New Malthusians are wrong: a rich world needs less energy than once feared
An untruth has led us to believe net zero is near impossible
Cutting-edge research suggests that we will require just 40pc to 45pc of today’s total energy supply to replace the old system, and to lift the global South, and to satisfy the voracious demand of data centres, all at the same time. So rejoice.
“The entire decarbonisation challenge is far smaller than is made out by its critics. Primary energy demand, irrespective of how it’s defined, is simply not a matter of any importance,” said Michael Liebreich, global technology guru and founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
Phew. We've been worried about nothing all these years.
"We fail to mandate economic sanity because our brains are addled by....compassion." (Garrett Hardin)
Decarbonisation is just one of the challenges of limits to growth. We are already deep into overshoot in almost all the major elements of the essentials to life. Like overexploitation of fisheries, tree cover, ground water, phosphate fertilizer, biodiversity, habitat loss, soil degradation, and not least the fossil energy input into nitrate fertilizer. Add on top of that the damage that the already baked in climate change, and polution from plastics, pesticides, and other chemicals and it is safe to say that massive depopulation is only a few decades away from collapse of the food supply and distribution, war, and the consequential spread of disease.
All very good and probably written by someone who has never heard of the reasons why coal power stations waste 70% of their thermal energy (Carnot equation and all that). The truth is that GDP is quite well tied to energy usage with a correlation of 0.98 according to one of the Nate Hagans interviewees, and I have no reason to doubt it. The West outsourced its energy consuming industries and lost a big chunk of its GDP along the way.
Energy use is not just power generation but industrial processes, chemical manufacture and agriculture, all of which need to be decarbonised. A lot of resources will be needed including gallium that China and Russia don't want to sell to the West anymore, to get the zero carbon revolution off the ground. Chemical industry will need to get off methane and ethylene feedstocks and onto hydrogen feedstock obtained by very energy intensive electrolysis. Process heat used in things like brick firing and cement manufacture, to name just two, will need to be electrified or use concentrating solar or even biomass - if there is enough biomass to use - which I doubt.
Ralph covered the other resource constraints fairly well I think.
