The Greenhouse Problem: Why you won't solve it

By Ted Trainer

Almost everyone who thinks the greenhouse problem is serious takes it for granted that it can be solved, just by moving off the carbon-based fuels. In addition we have been told by Nicholas Stern and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the cost will be negligible. So, you may ask, why don’t those stupid politicians just develop the sustainable alternatives?

Almost no critical thought has been given to what the limits to renewable energy sources might be. My Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society (2007) seems to be only the second book published on the theme. Here are a few of the basic reasons which I think show that it will not be possible to solve the greenhouse problem at any cost so long as this society remains committed to affluence and growth.

First, a responsible, safe greenhouse target is now generally taken to be to keep the atmospheric CO2 concentration under 450 parts per million (ppm), and probably 400 ppm. To do that we probably have to cut emissions by 50 - 80% by 2050, i.e., possibly to around 5.2 Gigatonnes per year (GT/y), and to somewhere around zero by 2100. (IPCC, 2007, SPM 5.)

That leaves only four options for providing the expected 2050 world energy demand of approximately 1100 Exajoules (EJ), more than twice as great as at present: conservation/efficiency in use, coal with sequestration of the CO2, nuclear, and renewables.

Let’s assume energy conservation cuts 25% off supply required to provide services, so the task is to provide 875 EJ of energy.

Geo-sequestration of CO2 can capture only 80 - 90% of the CO2 generated when coal is burned. If we take the 2050 release limit as 5 GT/y CO2, electricity generated by coal use would have to be no more than around 80 EJ. That means 743 EJ would have to come from nuclear energy and renewables. Let’s divide the task between them.

To provide 370 EJ from nuclear reactors we would need about 45 times as much reactor capacity as we have now - and Uranium resources (assuming 2 – 4 million tonnes) would be totally exhausted within 2 years. (Zittel, 2003, and Leeuwin and Smith, 2006.) Take the highest estimates, and add Thorium, and it’s 15 years.

So we would have to give most of the task to the renewables. Lets for simplicity split 700 EJ between solar and wind. We’d need about 1500 times the world’s present wind capacity. This is impossible to locate within thousands of km of demand. Europe’s total on and offshore potential has been estimated at 4 EJ.

Then we have to deal with the variability of renewables. Wind and photovoltaics (PV) provide no electricity at all on calm nights. Unless you can store vast quantities of electricity, wind and PV can’t save consumer society. Energy can be stored as water pumped up into dams to generate electricity later, but world hydro capacity is a small proportion of what demand will be so it can’t carry the load when wind and sun are down. Storing electrical energy as hydrogen wastes three-quarters of the energy generated by the time it drives a vehicle or other device and this is why we are not likely to use it in large quantity. (Trainer, 2007, Ch. 6.)

Because they can store energy as heat, solar thermal systems will be a valuable contribution to a world with renewable energy. But even in the best locations such as Central Australia it seems that output would be too low in the winter months for these systems to make a significant contribution, in view of the big embodied energy costs involved in the plant, storage systems, and long transmission lines. (See Trainer, 2008.)

By far the greatest problem for renewable energy is the provision of liquid fuels. Biomass cannot meet more than a tiny fraction of the global demand. We will probably get 50 GJ/ha (Gigajoules/hectare) from ethanol produced from woody biomass produced on a very large scale. To give the expected 9 billion people the present Australian oil plus gas amount of energy we would need to harvest 23 billion ha of plantations – on a planet with only 13 billion ha of land!

And what about electric vehicles? About two units of electrical energy have to be generated to get one to power wheels, because the losses on this path are considerable. (Bossel, 2004.) Australian transport energy is 70% greater than electricity consumption, so to run our present transport system on electricity as well as meet electricity demand renewables would have to generate 3.4 times as much electricity as we do now. And both transport and electrical energy demand are rising fast.

It must be recognised that the discussion is not about how to sustain the present society. The most fundamental element built into the foundations of this society, and into the mentality that drives politicians, economists, the media, and ordinary people, is the fanatical obsession with constantly getting richer and consuming more and more, that is, with economic growth.

Note that the 2050 target taken above, 1100 EJ, is only one-fifth of the amount we would need to give all 9 billion people expected the per capita energy use Australians are likely to have by then. That’s where they are all fiercely heading whether you like it or not. To give them all the “living standards” Australians are heading for by 2050 world economic output would be 30 times as great as it is now.

So what’s the answer? If the question was, as everyone thinks it is, “How can we run our rampant affluence and growth consumer society without causing a greenhouse problem?” then the answer is – we can’t! The overshoot, the magnitude of the unsustainability, is far too great. Consumer society has slammed into its limits. There is no possibility of keeping this party going on renewables plus nuclear energy. It can only be kept going, for a while, by continuing to burn highly unsafe amounts of carbon based fuels. The basic cause of the global predicament is gross over-consumption and it can only be solved by cutting levels of production, consumption, trade, investment and Growth Domestic Product (GDP) to perhaps one-eighth of present levels, and staying down there in a zero-growth economy.

Some of us have been trying to get consumer society to face up to the limits to growth for decades, without any effect. There is no sign whatsoever that the penny will ever drop. They want the greenhouse problem solved but they will not tolerate any suggestion that this will require the quest for affluence and growth to be abandoned. Consumer society is not just unsustainable; it cannot be made sustainable. But no one is willing to even think about this. So clearly the greenhouse problem will not be solved.

What will governments do? They will now plunge into carbon taxes, planting trees, researching Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) – while building coal-fired and nuclear power stations and desalination plants as soon as consumers demand more energy and water. They will follow Howard’s wisdom – take action to save the environment, but not if it harms the economy - which G.H. Bush put more elegantly as, “The American way of life is not negotiable.”

They will in fact make big gains, maybe even reducing emissions 20% by 2020. And this will make them think that all they have to do is keep that up and the problem will be solved. But even if they achieve Prime Minister Rudd’s goal of a 60% cut by 2050 this would leave Australians on 13 tonnes of CO2 per capita p.a., and if 9 billion were to live like that world emissions would be 98 billion tonnes p.a. - 4 times as high as at present. Remember, if we were to cut global emissions by 60%, to 11 billion tonnes p.a., that would be an average of 1.2 tonnes per person - under 5% of the present Australian per capita amount. Let’s see you do that without “harming the economy” Mr. Rudd.

The tragedy is that there is an easy and workable and attractive solution –which will not be even considered, let alone taken. We call it “The Simpler Way” – Google that and you will find that if we agreed to live frugally and self-sufficiently, in localised economies geared to need not profit or market forces or growth, we could easily cut our carbon footprint sufficiently, while liberating ourselves from the consumer rat race. (Trainer 2006.) In fact many little groups are working to build such economies, the most inspiring cases being within the Eco-village and Transition Towns movements. But the mainstream plods stolidly ahead obsessed with ever-greater wealth and GDP.

If you don’t like this analysis of the situation, work it out for yourself. I’ve given the basic numbers and sources; just do your own arithmetic and tell me where I’m wrong.

Bossel, U., (2004), 'The hydrogen illusion; why electrons are a better energy carrier', Cogeneration and On-Site Power Production, March – April, pp. 55 – 59.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (2007), Climate Change 2007, Fourth Assessment Report.
IPCC website here http://www.ipcc.ch/

Leeuwen, J. W., and Smith, P., (2005), Nuclear Energy; The Energy Balance, Sixth Revision, Ch. 2.

Trainer, T., (2006), The Simpler Way Website, http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/

Trainer, T. (2007), Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society, Springer, Dodrect.

Trainer, T., (2008), Estimating the limits of solar thermal power. See alphabetical topic list in The Simpler Way website, above.

Zittel, W, et al., (2006), Uranium resources and nuclear energy, Energy Watch Group, Dec.

The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change by economist Lord Nicholas Stern, commissioned by the British Government. Read a summary here http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/1910,features,-time-to-get-stern-on-climat... and the full report here http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_economics...