Be careful what we wish for

I find it curious when I peruse the latest edicts of looming catastrophe in social and news media that among them are so few genuine attempts to suggest a practical way forward. The focus on Australia’s terrible fires seemed for many commentators nothing more than an overdue opportunity to at last present a scary example of the actual consequences of human-made warming.

Usually this was expressed in the form of an attack on the coalition government. Yet an honest appraisal suggests that the jury is still out on the issue of what caused the fires, that increased fuel loads accompanied by the effects of a long drought and a hot summer may have been the most significant factor, and that Australia has seen more extensive devastation caused by bushfires in previous years, if never so close to so many populated areas.

We have somehow nurtured a culture in which people would rather be wrong than uncertain, that values the expression of passionate feelings more than facts, and energetically seeks out the worst possible news. Every cloud has a lead lining, it seems, and cynical alarmists jump at any chance to throw more and more fuel on the bonfire of fear and panic. Worst of all, we actually encourage our children to join in this frenzy, burdening them with terrible anxiety when they should be growing up with a sense of security, unburdened by adult concerns.

Meanwhile, where are the solutions? Where is the roadmap to the cooler, safer, happier planet — assuming that is what everyone really wants? All one mostly sees in the mass media are simplistic calls for drastic reductions in emissions, with little practical regard for how they are to be achieved. “This is an emergency. just do it!” is the message. Regularly, from The Guardian or commentators like Naomi Klein and now Greta Thunberg, we hear the suggestion that only getting rid of capitalism altogether and replacing it with “something altogether new” will suffice. It is hard to imagine what that might be other than some sort of global socialist state. Personally I would prefer the devil I know, for all its faults. And yet that overarching world government would still have the challenge of how to completely overhaul our many and disparate systems of electricity and fuel supply, systems that have evolved over centuries with billions if not zillions of dollars worth of infrastructure to go with them.

Knowing this, where is the widespread public discussion about the costs of replacing this infrastructure with renewables? It was certainly missing in our last federal election. An Australia powered purely by solar, wind and hydro would require massive resources to create, whether those resources come out of Australian earth or elsewhere. They include the minerals not only to create the wind turbines and solar panels, and replace them as required, but, more importantly, the batteries to run millions of cars and trucks and store power when there is no backup from turbines run on fossil fuels. And those batteries will also require disposal and replacement; only wind and sunshine are truly renewable. The expensive battery system now in use in Alice Springs provides back up for minutes, rather than hours and certainly not the days that would be required in the advent of a serious rain event.

Even if all these resources could be marshalled, the sheer financial cost of doing so in a mere ten or twenty years would likely bankrupt the country and cripple our health, education, transport and welfare systems. Roger Pielke Jr has famously estimated that if we wanted to reduce  carbon emissions to zero by 2050, and we solely choose wind power as the solution, we’d need to build and deploy 1,500 wind turbines on about 300 square miles every day for the next 30 years. I don’t know what the maths is for solar, but given the notorious intermittency of sunshine, one would imagine it would also be very high. Alternatively, says Pielke, to reach this target would require a new nuclear power plant every day.

A second issue that goes almost completely undiscussed among my Facebook friends is the fact that the emissions of the world’s two biggest nations are increasing and will most likely continue to do so until at least 2030, the year by which climate activists propose Australia should have zero emissions. Again and again, they say this is an issue of moral leadership rather than practical progress, the latter presumably meant to follow the former, unless we are simply indulging in an act of national virtue signalling. As the Prime Minister recently clearly elucidated, a serious decrease in emissions is unlikely to happen while India and China struggle, understandably, to supply their billions of citizens with the same kind of power supply we have.

It is at this point in the discussion, if the one who poses these issues has not already been labelled a denier and henceforth “cancelled”,  that we come to the precautionary principle. If we cannot be sure about how bad anthropogenic climate change is going to be, why don’t we just go all out for renewables anyway? We will have a cleaner, safer world, whatever is really happening with CO2, and we will have satisfied ourselves that we have done all we can to prevent a possible global catastrophe.

The problem with this argument is that it assumes that there is only one sort of catastrophe we have to worry about, and that is man-made global warming. But there are likely to be effects from creating a world run by renewables that we are overlooking in our haste to get rid of carbon. These include the rapid depletion of minerals required for batteries and subsequent inability to store excess power generated by renewables. Or there is the loss of land for farming and habitat to huge wind and solar farms and biofuel crops, the inability of the poor to pay for increased electricity costs. There is also the matter of the fossil fuel it will require to  create all these panels, wind farms and batteries.

Neverthelss it is reasonable, if indeed not urgent, to pursue the precautionary principle, given that a majority of people seem to believe that human-made warming is a threat. We just need to carefully consider what sort of precautions will be the most effective.

Even if we were able to create a world of zero emissions by 2030, which now seems impossible, we might still see increasing temperatures for many decades, if models are accurate. Or, if the models are wrong, we might not. Thus, one might reasonably contend that the highest precautionary priority  lies  in creating human systems that are resilient and resistant to the effects of climate change. Humans have shown themselves to be good at this over milllenia.

If we are to see flooding of low lying areas, we must create engineering systems to prevent it, just as the Dutch built dykes hundreds of years ago. If we are to see more extreme weather events, we need to be able to build stronger dwellings – such as we did after Cyclone Tracy – and more shelters to protect people. If we are to see more fires, we must minimise fuel load and reconsider where it is safe for people to live and design fire-proof dwellings.

When it comes to actually reducing our emissions, we have to ask what will be the most cost-effective way of doing so. This question does not arise out of an obsession with that awful thing called economics, as some of my Facebook friends think, but out of the need to protect future generations from the costs of our present actions, financial and social. Will those generations be able to rely on cheap and abundant electricity as ours has, to keep their food longer, to keep them warm in winter and cool in summer, to have hospitals and health systems that run smoothly and efficiently 24 hours a day? Millions of Indians are still waiting for a chance to live in that world. Will we snatch it from them before they have a chance to share in it?

Many have concluded that one way to enact the precautionary principle effectively would be to sharply increase our use of nuclear power, while gradually reducing our use of fossil fuels, focussing on gas and carbon sequestering in coal power stations. We cannot build a new nuclear power plant every day, but more might ensure we had sufficient power to mitigate the effects of climate change while moving over 100 years to lower or zero emissions. The nuclear solution assumes no path is without risk, whether it be the path of nuclear power or renewables, but its adherents, such as non-denier and former Time Magazine environmental hero Michael Schellenberger, argue convincingly that the safety record of nuclear power is much better than coal’s. We should remember the only reason that European countries like France and Sweden are able to lecture Australia about fossil fuels is not because they use more renewables but because they continue to use nuclear power. They have done so without serious mishap for decades. Scotland is one of the few European countries that can boast a very high level of renewables, but their ocean wind farms are backed up by nuclear power, which generates about a third of Scottish electricity.

The spectre of Chernobyl and Fukushima always arises when nuclear is mentioned, along with the issue of nuclear waste. Schellenberger and others point out that the death toll  from those two accidents has often been wildly exaggerated and the true count is dwarfed by the number of people who die from respiratory diseases caused by fossil fuel pollution (not carbon dioxide). The technology of nuclear power plants has advanced enormously, as has the ability to recycle nuclear waste as fuel.

Moreover, the predictions that we are hearing every day force us to choose between the lesser of predicted evils: a world of rapidly rising sea levels that is too hot for millions, or dealing with possible isolated nuclear accidents and radioactive waste, the latter having already been with us for many decades. I would argue that the third evil is rarely perceived: a world which is forever struggling to produce the power it needs for it people to live safely and comfortably, and for manufacturing to continue reliably.

True, nuclear power requires a lot of fossil fuels to build in the first place, perhaps more than solar panels or wind turbines. But if they last longer and the power they provide can be used to not only operate economies and keep people cool (and warm), but also to power the building of new nuclear plants, then they are worthy of serious consideration. Even the waste issue needs to be looked at again, because new generation nuclear power plants can recycle waste to create more power.

In the last analysis, one must doubt the sincerity of anyone who claims to fear for the future of the world but blankly refuses to at least open-mindedly consider the nuclear option. Australians are remarkably and inexplicably pig-headed about nuclear power, while the nation continues to supply other countries with yellowcake. Our abundant supplies of both uranium and thorium would provide us with a very effective and extremely long term power option, with zero emissions.

I am not attached to the nuclear option, any more than I am convinced we will need it to save the planet. But if it is possible that the planet is saving, we need to come up with seriously and realistic options to preserve it. While we dither with dreams and indulge in politics, important green issues with practical and relatively inexpensive solutions, such as the proliferation of unbiodegradable plastics and the overfishing and pollution of our oceans are getting far less attention and funding than global warming.  Meanwhile carbon emissions continue to increase. Those who are proposing renewables as the primary solution to global warming have a responsibility to explain in detail how they will be implemented and paid for without seriously endangering future generations.

Dave Richards