Great job Rachel, but Auke has climate myopia. We have a metacrisis driven and enabled by surplus energy, not that i think it is possible but if he were right - we are doomed. The worst thing would be for us to continue to have surplus energy because it would simple enable us to continue to destroy the life supporting capacity of the planet.
Rachel Simon Michaux's critical materials report is now peer reviewed and out and thats great news as it shows the utter impossibility of non fossil energy replacing anywhere near what we have from fossils Michaux, S. P. (2024): Estimation of the quantity of metals to phase out fossil fuels in a full system replacement, compared to mineral resources, Geological Survey of Finland Bulletin 416 Special Edition, https://tupa.gtk.fi/julkaisu/bulletin/bt_416.pdf
Also, .5 percent of land, of the whole of earth surface (not sure if he was including Antarctica in the totality of land), is actually a lot. I would be surprised if roofs built by humans amount to that much.
peer reviewed or not if its the same as it was 6 mths ago it is littered with misunderstandings and bad assumptions. His concept of the amount of storage required to firm wind water and solar is completely ignorant. As someone who has modelled renewable energy grids and knows the issues that must be navigated, he has obviously never modelled an energy grid in his life.
I look forward to the rebuttals of his paper. I can only guess his peer review was from other energy decanters who don't understand energy grids.
It may help you to understand why people like Simon Michaux are deeply ignorant when they make estimates of what kinds of RE and storage capacity is required to firm RE to be able to match demand curves. I could go into a lot of detail about how incorrect Michaeu is, I'll say it for a paper of my own perhaps.
I'm not suggesting ecological collapse is not a concern, for the reasons of overconsumption and over-pollution that you highlighted, but the renewables transition is not constrained by critical mineral shortages at any point that I have been made aware of by Simon Michaux or anybody else.
I've been a climate activists and renewable energy transition advocate and researcher for over a decade, and just because an energy transition to WWS (clean and green Wind|Water|Solar) is possible doesn't mean it will happen quickly enough and broadly enough to prevent 3-5 ºC of global warming this century, and I'm not completely convinced that if we get into the upper band of that, it a) wipes out most of the human civilisation on this Earth and b) doesn't tip further climate system breakdown in ways that are not clear enough to us at this time. (IPCC massively underprojected the polar ice melt rates due to ignoring the cutting edge science on melt water hydrology in AR1, AR2, AR3) and had a lot of messaging around it all being centuries away. That implied we had way more time to respond if we even wanted to as species largely controlled on these decisions by elite and unaccountable people. So I'm not ruling our new underestimates if we hit 3-5 ºC. Sadly, 3-5 ºC seems more likely than not today, with USA Government falling prey to the predatory FF industry lobby, and BRICS nations very unengaged in decarbonisation . The notable exception is China to the extent they're deploying wind and PV like no other nation on Earth, or region like EU. They are the hub of many of the electrification technologies that will displace FF technologies e.g. EVs and HSR technology. . It remains to be seen if they start fracking etc as is planned for 2030-50 in a 25 year plan I once read)
What about the research showing we don’t have sufficient key minerals without exponential energy expenditure to reach them? What is the spectrum of disagreement on that point? Seems an essential consideration that experts give wildly different answers on. Are proponents relying on an imagined future shift to different technologies using less scarce elements?
How realistic is the recycling process without adopting a donut model, which he liked, but relies on political and structural changes so you can build the things in a way to be easily recycled, if they can be at all at realistic scale (as opposed to always cheaper cheaper).
steel is already gaily recycled and it drives itself because it takes a fraction of the energy — and therefore a fraction of the cost — to recycle steel when compared to digging iron ore, processing that, then smelting and refining pig iron in steel products.
PV panels, wind turbines (including new blade technology recently) chemical batteries are all 95-99% recyclable. and there's costs savings in using recycled materials rather than extracted supply lines.
Why the skepticism?
The range of views is down to the deeply ignorant and popularist pessimism expressed by anti-renewables and energy descent ideologies pulling away from the scientifically literate views on the subject.
Again, ecological collapse is already happening many places, and AGW/CC are still massive concerns, but as to the possibility of renewables displacing FF energy technologies is realistic in technological and economic terms. Do we need to move to a strategic degrowth economy, certainly, but the RE transition is a major part of enabling that in a way a majority of people (rich or poor, rich nation or poor nation) will find acceptable, not an impediment to strategic degrowth.
I found the xenetwork podcast really helpful in putting my opposing tendencies into a bracket that is hopeful and separates out all my questions and anxieties into a manageable approach. After listening I'm pleased now to have a better rationalisation of the various pushes and pulls and find hope within the transitionista tribe.
I'd love to see a show between Auke and Simon Michaux. They both have lots of figures at their fingertips but have totally different views on this. It would be SO interesting to listen to/watch.
the simple & true point he made is that more clean energy doesn't necessarily entail violation of planetary boundaries. we know that exacerbation is conceivable with more energy/efficiency/energy/efficiency/novel technologies... but it's not the case that it guarantees that. problem of induction + complex system dynamics suggest that it may be possible to turn this clusterfuck around.
so it's not particularly strongly warranted to assert that as much planetary-boundaries-respecting growth / advance / progress as we can do is the worst trajectory leading to doom. no one knows that.
With all due respect, it is true that we need systemic change, not ONLY changing to a different source of energy. But your argument is basically the same as that of those who believe that Nikola Tesla's free energy technologies should be suppressed for humanity's own good and the good of the planet, because our species supposedly cannot handle it. And that is utterly patronizing, paternalistic, and ultimately comes from a place of, dare I say it, privilege.
Free energy is freedom. And as Thomas Jefferson said, it is an unwise jealousy to deny people freedom merely on the supposition that they might abuse it.
Look at the biggest elephant in the room (or rather, in the Volkswagen), for example, namely overpopulation. The two very best, and ethical, ways to reduce excessive birthrates are 1) female empowerment, and 2) poverty reduction. Both of which are achieved with MORE freedom, not less. And that implies that the poorer 80% of humanity need to "eat MORE electrons", NOT fewer.
A really interesting episode as it brought up many of the disagreements within the green transition camp which need to be aired as they provide ample fodder for those wanting business as usual. I have a sense that while wanting to grapple with the political and philosophical questions of a better world - and despite his claim to welcome uncertainty - Auke finds solace in the mathematically quantifiable. Not a criticism as we all need some solid ground and we can all share his frustration that while it could be rolled out much faster the political will is largely missing.
There is also some merit in his argument that going full tilt to roll out solar and wind (geothermal only got a passing mention, sadly) would at least buy us some time to address the deeper political and societal problems although, as was acknowledged at the end, this is also at the mercy of those very problems.
I am not a great fan of technology (in the sense that we refer to it now), primarily as it increases our reliance on structures that are inherently vulnerable and centralised. There are, though, few palatable alternatives to managing the sheer size of the global population. As Auke said - and he echoes the ever-eloquent Daniel Schmachtenberger - we also need conversations before the roll out new technologies about the costs associated with them and not allow ourselves to be seduced by the shiny new and the unremittingly positive spin that always precedes it.
Conversations across disciplines are vital for us to build a much more comprehensive view of where we are going and where we want to go and this one was a great example of that principle.
We need to pay attention to the late ecologist Howard Odum, who taught us that technology is simply a form of embedded energy, or "emergy".
That means that as energy declines — which it will, regardless of how many solar panels or wind turbines we build — technology must also decline.
Permaculture teaches us that "efficiency" is a two-edged sword. It reduces redundancy, and thus, it reduces resilience. And as William Stanley Jevons taught us, by corrupting market price signals, efficiency actually makes us use up a resource even faster.
We need to focus on making do with less. We are currently using 180 petawatts, on a planet that only receives about 180 petawatts of solar energy.
I've seen the future, and it is powered by current photosynthesis. I'm just not sure I see any people in that future.
for a start fossil fuel technologies waste 40-80% of the embedded energy in the combustion process as unused heat that takes energy to remove from the combustion appliance. so you should be embracing RE on that alone.
have you seen the recent IEA graphic meme, one shipping container ship of PV panels will produce as much energy for the grid (on off-grid) as 100 coal ships or 50 LNG ships?
also fossil fuels industries use way more critical minerals use than any other industry, and destroy their extraction points far more than the extraction of the steel, copper etc to produce one container boat load of PV panels or wind turbines. there's really no comparison between FF and RE pathways forward and yet we have the Simon Micheau's and Nate Hagens of this world “flooding the zone” with misinformation.
Another thing I noticed and wanted to comment on was something Rachel said, early on about how she sees her role through her interviews: “Naivety is perhaps not the right word, but [I want to] warn against the belief that things will just work out because we've lived through an era of things working out in our part of the world, essentially.”
It is not clear to me whether Rachel believes that “things have worked out” for people in the Global North but that she wants people to avoid assuming it will always be that way and so not to worry, or whether she is in fact saying that she does not believe that and wants to encourage people not to fall into the trap of thinking that “things will just work out” because of some illusion that they always have, again for those we often consider “lucky” who grew up in developed northern countries. But her position on this is not the point.
What she said reminded me of one of the biggest reasons why we find it so difficult to address any of our global crises, and that is our faulty complacence. It is that we are not being honest with ourselves. It is how we tend to believe it when those in power tell us that we are lucky and that we have the best system we possibly can have and that everything is going to be okay because it’s already really good. It’s why MAGA strikes a chord in many Americans, too.
I was born in the 60s and grew up in the Silicon Valley and so I guess I should consider myself very lucky. But as a boy, the family in the house next to mine had their son shipped off to fight in Vietnam, leaving his younger brother, years older than me, to wonder about what was going to happen to his brother and to him as well, as he approached draft age. His brother made it back home, luckily. My father worked in computers, before they were “personal,” which meant he worked for a now-defunct company known to the public as a harmless manufacturer of home electronics but which, like many Silicon Valley tech firms, made most of its money on government defense contracts. I never knew that. Wikipedia mentions none of the company’s military endeavors whatsoever. During the Cold War we eventually went to an American army base in Germany for the company as my father was asked to train the military on the use of their computer-guided satellite systems designed to intercept and decode Russian transmissions. Something he only revealed to me some 30 years later as it was literally Top Secret. What does spending a career working in such a covert environment do to such people? To their families? I could go on, but what I mean to say is that there has never been a time in my life when things were just fine. Not for the world, my country, my family. Not really. We can argue over whether they were really so bad after all, but I think this is just the Bill Gates mentality talking inside our heads.
At the end of the talk, Rachel finally asks Auke the “first” question: why is the world in crisis? And his answer? “First of all, we found no way yet to seriously deal with global long-term problems.”
This is the point. The wealthy, particularly people like Bill Gates, can tell us all day long that we are “better off now” etc., but we still have not addressed the major problems of human societies, because we are and have been controlled by psychopaths who do not care about us outside of making sure we keep working to provide them with riches. And we get lured into believing that having a bigger car and more stuff is a proper life goal, while we forget that we spend most of our adult lives in service (normally doing something we don’t actually enjoy, or would never chose to do in our spare time) to someone else who lives a life of luxury while we make ourselves sick with worry over how to keep our heads above water. What if I lose my job? What if I become sick? How on Earth am I going to find a way to earn enough money to afford some level of comfort for me and my family? For all our intelligence and so-called progress, we are still living the law of the jungle. Kill or be killed. Slave away and count yourself lucky.
This is why, as we face the latest development in our never-ending series of catastrophes, we must stop and think: will we fix the root of our problems or simply treat symptoms? Degrowth people know that an energy fix will only get us so far. And now, of course, it is very likely that it will not get us very far at all, given that tipping points are approaching and that, contrary to what we are told, we cannot live with these changes, cannot simply adapt to them. They will end us. At many stages throughout history people have been challenged to overcome horrors and hopefully start with a clean slate, with a better, new world, but we have always ended up with little more than a substitution of power. Are we really going to keep doing that, when the stakes are so high now? It is no longer a question of war, where we can hope that one or both sides come to their sense. The planet doesn’t work that way. Soon it will be completely out of our hands for the first time ever.
Hmm. So apart from what felt slightly like a God Complex (this is my mission - really?), I really struggled with the premise that data is king and if we don’t have data and can’t quantify something than it is somehow inferior. Qualitative data IS also data - and also data that he refers to is disproportionally skewed to the Global North.
Well done Rachel you are a much more stoic person than me - some of his argument was really tough to listen to - and is so ingrained in a very privileged mindset.
To not consider that we could reduce our energy consumption and only aim to keep the status quo with alternative energy is very short sighted as a vision. As you rightly said Rachel - we don’t need as much energy but we have just become comfortable.
The electrification of different industries, such as transport, plus other fuel sources for things that are hard to electrify, like using hydrogen for long haul flights,
These key industries are going to have a very difficult time electrifying: mining, long-haul shipping, and agriculture.
Vaclav Smil identifies cement, steel, plastic, and nitrogen fertilizer as four things that are currently utterly dependent on fossil fuel. "Renewablizing" any of these is going to be a monumental challenge.
We humans could probably live without cement, steel, and plantic. We could probably do without mining and long-haul shipping. But feeding over eight billion humans without fossil fuel is going to be impossible.
In peak planting and harvest seasons, a farmer can drive a tractor for as long as he can hold his coffee, and he can refill that tractor in the time it takes to empty his bladder. This is not at all the case for electrified agriculture. Such a tractor will need a charge or a pack-swap about every hour.
On the other end, agriculture is utterly dependent on natural gas, both as a feedstock, and as a convenient and simple energy source for creating high temperatures and pressures. Using electrolysis to create the hydrogen and expensive, multi-stage heating and pressurizing will increase the cost of food by an order of magnitude.
Can you afford $40 hamburgers? $50 for a gallon of milk? $100 for a box of chocolates? $500 for a sit-down restaurant meal?
"Yeabut, wages will increase, too."
No. What we have from energy depletion is "stagflation", or the increase in prices of things dependent on non-renewable resources, combined with stagnation of wages.
Those of us who lived through the 1973 and 1978 oil price shocks have seen this before. It ain't pretty.
don't know why you are citing Vaclav Smil! he's Bill Gate's goto on energy policy and technology matters and is the main reason why Bill Gates is investing in nuclear power (lets see how that pans out).
Vaclav Smil is so deeply misguided on energy that when he made his estimates on the quantity of RE and storage required to electrify the power grid as 100%+ RE and transition other sectors he neglected to understand one crucial thing. at least a third and up to two thirds of the embodied energy of fossil fuels are wasted as heat (2nd law of thermodydmanics) in current thermal power systems. So when you talk about the energy used by ICE cars in BTUs and the amount of electrical energy that would be required to displace that in EVs, (assuming we don't do more PT, which we will) is a third of the energy required, thanks to the very high energy efficiency of the electrical supply network and drivetrain in EV vehicles.
Thanks a rookie error and yet people put Vaclav Smil up as an authority on energy transition. Not to me he isn't. That kind of error precludes him from a position of authority on RE Transition matters, and really asks questions abut where he is coming from if you ask me. (Nuclear lobby?)
I agree I’ve not heard any renewables exponent explain how this works. For his focus on real solutions I hear no plans in this area of high power mobile industry demand. Perhaps we can change some to hydrogen (?) but at what speed and cost? Haven’t see political discussions for that at all... so would that ever become more affordable or available at smaller scales, or just massive farms / industries which are just the centralised industrialisation we should be moving away from?
He argued for not having less energy use then made the valid point to reduce land change and animal consumption. I agree, but would consider (perhaps incorrectly) this as part of reducing our energy footprint, our “having less”.
This looks dead wrong from a technical point of view the only place these technologies may have a place are off grid applications plenty of experts have declared this to be true more on this if you are interested
Good ep. What I gleaned was that Auke strongly believes that we should not let perfect be the enemy of good.
But I also think that a really cogent counter to his points about degrowth is that reducing energy and material demand would make deploying the net zero renewables easier. Our politics and economics are intertwined with distribution of resources to different industries and sectors. We have to stop wasting economic output on private jets and missiles.
It's a shame that the minerals requirements weren't examined in more detail. Reports by Mark P Mills and Simon Michaux (thanks to Mike Joy for pointing out that it has now been peer reviewed) cast serious doubts on the availability of the necessary minerals at the required rate, quite apart from the damage to nature by such mining. Although the main study quoted by renewables advocates, from Mark Jacobson, suggests that there is ample resources, both Marks could be thought to have a particular interest in getting the results they want, I don't think that the same is true of Simon Michaux (who, nevertheless, comes up with just as crazy "solutions"). It is by no means certain that a transition to less dirty energy sources can be completed.
Auke completely discounts the fact that so-called renewables are still environmentally destructive and, as Mike Joy points out, in his comment, would continue powering an inherently destructive way of life. Auke nailed his colours to the mast when he said his goal is the flourishing of human life using renewables. From that, we can discount anything he says, unless it is examined thoroughly and critically. He often talked about what kind of world people want for themselves and their descendants but never spoke about trying to determine just what is physically possible and what the overall impacts of that world is.
I could sense Rachel's frustration with Auke when he repeatedly tried to frame the degrowth strategy as continuing with fossil fuels, just using less. This alone suggests he hasn't examined degrowth, though he's right that the degrowthers don't seem to have a plan (or even a set of alternative plans) for how degrowth could be implemented. However, Auke also didn't elucidate any plan for his often stated notion that renewables could get us back to within the 9 planetary boundaries. To my mind, that would take severe reduction in energy use, something that Auke doesn't seem to want to contemplate. Perhaps he imagines perfect recycling (which is impossible) in a doughnut economics world.
As a scientist, one would think he'd understand what it takes to be sustainable, but there is no indication that he does.
"I don't think that the same is true of Simon Michaux "
Why? Simon is an old fashioned energy descenter and these guys predicted the RE technologies like wind and PV would never become affordable — now cheaper than FF power technologies with a minute fraction of the ecological damage (direct at extraction points and indirect through pollution vectors and CC) per MWh of energy in PV and Wind compared with coal, gas and oil. Given their false predictions of energy descent, they're all busily reinventing themselves as neo-energy-descenters with ridiculous estimates of the amount of critical minerals and storage required to have an effective and affordable electrification of modern societies.
I believe in strategic degrowth is essential, not because I'm of the opinion we will run out of raw materials to make RE and batteries, and understand well that we are living well beyond the ecological output of this planet each and every year (thanks to a few rich nations and the wealthiest people in rich nations who over consume and over pollute on a scale of 1000s of times what more modest people or societies do). But having to listen to Simon Michael and other "flood the zone" with their misleading "research" is so frustrating as it distracts everyone from the real issues that ecological economics identified decades ago, overconsumption and more recently the formal recognition of planetary boundaries.
don't agree with all Chris Nelder's positions on everything but on this subject in particular he's pretty much on target,
Good job Rachel. I have one technical comment and one bigger issue comment.
I believe the statement that you need just 1/3 of the energy when you use electricity as opposed to fossil fuels is misleading. It is true that electric engines are much more energy efficient than combustion engines. But elecrticity delivered by a battery that is charged by a grid has also a lot of losses, approximately 10 % in the grid and 10% in the battery, and in a 100% renewable scenario probably even higher losses as there is a need for storage solution (pump stations, hydrogen etc) where you also have losses. For a number of applications you need to convert electricity to liquid fuels (hydrogen, electro fuels etc.) where you also have a lot of losses. With electricity to hydrogen and back to electricity you are on par with fossil fuels. There are a number of uses of fossil fuels which are not based on combustion engines where I don't know if electrification means less energy, i.e, in cement production, nitrogen fertilizers and fossil free steel - I have seen no such calculations. The use of fossil fuels for heating, which is considerable in colder countries, there is no big efficiency gain in using electricity, even if heat pumps may have advantages over direct electricity heating. Finally approximately 1/10 of the oil (I don't remember the source for this figure, so I might be somewhat mistaken) is used as a feedstock för plastics, chemicals etc.
The bigger question which wasn't adress in the show is that the environmental impact of the USE of energy is not only in the production and storage of energy but in the actual use. Energy for heating has a small footprint for the use phase, but all other uses of energy entails a lot of materials, pollution, loss of biodiversity etc. E.g. electric cars need the same roads, tyres, garages, hospitals, traffic lights, and the cheaper the energy is the more cars and roads there will be. So even if "we" could run a society like ours on renewables it would still have devastating impact and obviously even worse if the claims that energy would be extremely cheap would come true (I heard them already 50 years ago about nuclear energy.....).
Very good points. I also thought that the one third figure was optimistic. Aside from the points you raised, electric motors and other electrical equipment aren't 100% efficient. So the fact that 67% of the petroleum energy is wasted doesn't mean we'd only need a third of that energy to come from electricity. It's odd that a scientist doesn't look at the complete picture and I can only assume that it's because he's human, and wants modernity to continue without GHG emissions, so that's what he has to conclude.
So more like less than a quarter of the energy used in an EV than an ICE
And that's ignoring the ever increasing amount of energy used to extract the oil for the ICE car (embodied energy in the oil supply chain). You'd think energy descenters would be cognisant of that given that peak oil was the defining religious article of faith for these folks! And the fly ash and oily sludge waste in the oil supply chains. And the massive amount of global pollution in the oil and gas industry which exposes large human populations to toxins and has been catastrophic to ecosystems all around the world, onshore and in the oceans.
seriously. educated yourselves before chiming in on this stuff, it's embarrassing.
I'm sure you can get deep into the literature if that is your desire. LCA is notoriously tricky as is the notion of embodied energy. But we can get a general sense of things without going crazy.
yeah, its *less* than a third of the energy consumption for EVs when you compare say a performance ICE luxury sports car with an similarly priced EV charged at home from your own PV panels.
and it's 100% clean energy being consumed not FF energy. the embedded energy of the EV vs the ICE car is also often under dispute and over-claim by energy descenters and doomers, don't have any recent numbers at hand on that but it's not equivalent to a complete negation of the entire EV proposition.
You should note that my comments was primarily NOT about ICEV vs EV but about all application of energy and fossil fuels and feedstocks, where I believe the 1/3 ratio has no scientific ground.
This dude has clearly never seen a mining operation in Australia. Colonisers attitude makes me sick. Use less energy, we all need to stop being so entitled.
zero emissions and negative emissions cement already exists. it was used for a runaway at the Brisbane airport 10 years ago I think.
it costs more. yet people say a price on carbon is pointless at this point in time (on account of RE now being cheaper than FF-dervied grid power most places in the world).
some forms of low/zero/negative emissions cement uses fly ash (waste from coal power plants that is often dumped into the environment when storage ponds overflow into rivers, as it did one icy Christmas in a southern state of USA about ten years ago. The waste pond contaminated water flowed into the river that was the drinking supply for two major cities and agriculture in that state).
Green steel has been made in pilot plants. Again, cost issues, largely due to it being new, not well understood in the steel industry and finance circles, still in immature stage of R&D etc etc. But potentially, with a mature market supply and no legal use of non-green steel, it could be chapter than the current method using heaps of coal that is usually imported on boats, as is the ore. Producing green iron blocks and green steel are a dream for some industrialists looking to produce green steel in Australia and other places that have lots of iron ore and lots of world class RE resources.
Aluminium is known as “frozen electricity”, same same. can be electrically powered not coal, needs alternative reductant for smelting but not for refining I think. One Aluminium refinery in Germany makes three times as much profit providing flexible demand grid services to the grid operator than it does producing aluminium!
There's lots of synergies to be unlocked in sector coupling (stabilising the power grid in industries and buildings that convert away from fossil fuels to electrification)
nuclear is already used for ling haul shipping in the navy of the nuclear powered superpowers. it's incredibly expensive. I looked up the costs of the Rolls Royce and Westinghouse reactors used in US/UK nuclear powered submarines (some aircraft carers also have nuclear power) and it's literally thousands of times more expensive for joule of energy than oil. then there's all the refuelling/decommissioning issues (some don't need refuelling but they all need decommissioning). Imagine all those beached container boats and coal freighters on the beaches of Africa being disassembled but workers wearing things also having a nuclear reactor lying around, or if not the reactors certainly the likelihood of contamination of the superstructure and hull.
I have a feeling the “this” and “it” may be a continuation of growth capitalism. I haven’t heard it all yet but his way of arguing so far has a campaigning smell to it.
They did it to us on tobacco and climate change. They will do it again on the metacrisis and paradigm change. But perhaps I’m being too cynical?
i’ve been quite forthright criticising the lazy and motivated thinking of previous guests declaring a critical minerals criss that precludes an RE transition based on some pretty poor scholarship and “back of the envelope” calculations.
therefore i really appreciate Rachel getting someone who knows renewables technology a lot better than these previous guests on the show to put a different (factually accurate) perspective. i look forward to enjoying this discussion.
we have enough ecological collapse problems to deal today and tomorrow without inventing problems that doesn’t exist. i’m not a Green Growther by any means, i think strategic degrowth in destructive parts of the economy (warfare, fossil fuels, livestock production and greed based economic policy) . but i’ve modelled energy grid transition extensively and studied the work of other modèles to understand the claims i make in a technically coherent way. i wish that was the standard for others to love by.
Excellent interview. Well done Rachel. Anyone who invokes Moore's law in a glib way, dismisses "degrowthers" because some have high carbon lifestyles, and seems not to think that Kate Raworth is one of them, certainly suffers from various types of myopia as suggested below. Very odd actually - it's worrying that people that this are editing UN docs, if that's what he doing.
People have a tendency to want to find silver-bullet solutions, and possibly even to prefer trying to roll all problems into one so that a single solution to what is then seen as one problem will seem plausible. In identifying the cause of global warming as a problem of how we generate energy, paying little attention to how we USE energy, the IPCC has made it seem easy to solve warming by focusing only on energy, or more specifically, how to create it. To use something other than fossil burning. Global warming isn’t an energy problem. It is a people problem. Just as it is not an accident. It is a crime. Global warming was identified over 100 years ago, was brought to the attention of energy executives and political servants (we really need to stop calling them “leaders”) over 50 years ago, was ignored, and later denied, rather than being acted upon. Until they could not deny it anymore (although they still do). The lust for power, and greed, are what caused global warming, as well as the many other problems in this polycrisis, and they are what keep us from acting to steer ourselves in a different direction. It’s not about energy, it’s about greed.
By the end of the discussion I came to feel that Auke was probably genuinely interested in changing what lies at the root of our problem, despite many of his comments striking me as stemming from a desire to not bite the hand that feeds him, and not disrupt those holding power over which way the wind blows. I can understand his frustration with the concept of degrowth if he thinks that by seeking to reduce consumption as a way to avoid falling off the edge of our cliff, people would reject a move toward replacing fossil burning with renewables, although as Rachel mentioned, it does not seem that any degrowth scholar is advocating that.
As for his insistence that reducing our energy consumption, and therefore consumption in general, is completely unnecessary, that could be said for many of the world’s people, but not for the elites of the world whose absurd lifestyles account for the bulk of total anthropogenic GHG emissions. It is a terrible mistake to try to market renewables with the mouth-watering idea that we need not shift away from permanent growth fantasies, from endless and mindless consumption, from the notion that our goals in life should always center on our next purchase.
The fact is, the vast majority of the developed world needs to start acting more responsibly. As Rachel said, our sense of entitlement has to be examined. Most people should take steps to reduce their carbon footprint, but this need not lead to radically different lifestyles for you and me. The real radical change is needed, again, by our abhorrent elites. There is no justification for such gluttony and arrogance. So people like Auke need not run around saying that “Hey, it’s okay, you can have all the energy you want” because this mindset that we can (or should strive to) have our cake and eat it too is our real problem. If we manage to somehow get around the global warming problem, our existing social structure, whereby we are all trained to be good little slaves for the billionaire class, where our schools do not educate us but merely train us for our life of service to our elites, we will simply encounter a new problem with similar scope for damage to all. And in any case, as both Auke and Rachel later mentioned, the idea that a “power to the people” revolution might arise through renewables when we all have our self-contained energy source, robbing the power of those in power over us, is rather unlikely. Those in power do not allow us access to self sufficiency now, and they will not allow it later either. That is what defines them: keeping us in service to them.
While it is true that the Sun provides us with plenty of energy, it may not be the case that we can build a renewable-based energy infrastructure capable of allowing us to end fossil burning, and maintain our lives (to say nothing of our excesses) before the rising temperatures, extreme weather events, and approaching tipping points (to say nothing of the real danger of our self-destructive behavior as driven by our psychopathic “leaders” who literally feel the heat now) snuff us out. This is another problem that too few people pay attention to: how much time we have. It is something even our climate experts are loathe to discuss, or to discuss honestly and realistically. We are living in a time when overreacting may be the only thing that saves us.
A final thought on Auke’s comment that people are not willing to drive a smaller car. As long as we insist on allowing everything to carry on as before, as long as we let our “freedom” be a sacred cow (as if we are really free) we will never make it. A wartime effort, with similar sacrifices, needs to be adopted. Laws need to be passed that force the behavior that we should be grown up enough to adopt on our own. So we should stop talking about what people are willing to do or not willing to do. If it is an “actionable path” that you want, just look at how we handle ourselves in many ways already. We have speed limits for car drivers. We have laws forbidding certain types of violence. Etc. Again, it need not be especially harsh for any of US. Not for you and me. It might seem harsh to not be allowed to drive a car for many people, but in many cases people don’t really need them. Those who will have to make big adjustments, to come down from the clouds and live like the rest of us, are the ones who will have to “suffer.”
agree with most of your points and there is uncertainty on the complete transition, leaving aside climate uncertainty. but its' generally well established fact that electricity can provide heat energy to any temperature that industry requires (they get to millions of degrees using electromagnetic fields to make plasma in fusion experiments), and in many cases more affordably. Heat pumps are not just for buildings, they now can operate in environments that needs temperatures in the 200-300 ºC range and constantly improving. Arc fitnesses are less efficient but go way higher, covering most industrial applications for process heat. The issue for smelting is that the coal and timber they throw into smelters where iron, steel, aluminium, silicon, etc gets smelted also use the coal/tree carbon as a reductant (scavenges off the oxygen that makes up the oxidised state of many ore bodies, released as CO and CO₂ ). That is where difficulties are presenting themselves, but there are other methods using very high temperatures that reduce the ore to more like a liquid/vapour state. It's all very much R&D at this stage.
I thought the arguments of your last guest, Jessica Lovering on nuclear, were more coherent. I was also struck by the lack of evidence that Auke Hoekstra brought to his argument. Maybe you should interview Bjorn Lomborg, at least he uses evidence to back his arguments.
Great job Rachel, but Auke has climate myopia. We have a metacrisis driven and enabled by surplus energy, not that i think it is possible but if he were right - we are doomed. The worst thing would be for us to continue to have surplus energy because it would simple enable us to continue to destroy the life supporting capacity of the planet.
Rachel Simon Michaux's critical materials report is now peer reviewed and out and thats great news as it shows the utter impossibility of non fossil energy replacing anywhere near what we have from fossils Michaux, S. P. (2024): Estimation of the quantity of metals to phase out fossil fuels in a full system replacement, compared to mineral resources, Geological Survey of Finland Bulletin 416 Special Edition, https://tupa.gtk.fi/julkaisu/bulletin/bt_416.pdf
Also, .5 percent of land, of the whole of earth surface (not sure if he was including Antarctica in the totality of land), is actually a lot. I would be surprised if roofs built by humans amount to that much.
Actually 0.9% according to Chat GPT, so not far off. But I'm not sure that the actual land taken up is the key issue.
peer reviewed or not if its the same as it was 6 mths ago it is littered with misunderstandings and bad assumptions. His concept of the amount of storage required to firm wind water and solar is completely ignorant. As someone who has modelled renewable energy grids and knows the issues that must be navigated, he has obviously never modelled an energy grid in his life.
I look forward to the rebuttals of his paper. I can only guess his peer review was from other energy decanters who don't understand energy grids.
please listen to this discussion:
https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-211-doomers-vs-transitionistas/
It may help you to understand why people like Simon Michaux are deeply ignorant when they make estimates of what kinds of RE and storage capacity is required to firm RE to be able to match demand curves. I could go into a lot of detail about how incorrect Michaeu is, I'll say it for a paper of my own perhaps.
I'm not suggesting ecological collapse is not a concern, for the reasons of overconsumption and over-pollution that you highlighted, but the renewables transition is not constrained by critical mineral shortages at any point that I have been made aware of by Simon Michaux or anybody else.
I've been a climate activists and renewable energy transition advocate and researcher for over a decade, and just because an energy transition to WWS (clean and green Wind|Water|Solar) is possible doesn't mean it will happen quickly enough and broadly enough to prevent 3-5 ºC of global warming this century, and I'm not completely convinced that if we get into the upper band of that, it a) wipes out most of the human civilisation on this Earth and b) doesn't tip further climate system breakdown in ways that are not clear enough to us at this time. (IPCC massively underprojected the polar ice melt rates due to ignoring the cutting edge science on melt water hydrology in AR1, AR2, AR3) and had a lot of messaging around it all being centuries away. That implied we had way more time to respond if we even wanted to as species largely controlled on these decisions by elite and unaccountable people. So I'm not ruling our new underestimates if we hit 3-5 ºC. Sadly, 3-5 ºC seems more likely than not today, with USA Government falling prey to the predatory FF industry lobby, and BRICS nations very unengaged in decarbonisation . The notable exception is China to the extent they're deploying wind and PV like no other nation on Earth, or region like EU. They are the hub of many of the electrification technologies that will displace FF technologies e.g. EVs and HSR technology. . It remains to be seen if they start fracking etc as is planned for 2030-50 in a 25 year plan I once read)
energy decanters → energy “descenters”
My main two questions following this interview:
What about the research showing we don’t have sufficient key minerals without exponential energy expenditure to reach them? What is the spectrum of disagreement on that point? Seems an essential consideration that experts give wildly different answers on. Are proponents relying on an imagined future shift to different technologies using less scarce elements?
How realistic is the recycling process without adopting a donut model, which he liked, but relies on political and structural changes so you can build the things in a way to be easily recycled, if they can be at all at realistic scale (as opposed to always cheaper cheaper).
steel is already gaily recycled and it drives itself because it takes a fraction of the energy — and therefore a fraction of the cost — to recycle steel when compared to digging iron ore, processing that, then smelting and refining pig iron in steel products.
PV panels, wind turbines (including new blade technology recently) chemical batteries are all 95-99% recyclable. and there's costs savings in using recycled materials rather than extracted supply lines.
Why the skepticism?
The range of views is down to the deeply ignorant and popularist pessimism expressed by anti-renewables and energy descent ideologies pulling away from the scientifically literate views on the subject.
Again, ecological collapse is already happening many places, and AGW/CC are still massive concerns, but as to the possibility of renewables displacing FF energy technologies is realistic in technological and economic terms. Do we need to move to a strategic degrowth economy, certainly, but the RE transition is a major part of enabling that in a way a majority of people (rich or poor, rich nation or poor nation) will find acceptable, not an impediment to strategic degrowth.
This is quite good:
https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-211-doomers-vs-transitionistas/
I found the xenetwork podcast really helpful in putting my opposing tendencies into a bracket that is hopeful and separates out all my questions and anxieties into a manageable approach. After listening I'm pleased now to have a better rationalisation of the various pushes and pulls and find hope within the transitionista tribe.
I'd love to see a show between Auke and Simon Michaux. They both have lots of figures at their fingertips but have totally different views on this. It would be SO interesting to listen to/watch.
the simple & true point he made is that more clean energy doesn't necessarily entail violation of planetary boundaries. we know that exacerbation is conceivable with more energy/efficiency/energy/efficiency/novel technologies... but it's not the case that it guarantees that. problem of induction + complex system dynamics suggest that it may be possible to turn this clusterfuck around.
so it's not particularly strongly warranted to assert that as much planetary-boundaries-respecting growth / advance / progress as we can do is the worst trajectory leading to doom. no one knows that.
just need to look at history give us energy we will use it to destroy
do you understand the problem of induction?
With all due respect, it is true that we need systemic change, not ONLY changing to a different source of energy. But your argument is basically the same as that of those who believe that Nikola Tesla's free energy technologies should be suppressed for humanity's own good and the good of the planet, because our species supposedly cannot handle it. And that is utterly patronizing, paternalistic, and ultimately comes from a place of, dare I say it, privilege.
Free energy is freedom. And as Thomas Jefferson said, it is an unwise jealousy to deny people freedom merely on the supposition that they might abuse it.
Look at the biggest elephant in the room (or rather, in the Volkswagen), for example, namely overpopulation. The two very best, and ethical, ways to reduce excessive birthrates are 1) female empowerment, and 2) poverty reduction. Both of which are achieved with MORE freedom, not less. And that implies that the poorer 80% of humanity need to "eat MORE electrons", NOT fewer.
A really interesting episode as it brought up many of the disagreements within the green transition camp which need to be aired as they provide ample fodder for those wanting business as usual. I have a sense that while wanting to grapple with the political and philosophical questions of a better world - and despite his claim to welcome uncertainty - Auke finds solace in the mathematically quantifiable. Not a criticism as we all need some solid ground and we can all share his frustration that while it could be rolled out much faster the political will is largely missing.
There is also some merit in his argument that going full tilt to roll out solar and wind (geothermal only got a passing mention, sadly) would at least buy us some time to address the deeper political and societal problems although, as was acknowledged at the end, this is also at the mercy of those very problems.
I am not a great fan of technology (in the sense that we refer to it now), primarily as it increases our reliance on structures that are inherently vulnerable and centralised. There are, though, few palatable alternatives to managing the sheer size of the global population. As Auke said - and he echoes the ever-eloquent Daniel Schmachtenberger - we also need conversations before the roll out new technologies about the costs associated with them and not allow ourselves to be seduced by the shiny new and the unremittingly positive spin that always precedes it.
Conversations across disciplines are vital for us to build a much more comprehensive view of where we are going and where we want to go and this one was a great example of that principle.
We need to pay attention to the late ecologist Howard Odum, who taught us that technology is simply a form of embedded energy, or "emergy".
That means that as energy declines — which it will, regardless of how many solar panels or wind turbines we build — technology must also decline.
Permaculture teaches us that "efficiency" is a two-edged sword. It reduces redundancy, and thus, it reduces resilience. And as William Stanley Jevons taught us, by corrupting market price signals, efficiency actually makes us use up a resource even faster.
We need to focus on making do with less. We are currently using 180 petawatts, on a planet that only receives about 180 petawatts of solar energy.
I've seen the future, and it is powered by current photosynthesis. I'm just not sure I see any people in that future.
for a start fossil fuel technologies waste 40-80% of the embedded energy in the combustion process as unused heat that takes energy to remove from the combustion appliance. so you should be embracing RE on that alone.
have you seen the recent IEA graphic meme, one shipping container ship of PV panels will produce as much energy for the grid (on off-grid) as 100 coal ships or 50 LNG ships?
also fossil fuels industries use way more critical minerals use than any other industry, and destroy their extraction points far more than the extraction of the steel, copper etc to produce one container boat load of PV panels or wind turbines. there's really no comparison between FF and RE pathways forward and yet we have the Simon Micheau's and Nate Hagens of this world “flooding the zone” with misinformation.
"That means that as energy declines — which it will, regardless of how many solar panels or wind turbines we build — technology must also decline"
this is a meaningless statement.
As considered and eloquent as ever Richard.
Another thing I noticed and wanted to comment on was something Rachel said, early on about how she sees her role through her interviews: “Naivety is perhaps not the right word, but [I want to] warn against the belief that things will just work out because we've lived through an era of things working out in our part of the world, essentially.”
It is not clear to me whether Rachel believes that “things have worked out” for people in the Global North but that she wants people to avoid assuming it will always be that way and so not to worry, or whether she is in fact saying that she does not believe that and wants to encourage people not to fall into the trap of thinking that “things will just work out” because of some illusion that they always have, again for those we often consider “lucky” who grew up in developed northern countries. But her position on this is not the point.
What she said reminded me of one of the biggest reasons why we find it so difficult to address any of our global crises, and that is our faulty complacence. It is that we are not being honest with ourselves. It is how we tend to believe it when those in power tell us that we are lucky and that we have the best system we possibly can have and that everything is going to be okay because it’s already really good. It’s why MAGA strikes a chord in many Americans, too.
I was born in the 60s and grew up in the Silicon Valley and so I guess I should consider myself very lucky. But as a boy, the family in the house next to mine had their son shipped off to fight in Vietnam, leaving his younger brother, years older than me, to wonder about what was going to happen to his brother and to him as well, as he approached draft age. His brother made it back home, luckily. My father worked in computers, before they were “personal,” which meant he worked for a now-defunct company known to the public as a harmless manufacturer of home electronics but which, like many Silicon Valley tech firms, made most of its money on government defense contracts. I never knew that. Wikipedia mentions none of the company’s military endeavors whatsoever. During the Cold War we eventually went to an American army base in Germany for the company as my father was asked to train the military on the use of their computer-guided satellite systems designed to intercept and decode Russian transmissions. Something he only revealed to me some 30 years later as it was literally Top Secret. What does spending a career working in such a covert environment do to such people? To their families? I could go on, but what I mean to say is that there has never been a time in my life when things were just fine. Not for the world, my country, my family. Not really. We can argue over whether they were really so bad after all, but I think this is just the Bill Gates mentality talking inside our heads.
At the end of the talk, Rachel finally asks Auke the “first” question: why is the world in crisis? And his answer? “First of all, we found no way yet to seriously deal with global long-term problems.”
This is the point. The wealthy, particularly people like Bill Gates, can tell us all day long that we are “better off now” etc., but we still have not addressed the major problems of human societies, because we are and have been controlled by psychopaths who do not care about us outside of making sure we keep working to provide them with riches. And we get lured into believing that having a bigger car and more stuff is a proper life goal, while we forget that we spend most of our adult lives in service (normally doing something we don’t actually enjoy, or would never chose to do in our spare time) to someone else who lives a life of luxury while we make ourselves sick with worry over how to keep our heads above water. What if I lose my job? What if I become sick? How on Earth am I going to find a way to earn enough money to afford some level of comfort for me and my family? For all our intelligence and so-called progress, we are still living the law of the jungle. Kill or be killed. Slave away and count yourself lucky.
This is why, as we face the latest development in our never-ending series of catastrophes, we must stop and think: will we fix the root of our problems or simply treat symptoms? Degrowth people know that an energy fix will only get us so far. And now, of course, it is very likely that it will not get us very far at all, given that tipping points are approaching and that, contrary to what we are told, we cannot live with these changes, cannot simply adapt to them. They will end us. At many stages throughout history people have been challenged to overcome horrors and hopefully start with a clean slate, with a better, new world, but we have always ended up with little more than a substitution of power. Are we really going to keep doing that, when the stakes are so high now? It is no longer a question of war, where we can hope that one or both sides come to their sense. The planet doesn’t work that way. Soon it will be completely out of our hands for the first time ever.
Hmm. So apart from what felt slightly like a God Complex (this is my mission - really?), I really struggled with the premise that data is king and if we don’t have data and can’t quantify something than it is somehow inferior. Qualitative data IS also data - and also data that he refers to is disproportionally skewed to the Global North.
Well done Rachel you are a much more stoic person than me - some of his argument was really tough to listen to - and is so ingrained in a very privileged mindset.
To not consider that we could reduce our energy consumption and only aim to keep the status quo with alternative energy is very short sighted as a vision. As you rightly said Rachel - we don’t need as much energy but we have just become comfortable.
Was this about electricity - now, about 20 percent of energy, but could go higher by electrifying more?
How do renewable sources provide an answer, ideally now, to the 80 percent that is not electricity?
The electrification of different industries, such as transport, plus other fuel sources for things that are hard to electrify, like using hydrogen for long haul flights,
These key industries are going to have a very difficult time electrifying: mining, long-haul shipping, and agriculture.
Vaclav Smil identifies cement, steel, plastic, and nitrogen fertilizer as four things that are currently utterly dependent on fossil fuel. "Renewablizing" any of these is going to be a monumental challenge.
We humans could probably live without cement, steel, and plantic. We could probably do without mining and long-haul shipping. But feeding over eight billion humans without fossil fuel is going to be impossible.
In peak planting and harvest seasons, a farmer can drive a tractor for as long as he can hold his coffee, and he can refill that tractor in the time it takes to empty his bladder. This is not at all the case for electrified agriculture. Such a tractor will need a charge or a pack-swap about every hour.
On the other end, agriculture is utterly dependent on natural gas, both as a feedstock, and as a convenient and simple energy source for creating high temperatures and pressures. Using electrolysis to create the hydrogen and expensive, multi-stage heating and pressurizing will increase the cost of food by an order of magnitude.
Can you afford $40 hamburgers? $50 for a gallon of milk? $100 for a box of chocolates? $500 for a sit-down restaurant meal?
"Yeabut, wages will increase, too."
No. What we have from energy depletion is "stagflation", or the increase in prices of things dependent on non-renewable resources, combined with stagnation of wages.
Those of us who lived through the 1973 and 1978 oil price shocks have seen this before. It ain't pretty.
don't know why you are citing Vaclav Smil! he's Bill Gate's goto on energy policy and technology matters and is the main reason why Bill Gates is investing in nuclear power (lets see how that pans out).
Vaclav Smil is so deeply misguided on energy that when he made his estimates on the quantity of RE and storage required to electrify the power grid as 100%+ RE and transition other sectors he neglected to understand one crucial thing. at least a third and up to two thirds of the embodied energy of fossil fuels are wasted as heat (2nd law of thermodydmanics) in current thermal power systems. So when you talk about the energy used by ICE cars in BTUs and the amount of electrical energy that would be required to displace that in EVs, (assuming we don't do more PT, which we will) is a third of the energy required, thanks to the very high energy efficiency of the electrical supply network and drivetrain in EV vehicles.
Thanks a rookie error and yet people put Vaclav Smil up as an authority on energy transition. Not to me he isn't. That kind of error precludes him from a position of authority on RE Transition matters, and really asks questions abut where he is coming from if you ask me. (Nuclear lobby?)
I agree I’ve not heard any renewables exponent explain how this works. For his focus on real solutions I hear no plans in this area of high power mobile industry demand. Perhaps we can change some to hydrogen (?) but at what speed and cost? Haven’t see political discussions for that at all... so would that ever become more affordable or available at smaller scales, or just massive farms / industries which are just the centralised industrialisation we should be moving away from?
He argued for not having less energy use then made the valid point to reduce land change and animal consumption. I agree, but would consider (perhaps incorrectly) this as part of reducing our energy footprint, our “having less”.
This looks dead wrong from a technical point of view the only place these technologies may have a place are off grid applications plenty of experts have declared this to be true more on this if you are interested
Good ep. What I gleaned was that Auke strongly believes that we should not let perfect be the enemy of good.
But I also think that a really cogent counter to his points about degrowth is that reducing energy and material demand would make deploying the net zero renewables easier. Our politics and economics are intertwined with distribution of resources to different industries and sectors. We have to stop wasting economic output on private jets and missiles.
It's a shame that the minerals requirements weren't examined in more detail. Reports by Mark P Mills and Simon Michaux (thanks to Mike Joy for pointing out that it has now been peer reviewed) cast serious doubts on the availability of the necessary minerals at the required rate, quite apart from the damage to nature by such mining. Although the main study quoted by renewables advocates, from Mark Jacobson, suggests that there is ample resources, both Marks could be thought to have a particular interest in getting the results they want, I don't think that the same is true of Simon Michaux (who, nevertheless, comes up with just as crazy "solutions"). It is by no means certain that a transition to less dirty energy sources can be completed.
Auke completely discounts the fact that so-called renewables are still environmentally destructive and, as Mike Joy points out, in his comment, would continue powering an inherently destructive way of life. Auke nailed his colours to the mast when he said his goal is the flourishing of human life using renewables. From that, we can discount anything he says, unless it is examined thoroughly and critically. He often talked about what kind of world people want for themselves and their descendants but never spoke about trying to determine just what is physically possible and what the overall impacts of that world is.
I could sense Rachel's frustration with Auke when he repeatedly tried to frame the degrowth strategy as continuing with fossil fuels, just using less. This alone suggests he hasn't examined degrowth, though he's right that the degrowthers don't seem to have a plan (or even a set of alternative plans) for how degrowth could be implemented. However, Auke also didn't elucidate any plan for his often stated notion that renewables could get us back to within the 9 planetary boundaries. To my mind, that would take severe reduction in energy use, something that Auke doesn't seem to want to contemplate. Perhaps he imagines perfect recycling (which is impossible) in a doughnut economics world.
As a scientist, one would think he'd understand what it takes to be sustainable, but there is no indication that he does.
"I don't think that the same is true of Simon Michaux "
Why? Simon is an old fashioned energy descenter and these guys predicted the RE technologies like wind and PV would never become affordable — now cheaper than FF power technologies with a minute fraction of the ecological damage (direct at extraction points and indirect through pollution vectors and CC) per MWh of energy in PV and Wind compared with coal, gas and oil. Given their false predictions of energy descent, they're all busily reinventing themselves as neo-energy-descenters with ridiculous estimates of the amount of critical minerals and storage required to have an effective and affordable electrification of modern societies.
I believe in strategic degrowth is essential, not because I'm of the opinion we will run out of raw materials to make RE and batteries, and understand well that we are living well beyond the ecological output of this planet each and every year (thanks to a few rich nations and the wealthiest people in rich nations who over consume and over pollute on a scale of 1000s of times what more modest people or societies do). But having to listen to Simon Michael and other "flood the zone" with their misleading "research" is so frustrating as it distracts everyone from the real issues that ecological economics identified decades ago, overconsumption and more recently the formal recognition of planetary boundaries.
don't agree with all Chris Nelder's positions on everything but on this subject in particular he's pretty much on target,
https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-211-doomers-vs-transitionistas/
Good job Rachel. I have one technical comment and one bigger issue comment.
I believe the statement that you need just 1/3 of the energy when you use electricity as opposed to fossil fuels is misleading. It is true that electric engines are much more energy efficient than combustion engines. But elecrticity delivered by a battery that is charged by a grid has also a lot of losses, approximately 10 % in the grid and 10% in the battery, and in a 100% renewable scenario probably even higher losses as there is a need for storage solution (pump stations, hydrogen etc) where you also have losses. For a number of applications you need to convert electricity to liquid fuels (hydrogen, electro fuels etc.) where you also have a lot of losses. With electricity to hydrogen and back to electricity you are on par with fossil fuels. There are a number of uses of fossil fuels which are not based on combustion engines where I don't know if electrification means less energy, i.e, in cement production, nitrogen fertilizers and fossil free steel - I have seen no such calculations. The use of fossil fuels for heating, which is considerable in colder countries, there is no big efficiency gain in using electricity, even if heat pumps may have advantages over direct electricity heating. Finally approximately 1/10 of the oil (I don't remember the source for this figure, so I might be somewhat mistaken) is used as a feedstock för plastics, chemicals etc.
The bigger question which wasn't adress in the show is that the environmental impact of the USE of energy is not only in the production and storage of energy but in the actual use. Energy for heating has a small footprint for the use phase, but all other uses of energy entails a lot of materials, pollution, loss of biodiversity etc. E.g. electric cars need the same roads, tyres, garages, hospitals, traffic lights, and the cheaper the energy is the more cars and roads there will be. So even if "we" could run a society like ours on renewables it would still have devastating impact and obviously even worse if the claims that energy would be extremely cheap would come true (I heard them already 50 years ago about nuclear energy.....).
Very good points. I also thought that the one third figure was optimistic. Aside from the points you raised, electric motors and other electrical equipment aren't 100% efficient. So the fact that 67% of the petroleum energy is wasted doesn't mean we'd only need a third of that energy to come from electricity. It's odd that a scientist doesn't look at the complete picture and I can only assume that it's because he's human, and wants modernity to continue without GHG emissions, so that's what he has to conclude.
there's lots of LCA studies on this question. look it up, I believe you are in error.
here's literally the first article I found.
ICE
Engine losses: 68-72%
Drivetrain loses: 5-6%
Other loses 12-17%
_________
Power to the wheels: 16-25%
EV
Charging loses: 10%
Drivetrain loses: 20%
Other loses: 8%
Regenerative braking: +17%
_________
Power to the wheels: 86-90%
So more like less than a quarter of the energy used in an EV than an ICE
And that's ignoring the ever increasing amount of energy used to extract the oil for the ICE car (embodied energy in the oil supply chain). You'd think energy descenters would be cognisant of that given that peak oil was the defining religious article of faith for these folks! And the fly ash and oily sludge waste in the oil supply chains. And the massive amount of global pollution in the oil and gas industry which exposes large human populations to toxins and has been catastrophic to ecosystems all around the world, onshore and in the oceans.
seriously. educated yourselves before chiming in on this stuff, it's embarrassing.
source: https://insideevs.com/features/392202/ice-vs-ev-inefficient-combustion-engine/
I'm sure you can get deep into the literature if that is your desire. LCA is notoriously tricky as is the notion of embodied energy. But we can get a general sense of things without going crazy.
yeah, its *less* than a third of the energy consumption for EVs when you compare say a performance ICE luxury sports car with an similarly priced EV charged at home from your own PV panels.
and it's 100% clean energy being consumed not FF energy. the embedded energy of the EV vs the ICE car is also often under dispute and over-claim by energy descenters and doomers, don't have any recent numbers at hand on that but it's not equivalent to a complete negation of the entire EV proposition.
You should note that my comments was primarily NOT about ICEV vs EV but about all application of energy and fossil fuels and feedstocks, where I believe the 1/3 ratio has no scientific ground.
This dude has clearly never seen a mining operation in Australia. Colonisers attitude makes me sick. Use less energy, we all need to stop being so entitled.
I could see nuclear for long haul shipping. Maybe even heavy ion salt batteries, depending on how much space they would take up
I can't see hydrogen or anything else for long haul aviation
So maybe we can electrify surface transport, plus maybe shipping
But cement, steel, ammonia? Plastics?
And it's 10 billion in 40 years
I was just curious when the speaker said "I can show you this, I have demonstrated it can be done", what the "this" and "it" actually were
zero emissions and negative emissions cement already exists. it was used for a runaway at the Brisbane airport 10 years ago I think.
it costs more. yet people say a price on carbon is pointless at this point in time (on account of RE now being cheaper than FF-dervied grid power most places in the world).
some forms of low/zero/negative emissions cement uses fly ash (waste from coal power plants that is often dumped into the environment when storage ponds overflow into rivers, as it did one icy Christmas in a southern state of USA about ten years ago. The waste pond contaminated water flowed into the river that was the drinking supply for two major cities and agriculture in that state).
Green steel has been made in pilot plants. Again, cost issues, largely due to it being new, not well understood in the steel industry and finance circles, still in immature stage of R&D etc etc. But potentially, with a mature market supply and no legal use of non-green steel, it could be chapter than the current method using heaps of coal that is usually imported on boats, as is the ore. Producing green iron blocks and green steel are a dream for some industrialists looking to produce green steel in Australia and other places that have lots of iron ore and lots of world class RE resources.
Aluminium is known as “frozen electricity”, same same. can be electrically powered not coal, needs alternative reductant for smelting but not for refining I think. One Aluminium refinery in Germany makes three times as much profit providing flexible demand grid services to the grid operator than it does producing aluminium!
There's lots of synergies to be unlocked in sector coupling (stabilising the power grid in industries and buildings that convert away from fossil fuels to electrification)
nuclear is already used for ling haul shipping in the navy of the nuclear powered superpowers. it's incredibly expensive. I looked up the costs of the Rolls Royce and Westinghouse reactors used in US/UK nuclear powered submarines (some aircraft carers also have nuclear power) and it's literally thousands of times more expensive for joule of energy than oil. then there's all the refuelling/decommissioning issues (some don't need refuelling but they all need decommissioning). Imagine all those beached container boats and coal freighters on the beaches of Africa being disassembled but workers wearing things also having a nuclear reactor lying around, or if not the reactors certainly the likelihood of contamination of the superstructure and hull.
* but workers wearing things → by workers wearing thongs
I have a feeling the “this” and “it” may be a continuation of growth capitalism. I haven’t heard it all yet but his way of arguing so far has a campaigning smell to it.
They did it to us on tobacco and climate change. They will do it again on the metacrisis and paradigm change. But perhaps I’m being too cynical?
i’ve been quite forthright criticising the lazy and motivated thinking of previous guests declaring a critical minerals criss that precludes an RE transition based on some pretty poor scholarship and “back of the envelope” calculations.
therefore i really appreciate Rachel getting someone who knows renewables technology a lot better than these previous guests on the show to put a different (factually accurate) perspective. i look forward to enjoying this discussion.
we have enough ecological collapse problems to deal today and tomorrow without inventing problems that doesn’t exist. i’m not a Green Growther by any means, i think strategic degrowth in destructive parts of the economy (warfare, fossil fuels, livestock production and greed based economic policy) . but i’ve modelled energy grid transition extensively and studied the work of other modèles to understand the claims i make in a technically coherent way. i wish that was the standard for others to love by.
Excellent interview. Well done Rachel. Anyone who invokes Moore's law in a glib way, dismisses "degrowthers" because some have high carbon lifestyles, and seems not to think that Kate Raworth is one of them, certainly suffers from various types of myopia as suggested below. Very odd actually - it's worrying that people that this are editing UN docs, if that's what he doing.
People have a tendency to want to find silver-bullet solutions, and possibly even to prefer trying to roll all problems into one so that a single solution to what is then seen as one problem will seem plausible. In identifying the cause of global warming as a problem of how we generate energy, paying little attention to how we USE energy, the IPCC has made it seem easy to solve warming by focusing only on energy, or more specifically, how to create it. To use something other than fossil burning. Global warming isn’t an energy problem. It is a people problem. Just as it is not an accident. It is a crime. Global warming was identified over 100 years ago, was brought to the attention of energy executives and political servants (we really need to stop calling them “leaders”) over 50 years ago, was ignored, and later denied, rather than being acted upon. Until they could not deny it anymore (although they still do). The lust for power, and greed, are what caused global warming, as well as the many other problems in this polycrisis, and they are what keep us from acting to steer ourselves in a different direction. It’s not about energy, it’s about greed.
By the end of the discussion I came to feel that Auke was probably genuinely interested in changing what lies at the root of our problem, despite many of his comments striking me as stemming from a desire to not bite the hand that feeds him, and not disrupt those holding power over which way the wind blows. I can understand his frustration with the concept of degrowth if he thinks that by seeking to reduce consumption as a way to avoid falling off the edge of our cliff, people would reject a move toward replacing fossil burning with renewables, although as Rachel mentioned, it does not seem that any degrowth scholar is advocating that.
As for his insistence that reducing our energy consumption, and therefore consumption in general, is completely unnecessary, that could be said for many of the world’s people, but not for the elites of the world whose absurd lifestyles account for the bulk of total anthropogenic GHG emissions. It is a terrible mistake to try to market renewables with the mouth-watering idea that we need not shift away from permanent growth fantasies, from endless and mindless consumption, from the notion that our goals in life should always center on our next purchase.
The fact is, the vast majority of the developed world needs to start acting more responsibly. As Rachel said, our sense of entitlement has to be examined. Most people should take steps to reduce their carbon footprint, but this need not lead to radically different lifestyles for you and me. The real radical change is needed, again, by our abhorrent elites. There is no justification for such gluttony and arrogance. So people like Auke need not run around saying that “Hey, it’s okay, you can have all the energy you want” because this mindset that we can (or should strive to) have our cake and eat it too is our real problem. If we manage to somehow get around the global warming problem, our existing social structure, whereby we are all trained to be good little slaves for the billionaire class, where our schools do not educate us but merely train us for our life of service to our elites, we will simply encounter a new problem with similar scope for damage to all. And in any case, as both Auke and Rachel later mentioned, the idea that a “power to the people” revolution might arise through renewables when we all have our self-contained energy source, robbing the power of those in power over us, is rather unlikely. Those in power do not allow us access to self sufficiency now, and they will not allow it later either. That is what defines them: keeping us in service to them.
While it is true that the Sun provides us with plenty of energy, it may not be the case that we can build a renewable-based energy infrastructure capable of allowing us to end fossil burning, and maintain our lives (to say nothing of our excesses) before the rising temperatures, extreme weather events, and approaching tipping points (to say nothing of the real danger of our self-destructive behavior as driven by our psychopathic “leaders” who literally feel the heat now) snuff us out. This is another problem that too few people pay attention to: how much time we have. It is something even our climate experts are loathe to discuss, or to discuss honestly and realistically. We are living in a time when overreacting may be the only thing that saves us.
A final thought on Auke’s comment that people are not willing to drive a smaller car. As long as we insist on allowing everything to carry on as before, as long as we let our “freedom” be a sacred cow (as if we are really free) we will never make it. A wartime effort, with similar sacrifices, needs to be adopted. Laws need to be passed that force the behavior that we should be grown up enough to adopt on our own. So we should stop talking about what people are willing to do or not willing to do. If it is an “actionable path” that you want, just look at how we handle ourselves in many ways already. We have speed limits for car drivers. We have laws forbidding certain types of violence. Etc. Again, it need not be especially harsh for any of US. Not for you and me. It might seem harsh to not be allowed to drive a car for many people, but in many cases people don’t really need them. Those who will have to make big adjustments, to come down from the clouds and live like the rest of us, are the ones who will have to “suffer.”
agree with most of your points and there is uncertainty on the complete transition, leaving aside climate uncertainty. but its' generally well established fact that electricity can provide heat energy to any temperature that industry requires (they get to millions of degrees using electromagnetic fields to make plasma in fusion experiments), and in many cases more affordably. Heat pumps are not just for buildings, they now can operate in environments that needs temperatures in the 200-300 ºC range and constantly improving. Arc fitnesses are less efficient but go way higher, covering most industrial applications for process heat. The issue for smelting is that the coal and timber they throw into smelters where iron, steel, aluminium, silicon, etc gets smelted also use the coal/tree carbon as a reductant (scavenges off the oxygen that makes up the oxidised state of many ore bodies, released as CO and CO₂ ). That is where difficulties are presenting themselves, but there are other methods using very high temperatures that reduce the ore to more like a liquid/vapour state. It's all very much R&D at this stage.
I thought the arguments of your last guest, Jessica Lovering on nuclear, were more coherent. I was also struck by the lack of evidence that Auke Hoekstra brought to his argument. Maybe you should interview Bjorn Lomborg, at least he uses evidence to back his arguments.
I think Bjorn misuses evidence.