COP26 Predictions

Thirty thousand plus attendees are about to descend on Glasgow for the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26). Hundreds of private jets will be flying in, lots of diesel engines have been installed in the five star hotels to power up the Tesla electric cars for the ride to conference. Most of Scotlands available big country houses have been booked for the billionaires, politicians, celebs and movie stars all wanting to be seen there to show off their green virtue. Meanwhile across Scotland since the year 2000 fourteen million trees have been cut down for onshore wind farm development. Sometimes apparently you have to destroy nature in order to save it. And after the COP26 crowd have jetted off lots of poor people across Scotland are going to be suffering and dying this winter because of energy price rises.

What can we expect from this giant media event?

We already know what will happen at COP26, the same that’s happened at all previous ‘last chance’ climate conferences, the script never changes. There will be dire warnings of a looming climate catastrophe, there will be deadlock, then the drama of a fast approaching end of conference deadline, finally some sort of last minute deal will be struck and a triumphant statement that major progress has been achieved but more needs to be done.

And afterwards almost nothing will change in the real world.

The reason that deep decarbonisation keeps retreating into the future is that no-one knows how to convince the masses to accept significantly lower living standards and really drastic unwelcome changes to their lifestyles without precipitating a rebellion. The Greens like to endlessly point the finger at the evil fossil fuel companies but those companies just make stuff we all want to buy and consume, its the everyday choices of billions of people that drive fossil fuel use not the companies that supply them. People in the developing world are going to continue to try to escape poverty and get richer through greater energy consumption, and populations in the developed countries will continue to try to live energy rich lives, drive long distances, fly to foreign holidays, buy lots of stuff, eat meat and do all the other things that the Greens have always hated. Even with the near saturation coverage of climate scare stories the only way to make people in the developed world really change their behaviour is by government action and that action can only take two forms; either things will be directly proscribed (banned or mandated), or ‘bad’ stuff will be punitively taxed out of reach of the masses. Both courses of action, if pursued with the rigour required to actually get close to zero emissions, will cause enormous political resistance that will eventually topple governments and destroy political careers. And of course the latter approach, making stuff punitively expensive, will excessively punish the poor.

Take flying for example. The only way to stop masses of people flying to foreign holidays is to either ration flights or make them so expensive that ordinary people can’t afford to fly. Governments really don’t want to go down the rationing path, can you imagine the bureaucracy involved and how pissed off with the government people will get when they are told they have exceeded their flying ration? So the most likely route will be to try to increase the cost of flying to push down demand, something that will also piss off really a lot of people who have become used to the pleasure of cheap foreign travel. And whatever route is taken to suppress flying we all know that the rich, powerful and famous will, inevitably, be exempt from any restrictions. The EU has just published its 2030 Climate Target Plan and it takes the approach of price rises via higher taxes to reducing flying but is careful to exempt ‘business travel’ and private jets. Is there any world imaginable in which the billionaires and film stars won’t be free to fly whenever and wherever they want? And if the masses are denied the right to fly but the rich and powerful can fly whenever they want the political resentment will be truly fearsome.

The sort of political problems that lie ahead if a deep decarbonisation is pursued have been on show in recent weeks as surging gas and electricity prices caused an “oh fuck” moment. In all the froth of commentary and campaigning around switching to renewables, decarbonising and going green, what got lost was the fact that the energy system actually has to deliver abundant, cheap and reliable energy or else we are all fucked – especially poor people. The reality of renewables and electricity generation are actually very simple and undeniable. Renewables – wind and solar – produce energy in an erratic and unpredictable way, and sometimes they won’t produce any electricity at all, and yet the demand for electricity is constant and growing. Soon for example millions of electric vehicles will be pumping up demand for electricity at night as they charge, so what happens when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun isn’t shining? You can’t store electricity in any great amount, you have to generate it as it is consumed. Imagine a prolonged cold snap during winter, high pressure sits over Europe, solar power is weak, daylight hours short, the wind isn’t blowing, everyone is running the heating at full blast. How do we keep the lights on? Or the rather how do we heat our homes, keep the factories running, keep the newly electrified transports system running, and keep the hospitals open?

Because you can’t store electricity in any large scale way there has to be a back up system for generating electricity for when – inevitably – wind and solar fail to deliver. Because it’s inevitable that there will be periods when neither the wind blows nor the sun shines you have to have a back up system that can deliver 100% of the electricity required to keep our civilisation civilised. That means we have to have an electricity system with double the capacity of our maximum possible demand. That’s already pretty expensive and those costs have to be incurred somewhere, some things will not funded in order to pay for our double capacity power system, where should those costs fall? But that’s the least of the problems, the really tricky problem is what sort of generators you use to back up the wind and solar systems. Whatever system you use has to be able to carry the entire burden of generating all our electricity, possibly for weeks at a time, and you need to be able to turn it on at very short notice and ramp up to full power production very quickly. If you use nuclear there are very long construction lead times, currently only one new nuclear power station is under construction in the UK and most of the existing stations will be closed by 2035. So if we are going to use nuclear we should be building dozens of power stations right now but we are not. Even if we deliver a successful crash program to build a back up nuclear power system capable of powering the entire country there are other problems with nuclear. For a start it’s very expensive, so combined with the expense of installing a bank of solar/wind systems capable of powering the entire country, and massively investing in the grid system in order to cope with rapidly fluctuating generation levels that are typical of renewable systems, the route of nuclear plus renewables means our energy costs will continue to increase by a lot. Really a lot. More poor people will die from the cold.

But there are technical reasons why a nuclear energy system as a back up doesn’t really work. Nuclear power plants take ages to ramp up from sitting idle to actually generating power so they are terrible as a back up system for renewables where the output of solar and wind might crash to nothing at very short notice and for unpredictable periods.

At the moment the UK mostly uses gas to back up unreliable renewables, which is also what much of Europe uses, because it’s relatively cheap (or was), because there are lots of existing gas fired power stations and because, importantly, you can ramp up the output of gas powered stations much quicker than nuclear to cope with fluctuating renewables. However there are two big problems with using gas to compliment and back up renewables. One is of course gas generators emit CO2 so there’s no way to get to near zero using gas as the back up system. The other big problem is if everyone is using gas then when there is a big surge in consumption as during the recent wind famine in Europe the price of gas will shoot through the roof utterly destabilising the electricity generating sector and punishing consumers with giant price hikes. Hardly a progressive outcome.

In reality the only sensible, rational and above all progressive strategy for a decarbonised electricity system is to reduce dependence on unreliable wind and solar and make the primary system nuclear. But of course the Greens have been successfully punting anti-nuclear ideas for years and so there is a deep antipathy to nuclear which makes any giant nuclear investment program politically very problematic and probably delaying any roll out very significantly.

Greta Thunberg told us to panic and we did – hence the terrible mess we are in. Government have been making grandiose green climate promises and commitments for a long time but now the time has come to actually deliver and the political costs will be truly fearsome.

I would propose that the only way a progressive can judge the value of a policy proposal is by asking ‘Does this improve or protect human welfare?” and secondarily “Does it increase social solidarity”. We know energy equals prosperity, we know we need more prosperity because much of the world is still way too poor, we know prosperity needs lots of energy, so we know in order to improve the lot of the world’s poor we need a robust energy system that can deliver globally many times the current levels of electrify and do so cheaply and reliably. So the correct way to calculate the best climate policy is to work out what option is best for human welfare. On the one hand we can go all out for decarbonisation and try to stop the world warming another degree or degree and half, by 2100. Or we can promote continuing economic growth, improved material welfare and higher standards of living which means finding a way to make a lot more abundant, cheap and reliable electricity by continuing to use highly efficient fossil fuels.

In reality we can to a limited extent blend the two options but there is a real opposing tension between them. The more we try to decarbonise the slower we grow our economy, and thus the more people we condemn to poverty, which in terms makes them vulnerable to climate change. The less we decarbonise the greater will be the warming in the next century and that will have some real social and economic costs, but we will be much richer so we can afford the adaptions needed for a warmer world. So what we need is some way way to work out the optimum path. Doing no decarbonisation is risky, but doing maximum decarbonisation is also very risky and almost certainly impossible. The only yardstick to use to work out the balance between decarbonisation and economic growth is to calculate at which point human welfare is maximised. The problem is that that sort of debate is completely crowded out by the noisy demands that only a full commitment to rapid decarbonisation is acceptable, based on end of the world scare stories not supported by the science.

I fear this won’t end well.