Sunflower society: a new vision for a climate compatible future

We are running out of time. Limiting global heating to 1.5°C seems almost beyond reach as the remaining carbon budget is rapidly depleting. On the contrary, we emit ever more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere; every passing minute brings us closer to the climate catastrophe.

By Harald Desing (reproduced from Medium)

The window for action is rapidly getting smaller, so I was wondering: can we accelerate the energy transition and so reduce climate risks?

Considering available energy as the only limiting factor, the transition can be surprisingly fast, in the order of years and not decades. However, energy storage is decisive: the more we want, the slower the transition gets, because current storage technologies are energetically expensive either to build — like batteries — or to operate — like synthetic fuels. We can address this dilemma in two ways: either by investing in the development of new storage technologies with both low embodied energy and high efficiency. But, technology development takes time, which we haven’t any more. Or, we align our energy demand to renewable supply as best as we can, minimizing the demand for storage.

Over the past decades, we have become accustomed to use energy whenever we want it. This jeopardizes a fast transition, as matching our current consumption patterns to renewable supply would require a tremendous amount of storage. In the transition debate, this is often regarded as the key barrier to reach a fossil-free energy system.

In contrast to biophysical limitations for saving a hospitable climate, our consumption patterns are not a given. We can and we need to rethink fundamentally the way we use energy. Following the course of the sun, just like sunflowers do, we can schedule our most energy intensive activities around midday and summer, while reducing the demand at night and in winter to its bare minimum.

Such a paradigm shift primarily requires a different vision; a vision that breaks the chains of ever faster, higher, bigger, better; keeping us in a futile spiral of environmental destruction, mental distress, greed and competition. With more technology, more production and working harder, we will neither save the planet nor create a desirable future.

Instead, we need less of everything physical and more of everything human. I will introduce here the vision of a sunflower society, which aims for achieving climate stability through the following principles:

Avoiding energy demand also avoids storing it: sufficiency in lifestyles; improving energy efficiency for demand that is hard to shift, such as lighting in the night.

Provide all energy through solar PV on the already sealed surface of buildings, parkings and other infrastructure: this avoids land conversion and does not impair wildlife; building oversize PV capacity comes at much less energy and material expenses and can help avoiding storage through curtailment.

Concentrate energy demand around peak sun hours: stimulated by hourly energy tariffs that reflect the true costs of storage; shifting from continuous to batch operations of industrial processes; changing behaviour patterns and concentrate physical activities to sun hours.

Use technologies that do not require storage: for example, grid-connected modes of transport, such as trains and trolleybuses, instead of battery-electric vehicles.

Shift active energy demand to passive embodied energy in materials: upgrade homes to passive houses; read books, shared through libraries, instead of online content in the evenings

As we tend to perceive “less” as sacrifice, I’m convinced that any vision for a sustainable future needs to be perceived as a true step forward. In contrast to the prevailing techno-optimist narrative, the vision of a sunflower society can lead to a substantial increase in everything that truly matters in life: quality time, cooperation, community, recognition, support, friendship, love,…

Less is more — for example, living in a small space reduces energy demand per person fundamentally. And, one has less space to pile up useless stuff, reducing consumption and all worries associated with it in return. It reduces the time spent working to afford one’s home and for keeping it in good repair. Simply, there is more quality time and mental capacity available for oneself, one’s family and community.

Reducing and shifting mobility has a similar effect. Travelling and moving around are essential for opening and enriching one’s mind as well as building and interacting in communities. However, this can be much better achieved in slow and public means of transportation: the journey is the reward. Meeting people you would have otherwise not met, experiencing the distance and nature you would have otherwise just rushed by leaves one certainly with a richer and different experience than expected. And needless to say, not owning a car saves you a lot of lost time for driving, working to afford it, caring about it, sitting in traffic jams, searching for parking,… On top of that, public transport has about a hundred to thousand times lower risks than driving one’s own car. And, what speaks against renting or sharing a car for those occasions when one really needs it?

Imagine car free cities: what an improvement in life quality could that be! Imagine the public space we can reclaim for our communities: urban gardening, parks, playgrounds, sports areas, open-air festivities, flea markets — all in front of our doorsteps. No air pollution, no noise pollution, no car accidents — who can truly say that this would be a step backward rather than a huge leap forward?

Building a sunflower society will enable us to get rid of fossil fuels in a matter of years, reducing cumulative carbon emissions and consequently climate risks. It will further free up capacity for the next gargantuan task after the urgent energy transition: removing excess CO2 from the atmosphere and restore ecosystems.

Renewables are the new Killer App

  

Image courtesy of Tsung Xu

It had to come, and it is coming. Silicon Valley is suddenly discovering that renewables are the next big thing, a new "killer app" poised to sweep the market and eliminate the obsolete, dirty, and uneconomic fossil fuels. Up to now, Silicon Valley's venture capitalists and entrepreneurs had been snubbing renewable energy. The common idea was that all killer apps are software. They are new fads on social media: things like Zuckerberg's "Meta," that nobody know what it is, but it is supposed to be something, Virtual, in any case.

But no, a killer app doesn't need to be purely virtual. Before the fashion of web things, the innovations that swept the market were not virtual. Think about that: personal computers, cell phones, even the Internet is not virtual, it is a real network of cables and connections. But it doesn't matter if a product is virtual or not. The important thing is the dynamics of the system. Things sold in a market are part of a system you may call CAS (complex adaptive system). These systems are subjected to rapid growth and rapid collapse as well. It is the way of the feedbacks. Positive feedback can generate a virtual killer app,  or it can affect a pretty real product that sweeps the market and kicks out the competition. 

This is a point that Silicon Valley types (who don't need to reside in Silicon Valley) understand very well: the secret of positive feedback is economies of scale (you can say that a product "scales"). What scales, grows. Which is what renewables are doing right now. They are scaling, generating the feedback that pushes them to grow.

Renewables as a disruptive and growing technology is hardly the way they are described in the mainstream debate. Most people see renewable energy as little more than a toy for "greens", even the most optimistic ones see them as something that may help us, but they are so limited that they will help us only if we accept to become abjectly poor.  And that, unfortunately, seems to be exactly what we are facing, especially if we accept a condition described in Newspeak with the term "saving energy." We'll be happy and own nothing. Sure! After all, who needs to eat to be happy? The brains of the people who think that fossils are indispensable are fossils, too.

Now, be careful. I am not telling you that we face a bright future that includes flying cars and weekends on the Moon, as it was the use in the 1950s. Not at all. What the pessimists say is not wrong. It is true that the fossils fuels are running out, that the climate is going to hell (almost literally), that the planet is overcrowded and, in addition, that instead of trying to do something useful, we rather enjoy playing the game of war. Homo sapiens (?), Yeah, sure....

What I am telling you is that the future will be different, disruptive, and rapidly changing. If you emphasize negative feedbacks, then you see imminent collapse -- which is in fact inevitable for all fossil fuel-based technologies, including that meta-technology we call "Industrial Economy". If you instead  emphasize positive feedback instead, you see how renewable energy is on the verge of wiping out all the old energy technologies, generating a whole new set of technologies. That will include a new meta-technology that perhaps we will continue to call "The Economy" but which will be completely different from the current one. Yes, the world will be different. Very different. 

The beauty of the situation is that the future is determined by these strongly non-linear feedback factors: at the same time we face enormous risks, but also fantastic opportunities. If the negative feedbacks win, it is the "Seneca Effect" ("growth is sluggish, but ruin is rapid"). If, instead, the positive feedbacks win, it will be the "Anti-Seneca Effect" ("ruin is sluggish, but growth is rapid"). 

This is the Seneca Curve, you probably know it already:

Then, take a look at the "Anti-Seneca" curve. It is the opposite

So, the positive feedbacks associated with renewable energy are giving us a unique opportunity in the history of humanity. We are facing one of those disruptive transitions that change everything, but it is not automatic that it will take place. We could collapse so quickly that there won't be time for renewable energy to develop to the point where it stands on its own. Or, we could remain so tenaciously attached to fossils that the transition to renewables is impossible, using for example bureaucratic, legal, etc.obstacles. Or climate change could sweep away human beings from this planet. But overall, there are good reasons to be optimistic. At least we have a fighting chance to avoid  returning to the Stone Age! 

To go more in depth into this subject, I suggest to you two documents. The first is an article by Tsung Xu, "A Guide to the Clean Energy Transition." It is a monumental work that examines many details of the renewable transition. One of its several good things is the dynamic view. Maybe you'll find it a little too optimistic and, indeed, the future is always full of surprises. But the article is correct, clear, comprehensive, and it includes an absolutely spectacular bibliography. 

The other article that I suggest to you is "Rethinking Climate Change" by James Arbib, Adam Dorr, and Tony Seba. It is another well documented study that also has a clear dynamic perspective of how things can grow in complex systems.

If you want to learn more, there are also several academic papers published in academic journals. There is one that myself and several colleagues are working on that has been recently submitted to the "IEEE Access" journal. Sorry that I can't share it yet, we have to wait for the definitive version. Coming in no more than a couple of months. 

Humankind's Tragic Mistake: How we Blew our Chances of Survival

 

A chronicle of how our civilization (if we want to call it in this way) blew its chance of survival. If we had invested in what really mattered, energy, we could have made it. But we preferred to invest in the toys we like so much: military hardware. And think that these 6 trillion dollars of hardware were used to make sure that some foreigners would send us the energy the US needed. With the same money, we could have had the same amount of energy produced at home. So much money thrown away, and that doesn't count the damage done on the receiving end. And now we are throwing away another good chunk of our remaining resources to follow the impossible hydrogen dream

 

An amazing article by Paul Gipe.

https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/2019/12/19/beating-swords-into-plowshares-or-wind-turbines-solar-panels-we-could-have-done-it/

 

 

We Could Have 100% Renewable Electricity If We Had Invested in Wind and Solar Instead of War in the Middle East

Yes, the United States could be generating 100% of its electricity from renewable energy if we had used the money spent on our ill-advised wars in the Middle East to build wind and solar systems, as well as battery storage, here at home.

That’s the startling conclusion of a simple calculation my colleague Robert Freehling and I made after the latest reports on the economic cost of our wars in the Middle East.

This is, after all, not rocket science. Money spent on war–anywhere–is money lost. It’s not an investment in the future. It’s money quite literally that goes up in smoke.

In contrast, money spent on building wind and solar farms or putting solar systems on rooftops is money invested in the future that will be earning returns–in the form of electricity–for 20 to 30 years.

I’ve followed this topic since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I posted my first article on this subject on July 4, 2005, and I’ve been updating that article periodically since then as the cost of our wars continued to grow.

On the anniversary of September 11th this year, news articles on the cost of the war in Afghanistan prompted me to take another look at our lost opportunities to invest in infrastructure here at home for the direct benefit of Americans.

What I learned shocked me. Using what I call a back-of-the-envelope method, I calculated that we could have installed enough wind turbines to more than provide 100% of our electricity with what we’d spent on war.

That just didn’t seem right. These are big numbers and it’s easy to get them wrong. After all, we’ve been told for decades that it’s simply too expensive to install that many wind turbines and solar panels. We could never afford it, critics warned.

So I called my colleague and renewable energy analyst Robert Freehling for help. I’ve relied on Freehling to sort out such thorny problems in the past.

His conclusion? Yes, we could be generating 100% of our electricity in this country from just wind and solar; that is, not counting existing hydro, geothermal, or biomass generation. Freehling, though, goes even further. We would be generating so much renewable electricity that we could store huge amounts in batteries–electricity storage that also would be paid for with our “war savings.”

How did we reach such a conclusion? Did we use a supercomputer to calculate all the possible permutations of what a renewable electricity supply would look like?

No. We kept it simple. We looked at two respected estimates of what our wars have cost in economic terms to the US taxpayer, not what they’ve cost in human suffering, nor what they’ve cost the countries on the receiving end of our expenditures.

The National Priorities Project calculates that the wars in the Middle East since 2001 have cost $4.9 trillion, a sum that continues to rise. The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University estimates $5.9 trillion through Fiscal Year 2019. Their latest estimate raises that to $6.4 trillion through FY 2020.

To paraphrase Senator Everett Dirksen, “A trillion here, a trillion there and pretty soon it adds up to real money.” For a sense of perspective, one billion is 1,000 million. Thus, a trillion is one million million. That’s a one with twelve zeros behind it–a very big number.

We made no attempt to match the annual costs of the wars to the deployment of wind and solar. Again, we kept it simple. We simply prorated the costs over two decades with the exception explained below.

Freehling’s simple spreadsheet model assumes ramping up installations from a low base over a decade to reflect the necessity of scaling up manufacturing to meet the demand. Then he held installations constant for another decade until he reached 100% renewable generation from wind and solar. If we had started in 2001, the whole conversion would be accomplished by 2020.

Shockingly, there was a lot of money left over. So Freehling plowed the remainder into battery storage using the same approach as with wind and solar. He scaled installations up from a low base until the industry was likely to reach maturity.

Existing renewable generation from hydro, geothermal, and biomass was then shunted into the mass of new storage. Batteries would be used to equalize the grid when winds were light or the sun had set. The remainder could then be used to charge electric vehicles.

Wind and solar are cheap today. That was not so, two decades ago. Freehling accounts for this by using historical figures for the cost of wind and solar.

He dropped the initial cost of wind from $2,500 per kilowatt of installed capacity in the year 2000 to about $1,400 today.

Solar has seen a dramatic drop in cost during the past two decades. Freehling used $12,000 per kilowatt as the cost of solar capacity in 2000 and dropped it to nearly $1,500 per kilowatt in 2020.

We apportioned how much wind and how much solar were built, based on the work of my French colleague Bernard Chabot. He found that for a temperate climate, such as the United States, the optimum mix of generation is 60% wind and 40% solar energy. This mix minimizes the amount of storage needed.

Batteries are still expensive. The cost of battery storage, however, has fallen 80% in the past decade alone notes Freehling. He suggests that the cost of battery storage would have fallen even more rapidly through economies-of-scale if we had begun deploying them at scale sooner. Batteries for Electric Vehicles (EVs) would also be cheaper today if we had plowed some of our war savings into battery development.

Here in California, the Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) requires 4-hours of storage for it to reliably meet peak demand.” Our scenario calls for one million megawatts of wind and another one million megawatts of solar. This scenario uses some 700,000 MW of batteries to store 3 terawatt-hours (TWh) or 3 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. The amount of storage is approximately enough to meet the peak electricity demand for the entire United States for a period of 4 hours.

All together, wind, solar, and storage would be capable of providing 4,400 TWh per year–the amount of electricity generated annually in the United States–for an investment of $6 trillion over two decades.

The United States produces more than 700 TWh per year–about 17% of annual electricity generation–from existing wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and biomass. Existing renewables would be capable of powering more than one-third to as much as one-half of the entire US passenger vehicle fleet with electricity.

If we had instead invested the $6 trillion we squandered on war in the Middle East, we would, two decades later, have made our grid more resilient with battery storage, and be generating 100% of our electricity with wind and solar. Moreover, existing sources of renewable energy would be sufficient to power a substantial portion of our passenger cars with clean, renewable electricity.

Incredible.

What a lost opportunity.
———-
Paul Gipe is a renewable energy analyst and the author of Wind Energy for the Rest of Us. He has worked with wind energy for the past four decades.

• United States Budgetary Costs and Obligations of Post-9/11 Wars through FY2020: $6.4 Trillion

• Cost of National Security, National Priorities Project

• Watson Institute of Public Affairs, Brown University, Economic Costs of War

• Beating Swords into Wind Turbines–or Solar Panels if You Like, December 29, 2007. This op-ed was originally posted on July 4, 2005 and then appeared at Renewable Energy Access.com (Now RenewableEnergyWorld.com) on July 11, 2005. This version has been updated with current figures for the cost of the war and estimates of its total direct and indirect costs (to the USA only).

 

 

 

 

The New Paradigm of Renewables: if we want something to change, we need to change something

 

We can make it: the latest results of the analysis of the performance of renewable energy, photovoltaic and wind, show that their efficiency in terms of energy return on investment (EROI) is considerably larger than that of fossil fuels. It is becoming clear, too, that renewables don't need rare and disappearing mineral resources: the infrastructure to build them and maintain them needs only abundant and recyclable minerals: silicon, aluminum, and a few more that can be efficiently recycled (rare earths and lithium). 

In other words, renewables can't be considered anymore as an emergency replacement for the depleting and polluting fossil fuels, but as a true step forward. They are the new, "disruptive" technology that people expected nuclear energy to be, but that never was.  

Tony Seba -- sharp as always -- has diffused the idea of renewables as the new energy revolution. Seba's ideas have been popularized by Nafeez Ahmed in a two parts series, (Part 1 and Part2). These assessments may be too optimistic in some regards, but they do note how things are changing. We have a chance, a fighting chance, to falsify the scenarios that saw an irreversible decline -- actually a collapse -- of the industrial civilization during the next few decades. 

Can we really make it? It is a chance, but not a certainty. The quantitative calculations made by Sgouridis, Csala, and myself indicate that we can only succeed if we invest in renewables much more than what we are investing nowadays. If we maintain the current trends, renewables will be able to slow down the decline, but not avoid a "dip" in the civilization curve. Then, we will re-emerge on the other side in a new and cleaner world. But we might not be able to avoid total collapse if we don't keep investing a significant fraction of the available resources in the transition.

Unfortunately, this idea faces stiff opposition from various industrial lobbies, and especially from a diehard section of environmentalism that remains stuck to ideas that have been shown several times to be ineffective: exhortations for good behavior, individual energy saving, carbon taxes, and the like. All these things have been proposed for decades and failed to make a dent in the predominance of fossil fuels and the emissions of greenhouse gases. In part, the opposition takes the form of wasting resources for technologies that are known to be inefficient (carbon sequestration) or useless (hydrogen), or both things at the same time. We need to do better than that. We need something different. 

If we want something to change, we need to change something. 

We can make it!!

The EROI of Photovoltaic Energy is now Higher than that of Crude Oil has Ever Been.

This is an article that I published today in the Italian newspaper "Il Fatto Quotidiano." As a discussion, it is not very deep -- of course, it is written for the general public and these articles have a limit of 650 words. Yet, I think not many people, even among energy specialists, have realized the silent revolution that has turned photovoltaic energy from an expensive, niche technology into something that has an EROEI higher than that of petroleum in the "golden days." Don't expect it to "replace fossil fuels," as some people would expect it to do. It is a different technology, with different capabilities, different applications, with its strong and weak points. But it is starting to change the world, and it will. 

How about hydrogen, the subject of this blog? Well, if we have cheap and abundant energy from PV, we could use hydrogen to store it. But that is an expensive storage solution and will be used (if it is ever used) when all the other possibilities have been exhausted.

 

Photovoltaic Energy is an Opportunity that the Country Should not Miss

Imagine a bank account that pays you 100% interest  That is, after you have deposited 1000 euros, it gives you another thousand euros at the end of the year, and so on every year. You would like a bank account like that!

Obviously, there is no bank account that yields so much, but there are technologies that yield at such levels, albeit not in monetary but in energy terms. There is an article published this month by Fthenakis and Leccisi which reviews the situation and finds a truly excellent yield of photovoltaic technology due to the technological improvements of the last 5-7 years. In practice, for good insolation, as we could have in Southern Europe, a photovoltaic system returns the energy needed to build it in about a year! We are now at the levels of oil during its heyday, when it was abundant and cheap, and perhaps even oil was not doing so well at that time.

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That of Fthenakis and Leccisi is not the only article that comes to this conclusion, all recent studies on the subject come to similar conclusions. A very recent article in “EDP Science” . Basically, the electricity produced by photovoltaic plants is often the cheapest in absolute terms, the growth of installations continues to exceed forecasts, and we are now talking about the "photovoltaic revolution." We face the real possibility of eliminating fossil fuels once and for all from the global energy system.

Now, I know that you are already with your fingers on the keyboard to write in the comments "but the variability?" "I don't want to see panels in front of my house!" "And how about waste ?" and things like that. I know. Everyone knows these things. However, think about that.

We have a technology that costs less than the others, and which is particularly suited to Italy, “the country of the sun.” It allows us to produce energy in our home without having to import it at a high price. We also have the added benefit of having mountains that we can use for storing  energy in the form of hydroelectric reservoirs. There are many other ways to manage variability - it's not an unsolvable problem . Then, about waste and recycling, we will have to invest in it, of course. But keep in mind that photovoltaic systems do not use rare or polluting materials. They can be recycled without major problems and we will certainly do so in the future. At the moment, it is a marginal problem.

In short, photovoltaic energy is an opportunity that we should not miss to relaunch the "country system" in Italy. And, indeed, things are going pretty well. In Italy we have reached 10% of electricity production from photovoltaic energy and it is a good result from which we can start decarbonise to truly the energy system. Certain things seem to have been understood nationally. You can read it in the "Pniec", Integrated National Plan for Energy and Climate, which provides for a fundamental role for renewable technologies, and in particular for photovoltaic energy.

But there remains a resistance rearguard formed by a rather ill-matched coalition that includes the oil companies, the diehard nuclearists, the cold fusion miracleists, those who are still paying the bills for the diesel car they bought, and, in general, a whole section of the environmental movement that rejects any change in the name of a "degrowth" thinking that we'll be happy to stay in the dark and in the cold.

To everyone their opinions but, in practice, at this point the only thing that can block the photovoltaic revolution is bureaucracy, perhaps the only truly "infinite resource" in the universe. On this point too, the government seems to be willing to do something to streamline and speed up the procedures of installation. It won't be easy, but with a little patience, we will get there.

 

The Greens trapped in a multi-dimensional gate from the 1980s

 

 

For your curiosity, here is a picture of a street demonstration by a group of Greens against a planned wind plant on the Appennini mountains, in Italy. And, no, it is not from the 1980s. It was last week! Really. The main street signs says "No all'eolico selvaggio," that is, "No to the wild wind power"

I have no doubt that this small group of Greens who collected in the town of "Vicchio" truly believe in what they are doing (I know some of them personally). But they are a good example of the mental fog that's overtaking the minds of most people, but in particular the "Greens." They seem to find no contradiction in sponsoring carbon taxes and advocating measures to reduce emissions, while at the same time approving "green hydrogen" and protesting against all sorts of renewable energy plants (and being against nuclear energy, too!). 

Truly, they seem to have emerged out of a multi-dimensional gate, catapulted to our time from the 1980s, still holding the same signs they were showing at that time.

But so is life. One of the good things of the universe is that contradictions can't exist for long. The natural evolution of things tends to remove them. It will happen this time, too, one way or another.

Government of the lobbies, by the lobbies, for the lobbies. How can we hope to ever move in the right direction?

 

Above: a tweet by the French Minister of Transportation on June 14, 2021 -- translated into English. 

This post is not directly about hydrogen, but it deals with the capability of our politicians of planning on any field related to energy. Mr. Djebbari shows such a total misunderstanding of the quantitative aspects related to the energy transition that goes beyond mere incompetency. It cannot be a bug, it must be a feature of the system.

Djebbari's tweet was noted by Jean-Marc Jancovici, who posted a comment on Linkedin. Here it is, translated into English.

Our Transport Minister sent a tweet last night (French time) to rejoice in the upcoming flight of an A320 with only biofuels, calling it "ecology": https://lnkd.in/dWp-NpK

A few things will help to put this information in context:

- on the day the tweet was sent, there were 85000 commercial flights worldwide (https://lnkd.in/dBFQaXx). If, in order to repay a debt of EUR 85000, you tell your banker that you have found EUR 1 of income, it is unlikely that he will consider that this fundamentally changes the problem.

 

- currently, deforestation is responsible for 10% of greenhouse gas emissions each year. This deforestation has one main determinant: to remove forests to obtain agricultural land. Therefore, a question arises: does not any area devoted to energy crops be tantamount to exacerbating deforestation, by domino effect? If this same area were devoted to food, would we not avoid the associated deforestation? However, if it induces deforestation (directly or indirectly), the production of an agrofuel generates more emissions per liter than oil.

 

In its report "being able to fly in 2050", The Shift Project and SUPAERO DECARBO (which is made up of former students of ISAE, and currently working in the aeronautical sector, so they are not "painters" it seems to me) recalled that, even by selecting all the technical improvements to come in a very, very optimistic way, air traffic had to decrease for this sector to comply with the Paris Agreement. If this conclusion does not seem to you to be well-founded, it should be refuted with convincing "counter-calculations", and nothing else.

And I think it is enough to understand how wrong was Djebbari in praising Airbus and Safran for having engaged in a task that's nothing more than a good example of a greenwashing stunt. Air travel will never be based on biofuels, at least not on this planet. But just in case you would like to have some more detailed data, take a look at this post where I try to estimate how many people would die of starvation according to the fraction of the world's food supply would be allocated to produce aviation fuels. 

The situation with hydrogen is not very different, although there is no obvious limit to the amount that could be produced using renewable energy, the problems involved in converting the aviation industry to using hydrogen as fuel are nightmarish, to say the least.

Whether we deal with biofuels or with hydrogen, I think there are at least 4 hypotheses to frame the issue

1. Politicians are truly unable to grasp the simplest quantitative aspects of energy production. They are truly ignorant and careless and they refuse to be taught by those who know more than they do. That's called at times the "Dunning-Kruger Effect," but no matter how you call it, it is very common. 

2. Politicians know that they are lying, but they lie for political reasons ("white man speak with two forked tongue") In this case, the French Minister Djebbari thought he could gain a little visibility for himself by means of a potshot at Greenpeace and it is just what he did. 

3. Politicians lie because they are on the payroll of powerful lobbies. In this case, we would have to imagine that the aviation lobby, or the fossil fuel lobby, organized a little PR stunt by flying a plane on 100% biofuels and they enlisted the transport minister to give visibility to it. Of course, in this case, everybody knows it is a scam, but then this is how PR works. 

4. All the three hypotheses above are true to a certain extent.

 

So, given the situation, our government system can be defined as "by the lobbies, for the lobbies, in the name of the lobbies." I don't have to tell you that the challenge to to solve problems that are not just urgent, but vital is a little difficult.