Debating Renewables: the Clash of the Straw Men

 

(image Created by Dall-E)

There has to be some reason why we tend to polarize every issue and divide ourselves into two opposite fields engaged in a struggle of strawmen. And yet, we keep praising the "open debate" even though we know that it doesn't work, it never worked, and perhaps never will. 

Try it with renewable energy. You state that renewables are a good technology to produce energy, and you are immediately submerged by a tsunami of criticism from angry people who accuse you of wanting to destroy the planet and starve people to death in the impossible attempt to keep the economy growing. On the other side of the debate, some people really think that "sustainable development" is really nothing different from the good, old economic growth, except that it is painted in green.

Is it possible to strike a middle way? Marco Raugei, a scientist working on renewable energy, puts forward a plea for understanding each other in a recent paper published on "Biophysical Economics." With the prudence typical of the scientist, Raugei starts with, "There appears to be a growing polarization." My gosh! Marco, did you really say "there appears to be"???  But the paper makes a very simple point, unfortunately almost always obscured in the clash of the titanic strawmen. It is that it is perfectly possible to use renewable energy to replace fossil fuels, but the resulting world will not be the same as it is today. And this possibility doesn't free us from the constraints that a finite world poses on economic growth. So simple, and so impossible to understand!

Let me propose to you a few excerpts from Raugei's paper:  

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From: 

Addressing a Counterproductive Dichotomy in the Energy Transition Debate

By Marco Raugei, Biophysical economics, 8, Article number: 4 (2023)

...several academic authors have increasingly positioned themselves (either explicitly or implicitly, but often equally unmistakably) within either of two seemingly ideological “camps.” These may be broadly characterized as, respectively, that of the “systemic pessimists” (i.e., authors who champion concepts such as carrying capacity, overpopulation, overshoot, peak oil, and peak resources, but who often downplay or even dismiss the potential of renewable energies) and that of the “technological optimists” (i.e., authors who mostly tend to focus on the rapid advancements in renewable energy technologies and the promise that these hold to decarbonize future societies, while often failing to address the broader context of other bio-physical planetary limits). While proponents of both camps often bring valid arguments and evidence to the table to support their viewpoints, they often seem to summarily dismiss the arguments and evidence put forth by the other camp, thereby ultimately allowing the discourse to degenerate into an unhelpful and, arguably, un-scientific “us vs. them” contest.

In the 1970s, the Club of Rome (a group of current and former politicians, United Nations administrators, diplomats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe) commissioned the famous report “The limits to growth” (Meadows et al. 1972), in which the consequences of unconstrained population and economic growth were quantitatively investigated by means of a computer model based on five key interdependent variables: population, agricultural production, non-renewable resource depletion, industrial output, and pollution generation. Widespread and long-lasting debate and controversy ensued on many details about the model structure, parameters, and assumptions, but the key message was clear, and it was essentially found to still hold by several other authors who reviewed and updated the calculations (Bardi 2011; Herrington 2020; Hall 2022): the Earth’s system is incapable of supporting infinite population and economic growth because of the finite nature of its natural resources.

More recently, a range of authors have taken it upon themselves to reaffirm these fundamental concepts within the specific context of future energy scenarios. But a new dimension to the discussion had been added in the interim, as various independent studies, often based on life cycle assessments (LCA), had started to appear, pointing to high energy return on investment (EROI) of renewable energies, and specifically photovoltaics (PVs). By some, these results were interpreted as undermining the very foundations of the concepts discussed above, for if renewable energy were indefinitely viable then perhaps the “limits to growth” could be postponed indefinitely. As a result, what was originally a discussion about finite resources in a more general sense, started turning into much more specific arguments about issues like what is the proper EROI for PVs and/or other renewables; broadly speaking, the debate on the ultimate possibilities of renewable energies became unhelpfully conflated with whether or not there are limits to growth.

In fact, some of these authors (e.g., Seibert and Reese 2021) have tended to paint renewable energies as a pernicious distraction from the key issue of global overshoot of the Earth’s carrying capacity, therefore also brushing aside any suggestion of renewable energies’ ability to significantly reduce global warming and environmental degradation (vs. the continued use of fossil fuels). ... “technological optimistic” authors may have studiously and rigorously investigated the potential of renewable energies to deliver modern societies from the grip of fossil fuels, but they have failed to consider the wider issues that would continue to affect the world, even in a future world largely supported by renewable energies. In fact, the hitherto dominating paradigm of unfettered growth in material consumption and rampant exploitation of many natural and ecosystem resources is incompatible with fundamental bio-physical constraints (Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2015), and it remains ultimately unsustainable irrespective of which energy resources are used to power it.

...the current polarization of views points to a false dichotomy that risks devaluing both positions, and it trivializes what should instead be the most important research questions of all, namely: to which extent a more sustainable future is indeed possible, and which systemic changes (including, but not limited to, phasing out fossil fuels) will be required to achieve it. ... Ultimately, it is high time to admit that both sets of core arguments loosely ascribed in this article to the two opposed ideological “camps” are probably simultaneously true, to some extent at least. And from this simple realization follows what should have been obvious all along, i.e., that adopting a more balanced “middle way” approach is the only truly sensible way forward for a healthy and genuinely scientific debate. 

The complete paper by Marco Raugei is available at this link