Category: Environment

I want the wind and solar dream to be true. Everyone does. Just like everyone wants the PET bottle they put into the recycling to be “recycled.”

Durham Region the other day quoted a statistic, “Since the 1950s, 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic have been generated around the world and only 23 per cent of those plastics have been recovered or recycled.”

To which I responded, “I want to know where you got the 23% figure. Prior to about 30 years ago exactly 0% of plastics were even being attempted to be recycled. Today as little as 5% of plastics are getting “recycled,” and that is down from 10% which itself may have been wishful thinking. And all that depends on allowing only the most generous use of the word “recycled,” because we do not have an industrial-scale method of cost-effectively breaking down plastics into constituent polymers so that they can be actually recycled into new plastic.”

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And essentially the same wishful thinking is happening with “renewable” energy (wind and solar) advocacy. I would be absolutely fucking delighted if this were happening. But it isn’t and it is not possible.

If we stay this course, what is more likely is that rich people, who can afford to pay ten or one hundred times more for electricity, will afford their private Tesla roof and their rapacious lifestyle, while everyone else can do without. Wind and solar are perhaps opening the door to the greatest regression into inequity that humanity has ever seen.

I would love a free-energy wind and solar future. But that is not really a logistical possibility and every day we waste on this dream is a day we continue not to do what must be done to mitigate this worsening climate emergency.

Pretending a thing is true when it isn’t is religious belief not science.

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Moreover green-washers inevitably tout electric cars as a big advantage for a sustainable future. But a huge part of why are cities are not sustainable is that the car-centric sprawl, that is taken for granted in Canada and the US, is inherently ridiculous. Car dependency is one of the main reasons why we are in this mess. And it is not the gas that cars guzzle and spew into the atmosphere as exhaust that is the worst part of cars. More than anything it is that car-centric development precludes efficient, compact, walkable human-scaled cities and towns. Seas of parking and vast rivers of stroads and highways are, and always will be, unsustainable.

Electric cars CANNOT save the planet and that is not what they are here to do. They are here to save the auto industry and the obscene urban sprawl that that industry foisted upon us. And even though almost all the vehicles we need will eventually have to be electric, the manufactured “need” for so many ubiquitous cars is a huge part of this catastrophe.

Sometime in the 1970s I learned about the greenhouse effect in geography class. In 1992 world leaders in Rio de Janeiro agreed to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. So we should have been building out low-carbon nuclear electricity generating capacity, to replace the energy we got from fossil fuels, in 1992, more than three DECADES ago.

In 1997 in the Kyoto Protocol world leaders agreed, after five years of greenhouse gas emission increases, that they ought to start doing something about climate change before the consequences grew too great, before the damage became too problematic.

So, in 1997 I thought we would probably start building the low-carbon generating capacity, we should have started more than five years earlier.

But the answer was, “NO! Never nuclear.” — “Soon we will be able to make all our energy with windmills and PV panels.” That was twenty-six wasted years ago.

And when, unsurprisingly, that revolution did not happen, by 2007 I thought, “After fifteen years of increasing carbon output, we have made less than no progress on carbon emissions. Shouldn’t we start building some meaningful low-carbon baseload generating capacity?” And keep in mind that reactors started in 2007 would probably be online by now actually depreciating fossil fuel use.

But the anti-nuclear lobbyists said, “NO! Nuclear scares us! We refuse to understand it. We have no useful sense of the risk/benefit ratio. NEVER nuclear. Besides wind and solar are getting ‘cheaper.’ [for some definition of cheaper that is one or two orders of magnitude too expensive] We can do this with ‘renewables.’”

Another wasted decade passed and in 2017 I thought, “Ok, after twenty five years of increasing carbon emissions. Wind and solar have not magicked the problem away yet. We can wish that they may someday. But right now we need to build lots and lots of low-carbon generating capacity. Could we do that now? So far we haven’t done anything useful. We should do something.”

Them, “NO! Nuclear is an archaic technology. With ‘renewables’ and ‘green energy’ investment we don’t need it. Besides even though wind and solar are only an insignificant fraction of unreliable generating capacity we can pad those numbers out with hydroelectricity and this great new biofuel technology. We can build dams and flood vast ecosystems. And we can cut down forests to make wood chips, cook those in bioreactors to make carbon fuel and burn it! It is all so ‘RENEWABLE!’”

Me, “OMG! those are terrible ideas! New hydroelectricity development is environmentally catastrophic. We cannot ethically expand hydro development. And biofuel‽ That is taking a low-energy-density fuel source that is otherwise a carbon sink and turning it into a source of additional carbon. Wood burning is already a major source of atmospheric carbon globally. We need to reduce its use, not increase it. This is making the problem worse, just with extra steps.”

Them, “But it is not nuclear. NEVER nuclear.”

Me, with some exasperation, “but we have a climate emergency. We need to solve this. We need to do something real and effective because the consequences are fast upon us.”

Them, “We already have the solution to the climate emergency. You just have to BELIEVE that a solar panel on the roof of an apartment block in Scandinavia in the winter at night can produce all the energy that building needs.”

And it turns out that the dream of wind and solar coming in deus-ex-machina to save us, in all likelihood is a logistical impossibility while, at the same time, even fifty year old CANDU technology could still do the climate-mitigation-heavy-lifting, as was always the case.

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It is 2023, the world’s hottest year ever recorded. We have seen climate catastrophe after climate catastrophe, flood, fire, famine. And it is already certain that coming years and decades will be worse even if we were to hit net-zero today. Thirty-one years have passed since the Rio Earth Summit and we have continued to do nothing that has even begun to make any difference. And most of that is because of our stupid, ignorant resistance to using a proven, safe, reliable, and cost-effective energy technology versions of which were fully resolved in the 1970s when I first learned about climate heating and the need to build low-carbon electricity generating capacity.

How cool would it be if all green-energy activists and Green Parties pulled their collective heads out of their asses, as they have done in Finland, and started following honest evidence-based policies that could actually achieve the climate change mitigation that they say they want?

People keep saying stuff like, “how did solar get so cheap so fast?”

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Earlier this year I watched a video of a rich guy breaking down his Tesla roof investment. That installation cost what my electricity costs for 1613 months or 134 YEARS. For an installation that has an expected lifespan of less than a maximum of 25 years.

But he expected to break even on the installation in about nine years, which implies that his household, even though not everything is electrified, devours almost 16 times as much electricity as mine.

And this leads us to the nightmare scenario. There are a couple of reasons why solar in particular, but also wind, can never replace our fossil fuel energy consumption. But they can do something else. They can create the greatest inequity in centuries by making it possible for the rich to continue with their energy hungry lifestyles by virtue of being able to afford energy at one or two orders of magnitude higher cost, while at the same time everyone else gets to freeze or swelter in the dark.

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This is why it is genuinely immoral to continue to pursue energy technologies that will not provide cheap reliable power to EVERYONE.

Today you may be outraged by the $7 billion oil and gas drilling Willow project in Alaska. Two months ago you may have been outraged by the destruction of the tiny west German village of Lützerath for coal extraction.

But if you will also oppose, or rather fail to actively support, investment in nuclear electricity generation, you are just as guilty of the perpetuation of fossil fuel extraction as any oil tycoon, or coal baron.

It is a delusion to pretend that wind and solar will end our dependence on fossil fuel. Hell, in Europe gas companies are running romantic ad campaigns depicting gas and “renewables” holding hands for the next two hundred years! Much of the funding for anti-nuclear advocacy comes from the fossil fuel industry because nuclear fission really does have the capacity to displace fossil fuels. And those same interests pour money into groups promoting wind and solar BECAUSE they know those investments will never threaten their business.

Nuclear is the ONLY technology we have, that we can practically develop and expand that can, and will displace fossil fuel use. And if you are helping stand in the way of that, I hope you will eventually figure out that you are standing with coal, and oil and gas.

It’s not a given, but you may think it would be a good idea to do something about the ongoing climate emergency. So here are two points.

One: The single largest contributing factor to climate change is that there are 8-billion of us. The biomass of just humans is 20 times that of all wild mammals combined! That is egregious overpopulation. It does not matter if we reduce our individual carbon footprint if we keep increasing our population. People will say all manner of ridiculous things but realistically, if most people are going to have a decent quality of life, then half of half this population is likely sustainable. If you want to avert this catastrophe then you need to acknowledge that a plan for reducing over-population is essential.

Two: No matter what you have heard or what you want to believe, the ONLY technology we have for electrifying on the scale necessary to depreciate fossil fuels is nuclear fission. While several other sources of electricity no doubt have a roll in our energy mix, there is no and may never be, any other low-carbon source of energy that can replace coal, oil and gas. In particular wind and solar fall short by ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE. It’s not even close. Nuclear is safe and cost effective and the technology is fully resolved. We should have seen massive investment starting in the early ’90s. But we can’t go back, so TODAY is the best time to start.

Most of the reason we have accomplished less than nothing in dealing with this pressing crisis, which I learned about in the 1970s in grade school, is primarily that we have not gotten over these two stumbling blocks. It may already be too late to avert 2.5°C of catastrophic global warming. But if people, perhaps including you, do not pull their heads out of their asses soon, the consequences will be much much worse.

Why do we continue to completely fail on climate-heating mitigation?

1. People who actively think it is a malicious hoax and actively oppose measures.
2. People who just don’t believe it is really happening, so no measures are warranted.
3. People who misunderstand “climate change,” do not understand the unprecedented time scale, believe it is natural and inevitable and not a problem, certainly not one caused by us, or that can or should be mitigated by us.
4. People who may believe that it is a problem but do not care.
5. People who believe it is not their problem.
6. People who know it is a problem but have some vested interest that they perceive to be threatened by mitigation. So actively oppose mitigation.
7. People who know it is a problem, but think some absurd religious mumbo jumbo. Perhaps it is God’s will.
8. People who understand that there is a problem, but expect a deus ex machina tech solution that requires no risk, compromise, sacrifice or effort on their parts.
9. People who know and understand that the consequences of doing nothing are dire but are emotionally invested in particular developing technologies that cannot have a meaningful impact on crucial timescales. They insist that just another ten years, and another ten, and another will see their preferred technology Superman that climate emergency.
10. People who urgently want mitigation, but not if it involves anything they fear, or anything they misunderstand, or anything they hate. (☠️nuclear power☠️)
11. People who despair of 1–10 and are resigned to an eventually uninhabitable world because people are almost universally unpersuaded by data and facts.

Reminder: By and large plastic is not recyclable, or at least not recycled. We have technology for reprocessing some plastic. Clean PET, that is pop bottles, thoroughly washed, with the lids and labels removed can be reprocessed into fibres that can be used to make fleece or shoddy tarp fabric or plastic wood. But that process is not ‘recycling.’ It does not cycle.

Some clean second generation materials can be reprocessed again into increasingly lower grade materials but inevitably such plastic is headed for the garbage, or the environment. In fact, reprocessing is an important stage in reducing whole plastic items to microplastics as the material is extruded as fibres.

But all of this is moot, since we never built the local facilities to reprocess plastic and instead rely on shipping our plastic garbage to vulnerable developing nations that also do not have the proper facilities to deal with our waste. Slave-wage workers there pick through literal mountains of wind-blown plastic to find economically salvageable bits. And because this is marginally more lucrative than subsistence farming, the local agricultural economy is undermined.

What garbage pickers can’t sell to reprocessing they sell as raw fuel to be burned uncleanly in local industries. Just burned in furnaces. No emission controls.

What should be happening to our plastic is that it should be incinerated locally in waste-to-energy facilities with state of the art emission control. But to do that we would have to build the infrastructure. And to build the infrastructure we would have to admit we have been talking bullshit about plastic recycling for decades.

It was more than a decade ago now that I first read a misleading article claiming that wind and solar had become cheaper than coal for generating electricity. Turned out that this was only true if you ignored an approximately 95% subsidy. In other words the article was claiming that less than five percent of the cost of wind and solar was less than the entire cost of coal. Or, in other words, these renewables were about 20 times more expensive than coal.

Yesterday I saw the latest in a series of claims like this. “Renewables surpass coal in US energy generation for first time in 130 years.” And like that first time I had a thrill of excitement at the possibility it was true. Spoiler: it was not.

Nowadays you can look up such data.

There has been a decrease in coal burning for electricity, due primarily to an increase in natural gas burning. Better than coal, but still not great. There has been a small increase in non-hydro “renewables” but that includes a large share of manifestly unsustainable biogas which is an environmental nightmare.

All non-hydro renewables for electricity generation look to be about 12–13%. Coal at 20% and expected to increase in 2021. So, the article is not even close to being true.

Coal for 2020: 730.30 billion kWh
Renewable non-hydroelectric: 476.92 billion kWh

And again “renewable” includes waste biomass, biomass-based diesel, ethanol, and a wood biomass electricity subtotal which are all sources of CO2.

Wood biomass electricity is shredding forests to make wood chips and essentially cooking them up to make burnable fuels. Wood biomass represents 9.822 quadrillion Btu of the “renewables” total of 11.797. So deforestation is 83% of non-hydro “green” energy in this case.

And it is not even clear that in such a scheme the fuel output is greater than the total fuel inputs. It is entirely possible that harvesting shipping and processing the wood consumes more diesel than the output from the generation offsets. So this process overall can consume more resources than it produces, a net loss of energy, and produces CO2 and deforestation as a… as a… bonus?

So, no, renewables have never come close to “surpassing” coal. And much of that free wheeling term, “renewable” is either hydro, which capacity has not grown in the last 6 years or absolutely mad biogas/biomass schemes that are disaster.

And that is only the electricity sector. What about industry? Transportation? Home heating and cooling?

What minute fraction of the greater energy budget are wind and solar? These being what people naturally think you mean when you say “renewable.” No one looks at that headline and assumes that you have replaced coal with vast inexcusable deforestation of much less energy dense wood.

Coal burning is a serious problem. We have not in the past solved it by pretending fantasy nonsense about it and we are not going to wish or lie it away now.

For the love of life on this tiny blue dot, stop pretending that there is a simple miracle cure to climate change and start backing realistic non-imaginary technologies we can use to address our situation now. We could go on pretending while the world burns, or we could do something about it.

One of three things must be true.

One: “Renewable” energy sources, wind and solar, are well defined and resolved technologies that are now capable of meeting the lion’s share of our current electricity needs and expanding to all the proportionately larger component of that demand that must result in our transition from fossil fuels. In which case all is well with the world because even selfish market forces would propel any economy toward renewables.

Two: “Renewable” energy sources, are not fully developed technologies and many issues remain unresolved. However eventually, in ten or twenty or thirty years, they will be. For instance we do not have battery technology to support a transition to wind and solar. Also we need considerable advancement in materials research or vast new sources of rare minerals to come anywhere near meeting the demands of transitioning. But these hurdles may be overcome. At which point, eventually, all will be well as these technologies inevitably supplant ones with greater environmental footprints.

Three: “Renewable” technologies never really come up to meeting current generating levels, let alone the vast increases that would be required to supplant fossil fuels. This is entirely possible. There may not be practical batteries better than lithium-ion. There may never be enough rare elements to build all the units. [edit: since I wrote this years ago it has become clear that there are not enough resources by a long shot to build out a single 25-year generation of wind and solar to replace fossil fuels. It is not even close. For some mineral reserves there is an order of magnitude or greater shortfall. (Source: Simon P. Michaux, Associate Research Professor of Geometallurgy Unit Minerals Processing and Materials Research, Geological Survey of Finland, August 18, 2022 – Seminar: What Would It Take To Replace The Existing Fossil Fuel System?)]

For decades people have been hoping that fusion was just thirty years away. However it is also possible that the €13 billion ITER experiment in France will conclusively show that fusion is not viable. Should the research have a more desirable outcome then it will still be decades before commercial reactors are displacing other electricity sources. We shall see.

And here is the thing. There is a gap. The gap started in 1997 with the signing of the Kyoto Protocol. The day after that we should have been transitioning to the carbon-free sources of energy at our disposal. Twenty two years ago we should have been building nuclear reactors to at the very least fill the decades gap until some unrealized technology could replace them.

Unless you believe in option one, which is discounted by the very researchers working on the problem, we still need to be building nuclear reactors to fill that gap. And that’s assuming it is a gap and the problems of replacement technologies become resolved in coming decades. Which they may not.

We need to decarbonize. But it is delusional to think that will be today, or this month, or this year. We really do not have a technology for that.
Electricity would be easy if people were not what they are. We could build nuclear reactors and decarbonize electrical generation within 10–20 years. It would take that long to build them. But that is not going to happen because first you would have to convince misinformed people that we should build nuclear reactors. Best of luck with that. So while possible with existing tech, decarbonizing electricity is by no means going to happen soon. And all the carbon cost of the delay lies at the feet of the antinuclear (energy) lobby.

And yet this is not the most significant problem. In a recent interview a climate scientist was finally asked what the prognosis was for decarbonizing. She made the above point about electricity, but went on to say that both heating and transportation were less tractable problems. And they are. It is not easy to see how heating can be refitted to eliminate fossil fuels. A bigger problem however is that for this, or more problematically to electrify transportation would require a vast increase in core electrical generating capacity that absolutely cannot be achieved with wind turbines and photovoltaic cells.

For the UK alone, electrifying all the vehicles would require an additional 10 full-sized nuclear plants on top of those that would be built to replace existing fossil fuel production.

Particularly in light of the Canadian government’s announcement on the Trans-Mountain expansion it is important to understand that while we must move toward carbon free energy, primarily by educating people about nuclear power, we are still in a fossil fuel age and we still need to manage the production and infrastructure associated with that fact until we can get off this carbon producing ride.