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Terry Leahy, 2017.
Renewables and a growth economy
In the most dominant version of the transition to a post-carbon economy, we will replace fossil fuel energy with renewables and be able to continue pretty much as we are going now, with a high tech growth economy. This vision is shared by even conservative politicians in the Australian scene and extends as far left as the Greens Party. The difference of opinion is in terms of timetable and the extent of government intervention necessary to secure this outcome. In terms of social theory this is the ‘ecological modernization’ thesis. For environmentalists with this view, the understanding is that economic growth, which is a growth in monetary exchange, can take place in fields that do not depend on the throughput of natural resources and do not cause environmental damage.
No further economic growth
For many in the environmentalist movement, this dominant outlook on our problems is seeming less and less plausible. The main argument is that a growth economy cannot be engineered that will bypass a growth in resource use, including energy use. In terms of an economic and social vision for the future, this viewpoint is associated with the work of Herman Daly and the idea of a ‘steady state economy’ –an economy with zero growth. In terms of the technical transition, this viewpoint suggests that we can replace fossil fuels with renewables to deliver energy services comparable to that in rich countries today. We would install renewables and increase the efficiency of energy use. However we could not grow the consumption of energy past this point, using renewables. Proponents of this ‘radical reformist’ position generally expect an increase in government intervention to achieve these goals, and major reforms of social welfare and work systems to enable a zero growth economy without poverty and unemployment as a consequence.
Drastic Energy Reduction
I will put to one side the issue of whether this radical reformist vision is achievable or desirable in relation to political, economic and cultural issues. A different kind of critique comes from a section of the environmentalist movement that is unconvinced that renewables can actually provide the energy services that we now receive from fossil fuel use. This viewpoint is shared by a disparate collection of political tendencies – ranging from anarchists to the permaculture movement, and from (some) eco-socialists to peak oilers.
I will stick to the technological issues and discuss two authors. Ted Trainer has long argued that the view that renewables can replace fossil fuels and provide equivalent energy services is mistaken. His arguments are always based on the latest research on renewable energy at any point in time and have been constantly updated and revised with new technological breakthroughs and new research. His central argument has always been that the intermittency of solar and wind power means that typical calculations of deliverable energy from renewables massively overestimate the amount of power actually available from these sources. What is not factored in are two things. One is that you need to build a lot more energy supply than the peak capacity in order to have enough total supply to cover the periods when solar and wind energy are down. The other is that you also need to supply storage capacity to deliver this energy when all the various plants that you are running are not operating. It is typical for Trainer to examine figures in detail and end up by declaring that to deliver the amount of energy that is being proposed you would need up to fifteen times the capacity that is being envisaged.
It is important to understand why this is taken as a problem. It is easy for those in the environmentalist movement to hear this and to just say, well yes, it will take time and government funding but eventually we will build a renewable system that will provide equivalent energy services. The cost in dollar value for energy will go up but is that a problem? The implication of Trainer’s analysis is that the ‘cost’ of energy is actually economic work – there is a rough equivalence between dollar cost and human work put into something. With energy, there comes a point where the consumption of energy services is not sufficient reward for the cost in human time that is diverted from other aspects of economic life. Trainer’s contention is that 100% replacement of fossil fuel energy services is that kind of target. Even if that target were to be totally achievable, it would distort the economy to such an extent that we would be better off without it.
Trainer also has another argument against 100% replacement of fossil fuel energy services with renewables. This is in terms of absolute limits of resource availability. For example, if we are using wind power there is a limit to the number of suitable sites for wind turbines. For example, there is a limit to how much land area we would be able to devote to biofuels, given our needs for other land uses. For example, if the cheapest way to store wind power is by pumping up to dam so that you can create hydropower at will, there is a limit to the number of rivers we could dam. There is a limit on the availability of the minerals we could use to create energy machines such as wind turbines, batteries or solar panels.
Trainer’s conclusion from these two basic arguments is that it would make sense to aim at something like ten per cent of energy use in the rich countries and to ensure that a similar target is reached in the poor countries. His detailed pictures of what such a ‘simpler way’ would look like in terms of daily life are based on this analysis. For example, we would work in major centres for only two days a week and would get to them by renewable-powered rail lines. We would consume much less and build a lot of things locally, by hand or using local renewable systems – when they were running. We would grow food locally and not use refrigeration. Local transport would almost always be on foot, by bicycle or with animal traction.
An author who approaches these issues from the perspective of ‘Peak Oil’ theory is Alice Friedemann. Her view is that industrial civilization, as we know it today, is not feasible without fossil fuel energy. She argues that to install wind and solar on a scale required to replace fossil fuel use now, we would be using vast amounts of energy to mine and transport the raw materials required, to make huge amounts of steel and concrete and to transport and install the finished components. Our small experiments in this direction today depend on the use of fossil fuels. She does not believe we could scale up renewables to supply both our current uses of energy and the program of construction of such a system in the first place. An underlying problem is that the current industrial order depends on diesel powered trucks to transport every industrial product. Renewables could not replace the diesel necessary to run such a fleet of trucks. Batteries are too heavy. Biodiesel cannot be scaled up to meet this demand. Trucks running on wires would use so much electricity (sourced from renewables) that there would be none left for our current uses of electric power.
Friedemann’s critique is aimed at the idea that we could supply current energy services with renewable energy. The message of her work is that we should prepare for this future energy shortage by restricting the use of oil to technologies that are efficient and require it – the main one being transport of goods by rail. Other transport uses – planes, private cars, trucks – should be eliminated. While she acknowledges climate change as a problem, she believes that projected quantities of available fossil fuels are vastly exaggerated. Accordingly, climate change may be less of a problem than we think. In comparison to Trainer’s writing, there is no very clear picture of the end state which we might aim at for in a world without fossil fuels.
And now the politics
I will address these comments to the green movement as a whole, rather than to any particular political tendency, and will assume that different tendencies will read the conclusions I come to in relation to their own broader goals.
We can see that the first two views outlined above have much more purchase in public discussion, with the ‘ecological modernization’ viewpoint being the one most common in the mainstream media – that renewables can replace 100% of energy services in the rich countries without too much economic disruption. Much of the environmentalist movement also promotes this view and sees the dominance of this perspective as the ideal climate for pushing renewables through state action. Tell people that the disruption will be minimal and they are more likely to support the necessary reforms.
However what we can readily see is that mainstream political parties are at best offering solutions that are ‘experimental’ – or promises that are as yet to reach their use by date. Real promises from the Kyoto protocol were only carried out to the extent that economic collapse reduced energy use. The Paris accords do not amount to anything sufficient to bring warming within the two degree limit – and now the USA is backing away from them. In Australia the Greens are still kicking around at ten per cent of the vote, the same as what they have been getting since the nineties, despite the best possible conditions for a third party to make headway – the system of preferential voting.
Surely this may give us pause. My reading of the public mood is completely at odds with the received wisdom in the environmentalist movement. The public views the most likely outcome of the present situation as collapse. Studies show that people do not think government or business are doing enough to deal with the environmental crisis or other threats to civilization. But they will not vote for an environmentalist party because they believe that environmentalists cannot be trusted, represent the middle class, want to take us all back to the stone age and so on. They do not actually think there IS any satisfactory solution to our current problems.
Two track thinking is the norm. In daily life the environmental problems are rarely mentioned and the expectation is business as usual. At the same time, deeper questioning reveals an expectation of collapse. These two viewpoints never meet. The implication, if you like, is ‘make hay while the sun shines’. On the other hand, the deep disquiet of the present conjunction is never far below the surface.
Politically, I can see two different ways the public may be receiving the news coming from the environmentalist movement – that renewables can readily replace 100% of fossil fuel energy services.
In what is most likely to be the dominant view, the public notes that nothing is actually happening much in replacing fossil fuel energy. The public assumes that this inertia reflects the huge costs of renewable alternatives, something that would be obvious to anyone who has thought about buying a solar array and battery to power a typical Australian house, or wanted to replace their car with an all electric vehicle. They believe that the environmentalist movement is lying to them, wanting this transition at any cost – and playing down the economic disruption entailed. This is the view of the vast majority.
A small minority of dyed in the wool capitalist ideologues take a different viewpoint. They are confident that this mainstream environmentalist news is correct and the normal process of capitalist development will sort out all these problems. The market will replace fossil fuels with renewables as they come down in price, something which is already beginning to happen. Accordingly they resent the environmentalist movement for trying to unnaturally hurry these developments with unwise regulations and subsidies which just harm the economy. These minority views get a disproportionate amount of airplay in the pro-capitalist media.
Here is my paradoxical suggestion. Let us leave aside the question of which of these three technological arguments is actually true. From the point of view of politics, the public is much more likely to trust the environmental movement if it is saying the following:
Climate change is a huge problem for our species. To do something about it will require immense sacrifices in our current lifestyle, starting now. At the end of these changes, we will live a much more parsimonious and less affluent existence. The alternative is far worse. We need to be courageous and selfless for the sake of future generations.
This view is much closer to what the public actually thinks than anything that is coming out of the mainstream environmentalist movement. The mainstream movement claims that affluence can continue and we can shift to renewables without so much as an economic hiccup. For most people, such claims demonstrate that the green movement is just as duplicitous and manipulative as big business and the established political elites.
The second world war state of emergency discourse has never been carried far enough by the green movement. It is treated as a recipe for a crash through economic program but the cultural dimensions of such a strategy are being constantly undermined. Instead of rousing talk about brave self sacrifice and tightening our belts, there are constant reassurances that renewables are now cheaper than coal. All we need is a bit of tinkering in parliament to seal the deal. Nobody believes this and you will never get a mass movement going with this lame message.
Further Reading:
Bowden, Vanessa and Leahy, Terry (2016) Don’t Shoot the Messenger: How Business Leaders Get Their Bearings on a Matter of Science, Journal of Sociology. 52(1), 219-234.
Friedemann, Alice J. (2016) When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation. Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition, Heidelberg.
Gow, John and Leahy, Terry (2005) Apocalypse probably: agency and environmental risk in the Hunter region, Journal of Sociology. 41 (2), 1–25.
Leahy, Terry (2017): Radical Reformism and the Marxist Critique, Capitalism Nature Socialism. pp 1-14 On line.
Leahy, Terry; Bowden, Vanessa and Steven Threadgold (2010) Stumbling Towards collapse: Coming to terms with the climate crisis, Environmental Politics. 19, 851-868.
Norgaard, Kari M. (2011) Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life, MIT Press.
Trainer, T. (2007) Renewable energy cannot sustain a consumer society. Springer, Dordrecht.