Opinion: There are some things I thought I knew about the complex crises afflicting this earth. I thought we were undergoing an energy transition away from fossil fuels to renewables. The relentless slow rise of global temperatures was, I thought, one aspect of this polycrisis we could fix – not biodiversity loss, not the forever chemicals, not the fresh water shortage, not our destructive use of land.
I thought the transition to solar and wind power would radically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and enable us to slow and eventually stop the earth getting hotter.
After all, doesn’t civilisation have a history of energy transitions?
Starting in the 18th century, haven’t we transitioned from the age of wood to that of coal, followed by the transition to oil and natural gas as our energy sources a century later?
Then comes the transition to nuclear power claimed as emissions-free by some users – in France and Japan, for example. Surely the only thing emissions free is the actual current that travels down the wires of a nuclear power plant. How much fossil fuel energy did the construction of those plants use? How was the bauxite mined?
So here we are at last in the 21st century kidding ourselves we’re transitioning away from fossil fuels by increasing the proportions of sun and wind we use to power our homes and devices.
But the evidence is stark. No transition has ever taken place. Historical verities have become shibboleths and these have acquired an extra dimension with the war in the Middle East.
We’ve layered each energy source one on top of another, benefiting from the new, praising its advantages. The discovery of coal didn’t save Europe’s forests. The trees continued to be cut to provide the wood to prop up the tunnels in the coal mines. And we still use coal to heat the boilers to produce the steel needed for the oil rigs and for the gizmos with which we decorate our lives.
Efficiencies increased production and so we’ve needed more of everything.
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Energies, writes Jean-Baptiste Fressoz in More & More & More: an all-consuming history of energy, are symbiotic entities that depend on complex webs of materials. After two centuries of “energy transitions”, humanity has never burned so much oil and gas, so much coal, so much wood, he says.
How many fossil fuels will the 54 wind turbines planned for the wind farm in the South Taranaki Bite use? Let’s start with the copper – according to the International Energy Agency figures the turbines will use a total of 7,200 tonnes of copper.
Now here’s the estimated real price of copper:
The conversion of 1kg from the ore into concentrate generates on average 210kg of mine waste, 113kg of mill tailings, 2kg of slag, and 2.3kg of sulphur-bearing co-product.
Imagine 1.6 million tonnes of earth mined, transported and left in tailings just for the copper for this wind farm.
As petrol and diesel prices increase, sending us all scrambling for EVs, here’s a reminder that the construction of these vehicles requires graphite, copper, nickel, manganese, cobalt, lithium and certain rare earth elements. None of these could be mined, delivered, refined without fossil fuels.
Mined but not here. Many of us are wary of digging up our precious earth to contribute to these things on which our daily lives depend. We look with horror at the mess in somebody else’s backyard.
But not the present government which has allocated $80 million to further the extraction and processing of these minerals. And not a thought for those with a view to the future who are already working on viable recycling projects.
As for conservation and using less, the concept is anathema to the capitalist ethos within which we are trapped.
We’re fortunate, though, that 80 percent of our electricity is “renewable”. But it’s our total energy use that’s crucial and this is estimated to be only 28 percent “renewable”. If a transition can be measured then that 28 percent is a measure of our failure to protect our children’s future.
All right, it could also be seen as a sign of our success. We’ve enjoyed our increased affluence and generally improved our standard of living but the proportion of renewable energy has remained at 28 percent since 1990.
Not so for our per capita consumption which has almost trebled since the 1950s. We’re not alone in this. Ranked above us in the fossil fuel-consuming stakes are six nations greedier than us. In the past 10 years, despite all the intense talk about solar, carbon in the atmosphere increased by 20.5ppm and is now at 429.3. If we’d listened to the scientists we would have stopped at 350.
The actual world energy mix for 2024 shows the other side of the often-touted increases in solar electricity. From 2010 to 2023 twice as much energy was derived from coal, oil and gas as from wind and solar.
How will these figures look now that war is wrecking the most oil-rich part of the world and sending our expectations and our economies into a spiral? The US military is the world’s largest consumer of hydrocarbons. What will they leave us?
We’ve known that fossil fuels are a depleting resource. There’s a sly acronym that’s used to show this. Energy return on investment, also sometimes called energy returned on energy invested, is the ratio of the amount of usable energy delivered from a particular energy resource to the amount of energy used to obtain that energy resource.
In other words, every energy technology has energy costs to produce it.
Coal was the magic rock brought up from the depths when human lives were expendable in the shafts. Then oil gushed unstoppably out of the deserts. Now we’re having to work harder to find and extract it. Some of the pastures of Taranaki have become fracking fields. Hydraulic fracking is moving closer to the Arctic in Canada.
Thus, the energy return on investment for fossil fuels has been declining as we use up the accessible stuff. The energy returned on energy invested for renewables, on the other hand, can be a slither better, depending on what and how you’re counting. Often forgotten or ignored is the fact that renewables depend on fossil fuels.
Still, we have to keep on this track. Carbon zero by 2050 would be an achievement. But 3 degrees of extra heat, due by the end of the century, will reduce the liveable and arable areas of the planet to nearly zilch.
I had thought that solar was the answer. If it isn’t, what is?
My thanks to Mike Joy and Jack Santa Barbara.