[Recap: this is a mini blog series prompted by SEAI’s announcement Monday (20/4/2020) that Ireland will miss its 2020 targets for renewable energy, which in turn prompted me to revisit a 2007 dissertation I prepared on wind energy’s contribution to Ireland hitting that target. Part I compares the wind forecast with actual, concluding the wind industry delivered, and highlights the impact of the financial crisis on electricty demand. Part II revisits the 3% carbon emission reduction in the 2007 Programme for Government.]
If you’ve arrived here having read Part I and Part II , thanks again. Part III is meant to be different, hopefully less wonky and more personal.
The second of the ‘Additional Considerations‘ in my dissertation was ‘Scarcity Pricing & Constrained Oil Supply (2010 – 2015)’. Having seen oil prices hitting negative territory for the first time in their history this week, I can hear the guffaws from here.
But cast your mind back to 2007. Oil prices had been on a steady upward tragectory for several years, and were forecast to break the $100/barrel threshold (and did), which people were starting to worry about, at least those old enough to remember the Seventies oil crises (I was born during the first one). A man with a front seat on the bus was former US secretary of defence and energy, James Schlesinger. The short video below summarising a conference (ASPO6) I ran in Cork in 2007 while studying at UCC captures the zeitgeist pretty well.
So this event was very much front of mind when I wrote this section of my dissertation, and in particular this statement:
“Sustained higher oil prices or a supply shock, if it triggers an economic downturn, will reduce the funds available to the government to invest in infrastructure projects such as the national grid. If such a shock occurs around 2013 it will likely have a negative impact on the grid infrastructure improvements required as identified in the Transmission Forecast Statement.“
Despite the apparent misunderstanding in how grid infrastructure is financed (it’s not from exchequer returns), we’re all painfully aware of what befell us long before 2013, as is graphically demonstrated in the chart below through the gaping hole of what was forecast in 2006 and what happened in 2009, a 40% drop.
One thing worth a closer look when studying contributing factors to missing our 2020 targets is the level of investment forecast versus actual on grid infrastructure.
However, the point of the above is not to highlight how prescient I was, because while I was right to be concerned about an economic crash, I didn’t understand what had been really going on in our banking sector that meant a crash was coming irrespective of what was happening in oil (although I’ll argue, as others have done better elsewhere, that the two are closely related).
So after my Chicken Little ‘Peak Oil’ period, I realised I needed to understand the banking crisis a lot better. Enter Steve Keen and Michael Kumhof, two well respected economists, albeit from two quite different schools of thought. I organised for them to speak at the IIEA in 2012, and it’s instructive to return to Steve’s talk now in light of our current covid crisis. He warned very explicitly not to apply austerity after the banking crisis. His latest work on the link between energy and the economy is very important.
Steve’s call to avoid austerity after the 2008 banking crisis is contextualised below in an excellent recent conversation between Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA and Professor Ian Goldin, author of The Butterfly Defect, in response to covid. Golden’s analogy with our response to WWI versus WWII and their respective consequences is very salutory indeed.
And so to my final thoughts, what next?
I’ve been working and campaigning in the green energy space for 15 years now, and despite all my concerns about energy security, banking and credit, biodiversity loss, ocean plastics, and climate change, a global pandemic was much further down the list of things I expected would force our global industrialised society to halt itself in its tracks (Bill Gates – take a bow). Being a systems thinker and proponent of the Limites to Growth theory, I understand everything is connected and you can’t work on it all, but I seem to be forever worrying about the wrong crises!
While covid has left us scrambling to respond, it’s also, as a joke I’ve seen circulating on social media says, sent us to our room to think about what we’re doing. I’m not naive to the economic consequences, nor the mental health and social costs – I’m experiencing my own version of them, but thankfully free from substance abuse, domestic violence, hunger, anxiety, and depression unlike countless others. These people need to be at the centre of our plans for recovery.
Looking at the headline above, the past is a very foreign country indeed. I don’t believe it’s up to the Greens to show us how it can be done. I believe we need to set an ambitious target, and then go for it. Missing it won’t feel any different than it does now, and we might just surprise ourselves.
The threat of climate change is far, far greater than covid, night and day. We share, and must accept, a collective responsibility to tackle it, as we’re doing now by staying at home, even as it wrecks our livelihoods and personal financial security. By setting a target, we can all get on with applying our collective capability, which is immense, to knock the Climate Crisis on the head.
Here’s a thought experiment for you…
What if the coronavirus was spread, not by contact with other humans, but by the release of greenhouse gases?
And rather than a fatality rate of 1-2% (or whatever it turns out to be), but it was eventually 100%, i.e. it kills us all and most everything else with us?
And we decided to immediately shut down the transmission:
– we turned off the coal and gas fired power plants, so that the only electricity that was available was that from renewables sources;
– police arrest and fine those who drive petrol or diesel cars, and no more air travel;
– no gas or oil delivered to your home to cook or heat;
– the national herd culled to a fraction of its current level;
This is a thought experiment, not advocacy. The choice presented here is killing everyone or what would probably be a lot of people, an awful choice to have to make. Luckily today, that’s not a choice we have to make, but our options diminish every day we continue to emit gigatonnes of GHGs into the atmosphere (we’re experiencing now some of the pain of not preparing properly for inevitable crises flagged well in advance).
For engineers, solving problems based on constraints is a foundation of the profession. The constraints described above would be considered lunacy if I’d proposed them January 18 when the headline above appeared in the Irish Times. Today we’ve demonstrated just how far we can go in an emergency. The problem with engineers is they say things like ‘this isn’t a hard problem to solve technically, and we can live fulfilled and fulfilling lives doing so’. Politicians have a different view of the world, as I’ve discussed elsewhere. Getting enough of us to agree that solving this problem is the one to prioritise over all others appears to be our greatest challenge, because it requires us to do much of what we do today very differently, and a reordering of the ‘natural order of things’.
If we don’t agree soon, very soon, when our collective grandchildren read this blog in 20 years time they will scratch their heads in bemusement, probably much as they do know trying to understand covid, and ask themselves: why did they ignore the clear warnings (stand up Bill Gates), why were they so careless, so feckless, so devoid of the true human spirit that has gotten us through the last 10,000 years?
Two things have struck me since the lockdown started, the air is better, the noise pollution is gone so I hear the birds as I remember as a child, there’s an eerie sense of calm (thankfully I’m far from the ICU wards), and I’m spending a lot more time talking to family and friends. So now I’m asking myself, how can I hold onto this? What is it I’m spinning on the hamster wheel for that I would give these up?
While the considered answer to that rhetorical question is a blog post for another day, the short one is nothing, it’s mad, and it should stop, whatever about must.
And as you’re here, worth remembering:
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