I’m angry about energy, let me tell you why. As electricity production accounts for roughly 25-30% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, it is necessary to understand the state of play so that you may be anger too [1].
First and foremost, we must accept that the burning of fossil fuels for energy is a problem worth addressing because not everyone agrees. So, why do some people think fossil fuels are good? “Le Monde Sans Fin” by Christophe Blain and Jean-Marc Jancovici gives a thorough account of the importance of fossil fuels in human history [2]. Since fire, we have burnt, and fossil fuels have helped lift us out of abject poverty to achieve living standards we now take for granted. Why? Well, they’re energy dense and easily accessible, thus cheap. We started with wood and then came coal signalling the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Populations soared as did wealth. From coal, we turned to oil and now natural gas. Each iteration produces less emissions and is more energy dense than the last. We would never have got where we are without them and where we are is objectively better than where we were. While we may not have known about their capacity to cause global warming in the past, we now resoundingly do. Ignorance was bliss but it couldn’t last forever.
Does their influential past warrant their continued use? Some argue that fossil fuels will remain necessary in the 21st century, one must only listen to the chair of CoP 28 from the UAE. But beyond vested interest groups dripping with oil, do any arguments exist for the continuation of fossil fuel usage in our energy supply? Evidently, many people work in the fossil fuel industry so they will be harmed, but that in and of itself shouldn’t mean we are forced to continue our copious consumption. “Apocalypse Never” by Michael Shellenberger puts forth a dissenting environmentalist view as to the place of fossil fuels in our future [3]. He believes the only way to ensure the Global South can develop is for it to follow the same path as the Global North; burning fossil fuels. I do believe that the development of the Global South in a manner that doesn’t exacerbate climate change is one of the biggest challenges related to this topic but just because fossil fuels were burnt in the past doesn’t justify their continuation into the future. As laid out thoughtfully in “Not the End of the World” by Hannah Ritchie, the achievement of true sustainability requires satisfying two opposed (up until now at least) criteria; the promotion of human flourishment and the prevention of environmental decay such that future generations may flourish too [4]. Ritchie seems to think this is possible through, among others, the expanded use of renewables, Shellenberg does not. So, who is wrong?
Shellenberg makes the argument that focusing on mitigating against the effects of climate change whilst continuing to use fossil fuels is cheaper and easier in comparison to the expansion of renewables. He argues that this approach would also prevent economic stagnation and would enable sustainable development in the Global South. I think this is a naïve claim due to the potential impact of tipping points which Shellenberg has deemed inconsequential due to the inherent uncertainty that comes with assessing them. Just because an exact prediction of when and how tipping points may occur is uncertain, doesn’t mean that they can’t happen and should be ignored. I would argue that it is much more sensible to proceed with caution until more is known. Yes, the actual effects of climate change may not be as bad as predicted, but they also may be much worse, mathematical uncertainty exists in both directions. Whilst Shellenberger’s hubris may turn out to be right, if it does not to quote The Simpson’s Movie, “Horrible, horrible things are going to happen” but rather than happen “to you and you and you”, it will be those in the Global South who Shellenberger appears to champion who fare worst.
Is there anything inherently wrong with pursuing an expanded renewable energy sector instead? First, let’s deal with what springs to mind for most people when they think of renewables; wind and solar. Before we talk too much, it is necessary to understand electricity grids. Let’s start in terms of capacity, the amount of electricity that can be supplied by the grid at any one time. Three capacities are particularly important when discussing the impact of renewables on the electricity grid; firm capacity, peak capacity, and ramp capacity. Firm capacity is the guaranteed amount of electricity supplied at all times. Where renewables fall down is their intermittency, weather conditions change meaning renewable power generation fluctuates too. Storage solutions like batteries can be used to overcome intermittency issues but these are expensive. As the percentage of renewables being relied upon rises so does the required storage facilities adding to per unit electricity costs. A grid reliant on renewables will require excess generation capacity, i.e it will need to be capable of producing and supplying more electricity than will ever be needed at any one time. This moves us on to peak capacity; the maximum amount of electricity supplied by the grid at any one time. In “Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air”, MacKay questioned whether renewables will ever be able to provide enough electricity on their own [5]. According to his maths, wind and solar require too much physical space to be the main components of an energy mix, at least in the UK. Ritchie attempts to challenge this idea in “Not the End of the World” but MacKay’s maths doesn’t lie, wind and solar have fixed upper bounds on how much energy they provide per unit area. A way to get around this could be a continental (or spanning multiple continents) electricity grid though this solution is very complex and beyond my ability to analyse. The last issue with renewables comes from our third definition, ramp capacity; how quickly the supply of electricity can be increased. Obviously, you can’t simply turn on the wind like you can turn on a gas power plant to meet fluctuations in daily electricity demands. This could be met with storage solutions but again this is expensive. In sum, wind and solar on their own physically can’t meet our electricity needs, and the more we rely on the them the more expensive they become. So, what must be done?
Two technologies get floated as game changers in our energy grid: hydrogen and carbon sequestration. Hydrogen would allow excess renewable electricity to be stored chemically, thus solving problems of intermittency and daily usage fluctuations. Carbon sequestration would allow us to pull CO2 from the atmosphere, thus offsetting the continued use of fossil fuels. Why not rely on them? They sound amazing! Simple really, beyond having not been proven to work at large scale, both have a similar problem; if they do work, they will require lots of energy. Where will this come from? We don’t have enough renewables to meet our current electricity requirements (and definitely not our current energy requirements!), let alone the capacity to produce an excess supply. As we’ve already said, there is a fixed upper bound on renewable energy production imposed by physics. We are also struggling to scale renewables at the required rate for our 2050/2060 emissions targets. Hydrogen and carbon sequestration won’t work in the short to mid-term because we don’t have any way to fuel them.
Hmm, unless there was a source of clean, abundant energy? That’d be nice. Despite all coming from different ideological persuasions, there is one thing that Le Monde Sans Fin, Apocalypse Never, Not the End of the World, and Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air all agree upon, and it’s something that most eco-ists are ardently against, the necessity of nuclear power. Fission. It is incredibly frustrating to think that we had the solution to the climate crisis 50 years ago: an abundant, clean, cheap energy source, the panacea that everyone seeks in their utopic dreams. And yet the amount of nuclear energy produced worldwide plateaued in 2004. Why didn’t the rate of nuclear fission usage experience exponential growth? Why did it stall and in some places slide backwards? Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. People became scared. They came to see nuclear fission as unsafe and unclean, an abhorrence that needed to be removed and cleansed. But that’s not the case. On a per kW hr basis (i.e when comparing sources based on a per unit of electricity produced metric) nuclear energy causes an equivalent number of deaths and emissions to the classic forms of renewable, with both being 10s-100s of times better than fossil fuels. This information is apparently irrelevant in the public sphere. Do you know how the CDP appeased the growing electoral support for the Green Party in Germany? By increasing Germany’s emissions [6]. The fuck. Germany’s nuclear power plants were decommissioned, and in their place coal usage skyrocketed to meet the electricity shortfall. What the actual fuck!
(Side note: Germany became more reliant on ahem Russia after closing their native nuclear power stations, make of that what you will [7]).
At a careers fair in university, a stall run by a major fossil fuel company was being protested by a group of environmentalists. Being curious, naturally I talked to one of their employees who, with an almost exacerbated expression, informed me that they were one of the largest suppliers of renewable energy in Europe. Curious. I was reminded of this interaction when reading Apocalypse Never where I learned that much of the opposition to the expansion of nuclear energy by groups like Friends of the Earth was funded by fossil fuel companies. Curious indeed. People stood to profit massively by redirecting the growing environmental sentiment towards support for renewables rather than nuclear. Why? As I have shown, on their own, renewables won’t work, so they will need another form of energy as a partner for energy density and to aid in excess generation capacity and ramp capacity. This is exactly where oil and gas companies now pitch their relevance as the safeguarder of the clean energy transition. They present clean coal, low emitting natural gas, hydrogen from the burning of oil as the necessary partners of renewables in the green new world. They knew nuclear energy wouldn’t need a fossil fuel partner. So they did they something about it. And now, they always love to point at how their switch from coal and oil to natural gas has massively reduced carbon emissions (yes, technically true) but that doesn’t make gas good, it just makes it less bad! How were those who wanted the best for the planet so easily co-opted by those who wanted the best for their shareholders? Greenpeace still opposes nuclear in Europe. Coal consumption continues to rise. We remain reliant on fossil fuels. Who really won?
Does this mean that nuclear fission is perfect? Well of course not! Nuclear is now much more expensive than renewables, though most of this is due to a continued lack of investment and loss of knowledge during the stagnant decades when new plants stopped being constructed (as well as rather large subsidies for renewables…). Currently, nuclear power plants require an incredibly large investment and take forever to build, the best time to build one being 20 years ago, but the next best time to start always and forever remains now. Due to our new found inexperience, nuclear projects are significantly overrunning on time and are continuously requiring larger budgets. But if we are allowed to assume that wind and solar will continue to decrease in price as they are implemented at a large scale, why can’t the same learning assumption be applied to nuclear? Nuclear fission no longer deals in the same material that goes into bombs. New generation reactors have all but eliminated the capacity for meltdown. Yes, there will always remain the issue of nuclear waste. But what we need now is time, time to solve nuclear fusion, time to allow all humans to obtain adequate living standards. Continued reliance on fossil fuels takes away our time and hampers our ability to mitigate against climate change. Nuclear fission is not the end of history, it is the next stepping stone on our energy evolution, we just need to take that leap of faith.
Be angry at fossil fuel companies. Demand renewable energy be scaled up, but remember this: it can only happen with one of two partners; fossil fuels or nuclear, which will you fight for?
[1] The EPA puts the contribution of electricity generation to the US’s total GHG emissions at 25% for 2021.
“Sources of Greenhouse Gases”, US EPA, https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions
The USA is actually rather representative of the world at large when it comes to the proportion of fossil fuels used in its electricity sector, 60% for the US vs 61% for the world. However, on average, coal is used more often worldwide so I think an upper range of 30% is sensible. See Our World in Data for a more thorough breakdown.
“Sector by sector: where do global greenhouse gas emissions come from?”, Hannah Ritchie, Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
[2] “Le Monde Sans Fin”, Christophe Blain and Jean-Marc Jancovici, https://www.dargaud.com/bd/le-monde-sans-fin-miracle-energetique-et-derive-climatique-bda5378080
It is worth noting that the English version is only available from October 1st 2024, but if you can read French it’s really worth looking at!
[3] Is a reference a recommendation? Not necessarily. I read this so you don’t have to, but then again, there’s no harm in it. However, it would be at the bottom of my list of books to read on climate change. “Apocalypse Never”, Michael Shellenberger
[4] “Not the End of the World – How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet”, Hannah Ritchie, https://www.nottheendoftheworld.co.uk/
[5] “Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air”, David JC MacKay, https://www.withouthotair.com/
As I’ve said before, this book is free! You literally have no excuse!
[6] “How much CO2 does Germany emit?”, International Energy Association
[7] Merkel’s policies left Germany too reliant on Russian gas, adviser admits”, Guy Chazan, The Financial Times, https://www.ft.com/content/aa2afe9f-0b5d-45b7-a647-cc61f6d010cf
The Angry Generation 
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