As the residue of millions of years of stored sunlight, fossil fuels were a one-time-only bequest from Earth to humanity. They gave us the opportunity to build a global machine-based civilization, in a few short centuries. Over the last 150 years, we have accessed an enormous quantity of cheap energy. Incredibly, just one gallon of petrol equals 500 hours of human work output. Granted this largesse, it is not surprising we became utterly dependent on cheap fuel.
‘Cheap oil is not a useful part of our economy,’ writes Bill McKibben, ‘It is our economy.’ The availability of cheap energy allowed for the production of inessential goods, impelling the growth of a mass consumer society over the last 200 years. ‘Oil provides 40 per cent of all energy used by human beings on Earth, and it powers nearly all transportation in the industrial world. It’s also the most important raw material for plastics, agricultural and industrial chemicals, lubricants, and asphalt roads,’ writes John Michael Greer. According to Peak Everything author Richard Heinberg: ‘Without petrochemicals, medical science, information technology, modern cityscapes, and countless other aspects of our modern technology-intensive lifestyles would simply not exist. In all, oil represents the essence of modern life.’
As predicted by the oil company geologist M King Hubbert, we have passed the critical threshold, known as peak oil, when most of the easily available oil has been extracted from the Earth. We have entered a new phase in which fossil fuels become more difficult and expensive to extract, following the downward decline of a bell curve. However, as I write this, the fact that oil has become more costly to extract is not reflected in market pricing – in fact, energy prices have been going down, and the market is glutted. There are many reasons for this. It is possible that oil-producing countries are keeping prices low to stall the development of renewables. There is also the fact that we are now extracting more fuel from non-traditional sources. But this is not a good thing.
As we run out of traditional sources of fossil fuels, energy corporations pursue, with ever-increasing fervour, procedures such as hydrofracking for natural gas, mountaintop removal to access coal reserves, and extracting oil from the Alaskan Tar Sands. Their success in developing new processes for accessing these resources has contradicted the predictions of peak oil doomsayers. But this is only a temporary reprieve, and the ecological impacts of these practices are devastating.
The depletion of traditional sources also explains the recent initiative to mass-produce ethanol out of corn. A global rush towards biofuels resulted in global famines, as well as food riots in 37 countries, in 2008. In the future, the depletion of fossil fuel supplies, as well as the limits of our ‘carbon budget’, could make large-scale projects, requiring intensive development of new technology and infrastructure, increasingly difficult to achieve. That is another reason – besides accelerating warming – that we should be seeking to switch to renewables now, when energy is still readily available.
Jeremy Leggett, president of Solar Century, writes, ‘Peak oil is not a theory. Because oil is a finite resource, it is an inevitability. The debate is all about its timing.’ Saudi Arabia, and other oil-producing nations, have passed their peak of production. What follows could be a surprisingly quick decline. Eventually, even unconventional sources of hydrocarbons will run out.
Leggett reports that many experts and insiders ‘think there will be a drop in production within just a few years, and we are in danger of that drop being so steep as to merit description as a collapse’. This collapse would affect not only manufacturing and transportation, but our food system, which requires massive inputs of petroleum to make fertilizer, and for long-distance transport. The average morsel of food in the US travels over 1,500 miles.
In the 1960s, Buckminster Fuller realized we needed to use our resources of fossil fuels to switch to unlimited, renewable sources. ‘The fossil fuel deposits of our Spaceship Earth correspond to our automobile’s storage battery which must be conserved to turn over our main engine’s self-starter,’ he noted. ‘Thereafter, our “main engine”, the life regenerative processes, must operate exclusively on our vast daily energy income from the powers of wind, tide, water, and the direct Sun radiation energy.’ Unfortunately, society went in the opposite direction, burning massive reserves of fossil fuel without establishing a new infrastructure based on renewable energy.
As a side benefit, if we make a global transition to renewable energy sources, we will eliminate air pollution. ‘The idea of a pollution-free environment is difficult for us even to imagine, simply because none of us has ever known an energy economy that was not highly polluting,’ writes Lester Brown, the founder of Worldwatch Institute, in Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. ‘Working in coal mines will be history. Black lung disease will eventually disappear. So too will “code red” alerts warning of health threats from extreme air pollution.’ As an asthma sufferer, I can appreciate this happy by-product.
We have the technical ability to make this energy transition, but our time for accomplishing it is short. Whatever it takes, we must force our global civilization to put the brakes on its current momentum, and change its course. This requires a realistic reckoning with the urgency of our situation – far beyond the voluntary limits set by the 2105 Paris Climate Conference, also known as the 21st Annual Cooperation of Parties (COP-21), where 195 countries came together but were unable to make the UN Framework on Climate Change legally binding – and a rejection of meaningless half-measures. Let’s take a look at some of the admittedly wonky details.
The likelihood that we can make a rapid energy transition keeps growing due to technical innovations – such as Tesla’s recent development of the Powerwall, a storage battery for renewable sources usable in private homes, or the ongoing development of the infrastructure for an ‘Internet of Energy’, maximizing efficiency, and allowing people to send extra power back to the grid. Germany is leading the way, particularly with solar. Solar now satisfies around 7 per cent of Germany’s electricity needs – but on bright summer days this goes up to above 50 per cent. While the percentage of world energy needs supplied by solar remains relatively small, the amount has been doubling annually, revealing the potential for a rapid, exponential leap.
The Solutions Project, founded by Mark Jacobson, Director of the Atmosphere and Energy Program, Stanford University, mapped out a programme for all 50 US states to run on 100 per cent renewable energy by 2050. This envisions a rapid transition in energy infrastructure at the state level, with power coming from numerous renewable sources, including solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric and wave devices. To take the state of New York as an example, the Solutions Project proposes that 40 per cent of the state’s energy could be generated by offshore wind turbines, with solar photovoltaic plants providing another 35 per cent. The rest would come from a mix of other sources, including solar cells on rooftops.
Similarly, in the UK, a report from the Centre for Alternative Technology at Machynlleth, Zero Carbon Britain: Rethinking the Future (2010), proposes that Britain could completely eliminate fossil fuels in twenty years, through a systemic transition in energy use, production, agriculture and land-use patterns. The report looks at the policy framework needed to drive such a rapid shift, as well as the technologies and lifestyle changes needed to make it a reality. Zero Carbon Britain points to a future where Britain has ‘acknowledged our historical responsibility as a long-industrialized nation and made our contribution to addressing climate change by reducing UK greenhouse gas emissions rapidly to net zero’.
Through a coordinated effort and strategy, Britain could decrease greenhouse gas emissions by 95 per cent in two decades. Reductions would be made in every area, including households, business, industry and waste management. These reductions would depend on significant changes to industrial processes and patterns of personal use, as well as the diversion of waste from landfill, and the conversion of landfill sites to storage silos.
The report estimates that Britain could cut its demand for energy by about 60 per cent through energy-saving and conservation measures. Without a skilful marketing campaign that unites the population behind a common purpose, many of the proposed measures would be extremely unpopular – such as reducing the amount that people travel, as well as limiting the transport and manufacture of unnecessary goods. Within two decades, the authors point out, all power could be generated from renewable sources, reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector to zero.
The plan calls for reductions in the consumption of meat and dairy, plus changes in land-management practices, dropping CO2 emissions from agriculture by more than 70 per cent. Another significant change in the British landscape would be a doubling of the area of forest. A larger proportion of this – almost a third – would be left unharvested, enhancing biodiversity and sequestering carbon. ‘These changes to the way we use land, the increased area of forest, the restoration of 50 per cent of our peatlands, and the use of more plant-based products made mainly from harvest wood’ would allow Britain to capture about 45 million tons of greenhouse pollution every year. According to the report, this systemic transition would produce millions of new jobs, as the country ‘powers down’ from fossil fuels such as oil and coal and ‘powers up’ on renewables.
In 2011, two American experts, Peter Schwartzman and David Schwartzman, at the Institute for Policy Research and Development issued a report entitled A Solar Transition is Possible. The Schwartzmans believe that, using current resources and known technologies, the world can engineer a complete transition to renewables over the next two or three decades. To achieve this, world governments would have to cooperate to build a new infrastructure that would focus on conservation. Developed countries like the US would agree to reduce energy usage as much as 25–35 per cent within a matter of years, not decades – a far greater level of reduction than that proposed by COP-21. The Schwartzmans’ plan would require demilitarization, since industries related to defence are huge energy wasters.
They propose the construction of a ‘new direct-current (DC) distribution network, as a means for moving solar-generated electricity around the country’. They believe this could be ‘achievable and economically feasible’ by ‘using geothermal as base supply, wind at night, solar during the day, and hydropower at peak hours of need’. Solar, we know, is an intermittent power source. However, this can be compensated for by distributing wind farms and solar arrays across a wide area, while increasing storage.
As the amount of financial capital required to extract energy from the remaining supplies of fossil fuel continues to increase, the Schwartzmans predict that renewable energy will become more attractive as an option. The rise of solar power in the next decades will drastically decrease the demand for petroleum in the global economy.
Joining a chorus of academic voices, the Schwartzmans conclude that shifting to renewables is achievable, can fulfil the energy needs of humanity and can provide a higher quality of life for all.
Thinking along the same lines, The Sustainable Development Solutions Network, an initiative of the United Nations, is devising a plan for the entire world to eliminate CO2 emissions over the next few decades. Their 2014 report, Pathways to Deep Decarbonization, led by the economist Jeffrey Sachs, focused on 15 countries, including the US, UK, Brazil, Japan, China and South Africa. According to the authors, ‘deeply reducing greenhouse gas emissions and achieving socioeconomic development are not mutually exclusive. Robust economic growth and rising prosperity are consistent with the objective of deep decarbonization. They form two sides of the same coin and must be pursued together as part of sustainable development.’
While I like the bold outlines of the deep decarbonization approach, I disagree with the authors in one crucial area. I don’t believe that we can reduce global emissions – and avert catastrophic climate change – while continuing rapid economic growth. When the United Nations issued its Sustainable Development Goals recently, it forecast a 7 per cent annual growth rate, measured by gross domestic product, or GDP, for developing countries. This seems impossible, if not suicidal. At the moment, GDP is increasing at about 2 per cent annually, while global debt is increasing at 7 per cent. Even though a transition to a renewable energy infrastructure can create hundreds of thousands – even millions – of new jobs, a rapid reduction of CO2 emissions to avert climate catastrophe will require strict limits on industrial production and development, at least during a transition period. Sachs is well known as a neoliberal economist, a proponent of corporate globalization. I think he wants to avoid the politically unpalatable realization that ‘deep decarbonization’ is only possible if we transition away from the current model of economic growth.
To stop our destructive momentum, we must transition our economic paradigm to promote a steady-state system, a ‘degrowth’ model or a ‘post-capitalist’ model, in the near term. I agree with Sachs, as well as the UN’s recent Sustainable Development Goals, that we must do this while we enhance the living conditions of the world’s poor. This requires far more than a reform of the global financial system. It requires a redefinition of many basic terms, such as work, value and happiness. It means we must change our behaviour, both individually and as a species.
Sachs’s plan proposes three essential strategies: increasing energy efficiency and conservation, rapidly developing low-carbon sources of electricity, and switching to them for building, transport and industry. He believes that we can become carbon neutral by replacing all of the existing fossil fuel plants to generate energy from renewable sources, and then we can save an enormous amount of energy through conservation, applying the most efficient technologies in areas like urban design, home construction, transport, industry and so on.
The problem is that our current infrastructure was built for an age of limitless, cheap energy. Some experts, like Vaclav Smil – Bill Gates’s favourite thinker – believe it will take a century, or more, to make the transition envisioned by experts like Sachs. Smil pessimistically notes that changing our fossil-fuel-based system is a ‘gargantuan task’.
Our energy infrastructure, including ‘coal mines, oil and gas fields, refineries, pipelines, trains, trucks, tankers, filling stations, power plants, transformers, transmission and distribution lines, and hundreds of millions of gasoline, kerosene, diesel and fuel oil engines – constitutes the costliest and most extensive set of installations, networks, and machines that the world has ever built, one that has taken generations and tens of trillions of dollars to put in place’. The annual throughputs include ‘more than 7 billion metric tons of hard coal and lignite, 4 billion metric tons of crude oil, and more than 3 billion cubic meters of natural gas’.
It is difficult to conceive of human civilization simply abandoning this massive construction. For Smil, it seems impossible. He also notes that we have not yet proved that carbon-neutral energy sources such as solar can replace fossil fuels universally. However, there is no theoretical reason they can’t be scaled, in the ways that Sachs and the Schwartzmans suggest. The difficulties in making a rapid systemic transition are financial and ideological. There are no physical constraints preventing us from doing it. If this transition became a central focus of collective human activity over the next few years, we would accomplish it. We do know from the past that ideologies, beliefs, social behaviour – as well as the economic systems that underlie them – can change quickly.
Focusing on averting a two-degree rise in global temperatures, the Decarbonization report warns that ‘without a dramatic reversal of the greenhouse gas emissions trajectory – one that leads to a significant decline in greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century and to net zero emissions during the second half of the century – the world will not only overshoot the 2°C limit, but will do so dramatically . . . Humanity faces catastrophic risks on our current path.’ Unfortunately, recent scientific projections have reduced that 2°C limit to 1.5°C as the maximum before large-scale release of the methane from the Arctic becomes inevitable. This only serves to highlight the severity of our current emergency, and how quickly we must work together to avert the worst possible results.
Although solar energy currently supplies only about 1 per cent of electricity globally, we are on the verge, potentially, of an exponential scaling up of solar power. This could happen so rapidly that solar will surpass fossil fuels as our principal energy source within a few decades. Energy analyst Tam Hunt is among many commentators who agree we have already reached the tipping point where solar becomes the cheapest source of energy and hence the default source: ‘The cost of solar power has plummeted in the last few years by over 50 per cent and we are seeing solar power costs at or below the cost of utility power in an increasing number of jurisdictions already; this is generally known as “grid parity”.’ This is the case, even though fossil fuel companies receive all sorts of government subsidies.
A recent report found that Germany, Italy and Spain are now at ‘grid parity’ for solar photovoltaics, and many other countries are close. Grid parity means it is now just as cheap to use solar as other sources of energy. According to Deutsche Bank, 80 per cent of the world will reach grid parity by 2017. ‘I call the next big step for solar after grid parity, the point at which solar power becomes the default new power source in a majority of jurisdictions around the world, the “solar singularity”.
When this moment is reached, solar power will take off and become the dominant power source relatively quickly,’ Hunt writes.
It is entirely feasible for solar to undergo a very rapid acceleration. One precedent for this is the rapid dissemination and penetration of cell phones and smart phones, which became ubiquitous more quickly than any past technology in history. In the US, the transition from horses to automobiles, early last century, took little more than a decade. If governments support the solar singularity with new subsidies and policies, solar could indeed become the world’s dominant energy source within the next decades.
The potential for a rapid scaling up of solar power and other renewable sources has existed for a while now. Unfortunately, it has been blocked and subverted by governments, particularly the US and China. These super-powers have committed to fossil fuels due to entrenched interests and fixed ideologies. But for China, at least, this is now changing.
In 2000, the entire global market for solar power was 300 megawatts a year. Since then, China’s increasing commitment to solar has radically boosted the prospects for the industry: Jeremy Leggett, the founder of Solar Century, a UK company, believes we have now reached a point where solar’s triumph is inevitable. Leggett saw the future when he visited a new factory in Shanghai, which can produce a thousand megawatts of solar panels annually. ‘The machines stretch in ordered rows many football pitches into the distance’, he writes in The Winning of the Carbon War. ‘Hundreds of workers, dressed just like the touring party, attend them. A thousand people work under this roof, in alternating shifts, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.’ In 2012, the total capacity of solar photovoltaic panels crossed 100 gigawatts: ‘This is equivalent to . . . 65 full-size 1.3 gigawatt nuclear reactors,’ Leggett notes – and solar is continuing to grow, exponentially.
While China’s totalitarian political system is not enviable as a social model, the Chinese might force a rapid conversion to regenerative practices in many areas. Instead of making disposable gadgets for the West, factories could be repurposed to produce rainwater harvesters, biochar units, storage batteries for renewable energy sources and so on. Similarly, China could undertake a large-scale retraining of its population to adopt conservation as well as permaculture practices. It could force its population to become essentially vegetarian.
The massive transition we need to ensure our continuity may be easier to manage under an authoritarian regime than under a liberal democracy, corrupted by special interests. The happiest outcome would be a worldwide metamorphosis, over a few decades, to both decentralized power grids and decentralized democracies.
Making a rapid, global transition to renewable sources of energy requires the development of enhanced energy-storage capacities and the creation of what some commentators call ‘The Internet of energy.’ The economic and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin outlines this optimistic alternative in his book, The Third Industrial Revolution.
Rifkin believes this revolution will be based on a number of factors. Obviously, first and most pressing, is the transition to solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and other renewable sources. Second, we must transform our approach to building, so that we construct new buildings and retrofit old ones to act as micro-power plants, collecting energy on-site. The third is developing and deploying hydrogen batteries and other storage technologies to capture the intermittent power produced from renewable sources. Then, we must develop network technologies that transform the power grid of every continent and country into an ‘energy internet’ able to transmit power efficiently. This would require a decentralized infrastructure, like the Internet itself. Lastly, we must transition our transportation system – cars, trucks, trains, boats, planes – to run on renewable sources of fuel. We can replace the current fleet of cars with electric plug-in and fuel cell vehicles – even though this would require a tremendous expenditure of energy. There are over a billion cars and trucks currently on the planet. Retrofitting them to run on electricity – or salt-water hydrolysis – might be less wasteful than junking them. We also might want to rethink the private automobile as our principal mode of transport. A ton of steel, raw materials and precious metals to move around one or two human beings is not very efficient. Cars are difficult to recycle. Once they cease working, they end up in dumps, leaking toxins into the Earth.
Rifkin, by the way, followed up his extremely optimistic book, The Third Industrial Revolution, with an even more optimistic one. In The Zero-Margin Cost Society, he argues that humanity may be reaching a threshold where super-abundance becomes our natural state. We will avert the ecological crisis by rapid innovations, spreading sustainable solutions across the Earth through distributed manufacturing and open-source, peer-to-peer forms of collaborative production. We will be able to ‘print out’ solar panels and desalinization kits, for instance, ending our dependence on scarce water.
Other futurists believe such a direction is plausible if we can overcome our ideological blockages and stop the robots from pulling a Terminator on us. For instance, Paul Mason realizes, in Postcapitalism, ‘Knowledge-driven production tends towards the unlimited creation of wealth, independent of the labour expended.’ Mason believes we are approaching the potential for a post-capitalist civilization where a basic income or universal subsidy gives everyone the means to live decently, where we achieve ‘freedom from work’. Once again, as Buckminster Fuller predicted, we seem to be on a seesaw teetering between polar opposites of utopia or oblivion.
One question is whether there are other forms of non-polluting renewable energy – besides solar, wind and geothermal – that we can access, which can speed our escape from fossil fuel dependence and help us reach carbon-neutral or negative, globally. While solar energy and other renewables could fulfil all sorts of needs, they are not effective for certain purposes, for instance air travel. It takes an enormous amount of fuel to power the world’s current fleet of jet planes as well as giant cargo ships.
‘One round-trip flight from New York to Europe or to San Francisco creates a warming effect equivalent to 2 or 3 tons of carbon dioxide per person,’ states the New York Times. ‘The average American generates about 19 tons of carbon dioxide a year; the average European, 10. So if you take five long flights a year, they may well account for three-quarters of the emissions you create.’ For someone like myself, who doesn’t drive a car, air travel is my biggest single contribution to warming.
Through my work, I get many opportunities to hop on a plane, which I love to do – although ironically, my work involves speaking about this very quandary. But I recognize that travel is a massive drain on the planet’s resources.
For those of us in the privileged classes – not only defined by wealth, which I lack, but access to other forms of capital, such as ‘culture capital’ – our ability to travel freely around the globe, whenever we like, is considered an inalienable right, not something to be judged, censured or questioned. Every other week, friends of mine jet off to Nepal, Bali, South Africa, Indonesia, Japan, Siberia, Berlin, Costa Rica, Gstaad, expelling several tons of CO2 with each puddle jump. They visit ski lodges, ancient temples, secluded eco-lodges and yoga retreats, and take selfies with native tribes sporting their picturesque penis gourds.
Many of us believe that our ability to descend on distant cultures – whenever we feel like it – is, somehow, beneficial for the world. We don’t see it as a form of colonialist entitlement, or another addiction. One by-product of this incessant travel is that wealthy people don’t develop a deeper connection with any particular place. They don’t feel the need to deepen community where they are. Why should they, when they can always jet off to the next spot, as soon as things feel dull for them and they desire more stimulation? Perhaps we could start with a commitment to travel less, to invest in building community at home? For instance, if one million or ten million or one hundred million people agreed to restrict their air travel to once a year, or less, that could be shown to have measurable impacts in the amount of CO2 and other waste produced.
If people continue to travel by plane all of the time, without regard for consequences, we are going to have to pray for some amazing, stillunimagined breakthrough technologies to arise – technologies that can suck carbon out of the atmosphere, and allow us to fly without emitting clouds of doom. One somewhat fanciful idea I entertain is the revival of airships – hydrogen-filled blimps (helium, unfortunately, is increasingly scarce). Imagine, particularly in a post-work society organized around the pursuit of what Oscar Wilde called ‘cultivated leisure’, airships being used as gigantic co-working and co-housing facilities, drifting slowly around the world, perhaps even containing some version of indoor aquaponics farms, producing their own food. They could become floating festivals. But I digress.
One tantalizing prospect for a new energy source for air travel and other forms of transportation is the use of algae as a source of biofuel. Algae is a non-flowering plant that uses photosynthesis to convert carbon and light into lipids and carbohydrates that can be turned into ethanol. Perhaps the most important organism on Earth, it is a major contributor to the stability, health and regenerative capacities of the biosphere, producing more than half of the oxygen that we breathe. Algae can be commercially grown in mass quantities, and then pressed – much the way olives are pressed into olive oil – to produce fuel, which, in theory, can power jet planes, ocean liners, as well as cars and home heating systems.
The path to a regenerative transformation of human society will require harnessing the restorative capacities of the oldest organisms on Earth, and applying our industrial techniques to scale up production and distribution. This will include working with plants and fungi, as well as anaerobic microorganisms called Archaea, ancient one-celled organisms with no nucleus, which can be utilized to transmute our waste products into fuel.
A number of companies are currently working on the commercial production of algae-based biofuels – and when they perfect the process, it presumably can be scaled up rapidly to be a replacement for fossil fuels on a large level. One of these companies, Algae Systems, based in Nevada, makes ‘diesel fuel from algae by simultaneously performing three other tasks: making clean water from municipal sewage (which it uses to fertilize the algae), using the carbon-heavy residue as fertilizer and generating valuable credits for advanced biofuels’. The technology, according to the company, is carbon negative, removing more CO2 from the atmosphere than it releases, but it is still a work in progress.
Currently, nuclear energy supplies an estimated 20 per cent of electricity in the US, and 14 per cent of electricity globally, without releasing CO2. Without dismissing other sources of renewable energy, billionaires like Peter Thiel and Bill Gates, along with ‘Neo-environmentalists’ like Mark Lynas, Stewart Brand and Ramez Naam, promote nuclear power as a necessity – even after Fukushima.
Lynas writes that ‘nuclear power is likely to be the most environmentally friendly technology of all, although appropriately sited wind, solar and other renewables are similarly benign and should be equally encouraged’. But to create enough power to satisfy the ever-increasing demand, while reducing global emissions of CO2 by 50 per cent by midcentury, would require the construction of 12,000 new nuclear power plants. In other words, one plant would have to come online, every single day, for the next 30 years.
In Eaarth, Bill McKibben writes, ‘Nuclear power plants don’t seem as scary as they did a generation ago – not that they’ve gotten safer, but other things have gotten nastier . . . If a nuclear plant has an accident, it’s bad news, but if you operate a coal-fired plant exactly according to the instructions, it melts the ice caps and burns the forests.’ Nuclear plants are extremely costly to build and often involve enormous cost overruns. ‘Bottom line: building enough conventional nuclear reactors to eliminate a tenth of the threat of global warming would cost about $8 trillion,’ McKibben notes, and would run electricity prices ‘through the roof’.
Plant safety and nuclear waste disposal remain serious concerns – not to mention the potential to turn radioactive byproducts into weapons. In the US, engineers are starting to fret about the potential of the ageing fleet of reactors to withstand the increasingly frequent onslaught of super-storms and earthquakes. Indian Point, near New York, where I live, appears to be leaking radioactive waste, according to news reports. As peak oil and climate change continues to intensify in the next years, large-scale projects such as building nuclear reactors will become increasingly difficult to implement. The construction of a nuclear reactor not only costs several billion dollars, but also adds an estimated 20 million tons of CO2 to the atmosphere.
Energy companies are in the process of developing fourth-generation nuclear reactors – including some able to use already existing radioactive waste as fuel – but the technology remains untested and unproven. These new kinds of reactors, according to Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, could be ‘so-called backyard nukes. These selfcontained small-scale modular generation IV nuclear reactors are built in factories (for cheaper construction), sealed completely, and designed to run for decades without maintenance.’ The timetable for these new reactors is vague, with the potential for a demonstration model of one kind to be running by 2020.
If it can be conclusively demonstrated that next-generation nuclear plants are safe and will help us stave off global warming, the technology should be considered. But the inherent problems with nuclear power remain severe. Even if the loss of life from Fukushima and Chernobyl was far less than initially feared, we still don’t know what the long-term, even multi-generational, impacts of this radiation will be. Nuclear reactors cost a fortune to build and require a massive security infrastructure to protect. They reinforce the current model of centralized government and corporate control.
On the other hand, we know that both solar and wind work. These energy sources are getting cheaper faster and they are available now. Solar power has already reached grid parity, and will soon be far more cost-effective than fossil fuels. Renewable energy does not require a huge security apparatus, does not produce dangerous waste and can be installed in a decentralized manner. The only question, in fact, is how do we bring about their immediate adoption?
Other potential energy sources exist. Some of them are controversial and remain on the fringes, but if it can be proved they work reliably without disastrous ecological costs, they should be implemented. One of these is cold fusion, also called Low Energy Nuclear Reactors, whose viability is still being studied.
According to promoters, cold fusion technology is on the verge of producing ‘zero carbon dioxide emissions, zero noise, zero radiation and zero toxins of any sort. In addition to being powerful and efficient, the technology is completely safe. It uses no radioactive materials, produces no nuclear waste, emits no radioactivity into the environment, and releases no pollution.’
On the scientific fringe, a number of other researchers believe we can draw an essentially unlimited amount of power by tapping quantum fluctuations from the vacuum, or the zero point field (ZPF). ‘Zero point energy is the sea of energy that pervades all of space and every atom, often called the physical vacuum,’ writes Thomas Valone. A tremendous amount of potential energy exists in every atom of space. According to Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, ‘the energy density of the ZPF would be ten raised to the 108th power joules per cubic centimeter’. This translates into the theoretical ability to access enough energy to power the world – more than we will ever need – by accessing zero point in a tiny region of space.
Valone, among others, claims that engines applying zero point are almost ready for mass release. These engines would make use of the Casimir effect – the repulsion between metal plates at a micro-scale – to produce energy. ‘Analysis of the Casimir engine cycle demonstrates its departure from hydroelectric, gaseous or gravitational systems’, Valone writes.
One issue to consider is that, if we did access unlimited free energy from zero point or cold fusion before we attained a more advanced planetary consciousness, this might exacerbate other problems. With unlimited power, for instance, we might rapidly exhaust our resources, plundering the last fish from deep in the oceans, pulling out the remaining raw materials buried deep beneath the Earth. We might also create new super-weapons. The other question, of course, is whether these two technologies are, in fact, attainable. Mainstream scientists remain sceptical, but we should stay open to all options. After all, we have already accomplished many things that were once, simply, unimaginable.
I realize this chapter has included a lot of information. I know your brain may have switched off here and there while reading it. I often find, when I speak to people – non-specialists or non-fanatics – about the ecological mega-crisis, as well as specific solutions, such as these proposals for global energy (let alone macro-economics, which is coming up later), they reach a threshold where their eyes glaze over. They stare, vacantly, away from me, into the middle distance.
The essential takeaway is that we have a realistic capacity to make a complete overhaul of our global energy system away from fossil fuels, towards renewables. This doesn’t have to take us a century. We can accomplish it in a few decades. This is not a pie-in-the-sky fantasy. It is something that can happen. As quickly as we can, we must impel our society in this direction.
In fact, nobody can say how fast we might bring this transformation about, once our focus shifts in this direction. Globally, civilization must break through political obstructions to engineer a rapid transition to solar and other renewable sources, focusing on conservation while we build new infrastructure. Unfortunately, the 2015 Paris agreements on climate change did not do the job – as Naomi Klein noted, COP-21 was ‘scientifically catastrophic’, like telling a patient with heart disease to cut down from five to four hamburgers a day and jog once every two weeks.
What humanity needs, as Lester Brown realized, is something like a Marshall Plan for the planet. We must act together as if we are facing a threat as dangerous as Soviet totalitarianism. The threat comes not only from the entrenched power of the fossil fuel companies, but also from social complacency – as well as consumerism and hyper-individuality.
Roy Scranton writes in Learning to Die in the Anthropocene:
The problem with our response to climate change isn’t a problem of passing the right laws or finding the right price for carbon or changing people’s minds or raising awareness. Everybody already knows. The problem is that the problem is too big. The problem is that different people want different things. The problem is that the problem is us.
Scranton is correct. We therefore must seek to engineer a collective shift in values and behaviour, based on the understanding that individual and collective consciousness are, in the end, socially produced.
In the short term, we must radically reduce our use of energy and design and implement a system based on conservation, cooperation and efficient sharing of resources. As we will discuss, a ‘carbon tax’ – financially penalizing the production of CO2 – might help. However, it won’t be enough. We must engineer a structural transition in our socioeconomic paradigm, away from growth.
Smil and other critics are correct in noting that our current fossil-fuel-dependent energy infrastructure represents a massive global apparatus, a huge ‘sunk investment’ made over generations. I realize that we confront a daunting task in switching over to renewable power.
Even so, this daunting task can be accomplished. The multitude must demand it, forcing the hands of corporations and governments. This will require a global movement of civil society, beyond anything we have seen to date. How such a movement develops – how it organizes itself to overcome the existing power relationships – is a question that I don’t think anyone can answer fully at this point.