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This is the place for discussing the potential collapse of modern civilization and the environment.
Collapse, in this context, refers to the significant loss of an established level or complexity towards a much simpler state. It can occur differently within many areas, orderly or chaotically, and be willing or unwilling. It does not necessarily imply human extinction or a singular, global event. Although, the longer the duration, the more it resembles a ‘decline’ instead of collapse.
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As far as I can tell, the core thesis is "We can't depend on renewable energy to keep improving such that it can sustain our ever-growing needs, which are massive. We better stick with coal and oil instead."
As much as I actually agree with the idea of being sensible about what the quantitative possibilities of individual renewable technologies are, there's a pretty obvious flaw in the logic...
He is full aware that we're in the tail end of the fossils age, so his message is probably "we're screwed".
I mean, I don't disagree with that message. But using that as an argument against switching to renewable energy is just silly. The reality is, if a large human population is going to stay around on the planet in the coming decades, we will do some combination of reducing our consumption and switching to renewables, whether that comes about by choice or because we got forced to when we ran out of everything else.
Sticking with nonrenewables as the "realistic" choice is going to be undone by the reality in the very-easily-forseeable future.
I agree. But we're certainly facing a considerable, involuntary reduction in our numbers as well.
Probably, yes
That's fine as long as people can admit to themselves that energy throughput with renewables is going to be a fraction of what it was in the age of abundant fossil fuels. And the problem I see is that most people touting green energy are either unrealistic or mendacious about this. We still haven't got past the phase of people thinking they will keep their consumer and commuter friendly lifestyles in the coming decades.
And the problem I see is that most people touting green energy are either unrealistic or mendacious about this.
I won't deny that a lot of people on the "green" side are probably unrealistic to some degree about it, yes. But the people on the other side are by definition being unrealistic about it. Consuming nonrenewable resources indefinitely is by definition an impossibility, and the definition of "indefinitely" that makes that true is getting very very short.
So to put it a little bit in specific. He says:
It is this kind of thinking which underpins the delusional proposition that we can replace the annual 137,236.67-Terawatt hours of energy we consume from oil, coal and gas, with wind and solar which currently accounts for just 6.5 percent (8,935.84 Terawatt hours) of that. To do so would require the construction of a Hornsea offshore wind farm (which cost nearly £3bn and took 10 years to build) every day between now and 2050… something which any serious examination of the material costs renders impossible:
The world does an incredible amount of stuff. The amount of work output is absolutely phenomenal. That's why the energy consumption is into the terawatts (18 terawatts, BTW, although if you multiply by hours and then divide by years then the number gets a lot bigger). How many apartment buildings got finished yesterday? I don't know, but the number probably wasn't 0. How much construction went into the power plants that currently provide those 137,236,670,000,000,000,000 watt-hours per year? I mean, you could do exactly the same type of math for how many single coal plants you'd have to build and then argue that coal can't possibly sustain the world's demand for power. He's comparing the scope of entire world against the construction of a single plant in an insanely difficult location.
The calculation is, how much does it cost to build one megawatt's worth of a coal plant vs. one megawatt's worth of a solar plant or whatever. For all I know, if you do that calculation, it supports his thesis (or destroys the credibility of offshore wind generation while leaving some other approaches intact), but this way of presenting it just isn't honest.
Edit: I got curious. A typical coal plant generates about a gigawatt and costs $1-4 billion. Hornsea One also produces about a gigawatt and cost about £3 billion. So, to satisfy our present power requirements with coal, we'd also have to undertake a project roughly as expensive as Hornsea One every day from now until 2050, and in addition we'd also hasten the climate-induced destruction of livable conditions on the planet.
If this is an argument against abandoning fossil fuels before any of the green power-generation that could replace them has actually been built, I can agree with that. If however this is an argument against renewable energy in general, I think it's based on bad math (or rather, intentionally misleading math) even if we assume that every renewable project in the future will be as difficult and expensive as one of the first large-scale ones, which was so new and ambitious that it got in all the papers and everything.
Edit: Oh, also, this bugged me even while I was reading it:
Moore’s Law, which held that the number of circuits on a computer chip would double every two years – which it did… until we ran out of physical space
That may happen at some point, but it hasn't yet.
Thanks for debunking this silly and narrow minded article 😊