalism can occasionally dominate over neoliberalism (ie in China), but the idea of economic expansion and a degree of emulation of the supposed economic success of the ‘West’ remains a primary aim.

Developmentalism and Neoliberalism both establish and protect ecological destruction for wealth generation and are among the main social obstacles to a transition to renewables.

Tags:Anthropocene, climate change, development, free markets, neoliberalism, renewable energy
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Problems of Transition 05: The problem of pace and size

October 23, 2019

Follows on from: Energy Return on Energy Input

The Path to Transition

Full transition, with replication of all social activities and produce, may not be possible. We may not have enough non-ecologically destructive energy to make the equipment needed for the energy transformation because of EREI and the decline in safe fossil fuel consumption. The Transformation, particularly, may not be possible in a situation in which less developed countries are demanding the right to ‘develop’ living standards for their people which are equivalent to the living standards in the developed ‘West’ which are currently produced with huge levels of ecological destruction. Stopping this ‘catch up’ from happening is probably impossible without war or major catastrophe, even without coal power companies and government institutions, still trying to sell the developing world coal based energy, because they would rather destroy the world than wind down their businesses.

The situation is made worse because of the small amounts of truly renewable energy installations actually present in the world. By ‘truly renewable’, I mean energy which once burnt is not gone. (Yes, I am aware renenwable energy machinery is not renewable at the moment, only the sources such as wind, sun, hydro, geothermal heat, tidal action and so on; that is part of the problem and part of the reason the machines are needed). This means that we have an extraordinarily large scale transition to engage with; one that has only jut begun, even while expansion of fossil fuel usage, with its emissions and destruction, has increased.

The most recent figures from the IEA (2018 Key World Energy Statistics) suggest that the world’s primary energy supply is distributed by:

Oil 31.9%,
Coal at 27.1%,
Gas at 22.1%,
Biofuels and waste at 9.8%,
Nuclear at 4.9%
Hydro at 2.5% and
Everything else (solar, wind, geothermal) at 1.7%.

Clearly by far the majority of the world’s energy (over 80%, over 90% if you include biofuel and waste, which I would) comes from burning Greenhouse gas emitting fuels.

Despite the need for transition being clearly established since the late 1980s, with the Kyoto Protocol being declared in 1997 most societies have done very little to forward the transition. Indeed coal use rapidly increased after the Protocol was declared, making the challenge even greater than it would have been. The obstacles to successful transition are apparently huge.

As is repeatedly announced, the number of companies, or government instititions responsible for most of these greenhouse gases is small. 100 companies are responsible for about 70% of global emissions since 1988 and, possibly, over half the emissions since the beginning of the industrial revolution. So, in theory, it should be possible to control this. The recent decline in coal usage in many countries is also helpful, but is probably not enough, especially given the refusal of fossil fuel companies to promote their products and promote confusion about climate change, its causes and likely consequences.

Conclusion of the part

The size and difficulty of the task of transition is enormous. Social relations and EREI are likely to make the task onerous at best, and maybe impossible without some change in social relations and aspirations. Political action is important, and the transformation almost certainly cannot be left to the private sector alone, as it has so far depended on ecological destruction and misleading hype.

The reality is that the transformation is not happening fast enough, and may not be able to occur fast enough, to stop tumultuous climate change from occuring. We can only try to restrain the tumult and prevent it getting even worse in the long term.

Difficulty of transition is increased by already failing infrastructure.

Later parts of this series will discuss
Drawdown
and problems with indivudal forms of renewable energy

Tags:Energy, renewable energy
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Problems of Transition 04: Energy Return on Energy Input

October 23, 2019

Follows on from Technology is Social

Energy Return on Energy Input (EREI)
Understanding this concept is fundamental to understanding what is possible with energy technology. Basically, any production of energy takes energy to make. In the fossil fuel world, the ratio of energy input to energy output has been said to be of the order of 1:100. Even today when it has become much harder to find and extract useable oil the ratio is still around 1:20 or more. Easy to access fields of fossil fuels, with little energy use, and little ecological destruction, will tend to be consumed first. There are inevitably declining returns on EREI from resources, and therefore declining availability of energy, without some massive new source of energy being discovered, and this does not happen that often.

The closer the EREI ratio gets to 1:1 or lower, the more the amount of energy used to produce energy gets to resemble the amount of energy produced. The smaller the ratio, the less energy is available for free action, or action that is not tied into energy production. If the ratio goes below 1:1, then energy is essentially being wasted to make energy.

That energy is being wasted and consumed in order to make energy, does not mean the system cannot continue for a while, making things worse. Energy ‘non-production’ can be supported by the taxpayer (as the State considers it important for national functioning); by weird financial schemes or straightforward Ponzi schemes in which more and more people are persuaded to put money into the ventures while return declines (as many people suggest is the actual dynamic behind fracking); by taking energy from a better functioning part of the system; by using cheaper energy such as slave labour; and by increasing unrepairable environmental destruction. Just as we can pursue declining fish stocks with more energy and ruthlessness until they are all gone, so we can pursue low EREI until we collapse. Money acts as an ersatz source of energy as it allows human focus and activity stripped from reality but, eventually, if it does not have some relationship to available energy, the currency will collapse. The point is such practices suck energy from the necessary transition, and eventually disrupt the society in a probably catastrophic way.

Renewable energies, and any potential ‘clean fossil fuels,’ have much lower EREI, than dirty fossil fuels. Most of the renewables are also intermittant, So we need more of them and more energy production, than we needed of fossil fuel energy supplies – and again that takes lots of free energy.

This lower EREI severely limits what can be done and unfortunately, we need a truly massive energy transformation in a time of apparent declining energy availability (and particularly low ecologically destructive energy) to produce machines with lower EREI, which makes transition harder.

Continues in Problems of Transition 05: The problem of pace and size

Tags:Energy, renewable energy
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Problems of Transition 03: Technology is social

October 23, 2019

Follows on from: Technology as Fantasy

Some of these problems talked about in the previous post, occur because technology is not neutral, it is born into being, and designed, within existing social relations, social struggles, ecological relations and so on. Technologies will almost always be designed, and modified, to try and maintain or intensify relations of social power, and distributions of wealth. In capitalism, for example, work tools are rarely designed to give people more simple leisure, and indeed leisure tools like the internet or mobile phone, can be used to extend work hours ‘voluntarily’. Any technology with potential, become sites of social struggle.

Technology involves social organisation

In the current world, social organisation and disorganisation exists before new technologies are introduced. Sometimes we can easily think of social relations and organisation as a form of technology. Armies of soldiers are a different form of technology, to collections of warriors. The discipline of Roman troops and troop formation, generally proved victorious over warrior bands, even though the basic physical technologies were not that much different; swords, spears, shields, armour, bows etc. The pyramids were primarily built through the organisation of human action; without that organisation, they could not have been made. Irrigation systems require co-ordination and distribution systems, which usually imply allocation of power and authority. These various systems may, in some cases be primarily religious, magical or astrological – so again magic is overtly part of the technologies application. Capitalism grew together with styles of organisation of factories, offices, labour, finance, expertise and so on. Office machines and factory machines also grew within these frameworks. Technology as a part of, or enabler of, social relations, is also deeply implicated in power relations and hierarchies, and the struggles within them.

To repeat; technology arrives into a situation in which social struggles, conflicts, failures, successes and so on already exist. The technology is designed by at least one faction in this set of complex social relations, and is inserted into them. It is not always possible to clearly demarcate a technology from the social relations and organisation that exist ‘around’ it and ‘through’ it. Technology is social from the beginning.

Maybe, in another world, it is possible the internet could have become a tool of democracy but, in this world, it was born in a period of increasingly neoliberal capitalism, and was transformed by the victors of that struggle into a commercial, data collecting set of business oligopolies. It was used in the political struggles of the world, to promote neoliberal ideologies, to win elections, to increase surveillance, to arrest dissidents, to destroy other States, to find new ways of manipulating people, and so on. Its potential to be a tool of democracy was destroyed by those who wished to use it to support their own power.

The same problem of the effect of established, or victorious, social relations is relevant for renewables. If renewables are established within social relationships which already depend on sacrificing ecologies for pofit, then it seems likely that renewables will be used to continue that sacrifice.

This is not an issue that can be answered in advance of research, However, continuing sacrifice does seem a problem.

Sacrifice of some for the good of all.

Research in India shows that people can have their land stripped away from them for corporate renewable installations (possibly through fraudulent contracts, or simply by ignoring the existing use). The installations can render the land desolate through the use of mass concrete stands. The removal of agriculture, can lead to massive unemployment and skill loss, because renewables only require a small, relatively unskilled labour force to maintain. Water, in short supply to begin with, can be taken from the public to keep the panels clear of dust. Attempts by local people to establish their own renewable networks, can be destroyed by people developing national grids, who demand local homemade grids be taken down, as they disrupt ‘proper’ grids.

Research in Australia implies that standard corporate development practices flourish, with top down imposition of energy farms (in a similar way to the way coal mines can be promoted) which alienates local people, prevents discussion of the potential problems of the development, prevents people discussing the contracts they might get for land-use, and leads to envy because some people get large payments, and others get nothing. Again, this can destroy local small town economies, because the levels of employment are less. As with the internet, democratic practices can be sacrificed for profitability.

Likewise, support for these top-down installations often seems to suggest that people’s relationship to the land which they feel they are protecting by objecting to the renewable projects, is irrelevant, when we precisely wish to maintain nurturing relationships to land and ecologies to allow transition. Strategies of development seem bound up with the idea of sacrificing people or ecologies for the developmental “benefit of all”, or perhaps the benefit of some. Renewables can take on this need to sacrifice others as easily as fossil fuels – although established power relations seem to make renewables easier to object to successfully. This idea of sacrifice may need modification, but how?

Capitalism and industrial society, have depended on destructive technologies

Capitalist economies have routinely profited from cheap energy, cheap resources (ignoring environmental effects), and cheap disposal of pollution, waste and used or superseded products. At the moment, most recycling is not true recycling, as people recently found out in Australia; much of the process involved companies being paid to collect waste and then paying third world countries to make it their problem with the recyclable produce often used as land fill. Money was made but little was recycled.

This reliance on cheap pollution and low monetary cost for ecological destruction, leads to the common point about such societies consuming more resources and producing more waste in a year than can be possibly regenerated in a year. Obviously the longer this goes on, the less can be regenerated and the more living capacity that is destroyed. Therefore, the problem intensifies.

Solar panel manufacturing in China, until recently, was driven by capitalist priorities, it was made with cheap dirty coal energy, paid low wages, and emitted harmful effluent pollution, killing rivers and possibly local people – although this latter point can be disputed. However, these cheap panels did drive cleaner manufacturers out of business.

Mess of information.

Because capitalism depends on sales, information about technology and technological quality is primarily propagated through PR, advertising and hype. These factors tend to exaggerate the quality and capacity of developing technologies, in order to diminish the attractiveness of other available, or potentially available, technologies and attract sales. It certainly was routine in the software industry for programmers to declare that company sales staff would promise potential purchasers capacities the software could not deliver, which would lead to problems after installation.

The same problems occur both with renewables and clean fossil fuels. In particular clean fossil fuels never seem to have the deliverables they promise. The promises often seem to be attempts to lock in pollution, on the grounds that it might get better at some non-specified time in the future.

We also have the problems that corporations which depend on fossil fuels, and others, try to find the weaknesses or uncertainties in theories of climate change, and predictions of what is likely to happen. As we are trying to describe complex systems, such weaknesses will always be found. Sometimes this propaganda behaviour seems to have gone against the scientific advice that they accepted for their own business survival, as when they moved storage and processing facilities to higher ground. However, they have helped delay transition, promote the use of fossil fuels, and confused people as to what they are facing in order to continue to make sales and profit, rather than to wind-back, change, or profit from transition. In this sense, these corporations really do depend on destruction.

Capitalism, like many other systems, messes with information as part of its standard modes of operation. It disrupts the flow of accurate information which is necessary for its own survival.

Consequence.

Without some changes to social systems, the product which confuses people and distributes its costs and harms to the populace, rather than to the manufacturer, is likely to win out. This may be especially true in a period of rapid change, in which it is hard to compare quality and harms as they become more visible over a longer period.

Technology is social, not pure and abstractly technical

Continues in:

Problems of Transition 4: Energy Return on Energy Input

Tags:Energy, renewable energy, technology
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Problems of Transition 02: Technology as Fantasy

October 23, 2019

Follows from Transformation to Renewable Energy: General Problems

Contemporary societies have social fantasies, or myths, about technologies, which may not be helpful to dealing with the reality of transition. The biggest problem, is that we all may be in the grip of these myths and fantasies without being aware of it. We can just assume the myth is common sense and that what we are saying is obvious. Obviously I am not going to be aware of all of these myths, and even if I was, I could still be captured by them.

One reason that fantasy is important is that we cannot see the future or predict the future completely accurately. Indeed, socially, we have a bad record at this. Books anticipating the future always fail in fundamental ways to predict exactly what will happen. Weather, economic and sports forecasting is difficult, and rarely always accurate. We now understand that this arises from the nature of complex systems. Trends can perhaps be predicted, but predicting specific events is hard, especially when the predictions change behaviour.

Therefore we have to imagine the future. Imagining is essential, and helpful, but it is never constrained by reality. So when we are talking about technological transition, we are engaging in imagining and fantasy. Often imagining has guiding principles which make the results seem socially acceptable, and these principles may not be correct.

Technology is either really good or bad.

In these fantasies, technologies are nearly always forces that bring either marked good or harm. There is a large proportion of the population that seems to believe technology can solve almost any problems without bringing any harms. This is rarely so, even if it is a common part of the sales techniques deployed around technologies. There are also others who think that transition to any new technology will inevitably bring disaster.

Technology is spontaneously generated when needed.

People, including economists, often talk as if, because a technology is needed or imagined, it will be developed, and it will be developed in time, and utilised as intended, with only the results expected. This is often not the case. We still do not have skies full of flying cars, we do not have bases on the Moon and Mars, but we do have climate change, which is a classic case of a known problem with technologies being ignored, because the technologies are profitable and useful and have been built into social relations, activities and hierarchies.

Technology has no real restrictions; it is magical.

There is another tendency for people to act as if technology was magical, and that because we can do one thing, or one device can be said to resemble another, then we will soon be able to do something else, which is actually difficult or impossible. Thus again, because we could travel to the Moon, we would soon have a Moon base, or we should soon be able to colonise the solar system, or travel to another star, or something. We might think computers resemble minds, so we should soon be able download individual minds into computers. We can in theory catch CO2 emissions from coal, therefore we will soon have emissions-free coal everywhere. Thorium is a good source of energy, therefore we will soon have functional Thorium reactors. Fusion is wonderful, therefore we will soon have fusion reactors. The list goes on. And the catch is that fantasy and imagining, or trying to do things which were previously ‘magical’, probably is important in developing new technology. The problem is that even if these things were possible, and I am not saying they are impossible, it does not mean they will happen now. There are other complexities to consider, including the social relations around the technology and current technology, the limited range of human attention and application, and the success of struggles for limited finance.

Technology can also be ‘magical’ in quite a literal sense, if we define magic as a way of changing human awareness, habit, focus and so on and producing ‘non-physical’ effects in the world. Technology can change the way people perceive things and think about things. For example, we can start thinking of minds in terms of computers (software and hardware), or we can start thinking of the cosmos in terms of clocks, or information processors. People can use imagined technologies to attempt to change our view of the world and our behaviour, as when they argue that clean cheap and quick nuclear energy is available, or clean coal will soon be available, or that renewable energy is already doing a large part of the energy work, and will easily be able to replace fossil fuels with no social change. Technology often seems to be part of a rhetoric of persuasion, used to change world views and actions, and to focus attention on particular parts of reality, often at the expense of others. You have nothing to fear from total computerised surveillance if you are good.

It seems easy for humans to relate to machines as if they were animate and intelligent, especially when the machines are unfamiliar; in which case their behaviour with those machines is also not purely rational. Humans give everything meaning, and use everything to try and make meaning for themselves and others, including technology, but as usual the meanings given may not be uniform throughout society, and may be a subject of struggle and disjunction. Meaning never exists by itself, so the meaning of a technology becomes tied into a web of meaning and contrasts in meaning. The technology can be made to support existing world views, even as it slowly changes them, and affects other meanings, actions and power relations. Magical/meaning warfare is not yet dead.

Unintended consequences disrupt our fantasies.

Then there is no necessity that the technologies would give the results which were intended or expected. Technologies often add complications to the task they were supposed to perform. They give people new opportunities for action and add complexities to life, and the results of those opportunities and complexities, can only rarely be predicted in detail. Even if the problems were predicted in detail, there is only a small chance many people will accept the prediction, over their fantasy. This unpredictability, can always be disruptive, in both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ways.

For example, the Internet was predicted to bring a world of free information-literacy and democracy. However, as well as providing communication between people who would never have previously met, it has probably brought endless shopping, induced polarisation, distorted information, strengthened politics as a form of identity, provided echo chambers for any idea whatsoever, magnified fantasy, and given new forms of political manipulation and Donald Trump. It brought both (some) benefits and (many) harms, and its main harms were not expected by most analysts.

We might also expect (via the so called ‘Jevons Paradox’) that if clean coal or gas could be made to work, then we would burn more coal and gas, and cause more ecological disaster through the mining and transport of coal and gas.

Resolution of fantasy and imagined expectations is a problem.

The series continues in:

Problems of Transition 03: Technology is social

Tags:Energy, imagination, renewable energy
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Problems of Transition to Renewable Energy 01: General Problems

October 21, 2019

This post is part of a short series on the problems of transition to renewable energy. It repeats and develops some earlier posts on this blog.

As the original post kept growing, I have decided to split it up into five shorter posts.

In this series of posts, I will deal with a set of general technological and social problems which are relevant to energy transition, before going into the problems of other necessary strategies (such as drawdown), and the problem with particular ‘renewable energies’.

Introduction: Fossil Fuels; virtues and problems

Fossil fuels are the most efficient sources of energy ever developed. Modern capitalist society is built on cheap fossil fuels (and steel making and plastics, which originate with the use of fossil fuels). Modern society may be said to depend on cheap fossil fuels.

Fossil Fuels are also amongst the most destructive forms of energy developed. They poison people and other creatures, they destroy functional ecologies, they are prone to disaster (leakage and spills, have vulnerability to acts of violence, coal seams can catch alight easily and be very difficult, or even impossible, to put out, etc), they can destroy water supplies, and they generate climate turmoil. All these various destructions mount up and get worse the more fuels are ‘mined’ and burnt.

Fossil Fuels are also finite and in decline. Although some say the end of fossil fuels is still a long way off, such fuels appear to be getting harder to find and utilise – hence the development and use of fracking, tar sands, open cut coal mines and other techniques. Fossil fuels nowadays produce more ecological devastation than they used to, through these new modes of extraction.

Fossil fuels have to be replaced if we are to save contemporary civilisations from ecological and energy collapse, and yet they have been essential to modern social organisation, function, social power relations and energy. This is the fundamental problem of contemporary life.

The further posts in this series follow this post:

Problems of transition 02: Technology as Fantasy
Problems of transition 03: Technology as Social
Problems of transition 04: Energy Return on Energy Input
Problems of transition 05: The Problem of Pace and Size
Problems of transition 06: Failing Infrastructure in the US
Problems of Transition 07: Neoliberalism and Developmentalism

Tags:Energy, renewable energy
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Climate, technology and chaos Blog

Posts Tagged ‘renewable energy’

Planet of the Humans: some comments

Bjorn Lomborg again

Problems for Renewables: Apparent costs and ‘lock-in’.

Only 1.3%

Problems of Transition 07: Neoliberalism and Developmentalism

Problems of Transition 05: The problem of pace and size

Problems of Transition 04: Energy Return on Energy Input

Problems of Transition 03: Technology is social

Problems of Transition 02: Technology as Fantasy

Problems of Transition to Renewable Energy 01: General Problems

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