How not to save the planet
It’s not often that you find an interesting article in The Daily Mail, but here’s one.
Greenwash! Why we need honesty over carbon targets, not more green propaganda
By Michael Hanlon, The Daily Mail, 24 July 2008
Saving the planet is such a simple matter. Just like the public being urged to donate their pots and pans to make Spitfires and Hurricanes during World War II, we can all do our bit. The thing we need to save the world from, of course, is climate change, the biggest single threat – we are told – faced by this Earth and its inhabitants since the shadow of nuclear annihilation was lifted at the end of the Cold War.
It’s a big battle, but urged on by the green lobby, we’re told we can all make a difference. And the ‘to do’ list is endless: sell the Mondeo and buy a hybrid petrol/electric Prius; make sure your TV is turned off, not left on standby; never leave your mobile on charge longer than necessary; stop buying beans grown in Kenya and eat locally-grown turnips instead; put a windmill on your roof and throw away the patio heater.
The list goes on and on. But sadly, the truth is that most of this, it seems, won’t make a blind bit of difference.The trouble, as a new book by Cambridge physics professor David MacKay points out, is that much of what we are told amounts to little more than ‘greenwash’ – a series of pointless gestures and incantations designed to make us feel better about ourselves, to make companies more money and to justify hikes in taxation on ‘non-green’ activities.We cannot stop climate change by small measures, he says, adding: ‘If everyone does a little, we will only achieve a little.’
The problem, says Prof MacKay in his book Sustainable Energy – Without The Hot Air, is that the green lobby is being totally unrealistic about what is really needed to achieve the cutbacks in carbon dioxide emission it says is necessary. Scientists say that to keep the warming to manageable levels – a two-degree or so rise – we need to cut our emissions by a staggering 80 per cent by 2050. This is such a gargantuan task, says Prof MacKay, that we are simply avoiding thinking about it. It is such a deep cut, in fact, that it amounts to almost total abstinence from fossil fuels altogether.
His book sets out in detail what it would take to meet this target. Just how many windmills Britain would need to build, or nuclear power stations it would need to construct to meet its targets as part of that global cut. And he claims that virtually no one – not our political leaders, not the companies and organisations pushing greenery at us and certainly not the public – has any grasp of the harsh and inconvenient truths that show what a gargantuan task we face. “A lot of the current discussion of energy is dominated by wishful thinking and ‘greenwash’,” says Prof MacKay in his book.
Typical of this greenwash, for instance, are oil giant BP’s boasts about the environmentally correct paint it uses on its supertankers, which never once mention the rather less green cargo they carry. Exhortations that we should turn off our mobile phone chargers are more greenwash – he points out that the energy saved by an individual doing so for an entire year is only the same as that used to heat a single bath. “Even more reprehensible are companies which exploit the current concern by offering ‘water-powered batteries’, ‘recyclable mobile phones’, ‘environment-friendly phone calls’ and other meaningless tat.” Prof MacKay believes these are gimmicks and token gestures which will do nothing to reduce carbon emissions. He is right: everything these days seems to be covered with pious green symbols, trees and pictures of the Earth, and company exhortations that ‘we care’. A box of tissues in my bathroom informs me that by purchasing this brand I have shown ‘I care for the world’s forests’. Classic greenwash.
Prof Mackay is not denying the existence of global warming. He merely insists that the debate about how we solve it should be honest. His book attempts to answer the key questions of the green debate on the grounds of hard evidence, rather than ideology. If we want to cut carbon emissions by 80 per cent, as the greens insist we must, then how are we going to replace the power we currently get from burning coal, gas and oil? Certainly not through the wind and the waves, says Prof MacKay: “To do so, Britain would need to build 50,000 big windmills, double the entire fleet of wind turbines in the world – a 75-fold increase in our current wind capacity.” This would mean that most of upland Wales, Scotland and the north-west of England would have to be covered in tens of thousands of wind turbines. Our entire coastline would be ringed by yet more of these eyesores.
As to hydroelectric power, Prof MacKay estimates that “roughly 100 of Britain’s major lakes” would need to be dammed and controlled to generate the sort of power needed. Huge tidal barrages would have to be constructed across all our major estuaries. In short, to convert our carbon-spewing economy into something acceptable to the more radical greens, using totally renewable resources, we would need to turn Britain into a massive power station. And even then, we need to remember that making electricity accounts for only one-fifth of our total emissions. Even if we made 80 per cent of our electricity using windmills (a probably impossible and colossally disruptive and expensive undertaking) we would reduce Britain’s total CO2 emissions by only 16 per cent, something never mentioned by renewables campaigners. The vast majority of emissions are created by transport, heating and food production, which consume vast amounts of energy.
What is the answer? One solution, thoroughly unpalatable though it may be, would be to take the hair-shirt option, abandon our modern lifestyle entirely and return to the Middle Ages. We would have to swap our homes for huts, shivering in the cold, eating turnips in winter and forgetting about motorised transport. This would be ecologically correct maybe, but the unfortunate corollary would be that millions would starve. Biofuels? Forget it. Growing plants to turn into fuel is a colossal waste of increasingly valuable agricultural resources and only marginally viable anyway in our cool climate. Solar power? Some greens advocate blanketing Britain in solar panels, but the reality is that this would cost many billions for limited benefit. The money would be better spent investing in a huge international scheme to carpet part of the Sahara with generator panels and pipe the electricity to where it is needed via massive cables.
But such technology as this and things like nuclear fusion are decades away – and the greens say we do not have decades. No, if we want to maintain our current lifestyle and cut CO2 emissions now to the degree we are told we must, there are only a couple of realistic options, it seems. First, we need to convert almost our entire transport system to electric power. That means trains, buses and trucks, and all our cars too, leaving only air transport to be fossil-fuel powered. Then we have to find a clean and effective way of producing all that extra electricity plus the electricity we are already using. That means perhaps ‘clean coal’ (burning coal as we do today, but capturing the CO2 it produces and burying it underground).
And nuclear: a tenfold increase in nuclear capacity over current levels would achieve the required reduction in CO2 emissions – that would mean building dozens of new nuclear plants in short order. Nuclear energy is not problem-free, of course, nor is nuclear fuel unlimited. And the greens hate it. However, taking the nuclear option (combined, says Prof MacKay, with clean coal and some increase in renewables) is the only way we will be able to maintain anything like our current lifestyle while still cutting carbon dioxide emissions to levels that the scientists say will save the Earth from global warming catastrophe.
Finally, we could simply ignore global warming, carry on as we are and hope we will be able to deal with the effects of climate change as and when they happen – a risky strategy, although one advocated by some, notably the Danish controversialist Bjorn Lomborg. Prof MacKay is not a fatalist. There are things we can do, even as individuals, that will work, he says: ‘”Turn your thermostat down” is, by my reckoning, the single best piece of advice you can give someone. So is “fly less” and “drive less”. But hybrid cars and home windmills are just greenwash.
Since we started worrying about climate change 20 years ago, a great deal of hot air, obfuscation and even a little sense has been talked. This is a hugely complex issue and one which needs to be dealt with forthrightly and with honesty. The current trend for silencing dissent – witness the castigation of Channel 4’s recent anti-green climate change polemic – is, I believe, counterproductive and unhelpful.
Most of all, we need to be realistic. To stop climate change will mean we will need completely to re-engineer our world on a scale not seen since the Industrial Revolution. Former U.S. Vice-President and climate campaigner Al Gore has likened his recent call for the U.S. to be carbon-neutral by 2018 to JFK’s speech in 1961 promising a Moon landing by 1970. In fact, turning the U.S. into a zero-carbon economy in a decade makes flying three men to the Moon and back look like child’s play.
Sadly, putting a windmill on your roof and turning off your mobile phone charger will have no more effect than cutting out your pots and pans did in World War II. The idea of turning scrap metal into Spitfires was little more than propaganda to make people on the home front feel good. The real sacrifices were, of course, much harder and bloodier, just as they will be now in the fight against climate change.
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It is certainly not an excuse to sit back in one’s vest and turn up the heating. This being the Daily Mail, one ought to look past the hogwash that passes for journalism. Let’s take, for example, what professor David MacKay himself wrote on his blog http://withouthotair.blogspot.com/ about home energy consumption:
“I’d like to make one suggestion to everyone: if you want to discuss what I said in the book, please read the book!
Some readers seem to think that whatever the journalist wrote, I said. For example his introduction said that most people ‘have no need to worry about the energy they use to power their electronics; it’s insignificant compared to the other things’. That was the journalist, not me! This attitude to standby power has provoked the mob to get out their flame-throwers, saying ‘MacKay should know that 8% of all domestic electricity goes to power junk on standby!’ Sigh!
For the record, here is my domestic electricity consumption for the last few years.
I started paying attention to my electricity consumption in 2007. I started switching off all my stereos, answering machines, cable modem, wireless, and so forth, in mid-2007. I am happy to confirm that switching off these vampires has reduced my domestic electricity consumption from roughly 4 kWh/d to below 2 kWh/d. This is an energy saving well worth making; I encourage everyone to bye-bye their standby, and read their meters to see the difference it makes.”
Excellent.
Thankfully, Daphne is not taken in by this now-decades-old political correctness that treats the environmental lobby as our saviour and whatever comes out of the lobby as the gospel.
This man-made-global-warming hogwash became a new religion and, like all religions, it soon abandoned logic and became even more fundamentalist than some other religions.
The green hogwash is an elitist gospel that has abandoned the basic principles of politics (toleration of others’ ideas, conciliation, practical ideas) and fundamental values (the option for the genuinely poor, the extension of freedom, democracy as equality) to fashion out of its dogma an ultimately futile quest that will only make the world’s poor even poorer.
I never believed anything about the greenhouse effect or climate change. Not just this article but also many other scientists prove me right. So, what about the ice-age – was it also because people those days were using fuels and leaving electricity on? Come on, I wish someone would put a stop to all this non-sense – there are ‘people’/’organisations’ making big money from all this non-sense. I believe that the world is just taking its natural course – that’s all. (And by the way I only have my common sense to rely on – I’m no scientist).
Comforting isn’t it!
Al Gore had done a lot to bring climate change to the fore of political discussion. Having said that, he’s done little in actually proposing concrete ideas on how to avoid climate change, and his statement comparing global warming efforts to the moon landings has not even been reported, let alone discussed (except in the joke of the day section).
Hard and bloody measures make absolutely no sense. They stimulate recoil – and that is the last thing climate change efforts deserve. Moreover, the reporter seems to have completely missed the fact that ‘hard and bloody’ measures impact firms and companies first, rather than people and their mobile phone chargers. Climate change efforts only work when they are bottom-up: when the people want them, and companies follow. As happened this week, when GM admitted, for the first time ever, a major lack of demand for its iconic gass-guzzling trucks.
Then again, the Daily Mail reporter would have us believe our anti-capitalist governments are trying to ban cars. In any case, I think we can all rest assured that the racist bigots at this lovely newspaper will keep us updated on all things necessary to the human race’s survival. Including horribly reviewed books.
Well, David, you’ll be happy to know that I took your advice and had the roof painted white today. The house seems a lot cooler but that might be because there’s a strong breeze and it’s not so humid, so I’m waiting for a really hot day to work out the difference. We’re also having a solar water-heater installed (I gave in) and so I will report back on that.
@Catherine. Believe is a dangerous word when not backed by knowledge.
just forget global warming and check your electricity meter. That would lower one’s energy consumption. we will not save the planet. The planet will save itself. All green alternatives are nothing but money making alternatives to oil. There are techniques to “free” energy (developed in 1900s). however most knowledge is lost or deliberately removed.
@ Libertas:
Of course the world treats the environmental lobby as its saviour! It has never arrested any Greenpeace member; energy companies have never held governments to ransom; politicians have never accepted big political donations from polluting multinationals; developed countries have never dumped toxic waste on failed states; and governments have never postponed carbon taxes.
“The poor” are infintely grateful, I’m sure.
@Daphne,
Well the white roof should make a difference, I’m pretty sure of that:)
Keep us posted on the solar heating, even though winter is when one can really test it properly!
@ Daphne: see to it that your SWH hot water pipes pipes are Insulated, and that it is placed level.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5L4O8ZJ8P4
Is this “Greenwash” on a minor scale? Are we being taken for a ride?
Why white?
Silver paint exists and its coefficient of reflection is much higher
@ A Attard : silver paint after a year becomes grey .
@A Attard – I don’t want to blind the passing helicopters.
Of course a lot of companies are using ‘greenwash’ to make money while easing consciences – it’s a free market globalised world! You don’t need to be a professor to know that, just like you don’t need to be one to know that climate change is not a problem that can be solved by world governments (look at how difficult they find it even to agree to give a little money to allow the poorest countries to get on their feet).
The problem with the article it that it has one fantastically short-sighted built-in assumption: that only existing technologies can save the world. For instance he throws biofuels out of the window – without considering that even today there exists the technology to synthesize organisms (Frankestein-like fears about biotechnology permitting) that can improve the energy output of biofuels tenfold…
@Daphne
This is probably the worst article i have seen.
To give one example:
“To stop climate change will mean we will need completely to re-engineer our world on a scale not seen since the Industrial Revolution.”
So is the journalist/professor saying that we are not capable of doing what our ancestors did with much less knowledge and understanding?
And i particularly guffawed at the worry of wind turbines spoiling the seaside view, when, without proper monitoring, the pollution would ensure there was no view to see.
Sure we need to be aware of potential cases of snake oil. But it is also true that things are reversible. London was once invisible because of the smog caused by inefficient coal heating. The Thames, for a long time, had no life in it.
It may be true that the ‘Greens’ may have over egged the situation, but it has raised consciousness and pushed industries and the ordinary man in the street to think of what their impact is on this small blue planet of ours, if not for ourselves then for those who come after us.
Many people noticed how much cleaner the air was without the buses. and that was after three days. Can you imagine if we can reduce air pollution by 30, 40, 50, 60 per cent or more.
Impossible, not really. The first hybrid cars worked on the principle that the electric engine supplemented the petrol engine. The new breed will do exactly the opposite, with cars running on electricity for a distance of 100 miles before resorting to petrol. Ah, i hear you say, but what is producing the electricity, isn’t it fossil fuel? Yes, but the electric car is 40% more efficient in energy usage.
As for CATherine’s ostrich approach, she may be right that the climate will change no matter what, but wouldn’t it be nicer for our health, for our environment and for the future, if we found more efficient ways to use what is becoming a verify finite source of energy, with as little pollution as possible? And isn’t it always a good idea not to rely on one source of energy because eventually, that will run out
here is an interesting article from http://www.salon.com. i know, its a left wing site (but hey I’m a liberal, so there!)
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/07/28/energy_efficiency/index.html#
So a crane came along this morning and hauled a giant solar water-heater onto the roof. There were men running all over the house removing bathroom boilers and shouting messages to each other from the roof. Needless to say, my lack of interest in this matter is so great that I didn’t even go outside to look at it being hauled up, and now it’s too late because it would involve climbing up a ladder and I don’t do exercise. We should have hot water by this evening.
There are two functional large bathroom boilers or water-heaters or whatever you call them going spare, so if anyone knows of somebody who needs one, please let me know. I’d rather pass them on than chuck them in a skip.
From: ‘Major discovery’ from MIT primed to unleash solar revolution
@Daphne,
How goes the clean energy :)
Issa keep an eye on the electricity and let us know if you notice a difference! U iva cheer up, you will save the planet single handedly :)
“two functional large bathroom boilers or water-heaters or whatever you call them”
To be 100% honest I still call them geysers *blush*
@Matthew
Thanks for the link, I read the article – very interesting but I think we are still far behind in actually capturing the solar energy in the first place (Stictly my opinion – I am no scientist/engineer)
But still, at’s a major hurdle overcome, but I still have my doubts that homes will be self-sufficient energy wise within 10 years!
@Matthew,
P.S. Hope I’m wrong of course!
@All,
Sorry to bring up the issue of the surcharge again BUT as regards to those who don’t pay it, is there a limit on how much electricity they consume or is the Government – i.e. we – subsidising their ACs etc? Does anybody know?
@ Daphne :”There are two functional large bathroom boilers or water-heaters or whatever you call them going spare” ; I left mine connected in place , in case the solar water heater gets damaged.
@ David:there is a threshold on subsidised electricity. Serrah rasek.
@John
“@ David:there is a threshold on subsidised electricity. Serrah rasek.”
Thank you
@John, apparently our solar water-heater (or so I’m told, because I didn’t see it), came equipped with a back-up system composed of a vast tank, with more capacity than our three boilers (I thought there were two) put together and a heating element connected to the grid. It has a thermostat which triggers the back-up system on days when the sun is not enough, or similar problems.
I’m pleased to report that so far, so good.
@ Daphne :Well they all have a back up heater and a big storage of hot water.I am not going into details but it’s nice to have more than one spare wheel especially when the cost is nil. Same goes to your ‘spare’ water heaters .
If I were you I would keep the SWH electrical heater in off position until the UV index gets to around 6 ,that is until end of September.
You proved to us that you keep ALL your options open.
@ Daphne : now you reduced your electrical load by around 4 Kw so you can probably afford installing an air conditioner or two without overloading your power lines.
I am assuming you kept your three water heaters always on.
I hope this fits to your way of thinking.
We would like to thank you just as before for the stunning ideas you gave Jesse when preparing a post-graduate research plus, most importantly, for providing the many ideas in one blog post. Provided we had been aware of your site a year ago, we will have been kept from the needless measures we were employing. Thanks to you.