There are, additionally, other shortcomings with most alternative energy technologies, especially when scaled up in an attempt to meet the gargantuan energy demands of wealthy and developing nations. Alternative energy is not necessarily the panacea that so many people and, in particular, environmentalists, are counting on.
Over the past few decades, critical thinkers both in Australia and overseas have written about the fallacy of relying on the expectation that technology will come to the rescue :
In the US, Howard Odums, and Eugene and Elizabeth Odums pioneered the field of energy evaluation, writing and teaching about the importance of taking into account the full energy equation of a particular technology. For example, Eugene Odums in his recent book, A Prosperous Way Down, 2001, considers that,
"Although there are enormous outflows of energy in the sun, the energy spreads out when it flows to Earth and has to be reconcentrated to be used for high-quality purposes. Wherever accumulated, the sun's rays do many valuable services, but the most of the services do not yield net emergy"
(Emergy spelt with an 'm' is the available energy of one kind that has been used up directly or indirectly to make a product or service. Odums defined this new word so as to more accurately compare the amounts of energy of various kinds - expressed in solar equivalents that have gone into making products and services).
"The solar technological hardware devices directly and indirectly use more emergy in resources and services in their manufacture, operation, maintenance, cleaning, and orientating to sunlight, than they produce in electricity. Just to make a magnifying glass to concentrate the sun's rays takes more work of high-temperature heat than the glass can concentrate. Advocates who quote net energy (instead of net emergy) calculations to claim the opposite, use emergy without multiplying by the transformities necessary to properly evaluate materials and human services on a common basis. The technological devices that convert solar energy directly to mechanical or electrical energy analyzed so far have no net energy yield."
Odums' assessment of wind power is a little more optimistic, but not much !
In the U.K. Peter Bunyard, science editor for The Ecologist journal wrote persuasively in the 1970's and 80's about the inability of renewables to substitute for fossil fuels due to their dispersed and intermittent nature.
Peak oil athor and campaigner Richard Heinberg has also written extensively about the false promise of oil substitutes. In his books, The Party's Over and Powerdown, he examines the proposed "hydrogen economy" and other alternative energy sources. He shows how natural gas extraction would peak only a few years after oil and that within a few decades uranium would also be exhausted as such fuels were intensively relied on to replace coal or peaking oil.
George Monbiot, investigative journalist and author of the book Heat, 2007, says that wind farms are a classic example of what are known as "end-of-the-pipe" solutions : "Instead of tackling the problem - our massive demand for energy - at source, they provide less damaging means of accomodating it. Or Part of it."
He calculates that one daily flight between the UK and Florida in the US requires the equivalent energy output of three giant wind farms. He has also estimated that for the US to run its vehicles on hydrogen power produced by electricity from wind would require a doubling of the national grid.
Monbiot is not antagonistic to the use of wind power, but is pointing out its limitations and the futility of "responding to one form of overdevelopment with another (whereby) we believe (we can) continue to expand our total energy demands without destroying the planetary systems required to sustain human life. This might be true for a while. But it would soon require the use of the entire land surface of the U.K."
Closer to home, S.A.'s Premier Mike Rann likes to parade his green credentials and frequently reminds us of the numerous wind farms operating, or under construction, in the state. However, he fails to point out that the energy of one mine (BHP Billiton's uranium mine at Roxby Downs) requires such vast amounts of energy that it negates any attempts to reduce our carbon emissions. And Rann is hoping the mine will grow and grow.
Ted Trainer, Australian academic and author of Abandon Affluence, Developed to Death, and recently, Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society, has examined Nicholas Stern's review - upon which Ross Garnaut and governments around the world have developed their responses - and found its proposals for alternative energy supplies to be seriously misleading and optimistic.
For example, he questions where it would be possible to find suitable sites for the 150 times present installed wind farms, adding that some European regions might already be approaching limits.
Trainer calculates that running transport on electrical energy supplied from wind power would require twenty-five times the wind capacity that Stern assumes. And, that to electrify the Australian transport sector and meet normal electricity demands, he says, would require generating 4.5 times as much electricity as now produced by the grid.
Trainer asserts that "the greenhouse problem cannot be solved at any cost in a society that is committed to high material 'living standards' and economic growth".
From approximately the mid 1960's to the mid 1980's an environmental awareness developed in response to increasingly glaring problems of pollution, habitat destruction, resource depletion, etc. Stimulated by a growing body of literature on these important issues books such as Rachel Carson's, Silent Spring, 1962; Paul and Anne Ehrlich's, The Population Bomb, 1968, and Population, Resources, Environmental Issues in Human Ecology, 1970; A Report from the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind, 1972; Edward Goldsmith's, Blueprint for Survival, 1972; and E.F. Schumache's, Small is Beautiful, 1973.
Environmental concerns were also being brought more sharply into focus by the oil price shock of the early 1970's, and the peaking of oil in the U.S.
This environmental movement was more far-reaching in its analysis and demands, than in the period following the mid-1980's.
There was, for example, a greater willingness to criticise our civilisation's reliance on finite and/or environmentally damaging energy sources. The destructiveness of economic growth (socially and environmentally) and the vast military-industrial complex it relied on were also under attack.
It was not unusual for environmentalists to call for radical change as in such books as David Dicksen's Alternative Technology and The Politics of Technical Change (1974) which did not hesitate to reject modern industrialisation and the technological system which drives it. The alternative technology movement, which Dicksen spoke for, encompassed the principles of : minimum use of non-renewable resources, minimal environmental interference, regional and sub-regional self-sufficiency and the elimination of alienation and exploitation of individuals.
In Australia, organisations such as Melbourne's Conservation of Urban Energy Group, made important contributions to the development of alternative policies based on renewable energy strategies encompassing shifts to public transport, passive-solar building design, spatial design of cities, etc. In 1978, they published their book, Seeds for Change : Creatively Confronting the Energy Crisis. In the mid-1980's, Adelaide's Friends of the Earth published an alternative energy strategy for the state, South Australia's Energy Future : The Sustainable Option. This document built on the work of Chas Martin, whose booklet, Jobs, Energy and Environmental Harmony Towards a Sustainable Economy for S.A., was published in 1981 for the organisation Environmentalists for Full Employment.
Had the proposals being made at that time been adopted, there can be little doubt that we would not now be in such a serious predicament. We would have brought ourselves some much needed time to rein in our insatiable appetite.
However, by the late 1990's oil prices dropped back as off-shore oil came on stream and OPEC production rose, and the belief in its limitlessness returned with a vengeance. In the U.S., President Carter's programmes to develop alternative energy sources and the vast sums of money he had committed to developing new energy technologies began to dry up; the promise of new technologies to replace oil failed to materialise.
The intellectual vigor of the environment movement also waned. Today, the Green Party and most environmental organisations, far from tackling the viatally important issues of economic growth, overpopulation, overdevelopment and consumerism, contribute to the false belief that not only could alternative energy technologies, if adopted on a large enough scale, allow our civilisation to continue pretty much as usual, but that social equity on a global scale could also be accomodated!
Ted Trainer sums it up this way, "... few green people seem to realise that the environment problem cannot be solved without dramatic reduction in the level of producing and consuming going on, and therefore without radical social change to frugal living standards and a zero-growth economy, yet our peak environmental agencies do not focus on the absurdity of the quest for economic growth".
Ally Fricker 2008-2010
This is produced by the group PRECIPICE
(People Representing Ecological Consciousness and Integrity of the Planet Instead of Committing Ecocide)
Phone (O8) 8581 8255.
International Phone (61) 8 8581 8255.
Write:
Ally Fricker
RSD 3
ROBERTSTOWN SA
5381
AUSTRALIA
Ally Fricker
RSD 3
ROBERTSTOWN SA
5381
AUSTRALIA
or Email kbarrett@adam.com.au.
