Since 1995 there have been 25 global conferences on climate change. At every one our so-called political leaders have kicked the can down the road and sung from a bright green hymnbook.
Greta Thunberg has disparaged the refrain as nothing more than “blah, blah, blah.”
She is right of course. Blah, blah blah has kept emissions rising, along with energy spending and its twin sibling unbridled economic growth.
Blah, blah blah has become the standard substitute for the conversation that needs to occur at global conferences and in every public venue: how to shrink the economy and beat a sustainable retreat?
The notion of shrinking the economy isn’t as medieval as you might think, given the enormous waste of our high-tech and high energy civilization. The existing system contains so much slack and fat that we could easily reduce our energy spending to levels common in the 1960s and 1970s. That wasn’t exactly the Dark Ages. (More on why this is possible, what stands in the way, and how to get there, in a second piece tomorrow.)
Of course such a conversation is considered impossible by our leaders who are ruled by the mantra of growth and short-term election hurdles.
So in Canada, the world’s fourth largest oil exporting nation, the blah blah blah refrain gets louder by the day. We want our emissions and our green cake, too.
Politicians and the Canada Energy Regulator claim, for example, that “carbon capture, utilization and storage can play an essential role in the transition to a prosperous net-zero economy.”
Meanwhile the media churns out daily stories on how grey, blue or green hydrogen will power our trains and planes. Maybe pink hydrogen will be next.
Millions of electric vehicles, of course, will replace the evil combustion engine and place us in an automated landscape where we don’t have to think about driving or owning vehicles. Amazon and Google will do that for us.
At the same time, G20 leaders asks us to believe that “people, the planet and prosperity” can go together as we follow a line called exponential economic growth.
And if renewables can’t electrify everything and the Green New Deal falters, then direct air capture will suck the CO2 out of air and bring us closer to a rapturous net-zero world.
Unfortunately no such thing as “clean energy” truly exists. Every form of energy comes with an ecological cost and has physical limits.
Let’s examine four heavily hyped technologies upon which the have-it-all crowd rest their dreams: carbon capture, utilization and storage; direct air capture; dematerialization; and hydrogen power. (We’ll leave electric vehicles for another day.)
Carbon capture and storage
For more than two decades politicians, academics and industrialists have promised great things from carbon capture and storage, or CCS. But after years of trial and error and multiple project cancellations due to prohibitive costs, this highly expensive technology stores less than one-tenth of one per cent of global emissions a year. Even JP Morgan in its 2021 annual energy report sarcastically notes that the “highest ratio in the history of science appears to be the number of academic papers written about CCS compared to its real life implementation.”
Meanwhile the International Energy Agency boasts that carbon capture and storage can help heavy industry remove 13 per cent of global emissions in one of its Clean Technology Scenarios. For the record Canada has three CCS facilities (two in Alberta and one in Saskatchewan). All were subsidized with tax dollars and Saskatchewan’s Boundary Dam project never reached its carbon targets.
Carbon capture, utilization and storage gives new meaning to the term energy intensity. First it must capture CO2 emitted from an oilsands plant or fertilizer maker. Then it must transport the gas in a pipeline to a graveyard. Next it buries the CO2 by compressing it into a liquid and injecting it deep into the ground. The government must monitor the storage site to make sure it doesn’t leak for more than a thousand years. The injection process can contaminate groundwater, trigger earthquakes and sprout leaks to the surface. (Alberta’s taxpayers have assumed all liabilities for the long-term carbon storage underground at its two facilities.)
The energy ecologist Vaclav Smil considers CCS a ridiculous endeavour because it will never scale up fast enough to make a dent in global emissions. The global economy now produces about 37 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. Tackling 10 per cent of that problem (roughly four billion tonnes) would require the same infrastructure that now supports the entire global oil industry, which produces four billion tonnes of oil a year.
“It took us 100-plus years to develop an oil industry, which is taking four billion tonnes out of the ground… and then taking it up and refining and using it,” explained Smil in a recent interview.
“Now we would have to develop a new industry, which would take four billion tonnes, and store it… and guarantee that it will stay there forever. Something like this cannot be done in five, or 10, or 15 years. And this is 10 per cent. So, simply on the matter of scale, carbon sequestration is just simply dead on arrival.”
Direct air capture
If technicians can’t figure a way to economically bury the globe’s carbon waste stream why then not capture it in the air and use it in a greenhouse or as a fuel? Although this pitch sounds tantalizing, its material and energy demands are herculean.
The technology basically uses big fans to suck lots of air and then filters that air through a chemical soup — such as an aqueous hydroxide solution — to remove the carbon. It’s highly energy intensive because the machines must suck huge volumes of air to remove small amounts of carbon. Small scale projects are being tested in British Columbia, Iceland, Switzerland and Texas.
Like carbon capture and storage, direct air capture doesn’t scale up very well. Researchers recently calculated that if the world deployed direct air capture using a chemical reaction that relies on caustic soda to break down CO2 emissions to water and sodium carbonate, it would require a new mining industry.
Just to capture 25 per cent of global emissions, it would need a system of extracting caustic soda that is 20 to 40 times greater than current global production. And this system would consume 15 to 24 per cent of the world’s primary energy spending to get the job done.
The technology also has a big footprint. An industrial factory, powered by natural gas and capable of removing just one billion tonnes of carbon out of the 37 billion tonnes emitted per year, would occupy an area five times greater than Los Angeles. If powered by solar energy such a factory would require a landmass 10 times greater than Delaware.
In other words don’t expect a direct air capture unit in your backyard soon. One group of researchers concluded that the technology “is unfortunately an energetically and financially costly distraction in effective mitigation of climate changes at a meaningful scale.” Another recent study concluded that carbon capture and storage and direct air capture projects emit more carbon than they remove or store.
Dematerialization
Dematerialization is seen by many academics as another blessed path for reducing global emissions. The word refers to using fewer materials or less energy to make stuff. But there’s a big problem making more efficient and cheaper stuff and it’s called Jevons’ Paradox.
In the 19th century, the British engineer William Jevons thought more efficient steam engines might result in less coal burning. But that’s not what he found. Efficient steam engines accelerated coal consumption as more industries found more uses for steam engines.
LED lights work the same way: they save energy. But their efficiency and cheapness encourages wider adoption of the technology (everything from carpets to toys). As a result LEDs result in more energy and material spending. Efficient combustion engines didn’t result in fewer drivers but in more drivers demanding bigger and more wasteful SUVs.
Renewables aren’t exempt from Jevons’ Paradox either. To date solar and wind energy haven’t retired a single fossil fuel because they have been used to supplement more energy spending.
A group of MIT researchers recently looked at 57 cases of dematerialization and asked if these products kept more resources and energy in the ground, unspent. They found that Jevons’ Paradox ruled and totally. More efficiency just led to more spending. Their conclusion: “Technological improvement has not resulted in ‘automatic’ dematerialization in these cases.” They also found that environmental impact did not diminish as people got richer.
Hydrogen economy
In the future, hydrogen will play a huge role in decarbonizing the global economy by powering trains, trucks and airplanes. At least that’s the Canadian sales pitch. Although the hydrogen economy has been hyped for years, it has never materialized. Physics and financial and energy realities explain why it will always remain a niche player.
For starters, hydrogen, the least dense energy fuel on the planet, is not an energy source but an energy sink. The gas can’t be mined like oil or methane; it has to be made from methane or water with processes that require lots of energy such as steam reforming or electrolysis.
About 96 per cent of the world’s hydrogen is cracked from methane, largely mined by hydraulic fracturing. Hydrogen cracked from methane produces greenhouse gas emissions on the scale of the world’s aviation industry or greater.
But hydrogen now comes with a fancy and deceptive vocabulary. Grey hydrogen is made from methane. Blue hydrogen is made from methane whose CO2 emissions have been buried underground by carbon capture and storage systems that largely don’t exist. And green hydrogen comes from solar or wind power erected and maintained by fossil fuels. (Brown hydrogen comes from coal but nobody really wants that colour.)
Yes, it is possible to make so-called green hydrogen from water via electrolysis. But that takes energy too, and lots of capital. (One unit of hydrogen made from methane costs less than a dollar while so-called green hydrogen costs on average more than $7 a unit.)
The astute U.S. energy critic Alice Friedemann has calculated that it takes about four units of energy to make one unit of hydrogen energy. “If you don’t understand this concept, please mail me ten dollars and I’ll send you back a dollar,” quips Friedemann.
These kind of profound energy losses makes hydrogen a dead end. But it also explains why natural gas exporters (Russia, the Middle East and Alberta) like to talk up the potential of hydrogen like used car salesmen. “Blue hydrogen” just ensures more natural gas sales.
But can’t fuel cells act as a green alternative to combustion engines and diesel generators? Yes, to a limited degree. But the fuel cell consumes rare minerals. The polymer membrane fuel cell, for example, needs platinum to work.
The Italian physicist Ugo Bardi, who calls himself “a former hydrogenist,” has calculated that “if you were to replace the current combustion vehicles with fuel cells, the world couldn’t produce enough platinum.”
Even the usual tech cheering crowd, such as energy analyst Wood Mackenzie, have doubts about the current hydrogen buzz amounting to anything. “Realistically, it’ll be another decade before hydrogen starts to make a meaningful contribution to decarbonization,” says Mackenzie.
But don’t bank on even that. The hydrogen hoax represents another example of an energy sucking complexity designed to extend the shelf life of fossil fuels.
The evidence here from just four so-called net-zero solutions shows that blah blah blah leads to energy dead ends and an avoidance of the real solution: economic contraction.
Can we really slow our economy to the point that it shrinks without plunging people into grim lifestyles, like those that climate change will most assuredly impose on civilization if we don’t address the ecological crisis? Yes, we can. Will we do so to avoid calamity? Probably not.
Will we even have that conversation? Maybe. Next I’ll explain what that might entail.
Thanks to bright green technologies, we can continuously grow the level of consumption on planet Earth and deliver a bloated North American lifestyle to all without inviting climate catastrophe or a general breakdown of natural ecosystems that support all living things.
That’s the big bold lie that politicians are telling themselves this week at yet another climate conference. Greta Thunberg calls such dissembling just so much “blah, blah, blah.”
As I’ll share in this piece, a number of brilliant energy critics from Vaclav Smil to William Rees have done the figuring, acknowledged the physical limits of things, and told us the truth. A truth that is not as uncomfortable as you might think.
It is this. We must contract the global economy, restructure technological society and restore what’s left of natural ecosystems if we want to live and breathe.
These green illusions, as I explained yesterday, represent the worst kind of falsehood. Many of these techno fixes, such as direct air capture, are largely unproven, don’t scale up or will invite bankruptcy.
Others escalate the destruction of the land. The majority of so-called renewables require extensive mining of scarce rare earth minerals and fossil fuels for their construction and maintenance. And that means devastated communities and mountains of toxic waste. Others, such as a hydrogen-fuelled future hoax, have been repeatedly pulled out of the ideas closet and abandoned, because an energy sink can never become a viable energy source.
Why, then, do so many members of our political, academic and media classes insist on telling us that unproven technologies will refloat the globe’s sinking Titanic?
The reason is simple. Big green lies allow the political class to avoid talking about a radical restructuring of the technological society and an end to economic growth.
Powering down is not powering off
For years the energy ecologist Vaclav Smil has argued that our civilization needs to power down, practice conservation and set limits on how much stuff it consumes.
A sensible society, he argues, would have taxed the hell out of big cars, big homes and frequent travellers decades ago, but there is a shortage of common sense and yes, it has something to do with supply chains.
Smil, a no bullshit guy, has repeatedly asked: What’s wrong with returning to the level of energy spending experienced in the 1950s and 1960s?
“I could design you the global system today without any horrible loss of standard of living all around the world,” he recently told David-Wallace Wells.
“Consuming 30, 40, 50 per cent less of everything that we are consuming, be it water, or steel, or energy. But we are not willing to go down that route. Technically, it doesn’t require any new inventions, nothing, and it will actually save us money in many ways.”
But people and politicians want more and not less.
“They want to have their SUVs, and they want to have their raspberries in January. That’s the problem,” said Smil. They also don’t realize if we don’t manage a descent in energy spending, we will face a collapse of civilization.
Smil is not alone in regarding climate change as a symptom of greater ecological problems. The physicist Tom Murphy, the ecologist Bill Rees and the energy critic Nate Hagens (a former investment banker) have all warned that only significant reductions in energy spending and a contraction of the global economy can forestall a ghastly future.
Unfortunately, today’s leaders refuse to enable the conversation we need to have. That is because they reflect our society’s dominant technological bias. Most of us are now inmates of what a group of British geologists call the technosphere, or what the social critic Jacques Ellul described as “la technique” long ago.
It is a parasitic growth on the biosphere (the living world) that consumes fossil fuels to drive economic and human growth. All of that growth requires increasing levels of technological complexity that seeks to control every aspect of human life. But the cheap energy to power this complexity is now dwindling and creating a crisis the system can not register, let alone acknowledge.
The inanimate technosphere consists of mines, ports, cities, roads, trucks, containers and all the technology — from computers to AI — needed to manage this byzantine operation. Corporate pioneers of the technosphere such as Facebook are now inviting us to join virtual worlds where we can perhaps experience virtual emissions along with the virtual destruction of the biosphere in comfort and splendour.
The physical presence of the technosphere is now greater than that of any previous colonizing force or empire. Its mass represents 30 trillion tonnes. That’s 50 kilograms of humanmade steel, concrete and plastic for every square metre of the Earth’s surface. Unlike the biosphere, the technosphere manufactures endless volumes of waste including plastic, carbon, cell phones and uneaten food (40 per cent waste) and lithium batteries.
The technosphere is self-augmenting and self-directing. Its primary purpose is to replace the natural world with artificial environments supported by high-energy inputs. Propelled by a cult of exponential growth, the technosphere respects no physical or ecological limits. Every inmate of the technosphere is taught to expect that every social, spiritual, political and ecological problem will have a technical solution.
But if the solution to any problem, say rising carbon dioxide emissions or wildlife extinction, requires economic contraction, an end to growth or a restoration of the biosphere, the technosphere will summarily reject it with blah, blah, blah.
The preservation of the technosphere at any cost explains why our politicians champion energy dead ends such as carbon capture, utilization and storage; direct air capture; dematerialization and hydrogen power.
What the world needs to hear
Instead, here is what our leaders should be saying:
We are eight billion people competing for finite resources and consuming energy at unprecedented levels. Economic growth is destroying the Earth and the atmosphere. It has degraded our humanity, and divorced us from the values of our ancestors.
Growth is a ponzi scheme. Increased prosperity depends on making more people because more people consume more goods.
If we don’t prioritize the health of the planet over our short-term economic interests the oceans will sicken with acid, the forests will die, and the fisheries will disappear. Nature will reduce our numbers if we do not scale down our appetites and ambitions.
The technospshere threatens our physical and spiritual existence. It must be scaled back and reoriented to serve people. Now it actively mines data from people while altering our brain functions to serve the growth of the technosphere.
We have exploited the richest of our fossil fuels, and renewables can’t offer the same energy density and quality. That is why energy conservation is the only way forward. Our energy use must consistently drop by three or four per cent a year over the next decade.
And it can be done. About 62 per cent of the energy flowing through civilization is now wasted and ends up in our atmosphere — our landfill for CO2.
This enormous waste gives us lots of room to cut and prune and scale back. An economic contraction, or what Gaia theorist James Lovelock calls a “sustainable retreat,” will dramatically reduce emissions and forestall a collapse.
It will result in more localized production and much less global trade and travel.
Almost all products will cost more but last longer. The era of buying cheap clothes and gadgets that end up in a landfill within a year of their purchase must end. No other civilization has ever bought food and thrown 40 per cent into the garbage and survived to tell the tale.
Yes, reducing fossil fuel spending means communities will have to rely on human muscle and community energy to get many things done. Agriculture will have to revert towards a human and animal enterprise instead of an industrial mining machine. Small farms may employ a third of the population.
Ignore those alarmists that say contraction means you and I must live in cold caves. An economic retreat does not mean returning to the Dark Ages. As Hagens has observed, a 30-per-cent GDP drop in the United States would bring that nation back to a 1990s level of energy spending. A 50 per cent drop in GDP would bring the U.S. back to a 1973 level. Were those times so bad?
Every community, every nation, should be open to radical reimagining, by asking: What works in this place? Everyone should be contributing their insights and experience towards preparing a human-scale economic model, a conservation plan for natural resources, and possibly even different political structures.
Don’t wait for the timid leaders
It is better to have those conversations now than later. Most citizens are already far ahead of their politicians on this front.
If we don’t consciously act now, other forces from famine to relentless political conflict will determine our lives.
“It is likely that, in the not-too-distant future, the size, complexity and (literal) ‘burn rate’ of our civilization will be much reduced by forces other than human volition,” Hagens warns.
A society that consumes less energy and stuff could rehumanize society and heal the biosphere, writes Rees in a recent paper:
“More human labour will mean more physically active lives in closer contact with each other and nature, which can restore our shattered sense of well-being and connection to the land,” the ecologist adds.
“Similarly, a waning focus on material progress will allow for emphasis to shift to progress of the mind and spirit — largely untapped frontiers at present with unlimited potential.”
In other words, to contract our economy would expand our humanity. Put that way, scaling down from a bigness to a smaller world may not just be the only solution, but an uplifting one.
Teaser photo credit: Batik craftswomen in Java, Indonesia drawing batik. By Stephen Kennedy – This file was derived from: Women Making Batik, Ketelan.jpg, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32192841
