Energise!

Before the financial crisis of autumn 2008, soaring Chinese demand for oil led some commentators to predict a rosy future for renewable energy.Then, after the Crash of 2008, others suspected that new renewables firms would falter through lack of finance, and that prospects for renewable energy in general would recede. Yet the $700bn bailout of the US financial system, agreed in October 2008, was accompanied by important tax credits for renewables, and for plug-in hybrid vehicles. (1)

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It’s a difficult moment to forecast the future of energy. Completed in the weeks that saw the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the climax of the US Presidential campaign, this book tries to take the longer-term view.

In the past 100 years, energy forecasters have pretty much failed to get their predictions right. (2) But as Alan Kay, architect of the Graphical User Interface, so memorably said:

‘The best way to predict the future is to invent it.’

This book, therefore, has a pragmatic intent. We want to help invent a future of rational energy supply. Our emphasis is on the politics of energy innovation. That’s also why we’ve put some of the more technical matters around energy and climate change ‘into grey-tinted panels’.

About this book

This book is a riposte to the endless doctrine that you are personally responsible for climate change and must curb your consumption of energy. Energise! argues that consuming more energy isn’t a problem if the right kind of supply can be arranged. With the right supply, climate won’t run out of control. But so long as the state’s ineffective, moralistic policy on energy is left unchallenged, it’s the state’s interventions in our everyday lives that look set to run out of control.

For the lay reader, climate science appears to be a discipline so vast that it’s impenetrable. So, to summarise the state of climate science in a handy manner, the end of Chapter 1 presents tables that give a bird’s eye view on some of the main forecasts and recommendations that have been made about global warming. In these tables, we also present our own ideas.

In Chapter 2 we establish why people see energy as a problem of individual consumption more than one of supply. This is a concept that must be understood if a rational politics of supply is ever to win through.

Chapter 3 is about climate change, and presents a new interpretation of it.

In Chapters 4, 5 and 6 – on nuclear, carbon-based and renewables technologies – we make suggestions about which energy technologies will make the most sense, both generally and in terms of emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). (3) We also follow Alan Kay’s activist spirit and suggest roughly how, and by how much, different technologies could triumph, if people mobilise political backing for them.

At the end of each of Chapters 4, 5 and 6, then, we present tables that give an overview of the advantages and disadvantages of key technologies. We then provide simple ratings, out of 10, for each technology considered, both today, and in a better future.

Finally, in Chapter 7, we move somewhat beyond the energy sector. Both inside and outside it, in fact, we compare our proposals for transforming the planet with those of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the consultants McKinsey, and Bjørn Lomborg, the world’s most prominent critic of Green thinking.

How we approach climate change

Necessarily, this book deals with the science of climate change. It also deals with something rather different – the politics of climate change. We very much favour science, but very much oppose the manipulation of science in the cause of political point scoring.

Ironically, it was free-market ideologues and members of the energy establishment who, when climate was first raised with them, pioneered the idea that scientific evidence could substitute for political argument and thus refute the idea of man-made global warming. Thereafter, the Left and many environmentalists adopted the same tactic to advance their solutions to global warming. More recently, in a rearguard action, an old Conservative – Baron Nigel Lawson of Blaby, Britain’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer – has indulged in a little deification of science. To back up his main argument that government policy on global warming is a denial of personal liberty, he has used some very partial data about average world temperatures to bolster those who are sceptical about man-made climate change: climate sceptics. (4)

This book differs from both environmentalism and climate sceptics. It offers a radically new perspective on energy and climate change. It covers not just the technology, economics, science and politics of these two issues, but also their sociology: how people perceive energy and how they organise it. Our main focus is on humanity’s need for a lot more energy, and a lot more innovation in energy supply.

With this focus, Energise! is unlike mainstream books on climate change, in which the pattern is: first, identify what level of climate change is dangerous; second, identify the maximum level of GHGs compatible with that; and third, propose measures to ensure that this limit is not exceeded.

The standard book on climate change tends to build its conclusions into its premises. Beginning with somewhat arbitrary definitions of what is dangerous, it typically uses science to calculate the ‘right’ emission levels, and then feeds those levels into dubious and opaque economic models to calculate how costly CO2 taxes or CO2 permits should be to keep emissions below those levels.

If such an approach sounds boring and technocratic, that’s because it is. Ours is different. We concentrate on climate change, but we put it within a social context. That social context begins with the world’s growing energy requirements.

Austerity and the sociology of energy

In the wake of the Crash of 2008, climate change is destined to become more, not less important, to political and economic decisions. However much European industry would like emissions regulation to be delayed, and however much consumers will need to focus on tightening their belts, the weather will not stop; and neither will the contemporary impulse to connect absolutely everything with climate change. Indeed, there’s already evidence that the authorities will paint the austerity of 2009 onward in feelgood shades of Green.

Tightening belts, it is now said, is a good thing – because all individuals have a responsibility to conserve energy, and, in that cause, improve their behaviour. EdF, a French energy company, offers to engage Britons in what it insists is a ‘coaching programme’ on how to save energy. (5) Others want more radical steps to be taken. One ‘radical fantasy’ suggests not just that people will ‘earn less and consume less,’ but that the Crash of 2008 has given them ‘a chance to start again.’ (6)

The compatibility between capitalism and Green thinking is something that Green thinkers themselves have long been keen to promote. (7) In the next few years, people can expect to hear a lot more about how:

• going Green saves money, which is something everyone must do
• slower growth is wiser growth
• the world must not exhaust finite supplies of energy too fast.

Whether the general public finds these arguments for austerity credible, though, remains a very open question.

Like climate change, energy is set to become an increasingly important factor in people’s lives. In looking at energy, however, we’re not overly concerned with burying the reader in statistics on oil reserves, for example. These statistics are readily available.

Nor do we mull over whether it was speculation that really drove up oil prices in much of 2008. But we are interested when Barack Obama tells Fox TV that, had he been President during 9/11, he would have asked Americans not to shop, as George W Bush did, but to ‘tap into the feeling that everybody has been caught up in’. In other words, to tap into America’s need for a bold energy policy. (8)

Obama said that, after 9/11, he would have proposed that all Americans ‘make commitments’ to increase fuel efficiency in their cars and in their homes, somehow. The government would have worked ‘in partnership’ with them in the cause of decreasing America’s dependence on foreign oil by 20 or 40 per cent over a decade or two. (9)

This book suggests that the call to arms to cut energy use is not going to go away. Most likely, it will grow more urgent.

One example of a call to arms in energy is ‘fuel poverty’ in the UK – officially, circumstances in which a household spends 10 or more per cent of its income on energy. In 2001, New Labour promised to end this newly defined condition by 2018. (10) Following that, not much was heard about it. But by October 2008, Friends of the Earth (FoE), along with the charity Help the Aged, was ready to sue the government in the High Court for its failure to meet its own targets. Claiming that more than five million households now suffered from fuel fuel poverty, an FoE spokesman announced:

‘A massive energy efficiency programme is needed. This will keep people warm, cut bills and help meet our targets for tackling climate change.’ (11)

Yet Prime Minister Gordon Brown is already planning a massive programme to promote energy efficiency in British homes. All that can be surmised is that, for government and critics alike, rallying the nation around energy conservation is what now passes for a political cause. That fact, too, is part of our sociology of energy.

The meaning of energy

Given that in the UK, old-fashioned poverty has been transfigured into fuel poverty and is supposed to afflict nearly a fifth of households there, it ought to be clear that the precise meaning of energy among men and women is pretty malleable. But with every shift in its social significance, energy looks poised to count for more than it ever did in the past.

The meaning of energy is what conventional treatments of energy, just like conventional books on climate change, tend to avoid. This book doesn’t make that mistake.

In the downturn that has followed the Crash, the meaning of energy has changed again. Politicians have rediscovered the Depression economics of John Maynard Keynes, the merits of state spending, and the merits of state spending on energy in particular. In his election campaign, Barack Obama said he wanted to spend $150bn on renewables over the next decade, so that this source of energy produces a quarter of US electricity by 2025. British Chancellor Alistair Darling proclaims that in switching his spending priorities, energy is one of the ‘areas that make a difference’. It’s an area, indeed, ‘where people are feeling squeezed at the moment,’ and spending on it would create jobs. (12)

Here energy acquires a new meaning. It’s now about creating jobs. But before people sign up for the Keynesian management of economic demand through spending, investment and job creation around energy, consider two facts. First, the number of jobs likely to be created in the UK renewable energy sector is set to be very limited. Second, and more importantly, job creation for the few will be accompanied by renewed cries that everyone cut their demand for energy.

This book makes no apology for its historical dimension. That allows us to see where the future of energy is headed. In all the euphoria around applying Keynesian principles to energy, it’s worth recalling what Keynes actually said about his policy. In the preface to the German edition of his most famous work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), he expressed the hope that his book would help German economists develop a theory ‘designed to meet specifically German conditions’. His book’s theory was, he said, ‘much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state’ than were theories premised on free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire. (13)

Britain and the US today don’t face the advent of a totalitarian state. However, the state’s intervention in personal demand for energy, and its insistence that energy use is cut back, could well turn out to be an authoritarian exercise.

We hope you enjoy Energise!

References

1. See the Energy Improvement and Extension Act of 2008 (Engrossed Amendment as Agreed to by Senate), H.R.6049, 23 September 2008, and Energy Improvement and Extension Act of 2008 (Introduced in House), H.R.7201, 28 September 2008, available through http://thomas.loc.gov. For an overview, see Christopher Helman, ‘Green Energy Boom In Bailout Bill’, Forbes, 2 October 2008, on http://www.forbes.com/business/energy/2008/10/02/green-energy-taxes-biz-energy-cx_ch_1002energy08_taxes. html. On the tax breaks for plug-in hybrid vehicles, see John O’Dell, ‘Plug-In Tax Credits Hitching Ride On Wall Street Bail-Out Bill’, Green Car Advisor, 3 October 2008, on http://blogs.edmunds.com/greencaradvisor/FuelsTechnologies/PluginsandElectric/.
2. Vaclav Smil, Energy at the Crossroads, Chapter 3, ‘Against forecasting’, MIT Press, 2003, p121.
3. Man-made greenhouse gases (GHGs) are 85 per cent carbon dioxide (CO2). The other 15 per cent is composed of methane/ natural gas (CH4), nitrous oxide, (N2O) and three rather hairy kinds of fluorinated gases, (F-gases): sulphur hexafluoride, hydrofluorocarbons and perfluorocarbons. The last two kinds of emissions have come to prominence because they are substitutes for chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which have been phased out for damaging the Earth’s ozone layer.
4. Nigel Lawson, An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming, Gerald Duckworth & Co, 2008.
5. EdF, ‘The Energy Deal’, on http://www.savetodaysavetomorrow.com.
6. Jonathan Freedland, ‘When old dogmas die, there is room for all kinds of radical new thinking’, The Guardian, 15 October 2008, on http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfre/2008/oct/15/economic-policy-banking.
7. See for example Jonathan Porritt, Capitalism as if the World Matters, Earthscan, 2005.
8. ‘Obama On Responding To 9/11’, Wall Street Journal Video, 9 September 2008, on http://online.wsj.com/video/obama-onresponding-to-911/1CE9C161C4E3-4F9C-AF117CC8BA712F93.html.
9. Ibid.
10. Department of Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (BERR), The UK Fuel Poverty Strategy, November 2001, on http://www.berr.gov.uk/whatwedo/energy/fuel-poverty/strategy/index.html.
11. ‘Government facing fuel court case’, BBC News online, 6 October 2008, on http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7653939.stm.
12. Patrick Hennessy, ‘Alistair Darling turns to Keynes as he looks to spend his way out of recession’, The Sunday Telegraph, 19 October 2008, on http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/article3223224.ece.
13. See John Maynard Keynes, Preface to the German edition of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 7 September 1936, on http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/k/keynes/john_maynard/k44g/ k44g.html#preface2
    

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Download the full PDF version by clicking on this Energise! link.