Neither Denier Nor Doomer: Sensible Doers Required
Setting the framework for a sensible energy policy
Introduction
Earlier this week, Hannah Ritchie published a piece called Climate deniers and climate doomers are more alike than they’d like to think. It got me thinking in more depth about my own position, and what I should write about in future articles.
Her basic argument is climate deniers (I do not like that phrase and its connotations) want us to choose to do nothing and climate doomers say we are already screwed so there is no point doing anything. She believes in the people in the middle “doing stuff to fix it.” However, Hannah falls short because she does not explain what exactly we should be doing and what the objectives should be. “Doing stuff” seems to be a rather vague call to action that allows too much space for bad ideas flourish and perhaps crowd out the good. I think it is time for sensible doers to step forward.
My Position
I commented on Hannah’s article and briefly laid out my position that I shall expand upon here. First, I would classify myself as a “lukewarmer,” although I suspect many “doomers” would describe me as a “denier.” Yes, the planet has got warmer. Yes, anthropogenic CO2 emissions have played a part in that. However, I do not think a degree or so of warming per CO2 doubling is a particularly big problem. There are far bigger problems in the world.
I do believe we should strive for clean air. By which I mean we should minimise truly harmful emissions such as particulates, SOx and NOx. This is why I am not keen on coal as a fuel. I am also not very keen on having to depend upon the world’s despots for energy. Plus, as cheap fossil fuels become scarcer, we need cheap, reliable sources of energy to replace them.
However, I do have two big problems with the alleged solutions to the climate problem. The first is strategic. What if global warming is also caused by factors other than CO2? There has not been adequate explanation of the Minoan, Roman and Medieval warm periods, nor of the Little Ice Age. As far as we know, CO2 concentrations were relatively stable for the few thousand years prior to the early 1800’s, so that climate variability must have been caused by something else. Yet, we are spending most of our efforts on mitigation by trying to eliminate CO2 emissions and virtually nothing on adaptation. Adaptation has the advantage of protecting us regardless of the cause of warming. Too much spending on mitigation measures that have insignificant impact leaves nothing left over for adaptation.
My second problem is that the solutions we are working on like wind, solar and biofuels cause bigger problems than those they are supposed to solve. Overall, they perform badly on a range of sustainability measures, as I covered here. For instance, biofuels lead to clearing of rain forests to make way for palm oil plantations, which is certainly not good for biodiversity. In addition, burning trees at places like Drax produces more CO2 and more particulate emissions than burning coal as well as having a low EROEI. The mineral and land requirements for grid-scale wind and solar are extremely high too. Yes, they do not produce much in the way of CO2 emissions, unless the solar panels are made using coal as an energy source in China, but they still have a massive environmental footprint. After all that effort they only produce intermittent energy which is not suitable to run a modern economy. Adding batteries or other storage, further increases the environmental footprint, pushes costs prohibitively high and reduces EROEI well below the economic threshold. In no way, can they be thought of as a solution to our energy needs.
Each time humanity has progressed, it has been driven by the discovery or invention of better and higher density sources of energy, be it from wood to coal, or coal to oil or oil to natural gas. Billions more people are now thriving on the planet with more energy and food to support them and life expectancy has gone up dramatically.
The Way Forward
So, what might the way forward look like? I have written extensively about the costs of renewables, how Net Zero policies are damaging economic growth and killing jobs and how hydrogen is probably not the answer. I am also very concerned about the plans for energy scarcity and cutting meat consumption as part of Net Zero and the authoritarian measures being proposed to get us to accept all of this. Although Hannah probably did not mean to include the misanthropic Malthusians on the Climate Change Committee, UK FIRES, the House of Lords Environment Committee and the Behavioural Insights Team in her list of doomers, I certainly would. Their outlook is fundamentally pessimistic and they have been allowed to promote their tin-pot dictator policies without challenge.
It is time to set out an alternative future. A future that allows as many people as possible to lead happy and fulfilling lives. But also, a future where we minimise our environmental footprint and create places for biodiversity to flourish. That future must include cheap, abundant and safe energy and food. Yes, we must have other things too, but energy and food are fundamental to human flourishing.
I will set out in the next few articles ideas about how we might achieve that future. The first will summarise and build on the work of David MacKay in 2008 when he wrote “Sustainable Energy Without Hot Air”. We need an economic energy plan that adds up. McKay’s economic plan relied heavily on nuclear power.
However, there are a couple of problems with nuclear. The first is that it costs a lot and takes a long time to deliver. I will focus an article to how we bring down the costs of nuclear. The second is that nuclear power struggles to be as flexible as we need it to be to cope with rapid fluctuations in demand. A further article will look at some of the innovative technologies in the pipeline that enable load-following nuclear plants.
I hope you will enjoy the articles I have planned. If you have ideas about other subjects to cover, let me know in the comments.
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The real problem is nothing to do with CO2, AGW, Global Warming or whatever, it is this:
"At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.
"This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution," she said. Referring to a new international treaty environmentalists hope will be adopted at the Paris climate change conference later this year, she added: "This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”
http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/climate-change-scare-tool-to-destroy-capitalism/
David, I second Paul Dennis's comments about this thoughtful and balanced piece. If we could only see such views expressed regularly in the MSM it might lead to a sensible discussion before the politicians lead us to renewable-energy ruin. I find it remarkable that so many climate scientists are convinced by their models despite the fact that these same models have been unable to replicate the climate over the Holocene (the 10,000 years or so since the end of the last Ice Age). Whereas proxy data suggest a 'Holocene Optimum' some 5-7,000 years ago followed by an irregular decline in temperatures until the end of The Little Ice Age, climate models indicate a gradual rise in temperature throughout that period. Something is clearly wrong with the models and yet our leaders seem prepared to spend trillions of pounds dealing with a crisis that may not even exist. It is hard to believe that western governments have been willing to go so far on such questionable data. Instead of investing yet more money in IPCC type studies whose raison d'être seems to be merely to confirm alarmist predictions we need to subject these models to thorough and critical testing.