Emissions and omissions: the green backlash against renewables

Part 3 of a series

(Part 1 read here)

(Part 2, read here)

Nobody really knows what the post-Covid world will look like, but as the virus gradually loses its grip on the world’s imagination, we are likely to see more discussion about what our “new normal” should look like. This is likely to be a hazardous conversation involving a lot of shouting and attempts at moral blackmail (see example at left).

The drop in carbon emissions (eight per cent in the March quarter in Australia’s case) has been widely heralded by media as “the silver lining” of the Covid 19 epidemic, as in a recent report  by the online New Daily. After listing the stats of what the article refers to as “carbon dioxide pollution”, its writers are quick to refer to the 25 million infections world-wide, thus ensuring we don’t get the idea they are suggesting the environmental benefits of the virus outweigh its effect on our health.

But once the health of human beings is no longer considered to be the central issue facing us, activists will begin to beat the drum for the health of “the planet”. The cost of achieving the preconditions for this health, for economies already impoverished by COVID 19, is unlikely to be considered any sort of handicap.

The New Daily article, like others I have seen on the same subject, does not allude to the massive increases in poverty and unemployment also directly linked to the decline of air and road travel. These increases have been swift and cruel, particularly in regions that rely heavily on the tourism industry. In March and April I saw at first hand in Cambodia, Laos and Jordan how COVID 19 struck at the same time tourism was booming. In Wadi Musa, the small city immediately adjacent to Petra, local hotels were expanding and renovating after a record influx of visitors in 2019. Our Air B and B host worked in one of the hotels, and was stood down within days of the Jordanian government closing its borders. After a week or two he had to leave his flat because he couldn’t pay the rent. Similar things are beginning to happen in Australia, no doubt, but we have been buffered by the generous government handouts other countries cannot afford.

Arguably it is dangerous, both culturally and economically, for any regional economy to put too many eggs in the tourist basket and perhaps that will be one of the painful lessons COVID 19 washes up. But it would also be dangerous to extrapolate that we would all eventually be better off in a world with less travel or less energy consumption in general because of the benefits brought about by the subsequent reduction in emissions.

This widely-held belief is accompanied, at least in the developed world, by an understandable longing by many for a simpler, lower-voltage sort of lifestyle with radically less conspicuous consumption. The desire for 100 per cent renewable energy is fuelled by our dissatisfaction with the tenor of modern life, and the sense that we have been plundering and destroying the Earth in order to sustain that tenor. There is a growing conviction that we can’t have our economic cake and eat it too.

But, while some envisage renewables powering a scaled-down world economy, others in the renewables camp believe there may be a Magic Pudding after all, a pudding that will last as long as the sun shines and the wind blows. Which view is more realistic? Could renewables supply the amount of energy required to run the developed world in the style to which it has become accustomed and bring the developing world to the same level? Unless something else proves much more viable than it is now (hydrogen?), this would require a huge amount of resources and land to create the solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and hydro-electric facilities required.

The danger is that in this process not only we might not only cause more damage than we are currently causing by mining and using  fossil fuel, but also that the transition to renewables might have very little effect on global warming.

Let’s look at that damage. It has already begun in earnest, and it is being chronicled not by evil fossil fuellers but by environmentalists. In March this year the BBC’s environment reporter Matt McGrath reported on research that showed wind, solar and hydro power installations posed a “growing threat to key conservation areas”. The researchers, led by Dr José Rehbein from the University of Queensland, published their findings in the journal Global Change Biology. They found more than 2,200 renewable energy facilities already operating worldwide inside important biodiversity areas, with more than 900 currently being built.

Dr Rehbein was “extremely alarmed” by the findings: ‘Energy facilities and the infrastructure around them such as roads and increased human activity can be incredibly damaging to the natural environment. Many of these developments, when not well planned for, are not compatible with biodiversity conservation.”

It’s not just solar and wind farms that are threatening the natural environment, but the mines that are being dug to supply the materials needed to create them — and the batteries needed to make them viable. Of course mines have always caused damage, but mining for renewables appears to be more extensive and the demand is growing rapidly.

The need for nickel (used in lithium ion batteries) for example, is expected to rise more than four-fold by 2030. As reported in The Times (and reprinted in The Australian) this week, nickel mining has in recent months caused disastrous spills of oil and toxic waste in Siberia and New Guinea. The mining technique used in New Guinea uses a process called acid leaching, which creates 1.5 tonnes of waste for every tonne of nickel. That waste is dumped in the deep sea because it is considered unsafe to store it in an area prone to high rainfall and earthquakes.

A study just released in the journal Nature Communications found that 82 per cent of all mining areas target minerals used in renewable energy production, rather than fossil fuels.  With only 17 per cent of the world’s energy coming from renewables, the authors express understandable concern that the effects biodiversity  of mining for materials used to make renewables on biodiversity will increase. In fact, say the authors, this mining may pose a greater threat to biodiversity than global warming.

They write in their abstract: Mining threats to biodiversity will increase as more mines target materials for renewable energy production and, without strategic planning, these new threats to biodiversity may surpass those averted by climate change mitigation.

The authors see the same process in train as Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs identified more trenchantly in Planet Of The Humans. (See part 2 of this series). They also identify the same wilful blindness to consequences among those who advocate renewable energy as a viable replacement for fossil fuels or even nuclear energy, writing that the potential losses in biodiversity from mining for renewables are not “seriously considered in international climate policies”.

Unlike Moore and Gibbs the authors of both these papers call for policies to mitigate the effect of the renewables industry on the environment. Whether this is possible remains to be seen, and may depend on how much renewable energy (and therefore how much mining) we settle for. It is hard to predict the future when the technology that will shape it is still developing. Moore and Gibbs don’t spell out their solution, if they have one, but seem to be advocating some sort of return to a pre-industrial society. Let’s face it, this is unlikely unless we see the emergence of some global Pol Pot-style regime. Personally, for all its faults, I prefer capitalism.

In any case, cost and environmental damage aside, the likelihood is that a massive and hugely expensive shift to renewables would have very little effect on global temperatures. The fact that these are widely expected to continue to rise for many decades to come, whatever we do, is the other reason we need to look realistically at renewables. Might it not be better to invest more money and creativity in dealing with temperatures that are going to get hotter and sea levels that are going to increase anyway? The Catch 22 here is of course that such measures will require more resources and more energy to create, but we can’t avoid this dilemma.

If human-produced CO2 is really the main driver of global warming, then, given the current viable alternatives, the only way we can mitigate both the warming and the effects of warming is to embrace nuclear power at some level. Germany realised this after phasing out its nuclear plants and ramping up renewables; to provide the back-up they needed, they imported nuclear energy from France. Bill Gates realises this, which is why he is investing his millions in developing small, sodium-cooled nuclear power stations that can back up renewable energy. Even Zion Lights, former British spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, has now begun campaigning for nuclear energy alongside Michael Shellenberger . In the same link, Shellenberger points out that Britain’s nuclear power plants require 450 times less space than wind and solar farms.

One of my most memorable interviews was with the novelist Xavier Herbert, after he had chosen to live out his last few years in Central Australia. It was in the mid-1980s, when Australians appeared to have abandoned the idea of nuclear power and invested large amounts of personal energy in opposing the mining of its uranium. Herbert surprised me with his clear advocacy of the nuclear option; it seemed to clash with his lifestyle, his camping in the bush under the stars in his beloved Land Rover. He may even have had a solar panel to meet his simple needs. When I asked him why he favoured going nuclear, his answer was simple: humans by their very nature have to go forward; the development of nuclear energy is a step up the ladder of progress humans have already taken and can now only be ignored to their detriment. It is baseless and almost absurd to believe we cannot learn from experience to solve the teething problems of nuclear energy; indeed, that process is already well under way.

If Australia decides the money is on solar farms like the one proposed for the Barkly, it will be investing its way into a technological cul de sac, while implicitly rejecting faith in the human ability to look for better solutions to our problems. Covering the Earth in structures that gather power inefficiently and require constant replacement when we know how to harness virtually unlimited power from grains of sand looks like an admission of failure, and a highly premature one at that.

Dave Richards