Pearls and Irritations

Renewable energy and its applications are pushing fossil fuels out of business – but will it be fast enough? Climate scientists are encouraged to be more vocal to stave off a ghastly future.

I’m not sure if P&I has many readers who consider themselves to be optimists, but if you are out there, these first two items are for you.

New energy is different to old energy

On the website of RMI, formerly the Rocky Mountain Institute, a US think tank ‘that transforms global energy systems through market-driven solutions to align with a 1.5°C future and secure a clean, prosperous, zero-carbon future for all’, is an 87-slide PowerPoint presentation called ‘“The Cleantech Revolution. It’s exponential, disruptive, and now”.

RMI’s messages are decidedly upbeat:

• The energy system has been transformed over the last decade by ‘the exponential forces’ of renewables (costs down, investments and generation up), electrification (electricity is the largest source of “useful energy”) and efficiency (which has reduced energy demand by a fifth). This pace of change will continue.

• Change is being led by China, but “exponential change” is also occurring in the OECD and the Global South, particularly Asia (RMI likes “exponential”).
• The fossil fuel system has lots of red flags and faces inexorable decline: investment, capacity and demand have or will soon peak; internal combustion engine car sales peaked in 2017; two-thirds of the energy fossil fuels produce is wasted as heat; massive social and environmental externalities; stranded assets are inevitable.
• The goals of the Paris Agreement are feasible and the Global South will continue to leapfrog to cleantech.
• Now is the time to act – “focus on the signal, not the noise”. This is the pivot (not pivotal) decade.
• And the bottom line: “The direction of change is inevitable, but the speed is up to us”.

I realise that I’m being cynical, but I have to say that I’m naturally suspicious of any organisation that has among its values “Applied Hope”, “Intentional Partnership” and “Inclusive Collaboration”, and promotes “Abundance by Design” and “Natural Capitalism”. But RMI is onto people like me with “Pessimists sound clever; optimists change the world”. Ouch!

World passes 30% renewable electricity milestone

Ember, a think tank that “aims to accelerate the clean energy transition with data and policy’”(and they do produce great data and graphs), is also very positive in its Global Electricity Review 2024.

Many of the messages are similar, so I’ll focus on additional information:

• Renewables generated 30% of electricity in 2023, having grown from 19% in 2000. This is largely attributable to solar (the fastest growing source of electricity) and wind, together growing from 0.2% in 2000 to 13.4% in 2023. In 2023, China contributed over half of new solar and new wind.
• The demand for electricity is growing at 2.6% per year (led by economic growth in Asia, particularly China). During 2023, the world’s demand increased by the equivalent of more than double Australia’s annual demand.
• Four technologies were responsible for over half of the demand increase in 2023: EVs, heat pumps, air conditioning and data centres. (A nice video compares the environmental impact of internal combustion engine cars and EVs.)
• Although fossil fuel’s share of electricity generation is falling (down to 61% in 2023), the amount it generates has been increasing. Ember forecasts that 2024 will see the amount generated by fossil fuels start to fall and a permanent decline is inevitable.
• Greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation have been growing at 2.6% per year since 2000 but are expected to have peaked in 2023 and now start falling.
• To achieve international climate change targets, the electricity sector must be decarbonised by 2035 in OECD countries and by 2045 elsewhere. This is dependent on clear government targets to provide confidence to customers, businesses and investors; incentive mechanisms to increase the attractiveness of installing domestic solar and large-scale utility wind and solar; and improvements in grid infrastructure and flexibility.
• A clean electrified economy will create economic growth, more jobs, better air quality and energy sovereignty. 

The author’s rosy conclusion is that “2023 was likely the pivot point, marking peak emissions in the power sector [and] will likely go down in history as the pivot year in the world’s shift from fossil fuels to clean energy”. Note that word “pivot” again. Not “pivotal” as in “crucial we do something” but “pivot” as in the actual point of change, i.e., when things start improving.

On the other hand

• Since humans started to farm, the biomass of terrestrial vegetation has halved.
• Over the last 300 years, we have lost more than 85% of the world’s wetlands.
• Wild animals account for only 5% of the living biomass of terrestrial vertebrates today. The rest is human beings and their livestock.
• The current species extinction rate is several orders of magnitude greater than the background rate since the last mass extinction 66 million years ago.
• The human population has doubled in the last 50 years and is still growing, but around a quarter is starving or malnourished.
• Human consumption is approaching double Earth’s regenerative capacity. Over 70% of people live in countries where the average income is less than the world’s average income and yet the collective consumption still exceeds regenerative capacity. Global aggregate consumption will inevitably increase, further increasing the world’s biocapacity deficit.
• The world’s ecological overshoot is largely attributable to the use of fossil fuels.
• And then there’s the urgent crisis of climate change, the facts of which don’t need further repeating here.

These are just a few of the attention-grabbing gobbets of information provided to justify an argument that biodiversity loss, the impending sixth mass extinction, ecological overshoot and climate disruption have not received the attention or urgent action they require; that these threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms will be far more dangerous than currently believed; that the scale of them (and the likely “ghastly future”) is so great that it is difficult for even well-informed experts to grasp; and that past and future political impotence will likely lead to an “accelerating vicious cycle of global ecological deterioration and its penalties [and that] it is doubtful than any needed shift in economic investments of sufficient scale will be made in time”.

The authors, 17 scientists, mostly from the US, but including two from Australia, assert that their goal is not to present a fatalistic perspective (because successful interventions are available) but to suggest that only a realistic appreciation of the challenges might allow the international community “to chart a less-ravaged future”. They refer to scientists’ extraordinary responsibility “to speak out candidly and accurately when engaging with government, business, and the public”.

This call for a more engaged scientific community in the belief that it could influence world affairs is difficult to reconcile with the authors’ realistic assessment of what is necessary:

“The gravity of the situation requires fundamental changes to global capitalism, education, and equality, which include inter alia the abolition of perpetual economic growth, properly pricing externalities, a rapid exit from fossil-fuel use, strict regulation of markets and property acquisition, reining in corporate lobbying, and the empowerment of women.”

Bearing in mind that the article was published almost four years ago, it isn’t obvious that it has had much effect. Nonetheless, I applaud the authors’ quixotic effort. We must all keep doing whatever we can to fight for change.

‘Forest Gardening’ – aka native forest logging

If you missed the article in P&I about a week ago about ‘Forest Gardening’, I strongly recommend it. The authors describe the ridiculous loophole that is allowing VicForests to sidestep the Victorian Government’s commitment to end native forest logging in January 2024 to conduct industrial-scale logging in the Wombat Forest (with plans to expand operations).

A tale of black-cockatoos, fungi and sheoaks

Glossy black-cockatoos feed almost exclusively on the cones of drooping sheoak trees, but they prefer the cones of sheoaks that grow on poorer soils. This is because sheoaks gain their nutrition mainly through the fungi in the soil, not the soil itself, and the sheoaks’ favourite fungi thrive in poor soils.

Maybe we need to revisit our thinking about what constitutes a rich soil and a poor soil. Soil richness, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. If it’s where you thrive, it’ll look like a pretty rich soil to you regardless of what an agronomist says.

I’m off on my travels again. My next environmental contribution to P&I will be on November 17^th.

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