Chris Turner says Yes
The author of How to Be a Climate Optimist, winner of the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize
I consider myself a climate optimist, even as an era of deepening climate disasters descends upon us. Canada’s 2023 wildfire season established a grim benchmark for the scope of the challenges humanity will face for the foreseeable future.
The engine of my optimism lies well outside the frame of news coverage of these disasters. But that doesn’t detract from its importance. That engine operates on the solution side of the equation, and it grows more powerful daily. I’ve been reporting on the global energy transition for 20 years and now routinely see numbers and details thought impossible only a decade ago. The one currently boggling my mind is 392 gigawatts—a rigorous estimate of how much new solar power was added to the world’s electricity grids in 2023 alone. This is virtually identical to the generating capacity of the world’s entire nuclear fleet. It’s also about four times as much solar as was installed on earth 10 years ago. That’s one year. Solar power alone.
And it’s very much not alone. The numbers are similarly staggering for wind power, electric vehicles, hyper-efficient heat pumps, energy storage—a comprehensive toolkit for climate action. All of it has quickly vaulted from margin to mainstream, defying even the rosiest estimates. And the 10 years just past show every sign of being mere prelude to the 10 years of transformative growth ahead, as prices continue to plummet and adoption curves for clean technology breach tipping points in one country after another (Bloomberg News counted at least 87 such countries as of October 2022).
The picture the International Energy Agency paints is an optimist’s dream. Electric vehicle use is expected to grow tenfold by 2030. Renewable energy will contribute at least 80 per cent of all new electricity generation worldwide from now until then as solar becomes the cheapest source of power virtually everywhere on earth. Electric heating and cooling (generated mostly by heat pumps) will overtake gas- and oil-fired boilers in market share. And fossil fuel use—first coal, then oil, then gas—will peak in overall demand before the decade is done.
Add that all up and it amounts to a clear victory. It likely won’t keep warming below 1.5°C, but credible analysis indicates the trajectory of current policies and pledges would land in the 2.1°C–2.4°C range by 2100. And there is every reason to assume ambitions will mount steadily as the energy transition toolkit becomes cheaper, more flexible and more familiar.
Let’s say modestly, then, that odds are at least even that the energy transition continues to accelerate over the next decade. That would surely generate the wherewithal to keep warming below 2°C (which until the 2015 Paris talks was seen as an ambitious goal). When I began searching for climate solutions 20 years ago, business-as-usual had a fossil-fuelled rocket strapped to its back pointed at 4°C or 5°C of warming—apocalyptic territory. That’s off the table now. The first generation of the energy transition has given us ample cause for optimism.
Andrew Nikiforuk Says No
The author of Tar Sands, winner of the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award
Civilization has for 150 years burned cheap, portable fossil fuels to pave paradise and erect a complex network of concrete cities decorated by many parking lots. In the process we have eradicated wildlife, replumbed rivers, overpopulated the earth and changed the climate with the emissions from billions of our energy slaves, such as diesel trucks.
Many greens now propose to fill these parking lots with battery-operated vehicles and other digital gadgets highly dependent on energy-intensive mining. Climate optimists plan to either bury CO2 emissions under parking lots or suck them out of the air with dubious, unproven and unbuilt technologies such as carbon capture or direct air machines.
But these techno solutions represent dead ends. Climate change, which is accelerating, is not a technical problem that can be solved solely by new technologies; it is social problem rooted in ruinous energy consumption patterns that will require behaviour changes. The “clean tech” transition won’t make a real dent in emissions until humans change our focus and embrace an energy descent by shrinking our energy footprint. That means fewer technologies, cars, people and parking lots.
In this age of the absurd, let me be clear. I’m not saying renewables aren’t needed, but rather that the material, money and time needed to replace 46,423 power stations run by oil, coal, gas and nuclear energy with 586,000 power stations run by wind, solar and hydrogen isn’t feasible and won’t reduce emissions. Furthermore, I recognize climate change as just one symptom of what ecologist Bill Rees calls “overshoot.” Too many people are spending finite volumes of energy to replace natural systems on the planet with materially intense artificial ones run by energy-intensive robots. Electrifying the Titanic will not remove the many icebergs in our path. The scale of mining, for example, needed to support an energy transition boggles the mind. We can’t build more solar panels, windmills or electric cars without extracting more copper, lithium, iron ore and aluminum along with rare-earth metals. That means transforming the carbon-rich peatlands in Ontario’s Ring of Fire into $67-billion-worth of metals and radioactive waste.
Many techno-optimists ignore the costs of mining and argue we’ll cut emissions through more-efficient technologies. Economist William Jevons documented the flaw in this thinking in the 19th century. He observed that as the efficiency of steam engines improved, industries simply employed more of them to produce new goods for more consumers. Efficient tech leads to more energy consumption, not less. Jevons’s Paradox partly explains why the world is producing more fossil fuels than ever. Global coal demand reached record levels in 2023.
The much vaunted low-carbon economy promises a chaotic extension of the status quo. British philosopher John Gray recently characterized the problem aptly: “Net zero will be remembered like having cancer and using candle therapy.”
Chris Turner responds to Andrew Nikiforuk
In Andrew Nikiforuk’s argument against climate optimism, he cites three experts (besides himself): a philosopher, an ecologist and a 19th-century economist. This might be a fine start for the faculty of a liberal arts college, but I’m not much convinced it’s the braintrust needed to produce durable climate solutions.
I have nothing but respect for the liberal arts—I’m a lifelong practitioner—but philosophers and ecologists are nowhere near the top of my list when I’m looking for an installer for my new high-efficiency heat pump. And I certainly wouldn’t trust any of them to manufacture one, let alone the millions now being churned out to reduce emissions from heating and cooling buildings worldwide.
To be clear (and a little less facetious): the task of taming the climate crisis is primarily one of building new clean energy systems for a technologically advanced, mostly industrialized planet of eight billion souls. And I remain a climate optimist even when the esteemed John Gray compares that work to candle therapy, because, to use the lingo of his native Britain, John Gray evidently knows bugger-all about the global energy transition.
There are several big hairy statistics in Nikiforuk’s argument, but in the absence of citations I can’t speak to their accuracy other than to suggest they don’t pass the eye test. If Nikiforuk has an authoritative source on why it will take 586,000 wind, solar and hydrogen power stations to phase out fossil fuels, he ought to share it right away with the International Energy Agency, Bloomberg New Energy Finance and other professional trackers of the energy transition—who have already revised their estimates for new solar installations upward for 2023 several times to track China’s mounting ambitions. The figure also seems to deny the existence of geothermal, biomass and any number of other new technologies still in (increasingly rapid) development.
There is nowhere near enough room for us all to take up local, artisanal, pre-industrial subsistence farming.
I have to assume the point of citing this strangely precise figure—586,000, no more, no less—is not to offer recourse to facts but to point in alarm at a big scary number. See also Nikiforuk’s reference to exactly $67-billion in minerals and metals to be dug out of northern Ontario, which displays a level of certainty and foresight not even the Ring of Fire’s most enthusiastic boosters generally trade in. Researchers just discovered enough lithium for more than 300 million electric vehicle batteries under the Salton Sea in California, and Toyota has bet its electric vehicle fleet on a solid-state battery made from sodium instead—does that affect this $67-billion bonanza? Never mind. It’s a large number, and it is allegedly borne to your front door on a great geyser of radioactive waste. And so you should not want it.
Beyond the specious numbers, I take exception to Nikiforuk’s use of the word “feasible.” In his estimation, the energy transition now well underway, the machinery of which I have personally observed on four continents, is not feasible. Whereas “behaviour changes” are feasible, even though the exact kinds remain unspecified, and he presents no evidence whatsoever of the political, social or economic mechanisms that might, in the space of a decade or two, unite all humanity in adopting such behaviour changes, presumably more or less all at once.
Perhaps this will be the year strict vegetarianism is adopted by everyone on earth. In the meantime, I’ll continue to rely on the concrete evidence of the energy transition itself as my compass of progress on the climate front. Which, to cite one fact regarding feasibility, has already shifted the behaviour of investors, developers and governments to the point where renewable energy is the source of the majority of the world’s new electricity generation as we speak.
Ultimately, Nikiforuk’s is not an argument about solving the climate crisis so much as an argument against industrial capitalism. Fair, I suppose. But I’ve found no evidence, in 20 years of searching, that there’s a way to solve this crisis at anything less than industrial scale—there are eight billion of us and nowhere near enough room for us all to take up local, artisanal, pre-industrial subsistence farming or the like. Nor have I discovered any mechanism more efficient at shifting the gears on the great industrial apparatus of the global economy in the direction of lower emissions than market capitalism, ideally but not always under the guidance of a liberal democracy. (Notwithstanding China’s role in building much of the transition’s essential equipment.)
How exactly would humans alter our many irredeemable behaviours in time? What system of organization would emerge to guide eight billion of us in more enlightened patterns of behaviour? Nikiforuk offers no answer. In my 20 years of reporting, meanwhile, the energy transition has offered me a clear answer. An optimistic answer. One that grows more feasible by the day.
Andrew Nikiforuk responds to Chris Turner
I appreciate Chris Turner’s enthusiasm and optimism about the future, but I don’t share it. My reading of events, history and numbers suggest the green transition is a grand illusion. Nor is it green. Over time, it will not become cheaper, flexible or more familiar as Turner claims. Nor will it stop the runaway train known as climate change. Instead, the transition will become more chaotic due to material limits, growth of the technosphere, unmanageable complexity, geopolitical chaos, environmental degradation and political instability.
First off, reality should temper Turner’s enthusiasm. Climate change is accelerating, and thousands of scientists have warned that life on the planet is under siege. Wrote data scientist Christopher Wolf in the journal Biosciences in 2023: “Without actions that address the root problem of humanity taking more from the Earth than it can safely give, we’re on our way to the potential collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems and a world with unbearable heat and shortages of food and freshwater.”
Meanwhile the non-fossil-fuel system Turner envisions hasn’t even been built yet. In 2022 electric vehicles represented only 2 per cent of cars on the road. In 2022 renewable energy (excluding hydropower) accounted for only about 7.5 per cent of global energy consumption. In other words, the metals and materials needed to build the solar panels, windmills, power lines, electric cars and batteries envisaged by Turner haven’t been mined or processed yet. And they’ll come with extreme environmental costs. There is no such thing as a clean revolution.
Second, transitions don’t subtract energy; they tend to add new kinds of energy. When the industrial world started burning coal, it didn’t stop cutting down forests. When it switched to oil, it didn’t abandon coal. And so on. Despite the recent growth of industrial solar and wind facilities, civilization’s dependence on fossil fuels has not diminished one iota. This is due to increases in population and per capita consumption. Renewables, for example, only met 42 per cent of increased energy demand in 2019.
So the world is not using renewables to retire fossil fuels but simply to spend more energy.
The materials needed for solar, wind, electric cars and batteries come with extreme environmental costs.
US sociologist Richard York, writing in Energy Research & Social Science in 2019, warned that there will not be any meaningful subtraction of fossil fuel demand until civilization faces the challenge of economic growth. “The rapid and continuing growth of total energy consumption—which is connected with continuing economic growth—makes it so that removing an energy source like fossil fuels is very difficult, even when the production of other energy sources is growing.”
My third point concerns material limits. The so-called green transition shifts the problems of extraction from oil to minerals. Renewables can’t operate without rare metals. Battery-operated vehicles require six times more minerals than a conventional vehicle. Mining is a rapacious and dirty industry. Lithium mining destroys water; child slaves mine cobalt in the Congo; rare-earth minerals have left behind a trail of poisonous radioactive waste in China. Canada is now proposing to mine the hell out of the carbon-rich Hudson Bay lowlands in the Ring of Fire to put more battery-operated vehicles on the road. Destroying vital carbon sinks to save the planet doesn’t sound like a moral solution.
Turner’s enthusiasm also ignores the demands of the technosphere. Civilization has used fossil fuels to build a semi-autonomous offshoot of the biosphere composed of steel, bricks, plastic, glass and cement, managed by digital machines. This ever-growing system has an insatiable appetite for dense, fossil-fuel energy. It gobbles oil and materials to expand while spewing streams of waste including CO2. Plastics alone now outweigh all wild animals. The growth of the technosphere explains why more electricity from renewables will not help. Whatever the future of particular renewable energy sources, writes the engineer Peter Haff, “the driving forces are already in place for transition to rates of energy consumption that are larger than, and perhaps much larger than, the current power level of fossil-fuel use.” Artificial intelligence, for example, is expected by 2027 to consume as much electricity as Sweden.
Lastly, the scale of the problem has been sorely underestimated. Total electrical power in the world is roughly 27,000 terawatt-hours (TWh). According to geologist Simon Michaux, the extra capacity needed to phase out fossil fuels is roughly 37,000 TWh. The green transition “proposes to construct an electrical system much larger than the existing grid, using energy that is more expensive and not as effective as what we have now.”
In sum we need a different plan that changes human behaviours, relies less on energy-intensive technologies, relocalizes life and accepts limits to economic growth.
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