Power to the people

Issue No. 231/232 (Nov/Dec 2009)

Speech presented by lead author and ISIS Director Mae-Wan Ho at the launch of Green Energies: 100% Renewables by 2050 in London, 25 November 2009.

WE are thrilled to have such strong recommendations for our report. Alan Simpson MP, special adviser to UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate, calls it 'a roadmap for survival' and the 'get out of jail' card for Britain and many other countries for avoiding 'climate chaos'.1 Chee Yoke Ling, director of the Third World Network, says 'it is just what world governments need to renew their commitment to the UN Convention on Climate Change.'2 That alone tells us there is nothing to divide the peoples of the developed and developing world as far as renewable energies and saving the climate are concerned.

What we need is to restore power to the people in all senses of the word 'power', through a commitment to 100% renewable energies by 2050. This is realistic, much more so than the non-renewable options favoured by the UK and other governments, and much more affordable.

 Renewable energy is inexhaustible energy that does not run out. Moreover, it is free; once you install your own equipment to capture it, no one can meter it, if you don't want them to, or cut off your supply. It is in principle available to all, so there is no need to fight over it. We, the people, are in control.

Being renewable is not enough. It has to be green, which means also being environmentally friendly, healthy, safe, non-polluting, and sustainable. 'Sustainable' needs more comment as it has been hijacked too often to mean just the opposite.

Being sustainable is to endure for hundreds or thousands of years like natural ecosystems, thanks to a circular economy of reciprocity and cooperation that renews and regenerates the whole.3 It is just the opposite of the dominant neoliberal economy driven by competition and exploitation that has brought the planet and its inhabitants to the brink of irreversible catastrophe, not to mention the actual financial collapse.4

Therefore it is important to modify Brundtland's definition of sustainability as follows: to use natural resources responsibly and equitably, to meet the needs of all in the present without compromising the needs of future generations. This makes sense, as truly green and renewable energies are freely available to all in any case.

Unfortunately, our political leaders are overwhelmingly blind to these simple facts. They are committed to the neoliberal paradigm, and held to ransom by big business. Truly green renewable energies that give power to the people do not leave enough profit to satisfy greedy big business!

That's why the Copenhagen summit is collapsing before it begins. Big business and big governments are fighting people to prevent them taking power, and fighting one another to get a larger slice of the power pie.

Being renewable and green is good whether or not you believe in climate change

The debate between climate scientists has just blown up over some hacked e-mails.5 Let me say this now: global warming is real and human activities have a lot to do with it.6 That's the best explanation of all the observations, past and present.

It is important to realise that being renewable and green is good, regardless of whether you believe in climate change. It solves our energy problem, puts people back in control, and gives us a cleaner, safer, healthier environment.

The coal and oil industries are desperate for any excuse to carry on business as usual. So please don't give them that. People are falling for all kinds of conspiracy theories except the most obvious one - that big business is out for big profit, and they will exploit all avenues to get it. If they can't have business as usual on the basis that human activities are not responsible for climate change, then they'll get bogus carbon-credits for saving the climate.

Trading carbon-credits does not give power to the people because it allows big polluters to shift the burden of reducing CO2 to developing countries least able to cope, and already suffering the brunt of climate disasters. It also financialises the problem, preventing real solutions while plundering the public coffers. The collapse of the economy should serve as a lesson, as it is caused by an unregulated financial market that creates 'wealth' out of nothing, which is ruinous to the real economy of goods and services.7     

Global warming is real and human-induced

The best rebuttal to the climate deniers and sceptics is a paper written by Jim Hansen and colleagues.8 Hansen is a scientist with the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and not at all popular with the oil or coal industry or the US government. Hansen and colleagues are critical of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, because the climate models used are not good enough, failing to even predict the summer polar ice melts that have been making headlines for several years now.

Hansen and colleagues' paper explains convincingly why the IPCC model is too conservative and at the same time answers the sceptics.

One main argument of the sceptics is that CO2 can't be responsible for global warming, because in the past history of the earth, changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration lag behind temperature by some 800 years.9

However, the current situation is just the opposite: although temperature has increased, CO2 has risen much faster than temperature. So what's the explanation?

 The main findings from Hansen and colleagues are that10:

1. The present is a non-equilibrium state when greenhouse gases (GHGs) from human activities are rising much faster than the system can respond, and is not the same as the equilibrium state in the past history of the earth.

2. IPCC models only take account of fast feedback processes whereas slow feedback from GHG (and vegetation) changes needs time to work through the system, in particular the oceans.

3. Including the slow feedback processes produces a much better fit of the temperature changes in the past history of the earth to CO2 levels.

4. In fact, CO2 has twice the effect on temperature than the IPCC attributed. And this led to the conclusion that 350 parts per million (ppm) atmospheric CO2 concentration is the target to aim for, not 450 ppm as indicated by the IPCC.

The head of the IPCC has agreed with the new target.

That means we must reduce the present levels of 385 ppm back down to 350 and soon. Hansen and colleagues said it can be done by ceasing to burn coal, unless efficient carbon capture and storage (CCS) can be developed.   

False solutions must be abandoned

CCS is not available until 30 years from now at the earliest, and it is much too expensive, very likely to be ineffective and unsafe.11

What about nuclear? Nuclear is not a renewable energy. The so-called nuclear renaissance is unravelling because nuclear is well recognised as highly unsafe, uneconomical and unsustainable.12 The nuclear industry in the US has been unable to overturn a single state ban so far, and Obama has put a freeze on Yucca Mountain as a long-term nuclear waste storage site. UK and France may well be in the minority in Europe to commit themselves to nuclear energy.

Another trap to avoid is the so-called 'International Biochar Initiative'13 that turns bioenergy crops into charcoal to be buried in the ground. This supposedly allows both harvesting energy from biomass and sequestering lots of carbon in the soil to improve soil fertility, because charcoal remains stable for hundreds if not thousands of years while increasing crop yields.

It turns out that charcoal does degrade, sometimes quite rapidly, and the effect on crop yields is erratic. Most of all, the proposal to plant energy crops on hundreds of millions of hectares of illusory 'spare land' was precisely the same as for biofuels five years earlier, which has already resulted in land grab, acceleration of deforestation, and a dangerous exacerbation of the atmospheric oxygen downtrend. 

New research shows that while CO2 has been rising, oxygen has been depleting from the atmosphere faster than can be accounted for by the increase in CO2.14 Furthermore, this downtrend has accelerated since 2003, coinciding with the biofuels boom. So climate policies that focus exclusively on carbon sequestration could be disastrous for all oxygen-breathing organisms including humans.

We must abandon the false solutions and go for the truly green energies that are already available in abundance.15

Huge potentials for green energies

Wind turbines on all available land surfaces that are not forests, cities, or covered with ice, and assuming they operate only at 20% of their rated capacity, would supply 40 times the world's electricity or five times its energy needs. Solar power at a modest 10% efficiency can provide all the world's energy needs with just 0.1% of the world's land surface. And methane from anaerobic digestion of organic wastes, which can be used for cooking, heating, generating electricity and running vehicles and farm machinery, saves over 50% of the world's energy consumption.

In addition, depending on local resources, microhydroelectric, geothermal, tidal reef, deep water conditioning, etc. are also available.

Green energies are widely available, affordable, efficient, flexible, readily upgraded, and especially if you keep it small, they are unobtrusive, even beautiful, if artists and designers get to work on them. The key is to take advantage of the most readily available local resources. Organic wastes must be the most universally available energy resource in the world, and don't forget, you also get good fertiliser from the digested residue.

Green energies for energy autonomy

Green energies are especially amenable to distributed, decentralised generation that gives people energy autonomy from the big energy industry. That's the key to their success.

In 2008, more renewable energies capacity was added than conventional for the first time. Germany has become the world's first major renewable-energy economy. Renewable energy accounts for 9.5% of total energy consumed supplying 15.1% of electricity. Wind power tops the renewable energies at 25 GW and accounts for 7% of electricity. The rest are: hydroelectric and almost equal second, biomass, solar, and geothermal. In 2007 alone, its new renewable capacity grew by the equivalent of two nuclear power plants. The country has been exceeding its successive goals since 2000, and its renewable industry is very optimistic about being 100% renewable by 2050. The key to its success are appropriate government legislation and subsidies, especially feed-in tariffs to stimulate the internal market.

There are wonderful things over the rainbow that you can feast your imagination on: artificial photosynthesis to harvest and store sunlight, thermoelectric devices that can turn waste heat into electricity, and best of all, we can clean up toxic and radioactive nuclear wastes with low-energy nuclear reactions, the notorious cold nuclear fusions that actually work!

So, in conclusion, the world can be 100% renewable by 2050:

• A variety of truly green and affordable options already exist, and more innovations are on the way.
  
  
• Policies that promote innovations and stimulate the internal market for decentralised distributed generation are key.
  
  
• Global cooperation is crucial; developed nations have an international obligation to support developing nations to fight global warming with renewable energies.                     

References

1.         Simpson A. Foreword to Green Energies: 100% Renewables by 2050, ISIS/TWN, London/Penang, 2009.

2.         Chee YL. Foreword to Green Energies: 100% Renewables by 2050, ISIS/TWN, London/Penang, 2009.

3.         Ho MW. The Rainbow and the Worm, the Physics of Organisms, 3rd ed., World Scientific, Singapore & London, 2008.

4.         Ho MW and Saunders PT. 'Financing poverty', editorial, Science in Society 40, 2-3, 2008.

5.         'Hackers leak e-mails, stoke climate debate', David Stringer, Associated Press, 20 November 2009, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091121/ap_on_sc/eu_climate_hacked_e_mails

6.         'Statisticians cool down the climate controversy', Lynne Peeples, 28 October 2009, http://www.scienceline.org/2009/10/28/blog_peeples_global-cooling-controvers/

7.         Ho and Saunders, op. cit.

8.         Hansen J, Sato M, Kharecha P, Beerling D, Berner R, Masson-Delmotte V, Pagani M, Raymo M, Royer DL and Zachos JC. 'Target atmospheric CO2: where should humanity aim?' 2008, http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0804/0804.1126.pdf

9.         'CO2 lags temperature, therefore it CAUSES temperature?' Carbon Climate, Debating the Global Warming Issue, 20 September 2009, http://www.carbonclimate.info/2009/09/co2-lags-tempererature-thereofre-it.html

10.        Ho MW. '350 ppm CO2 the target'. Science in Society 44, 4-7, 2009.

11.        Ho MW, Cherry B, Burcher S and Saunders PT. Green Energies: 100% Renewables by 2050, ISIS/TWN, London/Penang, 2009, Chapter 9.

12.        Ho MW, Cherry B, Burcher S and Saunders PT. Green Energies: 100% Renewables by 2050, ISIS/TWN, London/Penang, 2009, Chapters 3-7.

13.        Ho MW, Cherry B, Burcher S and Saunders PT. Green Energies: 100% Renewables by 2050, ISIS/TWN, London/Penang, 2009, Chapter 8.

14.        Ho MW. 'O2 dropping faster than CO2 rising'. Science in Society 44, 8-10, 2009.

15.        Ho MW, Cherry B, Burcher S and Saunders PT. Green Energies: 100% Renewables by 2050, ISIS/TWN, London/Penang, 2009, Chapters 11-26.

*Third World Resurgence No. 231/232, November-December 2009, pp 5-7