Samuel Alexander
A new report
has just been published which ought to provoke a Copernican revolution
in dominant conceptions of renewable energy and of sustainability more
generally. The message may not be one that environmentalists want to
hear, but it is one that we must all take very seriously, or risk having
our good intentions dedicated to goals that cannot actually solve the
very real environmental crises that we face.
Most people, including many environmentalists, seem
to believe that Western-style consumer lifestyles can be sustained and
even globalised, provided the world transitions to systems of renewable
energy and produces goods more cleanly and efficiently. This assumption
is reflected especially clearly in political discussion on environmental
issues, which consistently pushes the message that we can grow our
economies while reducing ecological impact. This view relies heavily on
the expectation that renewable energy sources can be substituted for
fossil fuels, but very little attention is given to the question of
whether that expectation is realistic. Environmentalists want to believe
it, but of course merely wanting something does not affect the laws of
physics.
With little recognition, Dr. Ted Trainer has spent
the best part of a decade tirelessly surveying the best available data
on renewable energy and other technologies, and he has recently
published the culmination of his efforts with the Simplicity Institute.
Contradicting widely held assumptions, Trainer presents a formidable
case that renewable energy and other ‘tech-fixes’ will be unable to
sustain growth-based and energy-intensive consumer societies, with
implications that are as profound as they will be unwelcome.
Trainer’s general point on technology is that the
extent of ecological overshoot is already so great that technology alone
will never be able to solve the ecological crises of our age, certainly
not in a world based on economic growth and with a growing global
population. The best-known advocate of technological solutions to
ecological problems is probably Amory Lovins, most famous for his
‘factor four’ thesis. He argues that if we exploit technology we could
have four times the economic output without increasing environmental
impact (or maintain current economic output and reduce environmental
impact by a factor of four).
In response Trainer points out that if the rich
economies grow at 3% until 2070, and by that stage the poorest nations
have attained similarly high living standards – which seems to be the
aim of the global development agenda – total world economic output and
impact could be 60 times larger than it is today. If we assume that
sustainability requires that fossil fuel use and other resource
consumption must be half of what they are today (and the greenhouse
problem would probably require a far larger reduction than this), then
what is needed is something like a factor 120 reduction in the per unit
impact of GDP, not merely a factor 4 reduction.
Even allowing for some uncertainty in these
calculations, the claim that technological solutions can solve the
ecological crises and sustain limitless economic growth is simply not
credible. Trainer has shown that the necessary reductions in ecological
impact that are just beyond what is remotely possible. The final nail in
the coffin of techno-optimists is the fact that despite decades of
extraordinary technological advance, the overall ecological impact of
the global economy is still increasing, making even a factor four
reduction through technological advance seem wildly optimistic.
Trainer has also levelled a narrower critique of
technological solutions, which focuses on renewable energy. This is not
the place to review in detail Trainer’s arguments and research, which
would be a laborious task given the meticulous and necessarily dry
nature of his analysis of the evidence. For the facts and figures,
readers are referred to Trainer’s latest essay. But the critical
findings of his technical research can be easily summarised. After
examining the evidence on varieties of solar, wind, biomass, hydrogen,
etc., as well as energy storage systems, Trainer concludes that the
figures just do not support what almost everyone assumes; that is to
say, they do not support the argument that renewable energy can sustain
consumer societies.
This is because the enormous quantities of
electricity and oil required by consumer societies today simply cannot
be converted to any mixture of renewable energy sources, each of which
suffer from various limitations arising out of such things as
intermittency of supply, storage problems, resource limitations (e.g.
rare metals, land for biomass competing with food production, etc.), and
inefficiency issues. Ultimately, however, the cost is the fundamental
issue at play here. Trainer provides evidence showing that existing
attempts to price the transition to systems of renewable energy are
wildly understated.
This challenging conclusion, however, only defines
the magnitude of the present problem. If we were to commit ourselves to
providing nine or ten billion people with the energy resources currently
demanded by those in the richest parts of the world, then the problems
and costs become greater by orders of magnitude. The challenges are
exacerbated further by the existence of the “rebound effect,” a
phenomenon that often negates the expected energy use reductions of
efficiency improvements. At times efficiency improvements can even be
the catalyst for increased energy consumption, a phenomenon known as the
“Jevons” paradox. Going directly against the grain of mainstream
thinking on these issues, Trainer is led to conclude that renewable
energy and efficiency improvements will never be able to sustain
growth-based, consumer societies, primarily because it would be quite
unaffordable to do so.
It is of the utmost importance to emphasise that
this is not an argument against renewable energy; nor is it an argument
more broadly against the use of appropriate technologies to achieve
efficiency improvements. Trainer argues without reservation that the
world must transition to full dependence on systems of renewable energy
without delay and exploit appropriate technology wherever possible. We
cannot afford not to! But given the limitations and expense of renewable
energy systems, any transition to a just and sustainable world requires
a vastly reduced demand for energy compared to what is common in the
developed regions of the world today, and this necessitates giving up
growth-based, consumer societies and the energy-intensive lifestyles
they support and promote.
The implications of this can hardly be exaggerated.
It means that the global consumer class must learn how to live ‘simpler
lives’ of reduced resource and energy consumption, as well as build new
economic systems based on notions of sufficiency rather than excess. But
as I have argued elsewhere,
this does not need to sound so depressing. A growing number of people
are seeing the hollowness of consumer culture and are finding a new
abundance in oppositional lifestyles of voluntary simplicity.
The necessary cultural shift obviously requires a radical change in
worldview, and it is difficult to be optimistic that the necessary
changes will ever arrive. But as Lao Tzu once said: ‘Those who know they
have enough are rich,’ which also suggests that those who have enough,
but who do not know it, are poor.
The choice is ours, if only we choose it.
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