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Posted on January 22, 2024 | 128 Comments
Michael Daw has written a blog post that criticises my arguments concerning the energetic implausibility of manufactured food (or ‘precision fermentation’ to use the biotech industry’s preferred term). I don’t think his arguments stack up, as I’ll explain below, but this seems like a good opportunity to run through the relevant issues, which is the aim of this post. It will be followed by a few more posts on various issues relating to my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and some of the criticisms of it, before I turn to other issues.
One thing I must do at the outset is thank Michael for the polite and good-natured tone of his post, which alas I’ve found all too rare in this debate. If only other major contributors identified points of intellectual difference with the same measured language that Michael uses.
Michael addresses (1) my analysis of the energy costs of protein production by hydrogen-oxidising bacteria in Saying NO…, and also discusses (2) the production of a dairy substitute whey protein from a genetically modified fungus by a company called Perfect Day, putting these techniques (3) into the wider context of the case for veganism as a way to safeguard nature.
I’ll follow that three-part structure in my response. But some of the details of my case in relation to point (1) may be too nerdy for the casual reader, so I’ve put these in an appendix at the end. I’ll try to cut to the chase in the main body of the post.
How much energy does it take to manufacture edible protein with hydrogen-oxidising bacteria? George Monbiot says 16.7 kWh of electricity per kilo of bacterial protein, but this is demonstrably wrong (see Appendix). A paper by Natasha Järviö et al says 18 kWh/kg bacterial biomass, which translates to 27 kWh/kg bacterial protein (it’s important to note the difference between biomass and protein – see Appendix). The figure I suggest in Saying NO… is at least 65 kWh/kg bacterial protein, which I calculated from a paper by Dorian Leger et al (Dorian Leger confirmed in a personal communication that my derivation was a reasonable low-end figure).
It’s worth adding that an application for EU regulatory authorisation for a bacterial protein product from Solar Foods – a pioneering industry player in this area – appears to suggest that the digestibility of their bacterial protein powder is much less than agricultural-origin alternatives like soy powder. On the face of it, that suggests my 65 kWh/kg protein figure might effectively be a considerable underestimate in relative terms.
Michael thinks I shouldn’t dismiss the Järviö figure, which he says is an actual measurement of small-scale production and not an assumption. But the provenance of this figure is unclear. Järviö et al say that “this study assumed an electricity requirement of 18 kWh per 1 kg product produced” (emphasis added) and states that data were gathered from current pilot-scale production performed by Solar Foods, as well as “expert interviews, and the literature”, but it doesn’t clearly specify the exact derivation of the 18 kWh figure and what’s included and excluded in it (see Appendix).
By contrast, the Leger et al study that I used is much clearer about the sources of its data, the parameters of its analysis and the mathematical basis of its energy derivation. It still omits some significant energy costs, but it was the clearest, most rigorous and most comprehensive study I could find, and that’s why I chose it.
Here, I think I have to bounce Michael’s query back to him. If my figure is wrong, I think that implies the Leger study is wrong, and my question to Michael would be where exactly has it erred? Until somebody can explain satisfactorily to me why the Järviö figure is correct and the Leger data are incorrect, I see no reason to recant my 65 kWh/kg derivation. The Järviö analysis addressed a wider set of questions than the Leger analysis and I think it probably just didn’t probe the energy input aspects as thoroughly as Leger, because it was doing a lot of other things. Fair enough, but energy input is important. In the Appendix, I mention other studies that suggest energy costs in a similar ballpark to mine. On balance, the Järviö figure looks like it’s too low.
Michael says he finds it odd that I draw my conclusions from two papers that seem broadly sympathetic to precision fermentation. I’d argue on the contrary that this is a strength of my analysis and methodologically appropriate. Even with the best will in the world it’s easy to introduce biases into an analysis that slant it toward one’s preferred approach, so using research that favours a different approach is a good defence against cherry-picking. I’ve drawn on studies that indeed are broadly sympathetic to precision fermentation, and yet they still show the high energy costs involved.
Stepping back from the details of this or that figure, it’s worth just considering what’s involved in bacterial protein manufacture. At a time when we desperately need to decarbonise the global energy system, and are largely failing to do so, manufactured food proponents are suggesting that we stop using a free, zero-carbon source of energy (the sun) to provide our dietary protein, and use costly generated electricity instead. Even Monbiot’s incorrectly low figure implies that we’d need to use the world’s entire current solar energy consumption more than twice over to produce sufficient protein globally, when it’s sorely needed for other things. I believe this technology is a clear non-starter as a mass food source.
As an aside, I should mention that promoters of bacterial food often stress its superiority to farmed plants on the grounds that its underlying chemical pathway for carbon fixation is more efficient than the photosynthetic pathway of plants. There are various problems with this line of argument. Not the least of them is the fatal muddling of efficiency and cost, given that sunlight costs nothing – which is not the case with generated electricity. I plan to look at this in more detail in my next post.
Anyway, getting back to my main theme, Michael wisely says that he doesn’t think manufacturing processes should be used to produce all the world’s protein: “I for one like my lentils, beans, nuts, and soya”. I’m with him there. My critique isn’t really directed at the odd bit of microbial protein manufacture here and there (though see section 3 below). It’s directed at people who profess manufactured food as a disruptive Counter-Agricultural Revolution that’s going to spell the end of most agriculture and challenge the place of plants in the human diet. Quite simply, it won’t. The cheerleading for it strikes me as just another bit of ecomodernist hopium which allows us to imagine we can lower our ecological impact sufficiently to avoid earth systems breakdown without fundamentally changing the present high-energy, high-capital, growth-oriented global economy and our place within it. I don’t think that’s an option, and we need to get real.
The process used by Perfect Day to produce non-dairy whey protein is different to the bacterial one just described. In this case, sugars derived from crops like maize or beet are used (along with other inputs like ammonia) to nourish a fungus that’s been genetically modified to excrete the whey protein. This protein constitutes only 22% of the biomass produced in the process, the remaining 78% being unsuitable as a human food source, albeit with other potential uses.
I don’t have a problem with the use of these agricultural feedstocks as such (I mean, I do have a problem with the industrial production of commodity crops like maize, but I’ll save that for another time). But inasmuch as the case for manufactured food rests on a land-sparing argument about eliminating the agricultural footprint, the non-dairy whey technique looks weaker than the hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria approach, because it’s agriculturally based.
Drawing on a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of their process commissioned by Perfect Day, Michael states that the process consumes 13 kWh of electricity to produce a kilo of protein, and notes how favourably this compares with my figure of 65 kWh/kg for hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria. But this isn’t comparing like with like, for various reasons. For one thing, there are other energetic inputs besides electricity, for example in producing the ammonia. The LCA Michael links reports a primary energy use of 56.3 MJ/kg protein, which converts to 15.6 kWh/kg. Granted, this isn’t much higher than the electricity figure, but it only refers to the non-renewable energy used in the process (from which it excludes nuclear energy, which is surprising since nuclear isn’t conventionally counted as ‘renewable’).
Further, this figure is based on allocating the energy between the whey and the biomass byproduct in their 22/78 mass proportions. If you allocate it wholly to the whey – as you probably should, since getting this product is the whole point of the process – the non-renewable energy input as defined by Perfect Day’s LCA comes to around 72 kWh/kg. That’s a lot of precious primary energy to throw at substituting for milk. And, as with almost all the studies in this field, this excludes the considerable energy costs of building, maintaining, decommissioning and rebuilding the industrial and electricity generating plant needed in the process.
I haven’t looked at this genetically engineered fungus to whey protein technique in as much detail as I have the hydrogen-oxidising bacteria to protein powder one, but if my analysis is correct I think there are grounds to be equally or more sceptical about its energetic implications. As I said above, the LCA that Michael links was commissioned by Perfect Day, and arguably this shows in the way it defined its terms – exactly the problem I mentioned of relying on studies supportive of one’s favoured approach.
There has in fact been a more recent LCA which is explicitly critical of LCAs done by Perfect Day on their technique, and finds claims about the environmental benefits of the technique made by Tony Seba, who Michael enthuses about in his post, to be “extremely unlikely”. This study found that the environmental footprint of the Perfect Day technique may be no better than and possibly even worse than animal-based dairy systems:
For many dairy products such as fluid milk, yoghurts and cheeses, it is reasonable to use raw milk as a raw material instead of extracted milk proteins. For these products and in countries with developed dairy chains, dairy proteins within the raw milk are likely to create a smaller footprint than the use of rBLG would create.
(rBLG refers to the recombinant whey protein excreted by the genetically modified fungus).
The lower energy costs of animal-based dairy appear to be corroborated in a master’s thesis co-supervised by the aforementioned Natasha Järviö, which calculated that the total energy cost of protein from fresh milk is 37 kWh/kg as compared to 220 KWh/kg from the genetically-modified fungal approach, and 90 kWh/kg for hydrogen-oxidising bacteria (when the electricity comes from the average Finnish grid). That result of 90 kWh/kg for bacterial protein powder is notably higher than the 65 kWh/kg minimum which I derived.
I should probably mention that the LCA critiquing the Perfect Day finding had some co-authors associated with the dairy industry. I can’t comment on the implications, although that LCA was at least published in a peer-reviewed journal, unlike the Perfect Day one Michael linked. But there does seem to be an emerging agreement in the literature that real dairy products require less total energy than analogous non-animal manufactured products. With the current state of knowledge in this area, I’d suggest it’s probably unwise to assume that dairy-type food produced with cellular biotech approaches necessarily has a lower total environmental impact than food from dairy animals.
Turning now to bigger picture stuff, I don’t – just in case there’s any doubt – have a problem with veganism. People opt for veganism for many reasons, but inasmuch as reducing the human impact on nature is one of them, there are some wider contexts I think it’s good to be aware of that can help clarify personal dietary and wider food system choices.
Michael references the inefficiency of meat and dairy production, and it’s certainly true that you can meet most human nutritional needs from a smaller land footprint and with low primary energy costs if you eat an exclusively plant-based diet (for several reasons discussed in my book it doesn’t follow that the land thereby ‘saved’ will actually benefit nature, which is one of the problems with couching the issue in terms of individual consumption rather than structural politics, but that’s another issue).
But the lesson from the energetics of manufactured food outlined above is that if you move away from eating wholefood plants and vegetables towards manufactured fungal or bacterial products, this efficiency argument weakens in terms of energy costs – possibly to the point of comparing unfavourably with animal-agriculture analogues. This parallels the efficiency arguments against animal agriculture. If instead of following the direct plant-to-human-stomach route you introduce intermediary processes for which plants are at most feedstocks, it’s hard to avoid increasing the costs in terms of energy and/or land footprint – and this is true whether the intermediary bioreactor is a cow’s stomach or a stainless steel fermenting vessel in a factory. Either way, you risk losing the efficiencies of the direct plant-to-human-stomach route. So if you’re opting for manufactured protein on environmental impact grounds, it’s worth being aware that it may not be low impact just because it’s livestock-free.
The flipside of this argument is that when livestock are used to cycle nutrients and deliver ‘ecological services’, as in most traditional mixed agricultures, and don’t compete with humans for their food sources, this doesn’t detract from system efficiency, but adds to it – an argument I outline in more detail in my book. The fact is that not much of the animal-based food in modern supply chains derives from such efficiency-augmenting mixed agricultures, at least in rich countries like the UK, so this argument in itself isn’t currently a strong one against veganism.
Still, those modern supply chains have emerged as a result of and largely depend on cheap fossil energy. In that sense, I disagree with Michael when he says “Changing our diets to eat less meat and dairy is the most impactful action anyone can take to tackle our most pressing environmental crises”. The most impactful action we can take collectively is cutting our use of abundant cheap energy in general, and fossil fuels in particular. If we did that, it would inevitably and drastically cut livestock impacts, because we’d have to meet needs for food, fibre, energy and fertility from local bioregions, and any livestock component could only serve that larger need. That’s basically the argument that I outline in my book – not high-energy farm-free food, but low-energy local mixed-farming food.
The issue is no longer our individual consumption choices within an existing global commodity food system, if it ever was. Like it or not, that system is unravelling, and I think the result is going to be the widespread adoption of low-energy local food systems. Those systems will be many and varied, but in general they’ll produce a lot less meat and dairy than people in the rich countries are accustomed to eating. They will not, however, involve no meat and dairy, except possibly in the most densely populated areas. I seriously doubt many of these systems will involve much in the way of high-energy biotech manufacturing of bacterial or fungal protein. That kind of energy and material profligacy will scarcely be affordable in the world to come.
And that, in a nutshell, is why Michael’s blog post hasn’t convinced me that my arguments in Saying NO… are wrong.
I mentioned in my last post that I’d start listing my current reading. I’ve got into the habit of reading multiple books simultaneously, some of which take me months to finish. So I think I’m just going to mention any new books that I’ve started reading since my previous post – which will probably give a misleading impression of my actual reading rate. Another biased methodology!
New reading:
Peter Heather Empires and Barbarians
Naomi Klein Doppelganger
Régine Pernoud Those Terrible Middle Ages
A better gender balance, but still no fiction!
If you read around the literature on manufacturing edible protein from hydrogen-oxidising bacteria, you’ll come across various figures for the energy cost of the process. Here are a few:
I’ll now try to make sense of these figures, and specifically why they differ.
One thing to note: some of these figures specify total bacterial biomass, while others specify only the protein component, which is typically 60-65% of the biomass.
Monbiot (eventually) revealed that his 16.7 figure was derived from Sillman et al’s 9.86 figure (9.86 rounded up to 10 and then divided by the 60% protein component = 16.7). Note that this 9.86 kWh figure refers only to the electrical energy input into the bioreactor and not to other electrical and other energy costs that Sillman et al report. It’s demonstrably not the total energy cost of the process and isn’t even theoretically possible in view of the 17.8 kWh minimum established by Wise et al. The Wise study suggests that this minimum figure could only be achieved by genetically modified bacteria (not the strain used by Solar Foods) and only then momentarily during the production process – not as the full energy cost of the manufactured protein, which will inevitably be higher.
Even Sillman et al’s 10.96 kWh/kg figure appears not to be a real-world one. They describe their analysis as a “quantitative literature review”. In the words of Järviö et al, Sillman’s figure was “based on theoretical assumption using currently available but limited literature values”.
Now, Michael argues that I should have used the figure from Järviö et al (they report 18 kWh/kg bacterial biomass, so at 65% protein content that would be 27.7 kWh/kg protein). The trouble is, the study is vague about which energy costs (beyond electricity) it considers for the various processes involved. Michael says the paper makes it clear that the 18 kWh/kg is an actual measurement and not an assumption. What the paper actually says is this:
Whereas this study assumed an electricity requirement of 18 kWh per 1 kg product produced, Sillman et al. (2020) estimated 10.96 kWh per 1 kg product produced. This difference could mostly be explained by the fact that the estimate of Sillman et al. (2020) was based on literature values whereas this study was based on empirical data.
So the Järviö study ‘assumes’ a requirement of 18 kWh per 1 kg of biomass (or 28 kWh per 1 kg of protein), which is ‘based’ on empirical data, with some of the data apparently from the pilot-scale production of Solar Foods. The paper briefly mentions the assumed electricity requirement while leaving out other energy requirements. The supplemental information document gives some details which add up to 17.83 kWh of electricity for the fermentation step, before the separation and drying steps, without including all the energy required for the ammonia, carbon dioxide, steam, and mineral inputs. The 18 kWh figure seems to leave out or underestimate some energy costs which the Leger et al. study includes and substantiates. The Leger study devoted much more detailed consideration to the total energy costs.
Another study that looked at hydrogen-oxidising bacteria as human food shows an energy requirement of 37.8 kWh/kg for bacterial biomass with 65% protein content, equivalent to 58 kWh/kg of protein, which is pretty close to the 65 kWh/kg I derived from the Leger et al. study.
In fairness, the Järviö study has a wider focus than the energy input into the process and it seems to me that the authors didn’t probe the issue all that thoroughly. By contrast the Leger et al study I used does clearly specify the energy inputs it considers (it omits some things which could be pretty important, such as the energy costs of manufacturing, installing, maintaining, decommissioning and replacing the PV generation and other facilities). I concluded that the Leger paper was more reliable in relation to energy costs than the Järviö one. Unlike the latter, it provided a clear mathematical rationale for its energy derivation. So for my purposes, it was unquestionably the stronger paper to use.
The thesis mentioned earlier took a closer look at the Järviö study and calculated that the resulting total energy cost for hydrogen-oxygenating bacterial protein is at least 55.5 kWh/kg protein, when using electricity from renewable sources only. When using the average Finnish electricity grid, which has some additional energy requirements due to generation losses from non-renewable sources, the data from the Järviö study resulted in a total energy requirement of 108 kWh/kg of protein.
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A few thoughts on dairy and weird fungal whey:
I’m going to assume everyone is measuring dry mass of protein, not liquid whey, here.
Whey protein powder isolate by itself is nearly inedible, requiring liquid and usually some other food ingredients to make it palatable. It’s also a pretty bad idea to rely on lean protein for a majority of your calories for very long, especially if you are lean, so even if you do something like down multiple capsules of whey protein powder to get the amino acids your body needs, you’re going to need to eat some plants (or maybe some animals). I assume the same would be true of weird fungal whey.
Milk, on the other hand, is frankly delicious as it is. It contains some carbohydrates and fat, so you’re going to get more energy from it than from weird fungal whey. Whole food dairy products like cream, yoghurt and cheese are also good sources of vitamin B12 (basically unknown from vegan sources), cheese has appreciable vitamin D (possible to produce in a vegan manner by exposing mushrooms to sunlight, but not locally in winter at this latitude so have fun with that), albeit not anywhere as much as oily fish, red meat or liver, and (for some varieties of cheese) vitamin K2, without which we don’t use vitamin D properly anyway. Calcium and potassium are also important nutrients that can be provided by dairy (though these minerals are not so very difficult to get in a vegan diet). I don’t know how the weird fungal whey would stack up there.
But why do humans even eat whey powder at all? I think that usually we don’t.
Whey is a liquid by-product of making cheese, not a primary goal of having dairy cattle; probably the best thing to do with it, rather than expending the energy to dry it out, is probably to use it in home cooking much as one would use buttermilk (which generally tastes much better), or to feed it to livestock such as pigs and poultry. I suspect the only reason we ever see it on shelves in health food shops or as an ingredient added to “high protein” ultra-processed snax (many of which aren’t anywhere near as high in protein as drinking a pint of milk, and cost quite a bit more) is because the energy to dry it, package it and ship it is far, far cheaper than it should be, and because we so drastically over-produce dairy on such a large scale in the first place.
Comparing a by-product of the existing (terribly unsustainable) dairy industry with a primary product of a precision manufacturing industry seems like a bait-and-switch to me. Comparing weird fungal whey protein with dairy protein in whole milk is even stranger, because milk has so many other things in it that the human body uses.
Meanwhile: I finally ate the last of the greenhouse tomatoes (harvested 1st December) but found that many of the seeds had germinated inside the tomato fruits so decided to go ahead and plant some of them out. I now have 40-something baby tomato plants, about three months too early, which seems like a great opportunity for further selection based on spring hardiness except I didn’t do any intentional cross-pollination so I don’t expect these plants to be all that diverse. But being able to eat fresh (or fresh-ish) homegrown tomatoes seven months of the year is not bad going; I could probably increase that another couple of months if I focused on early season extension instead of late, this was more of an accidental experiment to see just how long the tomatoes would hang on.
I wonder if there is something in the principles of design here that is relevant to the precision fermentation sphere, too. For most of human history we have been exploring new foods, not by designing them on a biochemical levels, but by a more iterative process. I use elderflowers for making a fizzy drink and also for my sourdough starter. I select seeds from my best plants to use next year. This iterative experimentation can be sped up by scaling up to a degree (I’m more likely to get a good tomato mutation with 400 seedlings than with 40), but the iterative nature of such development imposes practical limits on scale, too. I can’t grow tomatoes faster than they grow, I can’t make the days get longer faster and so and starting tomatoes in January is counterproductive.
I don’t know the history of the science being used in the precision fermentation industry, but from here it feels like something made to order, something engineered to a set of specifications, rather than developed from existing foods by iterative experimentation. I could be wrong about that, but perhaps it would explain the focus on providing manufactured protein, which is just one component of a healthy human diet.
The thing I wondered about is where does the fiber in the studge diet come from ? My microbiome gets pretty cranky if there is a lack of it.
Kathryn, have you run across tomato plants from cutting before? There is a whole world of cuttings and grafting tomatoes if you haven’t run across that yet.
Since your plants are three months early, you could do another round of starts by cutting and have even more plants!
Just what I need, more genetic clones of this one variety!
Yes, I’m aware it’s possible to grow tomatoes from cuttings, but I don’t really feel a strong need to do things that way. I have plenty of seed available.
It also works with potatoes, incidentally — a good thing to know if your access to seed potatoes is limited.
I think the idea of the whey protein is that you can use it as a building block to make non-animal analogues of dairy foods. Likewise with bacterial protein to make meat analogues, similar to the soy based ‘fake meats’ presently available. My argument is that these products aren’t viable energetically as mass sources of protein alternatives to plants, and possibly even to animals.
Dietary fibre – yeah, you need agriculture for that. Maybe somebody is working on how to manufacture it (though perhaps not in view of the likely profits). But I doubt they’ll be able to do it at as low an energy cost as a gardener, for the same reasons I’ve outlined above.
Also, just to note that when I first uploaded this post some of the figures in the bulleted list in the Appendix were wrong because the decimal places got chopped off for some reason. Now corrected.
There is reportedly some type of “fiber” in the microbial biomass which has been dried and turned into bacterial protein powder.
The Järviö et al study (mentioned above) indicates 11% fiber content:
“The functional unit (FU) of the system was 1 kg of MP product prior to packing with a 5% moisture content at factory gate. The nutritional content was 65% protein, 6% fat, 2.2% carbohydrates, and 11% fiber, although higher protein concentrations are also possible by increasing the nitrogen inputs (Sillman et al., 2020).”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969721008317
Is drying taken into the energy use to make this stuff , drying grain down to 10/12% moisture as a real energy hog !
Yes, I understand that the weird fungal whey would be used as an ingredient, much as whey powder is now. I’m just questioning the wisdom of trying to produce something that can only be used as an ingredient (largely in industrial food manufacturing, rather than as a food I can cook with in my kitchen. In fairness I can indeed prepare food using whey powder as an ingredient in my kitchen — but I have no compelling reason to). Milk, on the other hand, can be delivered as-is or turned into cheese or butter or yoghurt, and all of these products can also be food as they are or be used as ingredients in other foods; wheat and barley can likewise be eaten as boiled whole grains (like rice) or turned into flour or flakes which can then be used in any number of other foods and drinks. But the weird fungal whey, and precision fermented whatever, can’t really be food at all without a factory.
My understanding is that most of the soya protein that goes into fakemeat products likewise comes as a by-product of soybean oil extraction, though tofu and tempeh are obvious exceptions (but then, tofu is not really fakemeat). Not sure where all the pea protein is coming from — well, peas, obviously — but presumably the starch and fibre that are removed during the extraction process do get fed to livestock, at least.
Perhaps I’m splitting where I should lump, here. After all, cassava requires substantial processing to be safe to eat, and maize when used as a staple is really a lot better with nixtamalisation, so it’s really not as if more traditional foods are always edible at every stage with minimal processing. I’d just like it if those processing steps are things I can conceivably do at home if I need to.
Hi Kathryn, I’m not quite sure but your last question did not have a reply button? Is that because we should click the “Notify me” button every time we post? Anyway – I clicked a reply button to another post – just to explain why this answer might come up in a weird spot.
IS ANYONE MAKING GREEN STEEL RIGHT NOW?
It’s mainly been proof-of-concept and lab-scale builds promoting the companies that are currently scaling up. EG: Volvo had this green steel truck 2 years ago from green steel made by SSAB. (1 minute).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsBxDBgnKgY
There’s stuff happening – but the details are hard to google. I can get market reports, but not specifics on who is building what and selling to who. But the REAL game hasn’t started yet – this is all high priced proof-of-concept marketing stuff. EG:
“The global green steel market size is projected to grow from $2.70 billion in 2023 to $98.84 billion by 2030, at a CAGR of 67.2% during the forecast period.” https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/green-steel-market-108711
And from what I can tell (don’t quote me on this cause I’ve only been looking at actual deployment for a few hours) – much of the $2.7 billion above MUST be market activity that isn’t realised yet. That is – pre-payment for orders covering the next 5 to 7 years in contracts I’ve read about from factories that haven’t even opened yet! So it’s ‘market activity’ but not actual activity! Yet.
The real challenge? Green enough grids and enough hydrogen supply. But check this out. The world’s first commercial scale factory of green steel opens next year – and they’ve got some SERIOUS money. Europe’s “H2 Green Steel” is coming – and “is expected to be launched by the end of 2025, with an initial capacity of 2.5 million tons of green steel per year, with commercial production ramping up in 2026. The company plans to produce 5 million tons of steel annually in Boden by 2030**.”**
https://gmk.center/en/posts/h2-green-steel-a-startup-shaping-the-future-of-green-steel-industry/
The increase in hydrogen demand is why Hysata in Australia is going to REVOLUTIONISE the green steel industry – with 20% energy savings making hydrogen. Just imagine the money they’re going to make!
https://reneweconomy.com.au/australian-electrolyser-start-up-gets-huge-global-backing-in-countrys-biggest-ever-clean-tech-fund-raising/
Other market reports are vastly more bullish than the one above. EG: “The global green steel market is set to experience remarkable growth, with a staggering Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 122.9% during the forecast period from 2023 to 2030.” https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/green-steel-market-size-soars-monumental-la5of/
The reply button goes away when threads are a certain number deep. I assume it’s a setting somewhere in the WordPress theme; usually when it happens here we just reply to the previous comment in that thread and include a name at the start of the comment so it’s clear who we’re replying to.
My question wasn’t about steel. It was about green energy in aluminium:
Is anyone actually using renewable energy in aluminium mining and smelting yet? I mean actually doing it today, not “this is theoretically possible with tools we have today” but “this is economically feasible to do now”.
Can you use the same tools to mine and smelt aluminium as you can for copper, or are you also talking about re-tooling an entire industry?
My understanding is that steel already requires quite a bit less energy for processing than aluminium does; this is one reason (of many) that I opted for steel for my bicycle frame. The other main one is that it is far, far more repairable than an aluminium frame would be.
Speaking of the embodied energy in aluminum, which “includes the energy from material extraction, refining, processing, transporting…”
Aluminum, 190-230 MJ/kg, mid-range 210
Copper, 30-90 MJ/kg, mid-range 60
Iron, 20-25 MJ/kg, mid-range 23
https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Embodied_energy
Converting the embodied energy to kWh/kg, and comparing these metals to bacterial protein (the “precision fermentation” type touted by George Monbiot in Regenesis):
Aluminum, 58 kWh/kg
Copper, 17 kWh/kg
Iron, 6 kWh/kg
Bacterial protein powder, 65 kWh/kg protein
Thus, it takes less energy to mine and produce a kilogram of aluminum than it does to produce a kilogram of bacterial protein!
And the amount of energy required to produce only 1 kilogram of bacterial protein (using George Monbiot’s “precision fermentation”) is enough to mine and produce approximately 4 kilograms of copper, or 10 kilograms of iron!
Energetic implausibility, indeed!
@Steve L
Thanks for that — I’m not sure whether it makes me think aluminium is cheaper than I thought or precision fermentation is more expensive than I thought!
Presumably it is cheaper to recycle aluminium, but whether there’s enough of it in a high enough grade recoverable from landfill is something I could only guess at. And substitution games will only get us so far in any case.
PS: It’s Friday night and my fragile sleepless brain is a bit cooked. I forgot to say sure – aluminium is going to go green at some stage – but the real action has been developing green steel because steel is 1.9 billion tonnes a year, while aluminium is only 68.4 million tonnes a year – so like 29 times less. But they’ll get there. But the exponential growth in green steel is exciting. But you know what? I’d rather see exponential growth in Cross-Laminated Timber buildings and bridges to offset the need for so much steel in the first place! Then as we meet all human needs by 2050, the population peaks and starts to decline by a few billion by 2100. Those generations are going to have 2 to 3 billion people’s worth of city stuff like steel and concrete and wood and e-waste and wind turbines and solar panels – all ripe to recycle for the raw materials. What an interesting generation and culture that could be! If we feed them with the right bright green dreams. If we depress them with pessimistic doomer narratives… they may just suicide like the young man in my peak oil group did all those years ago.
Hi Eclipse
I really don’t appreciate your implication that advocating for more people to grow more of their own food locally is a “doomer” narrative that encourages suicide. You’ve mentioned this suicide a few times now, so I gather it is still hurting you. I’m very sorry that your young friend decided to take that tragic step; it’s an absolutely horrific thing for a community to deal with and I’m not surprised you are still reeling from the trauma of it. But there are many, many people who are way more focused on “doom” than Chris and the commenters here, but who don’t decide to take their own lives, so I think probably it’s more complicated than the narrative being at fault. And while Chris may seem like a doomer in terms of how he expects things to go, I think I can confidently say that he wants humanity and the more-than-human world to flourish together.
My own experience of climate discourse has been very different! It is true, I am sometimes daunted by the scale of climate catastrophe we humans have unleashed. This is perfectly natural, because it truly is on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. Sitting around waiting for corporations and governments to come up with the right combination of sounds-too-good-to-be-true technology to alleviate some of this mess would be pretty depressing for me, though. Those parties haven’t exactly gotten us very far in my lifetime. By most realistic measures, I’m over halfway through that lifetime. I will certainly die before the damage we have done is mended, even if we manage some kind of miraculous transformation. That is true whether the transformation is to some kind of high-tech superabundant utopia, or something humbler that’s much harder work, or some combination of both.
But there is nothing in the world that gives me as much hope as growing delicious and nutritious food where I am and sharing it with others. I can participate in this in a way that I can’t, at least with my resources, participate in factory-based precision fermentation or green (or green washed) electricity. In a worldview which champions people producing more of what they need locally, for themselves and their communities, I am so much more than my consumption habits or consumer choices.
I would like to die in my bed, of very old age, surrounded by loved ones, in a world where nobody is oppressed and everyone has what they need to live a dignified life. That seems increasingly unlikely. It seems especially unlikely if I sit around waiting for someone else’s technology to save me. But it’s still very much worth working towards that world while I am alive — and savouring my relationship with this earth, other people, and the more-than-human world along the way. So I’m going to wish you a good weekend, and go and sow some beans and winter squashes in the sunshine, and see about some chicken of the woods on my way back home since it’s around the right time of year and two of the local known-infected trees are fruiting. I’m going to eat supper with my household, and bake some bread, and probably something for the soup kitchen too since the oven will already be hot. I hope your own weekend includes at least that much joy and connection.
Well said Kathryn. Likewise, I’m sorry for your loss but invoking it as a counter to positions taken here is a low move for me. The duality of a bright green ecomodernist future vs doomer misery has been critiqued and debunked from so many angles. Meanwhile, depression, drug use and suicide have been escalating in many countries, notably the US – and not because a few marginal voices are claiming that the material basis of modern life is unsustainable. The idea that people can’t be trusted to produce low-input local livelihoods but must be corralled in cities as helpless peons of tech overlordship does not represent a bright green future in my eyes, even in the unlikely event it’s possible. A renewable energy transition does little to address the numerous other dimensions of the metacrisis, including its existential/spiritual ones.
Hi Chris,
if you’ve done the hydrogen calculations in your book – you may need to run the numbers again in a few years when this new Aussie tech is verified.
“The company announced on Thursday that a Series B funding round, led by oil major bp and Hong Kong based Templewater was oversubscribed and attracted $A172 million, and ranks as the largest clean tech Series B raising in Australia’s history… …It says that it needs only 41.5 kilowatt hours for every kilo of green hydrogen with its alkaline electrolysers, which translates to a 95 per cent efficiency and is 20 per cent – or a country mile in technology terms – ahead of incumbent technologies… …Hysata was spun out of the University of Wollongong and is targeting hard to abate industries such as steel, chemicals and heavy transport.
The fund raising, which follows a $20 million commitment from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency announced last year, was supported by existing investors IP Group, Virescent Ventures on behalf of Clean Energy Finance Corporation, Hostplus, Vestas Ventures and BlueScopeX, from the steel giant down the road.
Major new investors included South Korea industrial giant Posco, IMM Investment Hong Kong, Shinhan Financial Group, Twin Towers Ventures, the Oman Investment Authority’s VC arm IDO, and TelstraSuper…
…Hysata says it currently has 75 staff and aims to grow this number to more than 200 employees over the next couple of years. It says it is “moving rapidly” towards manufacturing at the multi-gigawatt scale.”
https://reneweconomy.com.au/australian-electrolyser-start-up-gets-huge-global-backing-in-countrys-biggest-ever-clean-tech-fund-raising/
Cheaper hydrogen is of course also part of decarbonising green steel, chemicals, explosives (for all the mining for the energy transition), and extra heat when industrial heat process need to boost above the Rondo heat brick’s 1500 degrees (all from renewable energy!)
The energy content of 1 kg of H2 is roughly 35kWh.
Sure – but the bacteria don’t care. They hydrogenotrophs eat it all the same – whether it took 20% more electricity to make or not. The point to us is that whatever applications we use the hydrogen in – whether it’s airline fuel, green steel, or feeding bacteria – it’s going to take 20% less energy to do it. 20% less on the energy price as well. Especially as solar is still expected to HALVE in price by 2030.
“What are you talking about ? Copper is used for making motors, rewiring every house on the grid, wiring in cars, a larger grid to supply all the electricity needed, etc. Even Li batteries don’t use a significant amount of copper (~10%).”
In fairness to yourself I did supply a lot of links. But for the last link in particular I provided the basic summary – to which most of your question applies? Here it is in more detail – I hope this helps.
—
In 2021, The Journal of Cleaner Production published a letter to the editor titled Copper substitutability might be about 60% or more of current copper use. I would argue that this is very conservative indeed.
The letter was partly a rebuttal to an article that, among other things, claims that “because overhead transmission lines are considered ugly … high-voltage transmission may happen more through underground copper lines (than) overhead aluminum lines … for interior wiring, copper is preferred to aluminium, because aluminium has led to problems of overheating and fires (and) in some applications copper seems virtually irreplaceable, such as for local distribution of electric power.”
Yes, I’m scratching my head.
If you want to replace copper with aluminium, then you should know this: Aluminium has 60% of the conductivity of copper. This means you will need a 25% thicker wire for the same results. However, the aluminium in this equivalent wire will cost and weight about half as much as copper. That’s it.
Aluminium in power lines? Of course! Also underground! And in transformers and coils, in motors? Yes!
Replacing copper with aluminium in e-cars
Let me move on to the automotive industry, which is also part of the green transition. I’ve seen electric vehicles mentioned as one of the biggest problems with regard to a scarcity of copper.
The IEA claims we will need about 50 kilograms of copper per e-car, which is roughly double that of a conventional car. So if we were to replace all 1.7 billion cars in the world by EVs, we would need an additional 42 million tonnes of copper. Assuming that this happens over a 42-year period, then we need to come up with 1 million tonnes per year, or an additional 5% of yearly copper production.
That sounds like it could be plausible, but still – aluminium. Aluminium is researched a lot because almost all copper in an electric vehicle can be replaced by aluminium.
The motor is where most of the copper is found. Can we replace that with aluminium? Yes. The motor’s efficiency might drop by 1% or so, but you also get a lighter motor.
Next is the wire harness and – yes, you guessed it – aluminium can do the job. The replacement is actually already in full swing, although the scarcity of copper to give it urgency is so far missing.
Replacing copper with aluminium in wind turbines
Of course we all know by now that wind turbines are the No. 1 copper problem. But wait, isn’t all that copper going toward their motors and for the power lines to shore that could be replaced by aluminium?
That is indeed the case.
Aluminium instead of copper in wind turbine windings is a mature option – and we already discussed power lines. But for subsea cables, aluminium doesn’t work. Right? Wrong.
Copper is also used for heat sinks, and here the story is basically the same: Aluminium has 60% of the conductivity, which means your aluminium replacement is slightly larger, but the aluminium is half as heavy and half as expensive.
It’s really hard to find large-scale applications where you can’t replace copper with aluminium. I would estimate that about 90% of the copper can be replaced by aluminium using mature and available options.
Environmentally responsible to use aluminium in transition
My last point considers environmental responsibility. Is it OK to replace copper with aluminium in the renewable energy transition?
Even though it is abundant, aluminium requires mining, too. And although bauxite mines tend to have less averse direct environmental impacts than copper mines, it takes roughly three times more energy to produce new aluminium. This currently leads to about 50% more emissions per kilo.
However, as electricity production becomes low-carbon, aluminium actually emits less CO2. It doesn’t contaminate marine environments as much, it has less adverse effects on human health, and it has less harmful heavy metals as by-products.
So if copper scarcity forces us to substitute aluminium, then this is actually a good thing for the environment.
https://www.shapesbyhydro.com/en/material-properties/how-we-can-substitute-aluminium-for-copper-in-the-green-transition/
Is anyone actually using renewable energy in aluminium mining and smelting yet? I mean actually doing it today, not “this is theoretically possible with tools we have today” but “this is economically feasible to do now”.
Can you use the same tools to mine and smelt aluminium as you can for copper, or are you also talking about re-tooling an entire industry?
I agree with the other comments about nutrition and I don’t think I’ve yet seen any analysis of the way that these substances will be manufactured into palatable products for a mass market? They will have multiple additives, as animal ingredients have, to make burgers, pates, “steaks” etc. This will make them ultra processed foods, generally accepted now as bad for our health. A fact that seems to be conveniently overlooked by their supporters. Unless there will be whole food artisan versions available for those who can afford them?
Thanks for taking the time to provide a full response to my blog post, Chris. I’m sure you’ll be delighted to hear(!) that I aim to respond in turn. Hopefully something that moves us forward, but I guess you and any other readers will be the judge.
What moved me to reply immediately though is to note the synchronicity that I too am reading Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. It’s a brilliant and insightful book. Hope you enjoy it. (If that’s the right emotion.)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=408&v=m7PHUMd7PYA&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fnotalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com%2F&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY&feature=emb_logo
Dutch take on the feasibility of manufacturing hydrogen .
Excellent post Chris. Thanks for this.
Thanks for comments – not least to Mike … look forward to your reply, Mike.
And thanks, Kathryn – okay, got it. I agree with you on the importance of kitchen sink level food processing, and also on understanding food holistically as part of a functional local ecosystem. Possibly this is the real point of division between agrarian and ecomodernist thinking.
I added a few numbers from the master’s thesis to the end of the Appendix above since they may help to give another rough reckoning of the comparative energy costs involved.
I’m going to be mostly offline for a few days but I’ll respond to any queries as best I can.
Well done Chris, another clear, balanced and collegiate exposition of the case. I hope Mike can meet you on your questions and confirm, at least, the transparency of your methodology.
I recently had to comment on the bastani and monbiot talk on novara media, which was followed by a list of comments on becoming, being or the greatness of veganism. The reductive, infantile proposition of plants good, animals bad is a tiresome shorthand for a generation now substantially separated from the production of their food (fibre and fuel). Veganism is presently a growth industry clearly seen in the ultra processed food, ultra packaged super market space. The idea that this, along with industrially farmed vegetables is having anything but a detrimental effect on environment is the kind of magical thinking that underlies this position.
Present veganism is a mirror image of the industrial meat farming it pretends to be an alternative to. Precision fermentation is a further extension of that. Both are capitalist projects that have no care for people, animals or environment.
I look forward to your posts on sun versus electricity and the mixed farming that restores care to people, animals and soil. It is so important to have voices of nuance that understand the structural issues.
Hi Chris, I’m surprised you don’t seem to have read The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler (yet) as his views are very similar to yours. Would be great to have you two yakking on his podcast sometime. I already sent him message some time ago. Best regards, Michael
https://slaynews.com/news/who-declares-war-food-supply-fight-climate-change/
Make what you will of this …..
James Howard Kunstler – thanks Michael, another one to add to the list but yeah I know I should probably read it.
Meanwhile, in case anyone’s interested here are a few online adventures I’ve been on lately outside the confines of chrissmaje.com:
An interview on KCRW radio in Los Angeles: https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/good-food/soil-future-of-farming-policing-avocados/chris-smaje-saying-no-to-farm-free-future
An interview with Colin Tudge, co-founder of the Oxford Real Farming Conference and prolific author on agricultural and biological issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUTafzS2Yyc&ab_channel=ColinTudge
And an essay excerpted from my book ‘A Small Farm Future’: https://www.laprogressive.com/climate-change-2/small-farming
Coming up, I’ll be talking at the ‘Reading the Land’ festival in Shaftesbury on 17 March, and doing a podcast with Rachel Donald – who recently did an interesting interview with Hannah Ritchie of Our World In Data: https://news.mongabay.com/2024/01/its-not-the-end-of-the-world-book-assumptions-omissions-spark-debate/
Perfect Day’s synthetic whey protein (manufactured using sugar-fed GM fungus/yeast) is being used to make “milk” currently sold in the USA by Bored Cow for $26 per gallon (much higher than the price of real milk which is less than $5/gal.) A lab tested this product and reported some interesting results:
“Not so precise fermentation: Lab finds 92 unknown compounds in synthetic biology milk”
https://non-gmoreport.com/not-so-precise-fermentation-lab-finds-92-unknown-compounds-in-synthetic-biology-milk/
“Using full spectrum molecular analysis technology, HRI found 92 small molecules in the product that are unknown to science, according to John Fagan, chief science officer at HRI… HRI’s testing also found residues of a fungicide at a substantial level… HRI’s tests found that the protein in Bored Cow’s milk was mostly from the GMO yeast and not the milk protein. “The amino acid composition of the protein that’s present in the Bored Cow milk is strikingly different from the amino acid composition of real milk,” Fagan says…”
“Both Perfect Day and Bored Cow claim their synbio products aren’t GMOs because the GMO-derived “microflora” or yeast is removed during the fermentation process. Fagan calls that “wishful thinking.” “The (genetically engineered) DNA in these products is broken up or fragmented but is certainly still there,” Fagan says.”
Hi Chris, would be nice to hear more background behind your 18 month trip to Canada you mentioned in your interview with Colin Tudge, the places you visited and so on. A trip like that sounds rather like a life-changing experience to me.
According to Mr Monbiot, while it appears to be a populist movement, it is in fact being stage-managed by the ‘far right’ and the farmers are just useful stooges. Or something.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/bitter-harvest-for-the-lefts-war-on-farmers/
For your information .
Funny how Monbiot didn’t mention his trademark “agricultural sprawl” for once. Strange term he seems to have invented…
So according to Monbiot I should replace my low tech vegetable patch with all this stainless steel solar powered fermentation plant.
Just looking at it from that perspective it doesnt add up
LOL. low tech no patents .
Hi tech , patented money earner .
Hi Chris, might be slightly off-topic but just wondering if you ever managed to make cheese on your holding? Your milk must have been absolutely creamy and delicious with such a fertile and mineral rich soil you must have been getting after all those years of sound animal husbandry.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2024/01/22/urban-farming-has-a-shockingly-high-climate-cost—heres-how-growers-can-bring-carbon-down-according-to-scientists/?sh=48f7397a1540
Small farms bad .
They will be throwing tomato soup on my spade next .
That study indicates how the GHG impact actually depends on the practices at the specific sites. 25% of individually managed gardens were found to be currently *outperforming* conventional agriculture, instead of having a worse GHG impact.
The study suggests improvements can be made by using the garden bed materials for more than a few years, and using more waste as inputs, for example.
The GHG impacts were calculated on a per-serving basis for the food harvested. Practices such as anaerobic composting and the use of concrete for paths contributed to the increased GHG impacts of urban gardens. The study’s results weren’t statistically significant for “urban farms”.
Energy wasn’t mentioned much, and the future availability of energy for the continuation of “conventional” supply chains seems to be assumed as a given.
From the abstract:
“However, some UA [urban agriculture] crops (for example, tomatoes) and sites (for example, 25% of individually managed gardens) outperform conventional agriculture. These exceptions suggest that UA practitioners can reduce their climate impacts by cultivating crops that are typically greenhouse-grown or air-freighted, maintaining UA sites for many years, and leveraging circularity (waste as inputs).”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-023-00023-3
Doubt that the Africa takes in the manufacturing carbon footprint of a tractor versus a spade or any agricultural machine compared with its small farm equivalent .
MSM will run with the headline and the gullible in power will run with it , think electric cars that become yard ornaments the temperature drop below freezing .
Wonder where Africa came from ? ARTICLE !
Thanks for the comments. I’m still in relative radio silence for the next week or so, but a few quick thoughts.
Ben, we were mostly in British Columbia/Illahee Chuk, and yes it was quite life-changing. Perhaps I’ll write a bit more about it sometime. I did actually write a book-length memoir about it, which is unpublished apart from an account about an encounter with a cougar which won the BBC Wildlife Magazine travel writing prize and a safari to Zambia … which now seems incredibly self-indulgent. Perhaps I’ll dust off that manuscript and put it out in some format, if it still passes muster.
John, I don’t think George would want you to give up your veg patch … it’s the one kind of farming he’s all in for, although he also says worrying things about arable. However, I think your wider conclusion about it ‘not adding up’ is sound.
Talking of George, he’s still trailing his ‘Cruel fantasies’ piece on Twitter. Maarten Boudry writes “…judging from Monbiot’s review, the position of [Smaje’s] book is pretty insane…” and I can only agree that if you judge my position from what Monbiot says about it then indeed it seems pretty insane – https://twitter.com/mboudry/status/1750498225398661564
Ella – no alas we’ve never kept dairy animals on our site. I’d like to, and maybe we will if the community develops in the right way, but I’m a bit too work shy to take it on as a solo project.
Diogenes et al – thanks for the discussion of the farmer protests. I hope to say more about this soonish. Unfortunate but predictable media framings of it.
Diogenes, Steve – thanks also for ‘small farms bad’ research. Context is everything with empirical research, but this one will no doubt be trotted out widely to ‘prove’ that large-scale conventional farming is the most ecological way to go. If only it could come with Steve’s health warning attached. I hope to say more about the wider issues involving the use of empirical research like this soonish too.
Ciao for now.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MfPXUoq-6OE&t=93s
Not msm but have over 2 million subscribers .
Watch , ignore or delete .
Davos crazies, not covered by any of the media , and called disinformation when it is covered by the new media .
This Land is Our Land by Ken Ilgunas is a really good book on private property and the right to roam. I’m sure you would enjoy it.
As I mentioned in my first comment, I’ve been meaning to respond to Chris’s response through a blog post of my own. However, other priorities have intervened and I realise that this might take a while…
So, in the meantime so I can’t be accused of going AWOL, let me issue a mea culpa. Chris – you’ve persuaded me that you are broadly correct in your energy estimates and my criticism was unfounded. The clincher for me was Perfect Day’s own LCA which does (as you point out) state that their energy use is based only on the whey-equivalent protein and not on their entire output. This is somewhat hidden in their document and I missed it. (I feel like I’ve had a public peer review!) I agree that their presentation is misleading. Whilst the LCA says that Perfect Day’s by-product might be useful in other domains, such as making synthetic leather, this feels like speculation to me.
However, I still feel that precision fermentation could play a role, at least as a transitional technology.
Firstly, it is possible that renewable energy from wind, solar, and batteries might become superabundant because of the need to overprovision generating capacity to account for times of the year when there is no wind or sun. This would mean that most of the year there is plenty to spare. (This is another argument made by Tony Seba.)
Secondly, there are numerous other (I think undisputed) advantages of precisions fermentation over industrial animal farming, such as a significantly reduced need for freshwater and chemical inputs, a much lower land footprint, no need for antibiotics, and much less pollution (Wye Valley and chicken farms, anyone?). To say nothing of the eradication of the horrendous suffering of animals endured by society’s desire for ‘cheap’ meat and dairy.
I’d also like to thank Chris for acknowledging in this post the need for substantial reductions in meat and dairy in any truly sustainable system. This is important to stress as it feels to me that some commentators who advocate for animals to be involved in farming systems miss this (or gloss over it).
And so I wonder whether our differences may lie in differences in perspective? I am attracted by precision fermentation as a way to get from the current exploitative and unsustainable food system to somewhere less exploitative and more sustainable. If nothing else, it could buy us time. Perhaps Chris and supporters who’ve commented on this are viewing this technology from a vision of a world where all our food needs are met through agroecology and similar systems? In which case, it’s perhaps not surprising that a technology associated with labs and food companies who are part of the problem is viewed as anathema. (Yes, I do get that!)
Finally, thank you Chris for acknowledging my ‘good-natured tone’. It’s depressing to think that we can’t expect that from everyone, but yes, this doesn’t always happen. In the end, even if we differ in some of our viewpoints to lesser or greater extents, we need to remember that WE ARE ON THE SAME SIDE. That is, the side that is working for a truly sustainable future for our planet. And some humility is required because, as I so clearly showed, we can’t always be right.
Thanks for hosting me and thanks for the constructive dialogue.
@Mike Daw
“Firstly, it is possible that renewable energy from wind, solar, and batteries might become superabundant….. ”
I think this is the “Achilles Heel” of any “lab food”.
There isn’t going to be superabundant renewables. There isn’t the raw materials or existing (fossil fuel) energy to make them in enough quantity.
We are about to descend down the back side of the energy curve. Whatever we decide to do, it will be with ever declining available energy.
To add to what you have said ( which I completely agree with ) there is the cost , all the ” renewable ” energy manufacturer ‘s are in severe financial trouble , German production of solar pannels and wind turbines is on life support markets will not lend them finances , without government subsidies they would have all ready closed .
The UK can no longer supply the high quality steel needed to build generators ,( plus tanks guns and other military crap the gov thinks it needs ) port Talbot is closing virgin steel production and only recycling scrap which is a very inferior product , I doubt you could make a decent axe or saw out of it .
Hey Mike, Welcome to the peanut gallery. Don’t be shy about chipping in with comments. It helps to have dissenting voices to clarify ideas. Hopefully we are all able to hear them and question our own beliefs and not simply pile on. A lot of us have been questioning the notion that there can be infinite growth on a finite planet for a long time. By now our ideas pretty well entrenched. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they (or we) are wrong…
Thanks Greg. And as someone who’s been in the Green party for almost 40 years, including standing for parliament, I count myself amongst those people who have been questioning such fallacies of infinite growth for some time. That doesn’t mean that I believe that all businesses (including some large ones) are bad. We all (by which I mean all humans) share the same planet with (mostly) a common desire for peace and prosperity, albeit we might have different notions of what that means. Nuance is all!
Thanks for your reply Mike. How refreshing to have a good-natured online conversation with somebody who’s willing to say they were wrong. It should be normal, but it isn’t.
Like others here, I’m not persuaded that a future of abundant clean energy awaits (my next post addresses this). I think the overprovision argument is a red herring. We will need to prioritise energy use carefully. Anything that can be achieved without using electricity or other primary energy – like growing food – will be low on the list.
Possibly there will be a limited role for microbial food in some places. But I think it’s a technology of prevarication, a bit like switching from coal to gas and claiming a climate win. Better to make the bold step into agroecology. I’m sceptical of its nutritional qualities too. I agree that it may be superior to industrial farming in principle in relation to non-energy inputs and pollutants (though its heavily industrial infrastructure may weigh against it there too). But the real comparator should be job-rich, local agroecological farming, not the industrial status quo.
Regarding animal agriculture, for sure there’s no argument from me in favour of the horror show of the existing global livestock industry, and I understand the case for veganism in the face of it. Where things get trickier is in the wish that some people have to abstract themselves entirely from any implication of being an organism embedded in an ecosystem, where the dance of life involves multicellular organisms eating other ones, and therefore putting their interests above those of their food organisms. This idea seems to lurk behind some of the impetus for microbial food … e.g. in the use of the word ‘clean’: ‘clean meat’, ‘clean production’ and so on. I think we can easily over-elevate ourselves in this search for cleanliness, and the result will probably be more destructive than if we embrace the role of dirty ecological protagonists.
Hi Mike
I’ll chime in to say that I’m also not convinced that superabundance of renewable electricity is right around the corner; I’ll leave others to expound upon why. And yes, I think we all agree that extractive industrial monoculture farming of grains to feed animals raised in factory conditions is horrible on just about every level and must stop.
I am intrigued by the idea of precision fermentation as a transitional technology, though; I haven’t seen it presented as such. But then, my question is what advantages precision fermentation as a transitional technology might have, over applying the same amount of technological innovation to intensive mixed horticulture.
Intensive mixed horticulture is more productive per acre than extensive industrial monocropping of grains, oilseeds and legumes for fodder and biodiesel; I’m not sure how it compares to sugarcane. Horticulture still produces some surprisingly large proportion of all food eaten by humans — I don’t remember the percentage offhand, but you’ve probably not eaten a tomato, a strawberry, or spinach greens picked by a machine (I think we do have mechanised harvesting of carrots and spuds these days.) It works better if the food isn’t transported too far. It does require quite a bit more human labour than anything involving a diesel tractor, but certainly not so much that society can’t have people doing other jobs (and some of this is a matter of choosing appropriate crops: my winter squash, runner beans and potatoes give me a lot more food for my efforts than my lettuces do; I grow both, but know exactly which ones I will neglect when there is a drought.) It doesn’t require huge amounts of specialist machinery or tools, and can be scaled up or down according to available land and labour. It doesn’t rely on patents or intellectual property, and while catastrophic storms, fires, floods and droughts impact all agriculture, mixed horticulture has a lot of resilience built in due to diversity (I sow peas, broad beans, French beans and runner beans: in a hot dry year the French beans thrive, in a cool wet year the peas are fantastic.)
My homegrown and allotment produce tastes better than anything I can buy, partly because I can prioritise flavour over transport convenience when selecting varieties or developing my own lines of seeds (the latter being easier than most people think). It’s also likely to be more nutritious, both because of making some informed choices about varieties and also because it’s so much fresher. Most of it can be preserved at home using low-energy techniques (fermentation and solar dehydration being the primary low-energy methods for things that aren’t starchy veg, which will just keep for months in a cool place, or store in the ground until they’re needed; I also do some canning and freezing, since I do have the facilities). I’m also providing food for pollinators and habitat for birds, beetles, slow worms, and goodness knows what else. My grocery bills have gone down since 2020 despite considerable inflation on the products we do purchase. That in turn has enabled us to pay a premium for a monthly delivery of high welfare meat raised on agroecological principles, and I’ve found that we don’t eat as much of that as we used to buy from the supermarkets, because it is far more satiating.
My “hobby” of gardening has also made me feel more connected to the land I inhabit, and helped foster connections in my wider community — something it’s difficult to see a precision fermentation startup managing to do. I trade produce with neighbours, grow vegetables in a churchyard for a soup kitchen, and my diet is far more varied and far more seasonal than I would otherwise manage.
For sure, I could do more if I had livestock. Ducks would make short work of the slugs; chickens also eat a number of soil pests and leave behind valuable fertiliser as they go. I don’t have anywhere near the space for a dairy cow and I do love milk and cheese. But there are a number of reasons livestock aren’t practical in my context, not least transitioning from dependence on the supermarket to dependence on the feed store being something of a red herring. Instead, I gather street leaves and receive tree surgeon woodchips and spent coffee grounds from a local independent chain to compost — hardly a fossil-free input, but I imagine people are going to be drinking coffee anyway for some time to come and at least this keeps it out of landfill. I expect the woodchip supply will dry up at some stage as the tree surgeons find they can sell even smaller loads to companies processing it for biofuel, or as the petrol for the woodchippers becomes too expensive. We’ll see.
I am well aware that not everyone has my privilege of time to spend growing food (though again, appropriate selection of crops helps quite a lot here) or access to land (though I own none of the land I tend: it’s two allotment plots, the rented back garden, and a churchyard). Not everyone can start a precision fermentation plant, either, for similar reasons, though I see the barriers to entry as quite a bit higher for the latter. But I do question the push to use the technology we do have to create novel industrial ingredients for use in profitable manufactured processed food products in an energy-intensive fashion — that is largely how we have approached the overproduction of grains and meat, and it has been pretty terrible. Instead, why not use the technology we have to improve or augment access to small-scale mixed horticulture?
Something like FarmBot, or some similar system, could work well on a neighbourhood scale with less labour input than entirely manual farming, but less dependence on electricity than precision fermentation. It can be run on solar panels if necessary, at a rate where the solar panels cover less land area than the farmed beds (probably not at every latitude). It would be compatible with proper composting facilities for human waste (rather than literally flushing valuable minerals into our waterways, yikes). It could be started with one bed, and then expanded as funds allow, and while it does require some specialist equipment, the startup cost is not exorbitant. And if the electricity supply dries up, well, the plants are already there, the planting plan is legible to humans (if you’ve bothered to print it out), and the shift to more manual labour can happen fairly trivially: a lot of people aren’t going to be doing their desk jobs without electricity, either.
If hyperlocal robot farms for horticulture might put land back into direct use by more of the people who depend on it for their food, then so much the better. To me, one of the more worrying aspects of precision fermentation is the way it often seems to come along with a re-wilding narrative that feels more like dystopian enclosure than wildlife conservation. Abolish farming, sell the existing farmland to corporations which will plant monoculture spruce forests for carbon credits (and later sell them off for wood fuel or FSC-certified loo roll, because that kind of double accounting is so easy to do), start a few precision fermentation factories to produce the food people will still need… profitable, at least if energy remains cheap enough to pull it off, but it seems to me that even if it works as intended, the profits will go to a few people, and those who would like to tend the land in more holistic ways will continue to be denied access to either land which they can tend (for their own use or for local resale) or commons (which have traditionally been the way communities deal with production of items where economies of scale come into play — pasture and woodland being two examples, though I’m sure there are more.) If the products of precision fermentation are cheaper or much more convenient to use than fresh whole food grown from real soil, whether that cheapness is because of abundant cheap electricity or because of government subsidy, then it will be even harder for those engaged in more holistic land tending to break even. Chris has written before now on the economics of small-scale farming and how difficult it is to compete with global corporations.
How do you think a transition from precision fermentation to agroecological farming would work?
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/we-are-not-mining-with-renewable
Worth a read .
Germane to this conversation:
https://soundcloud.com/farmerama-radio/less-and-better-ep-3-alternative-proteins-more-and-better?utm_source=farmerama.co&utm_campaign=wtshare&utm_medium=widget&utm_content=https%253A%252F%252Fsoundcloud.com%252Ffarmerama-radio%252Fless-and-better-ep-3-alternative-proteins-more-and-better
Good man Mike. I think the subtle but critical point in Chris’s book (which I am seriously enjoying) is that supply chains are the most destructive part of any technology, venture or idea – regardless of how well meaning. Encapsulated in the saying ‘the means do not justify the ends’. Grasping this insight makes the houshold small farm, local, regional low energy sufficiency visible as the only viable field of research. It is full of technology that can be mostly manufactured within its bio region. It taps directly into the human attributes you rightly highlight.
It is the very structure of supply chains and mass production in itself which disfigured our environment and our relationship to one another – regardless of what powers it.
Is it supply chains that are the problem, or the enclosure of land in service of them? The thing about local supply is that how you define local, how you define regional… I think there is room for some flexibility in this (if I get most of my calories locally maybe I can also eat cinnamon, and maybe I can in turn produce some herbal tea that is used halfway around the world). But not having access to sufficient land to support my household and contribute to my community means I’m forced into competition with global supply systems. That’s very good for those who profit from the supply chains, and very bad for anyone who doesn’t want to get most of their calories from far away…
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own,
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.
The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so, but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
And geese will still a common lack
Until they go and steal it back.
As for food miles everyone should spend a night at ringway airport Manchester and watch the old / ancient jumbo jets loaded with ” fresh fruit and veg / flowers ” from all over the world
I can pretty confidently say that less than 10% of the fresh fruit and veg I eat is imported. It might not even be as much as 10%, but I’d have to do the sums for real to be certain.
I totally agree and there starts to be a differentiation between supply chains that serve enclosure, mass production and capital and trade routes that serve locally crafted goods, bioregional plants and village economies.
I had never read the complete song/poem/saying, thank you.
Interesting thoughts and observations on peasants/peasantry, and a few reading recommendations too:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/feb/03/patrick-joyce-remembering-peasants-a-personal-history-of-a-vanished-world-interview
There is little difference between ” then ” and” now ” .
Being silence or silenced , look at the draconian Irish law , anything the powers that be don’t like found on your pc / phone and its jail for you , the EU demanding social media platforms censor free speech and ban users with threats of unlimited fines , there is no difference between them and now accept today they debank you and call misinformation on unapproved material , they used to just cut your throat .
Just to add to the above .
https://newsaddicts.com/un-secretly-working-banks-destroy-farming-industry/
Debank farmers .
The EU has turned into the EUSSR.
The ECSC/ EEC/ EU always aimed to become a corporate-controlled, centralised superstate. That was well-hidden from ‘the little people’. I didn’t wake up fully to this until late 2020.
I hope other countries now have the sense to leave.
Do you think the UK is any less corporate controlled?
I’ve just finished ‘Saying No to a Farm-Free Future’, and I really enjoyed it, such a great, readable, funny and reasonable book. You are good writer! And a great guide through the arguments.
I cannot understand Monbiot’s reaction. Any editor that is publishing his insane diatribe on the book should read it. They would be embarrassed to have given Monbiot’s reply credence.
I look forward to your chat with Rachel Donald, very interesting discussions going on there and on her own site. The degrowthers are still a bit dreamy about what they will do with all their urban leisure time, and still stumble on how you engage people in the status/convenience ‘step down’, which is where the SFF comes in with some more earthy non negotiable commitments for our time – as well as the transformation of value through self provisioning – the joy/peace of making your own things that you need.
Thanks for the book, really well done.
Jeez, where to start. There’s so many insightful and varied comments on here. Well, to add to the energetic original discussion, there’s some costs I basically never see mentioned except in my Mom’s writing (Joann Grohman, Keeping a Family Cow (Chelsea Green); Real Food; and various essays available at http://www.keepingafamilycow.com; which Kathryn at least would enjoy!). So, any manufactured food- certainly all the ones I know of- will have a listed content of lysine and methionine. These of course are critical amino acids necessary to bring the protein content to some specified minimum, essential to any higher organism from farmed insect to chicken to pig to vegan. They are produced in factories that look like an LNG plant and are about as “green”. Methionine is made from sulphur methanol, ammonia propylene, and sulphuric acid. Lysine is made from sugar and bacteria and it requires an enormous land base for the feed stock which was mostly cassava if I remember rightly. Both, of course, need to be incorporated into the fossil fuel budget of manufactured foods- plus given industrial food’s dependence on them one might note that the factories are very few and far between. A couple other items of note would be that vegans require added B12 which also has a fuel cost (plus it’s a GMO product). Iron requirements are a problem too since most iron supplements are not well absorbed. The only one that is well absorbed is ‘heme iron’ which is derived from blood, hence the name. – Also when comparing land take of mixed farming to vegetable as far as protein content, one should note that (as my Mom put it) animals can protect their proteins by running away but plants can only do it by trying to be indigestible, so you can’t really just say that x has so many amino acids, because they may well not be that available. – One thing that both Smaje and Fairlie point out but that can’t be emphasised enough is the problem of fertilizer, and this one is so obvious that it’s hard to understand how those opposed to mixed farming contrive to overlook it. Even manufactured food is made out of something, and that something requires fertilizer. As peak oil recedes ever further into the rear view mirror, manufactured fertilizer becomes ever more expensive and even unattainable. It’s also a major pollutant.
Here’s a story of interest. It looks like lab grown meat is a bust. Perhaps lab-grown protein sludge will still be possible (if not marketable), but anything resembling meat looks like a bust.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/09/opinion/eat-just-upside-foods-cultivated-meat.html
I think that’s going to be the fate of most if not all modernist or high tech visions of the future. Once they start digging into the details, it is not sustainable. Sustainability is no fun, not exciting and never profitable, not that fake meat was ever going to be profitable.
IMHO this is what will destroy fake food .
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/02/08/too-big-to-comprehend/
The economic problems of the West are so severe that it will make the depression look like a church social . I doubt they will be able to keep the lights on never mind powering fake meat producers .
The author of that article about lab-grown “meat”, Joe Fassler, wrote an article last year about beef which Chris Smaje (quoted below) criticized:
——————————————-
Chris Smaje unpicks Guardian reporter Joe Fassler’s “five myths”
June 6, 2023
The journalist Joe Fassler begins his article on what he calls the five climate myths pushed by the US beef industry by stating “if we’re serious about avoiding the worst scenarios of the climate crisis, people – particularly those who live in the wealthier nations – need to consume fewer animal products”.
I’m going to criticize Fassler’s article here, so I thought I’d start on a point of agreement by endorsing that opening headline. Yes, people in the wealthier nations probably do need to consume fewer animal products – but many of them also need to produce more animal products.
Isn’t that a contradiction? Only if you believe there are no economic options beyond a two-category world comprising consumers who buy things and industries that produce them…
https://8point9.com/chris-smaje-unpicks-guardian-reporter-joe-fasslers-five-myths/
——————————————-
Apologies for the radio silence. I’ve been … doing stuff.
Thanks for keeping things ticking along with all the comments. A bit late for me to add much really, except to say thanks Joel for your comments on the book. And thanks Simon for your links – perhaps the Guardian/Observer isn’t a completely lost cause! I thought Farmerama did a pretty good job regrding manufactured food, trying to stay balanced while laying out all the problems. Likewise with the quietly devastating Prof Pierrehumbert. And thanks to everyone else for the usual interesting and diverse commentaries 🙂
I have some more posts coming up here soon, but I’m still under the pump a bit so please forgive me if I’m sparing in my response to comments.
Meanwhile, another review of ‘Saying NO…’ here:
https://vetsalus.com/news/2024/01/book-review-saying-no-farm-free-future-chris-smaje
And a nice one from Holly Rose in the print version of The Ecologist/Resurgence – a bit of a contrast to the online version…
Back into the hands of the ‘small’
by Holly Rose
Holly Rose reviews Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future: The Case for an Ecological Food System and Against Manufactured Foods by Chris Smaje
https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article6255-back-into-the-hands-of-the-small.html
Howdy Chris.
I’m reading your latest piece on Substack, which doesn’t seem to have been posted here yet. It’s great!
I can’t comment over on Substack, it being closed to comments there. So I am here to point out some good writing on your theme which you’ll want to explore if you haven’t already.
________________
I Warned Against the Green Energy ‘Boom.’ It Sparked Debate
Challengers raised points that merit responses. Mine lead to one answer: degrowth.
Andrew Nikiforuk
https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2023/05/10/Warning-Against-Green-Energy-Boom-Sparks-Debate/
https://sputnikglobe.com/20240210/industrial-megapower-germany-on-edge-of-ruin-thanks-to-energy-war-against-russia-1116714501.html
Regrowth in action
Degrowth .
Hi Chris,
I’m confused. Jarvio had a few energy figures. See page 6.
”The FAEM scenario had the highest CED score, with 240.2 MJ (SD 21.65) of energy consumed. The share of renewables was 18%, which was explained by the relatively high reliance on renewable energy within the Finnish electricity mix (Statistics Finland, 2018). The CED for the FHE scenario was 101.2 MJ (SD 0.52), with the majority coming from renewables (90%). Most of the CED is related to electricity consumption, with 182 MJ (76% of the total contributions) and 92 MJ (91%) for the FAEM and FHE scenario, respectively. This was despite the fact that the direct electricity consumption was higher for the FHE
scenario as both steam and CO2 are produced on-site. This is explained by the lower impact factor resulting from energy use through hydropower than that of the average electricity mix in Finland. The on-site production of CO2 and steam also ensures that these inputs were produced with renewables.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01227-8#ref-CR29
So from that – we see a range of energy possibilities – depending on whether they are discussing electricity used or total energy used. Just from the above we can extrapolate:
Finnish average energy mix = 240.2 megajoules.
182 megajoules of that are electricity, or 76%. That is 50.55 kwh. But if we covert the remainder to electricity – because in the future we’re going to “Electrify Everything”, all 240.2 mj are 66.72 kwh.
Hydro = 101.2 megajoules. 92 Megajoules of that are electricity, or 91%. That’s 25.55 kwh. But if you convert the extra energy to electricity all 101.2 megajoules as electricity is 28.11 kwh.
BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE!
Just to deepen the mystery to a social sciences lay person like myself – there’s another figure. 53 kWh per kg! But this is from a study published this year (Wali et al) that quotes Jarvio’s paper above. So there’s something else I’m missing.
“The energy requirements for cellular agriculture were derived from Järvio et al.29,30—53 kWh per kg MP and 44 kWh per kg cell-cultured RP proteins. Further information on the total energy demand of cellular proteins can be found in Supplementary Fig. 2.”
Wali et al 2024
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01227-8#MOESM2
But the truly ambitious bit about Wali et al? It’s not just about Precision Fermentation – but trying to model the energy transition and whether it can power PF. And even at 53 kWh – it can!
Also – I think Wali is a bit pessimistic how fast the transition is happening. Consider:-
OIL DEMAND TO PEAK: The IEA tracks EV sales over the last few years: 2020: 5% 2021: 9% 2022: 14%
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/executive-summary
OIL GLUT BY 2028! https://www.iea.org/news/growth-in-global-oil-demand-is-set-to-slow-significantly-by-2028
Renewables are 1/4 the cost of nuclear (LCOE – Lazard). They are doubling every 4 years – TWICE the exponential growth of oil in the 20th century which doubled every decade. They are starting to race ahead of the IPCC Paris goals. EG: They wanted 615 GW solar annually by 2030 – but that could happen in the next year or so and it’s still doubling. This article wonders if we’re going to see 3 TERAWATTS annually by 2030! That’s 2 to 3 times the Paris goals. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/12/25/all-i-want-for-christmas-is-one-terawatt-of-solar-deployed-annually/
IEA: World FOSSIL FUEL demand will peak by 2030 and then begin to decline! That’s as a whole!
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/10/iea-energy-peak-fossil-fuel-demand-by-2030
China is about to open 455 GW of renewables – and their emissions could peak in the next few years! The world’s biggest industrial factory – peaking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX_PeNzz-Lw
Professor Andrew Blakers (who won the Queen Elizabeth Prize – like a Nobel prize for engineers) says net zero will be reached well BEFORE 2050! https://theconversation.com/theres-a-huge-surge-in-solar-production-under-way-and-australia-could-show-the-world-how-to-use-it-190241
As we “Electrify Everything” in transport and mining and smelting and industrial heat, everything will be so much more efficient they get the SAME WORK DONE with 60% LESS energy. Burning stuff like cave-men is just that inefficient. A modern all-electric civilisation will run on 40% of today’s energy! https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-energy-efficiency
Australia’s electricity grid will probably be 82% clean by 2030.https://theconversation.com/how-could-australia-actually-get-to-net-zero-heres-how-217778
Australian industrial giants worth a THIRD of our stock-market figured out it’s cheaper to Electrify Everything and run it on renewables. They’re going to build 3 TIMES our 2020 electricity grid capacity in renewables to Electrify their industrial heating with Rondo heat-bricks and electric mining trucks etc. Page 45 here. https://energytransitionsinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Pathways-to-Industrial-Decarbonisation-report-Updated-August-2023-Australian-Industry-ETI.pdf
People are going to be shocked as global demand for oil peaks in a few years – then all fossil fuels peak in 2030 and start their gradual and accelerating decline. That’s not far away. I’m quite surprised to be uttering the next sentence – but the market has tasted super-cheap renewables – and IT LIKES IT!
Thanks for that. Will try to reply when I have a moment.
@Eclipse. This has been covered half a dozen times and it seems pointless to rebut the same argument over and over and over and over. Etc. It seems like no one is listening (thinking ?) on your end, just more spouting of the same eco modernist techno euphoria.
Short form –
1) how much energy is needed to build out the ‘renewable’ energy transition ?
2) where does the energy come from to build out the ‘renewable’ energy transition ?
3) what happens when you dump that much carbon into the atmosphere ?
4) how many tons new minerals / metals need to be mined to build out the ‘renewable’ energy transition ?
5) Where do the materials come from to build out the ‘renewable’ energy transition ?
6) what is the energy cost to mine and process those materials ?
7) how will ‘renewable’ energy sources be replaced in 25 years, at the end of their useful lifetime ?
So far no one as in no one has been able to answer these very basic questions. Will you ? They are all critical questions for your vision of a ‘renewable’ energy future.
Short form –
1) how much energy is needed to build out the ‘renewable’ energy transition ?
ENERGY TO MINE FOR MORE ENERGY? It will take a lot of energy, but if we convert that into a CO2 figure – it’s only 4.5 to 9 months of today’s annual emissions. That is – under half to 3/4 a year to stop fossil fuels forever.
https://www.energy-transitions.org/new-report-scale-up-of-critical-materials-and-resources-required-for-energy-transition/
2) where does the energy come from to build out the ‘renewable’ energy transition ?
You’re kidding, right? Today’s nasty fossil fuels – until we’re not using them any more.
3) what happens when you dump that much carbon into the atmosphere ?
What happens if we don’t mine 4.5 to 9 months worth of CO2 and so end up burning ALL the CO2? What – you think you can quote some kind of Neo-Romantic Amish Manifesto for society and everyone is suddenly going to walk out of the cities and everyone who owns land in the country is going to say “Here you go old chap – here’s your farm and your farmhouse and a few year’s budget to retrain. You good old pal?” I mean – for real?
4) how many tons new minerals / metals need to be mined to build out the ‘renewable’ energy transition ?
I assume you’ve heard we’re running out of “Critical Minerals” and rare earths? Sure. And while it might matter for electronics – it does not matter for bulk energy transition technologies. It will prune away those brands that still use them – because most of the tech has brands that are already moving away from them. Why? It’s the cost! Name a critical mineral you think is essential for the energy transition – and I’ll either show you the alternative or show you why we have MORE than enough! https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/materials/
### Will mining for ET destroy world!? Thoughts so far…
WILL MINING FOR THE ENERGY TRANSITION DESTROY THE ENVIRONMENT?
Global warming must be stopped. It makes every other negative environmental trend worse. But the good news is as the energy transition unfolds global mining will gradually reduce – and that includes the enormous amounts of waste rock removed and processed to get the final pure lithium and copper and steel. The few areas we sacrifice as mines must be rehabilitated as best we can. But that’s nothing compared to losing the biosphere in a climate catastrophe.
HOW MUCH MUST BE MINED FOR THE ENERGY TRANSITION? This is an enormous question – but first – how much do we mine in the way of oil and coal and gas?
That’s about 15 gigatons. 15 BILLION tons. Then it all gets moved around the planet, burned, and causes climate change. In contrast most of the stuff we mine for metals gets dumped as waste rock. It is often smelted locally (or at least regionally) and then shipped in vastly smaller refined metals. It is NOT burned to last in the atmosphere for millennia.
The next most mined thing is iron ore – at 3 billion tons a year – for steel bridges and trains and towers and tools. The energy transition component of that is only about 150 million tons a year – and then a TINY fraction of that is ALL the other minerals combined. Data Scientist Hannah Ritchie summarised the reports.
COAL and GAS for electricity: When we include the waste rock, wind and solar still come in at a THIRD less mining than coal for electricity!
BUT…
OIL was always going to be trickier because of the low energy density of batteries requiring so much concentrated, heavy, refined metals. The mining for EV’s will almost DOUBLE the mining we currently do for oil. Much of that will be left in the area as waste rock and possibly re-buried as they rehabilitate the area at the end of the mine’s life. But this is only for a few decades, and on a downward curve, because as BHP and Rio Tinto electrify, the minerals will not only replace transport oil but mining diesel as well. They won’t need oil to replace oil! Finally – these minerals can get recycled almost forever – and just tiny, tiny top-ups now and then will compensate for any inefficiencies.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/energy-transition-materials
Next questions in next post
5) Where do the materials come from to build out the ‘renewable’ energy transition ?
6) what is the energy cost to mine and process those materials ?
7) how will ‘renewable’ energy sources be replaced in 25 years, at the end of their useful lifetime ?
So far no one as in no one has been able to answer these very basic questions. Will you ? They are all critical questions for your vision of a ‘renewable’ energy future.
5) Where do the materials come from to build out the ‘renewable’ energy transition ?
All over the planet. Google it if you must. There are certain ‘critical mineral’ nations like China with their rare earths or the DRC’s child labour mining Cobalt. Of course there are social and environmental concerns. Activists should watch all groups involved for exploitation of the poor and indigenous groups and destruction of ecosystems or threatened species habitat. Friend-shoring mineral supply lines amongst democratic nations like Australia is a good start. Australia has lots of Cobalt. But that’s for expensive NMC batteries – and the market is already 30% LFP anyway (no rare earth’s just lithium.)
OTHER REPORTS THAT SAY THERE’S ENOUGH:
Energy Transitions.org: https://www.energy-transitions.org/new-report-scale-up-of-critical-materials-and-resources-required-for-energy-transition/
IEA: https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions/mineral-requirements-for-clean-energy-transitions
UN: https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/what-are-energy-transition-minerals-and-how-can-they-unlock-clean-energy-age
6) what is the energy cost to mine and process those materials ?
Covered in question 1 above. But the more we electrify everything, the less energy we use.
Again – when finished we will only need 40% of the original thermal value of fossil fuels! https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-energy-efficiency
For example – watch a 240 tonne electric truck do TWICE the speed of a diesel mining truck. While going UP hill – charging on overheat catenary lines from clean clean hydropower. Does going TWICE the speed mean electric mining will use half the trucks? 1 min here: https://youtu.be/6TxMeHRq1mk?t=213
What about highway trucks? Move over Telsa with your tiny little 36 tonne Semi, Australia has Janus Electric – who cater to 100 tonne road trains!
* Battery conversions on old diesel trucks that need an engine rebuild (every 8 years). The driver or company will make the money back in 1 year.
* Can run 10 trucks from solar on the warehouse roof.
* A guy on a forklift does a 60 second battery swap instead of recharging.
* This is gentler on the batteries that can charge slower, and gentler on the local grid that does not have to handle Tesla “mega-chargers”.
* A 60 second battery swap is not that inconvenient – so it even opens up the possibility of cheaper sodium batteries (which will of course have less range than LFP – but could be so much cheaper one day it’s worth it! And sodium batteries can be made from sea-salt, aluminium, and agri-waste for Hard Carbon cathodes. We’re NOT going to run out of any of that!
https://www.januselectric.com.au/
7) how will ‘renewable’ energy sources be replaced in 25 years, at the end of their useful lifetime ?
The All Electric Civilisation will mine the required raw materials and manufacture them with all the “Electrify Everything” kit that has already been developed – and is now starting to be deployed. Every year the ratio of renewables and EV’s goes up. Due to an energy hungry world still developing – the consumption of fossil fuels is also still rising. But demand will peak around 2030 and then go down. (IEA).
Australia’s industrial giants like BHP and others plan to build 3 TIMES Australia’s 2020 electricity grid capacity just to mine all the green steel, aluminium, copper, nickel, lithium, etc we need for our Domestic market. By 2050 it could be ANOTHER 3 TIMES for the export market! Industrial heating uses a lot of electricity – but with Rondo heat bricks storing 1500 degrees and only losing 1% per day – intermittent renewables can generate consistent heating supply.
Electric industry plans from p 45 of the Feb 2023 PDF. https://energytransitionsinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Pathways-to-Industrial-Decarbonisation-report-Updated-August-2023-Australian-Industry-ETI.pdf
“So far no one as in no one has been able to answer these very basic questions.”
What – do you live in an echo-chamber? You need to get out more. There’s a whole world of peer-reviewed data you’re obviously avoiding.
“They are all critical questions for your vision of a ‘renewable’ energy future.”
I have been asking them for 20 years since I became a peak oil activist. I could not see the answers originally. But now that they have come down in price SO much – we really CAN overbuild them economically for ‘geographic smoothing’ of supply – and even afford some sodium batteries and off-river pumped hydro for storage.
Janus trucks. Electric mining. Rondo heat bricks. Batteries from sea-salt. Off-river pumped hydro at 100 TIMES the potential sites the world needs for deep storage time. Sure – it’s going to be bumpy. But I can’t see any technical inevitability about collapse. Politically though – with Russia invading other countries and China getting hostile? That’s a whole other question. I’m not glibly predicting the future. But I am assured we have the tech to do the energy transition.
But do we have the wisdom to make sure all biodiversity and the biosphere comes through the next few decades of bottleneck with us? That’s the real question.
Let’s start right at the top – I’ve done that calculation too. It looks great but then the real world intrudes. We live in a region where there are only 8 hours of low angle sunlight in winter, when we need the most energy. And there is the month on either end of the season when it is mostly cloudy. Totals and averages do not reflect the peaks in real world demand. Your estimate is too low. By far.
The PV panel EORI provided by some rando guy or company on the internet does not reflect the need to build bigger transmission lines, more electric motors, rewire every house on the planet. Estimates say that it would take as much new copper as has ever been mined since the end of the stone age. Of course that does not exist.
100% recycling !? It is currently, maybe, 30%. You’re going to change that how ?
Using a wide frame, solar EROI comes out to 0.8. A wide frame includes the real world externalities and operating conditions. It will take a lot more than 4.5 to 9 months of total global energy consumption to get the job done. But at 0.8 EROI is it even worth doing ?
If your initial premise is faulty, how do you to come to a correct conclusion ?
The renewable energy transition was covered (by Chris and commenters) in another post:
https://chrissmaje.com/2024/02/how-many-solar-panels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin-thoughts-on-the-eschatology-of-energy-transition/
A recap of my comments there:
A recent report (IRENA) reveals that the electricity generation cost per kWh for new utility-scale solar farms has gone *up* in most of the places being monitored…
The global weighted *average* (of the utility-scale production costs for new solar farms) per kWh may be down to 4.9 cents (US), but this varies greatly by location, for example it’s around 8 or 9 cents (US) in less sunny locations like Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands [Fig. 3-12]. And these are the utility generation costs, not the wholesale or retail prices to industrial and commercial customers.
The costs of the PV panels themselves have pretty much stopped dropping dramatically and started levelling off, even increasing in recent years…
Renewable Power Generation Costs in 2022
International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA)
https://mc-cd8320d4-36a1-40ac-83cc-3389-cdn-endpoint.azureedge.net/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2023/Aug/IRENA_Renewable_power_generation_costs_in_2022.pdf
All that installed capacity still has significant costs, beyond the claimed monetary costs per kWh produced. The externalized costs for PV electricity production have been estimated to be equivalent to US$3.55 per kWh (assuming a 30-year life for PV equipment). This is around two orders of magnitude (100x) higher than the nominal (marginal) cost per kWh for PV production. (And this monetization of externalized costs is itself flawed, since human and environmental damages cannot be totally undone and reversed by spending more money.)
Beyond the billed costs per kWh, society thus indirectly pays an estimated $3.55 for each kWh produced (whether actually consumed or wasted as overgeneration), while the solar farm owners pay a small fraction of this amount for each kWh produced ($0.049/kWh as the global average for the newest solar farms, or around $0.08 or $0.09/kWh for the newest solar farms in less-sunny places like Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands, before the owners mark up the kWh price to sell to their customers).
“Although solar PV power seems more environmentally effective than coal-fired power in the life span, our results reveal the high environmental external cost of producing solar photovoltaic modules, which reminds us to pay more attention to the environmental impact when conducting cost-benefit analysis of renewable technologies. Without incorporating the environmental cost, the real cost of renewable technology will be underestimated.”
Life cycle cost analysis of solar energy via environmental externality monetization
15 January 2023
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969722060090
Hi Steve,
interesting reply. I had to think about that for a bit. A few points.
CHINA CHINA CHINA!
Solar panels are made in China. So of course they are cheaper than they should be – largely due to their low industrial WHS and environmental laws. They just externalise costs by not really processing that pollution. Their rare earths city is famous for the Baogang Tailings Dam and being ‘hell on earth.’ There are no doubt many other horrors in their solar industry.
I’m not buying this PDF – either with money (is there a free version somewhere?) or with my credibility.
I’m curious as to whether they mentioned a REAL cost saver that should be monetized? This little detail called SLAVERY! The polysilicon is made by Uyghurs slaves. I doubt these Chinese ‘academia’ are allowed to even mention this fact.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/29/evidence-grows-of-forced-labour-and-slavery-in-production-of-solar-panels-wind-turbines
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67550551
On the other hand, first world nations are trying to compete. As long as they have first world mining standards and avoid cheap labour practices like SLAVERY – of course their solar panels will be more expensive than China’s. Then there’s the huge state subsidies giving Chinese firms access to cheap power and other kickbacks.
HYPOTHETICAL: IF DE-RISKING GETS SERIOUS AND THE WEST MAKES THEIR OWN POLYSILICON MODULES
Nevertheless – IF the west sunk billions into investing in this technology in some kind of co-ordinated way (difficult geopolitically!) then it seems solar would go up for a while before eventually scaling back down again.
First world mining regulations and environmental and pollution laws and wages would raise costs and eliminate most of the pollution concerns in this paper.
But breakthroughs in Perovskites and other efficiencies – along with manufacturing economies of scales (once they kicked in) would bring the costs down.
EG: Australia has a proposal from the Solar PV industry to the government for taxpayer subsidies to kick off a solar industry here. While some parts of the solar panel would not be that much more expensive if made here – the polysilicon would cost TWICE as much to make. That’s about 30% of the final solar cell – so it’s at least 30% more just for the polysilicon phase. More details here: https://letmesumup.net/episodes/the-old-double-reverse-china-australias-solar-industry-strategy
If this geopolitical mess with China continues – the west may just have to bite the bullet and get into our own solar manufacturing. Hey – I’d vote for Australia to provide green steel and aluminium, Europe to take the wind industry (especially off-shore) and America to take solar. Get into serious friend-shoring – make NATO strong on both military and clean energy alliances – all that jazz.
Because Professor Andrew Blakers – inventor of the PERC Solar Cell – says he expects solar to be HALF the price again by 2030.
So if we can get economies of scale into our solar – then I’m convinced we could eventually manufacture a decent product for a decent price.
AVOIDING THE HEALTH COSTS PAYS FOR THE SUBSIDIES
WHO estimates that fossil fuel pollution costs our global budgets $5 Trillion a year!
https://www.who.int/teams/environment-climate-change-and-health/climate-change-and-health/advocacy-partnerships/manifesto/funding-pollution
The IEA estimates we need to spend $4 Trillion a year on the Energy Transition. https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050
The sooner we get this done, the sooner it starts to pay for itself! And that’s not even costing the extra natural disasters and geo-political stressors from Petro-Dictators pushing their weight around as they invade other countries!
WHERE DO THE ‘EXTERNALISED COSTS’ HIT?
But even if we continue buying Chinese solar and these externalised costs are real (I’m taking everything from this paper with a METRIC TONNE of salt) – do WE bear this externalised cost? Not at all! Unlike global pollution issues like climate change – this is a local issue. These costs are born by the Chinese people, their health system, and their slaves. We don’t pay that bill – the poor Chinese people and Uyghur slaves do. That’s messy morally. But we’re talking about the fate of this world’s biosphere.
SOME QUESTION THE ‘MONETISATION’ OF THE LIFE CYCLE ANALYSIS METHOD IN THE FIRST PLACE!
The EU runs LCA’s across various industries – and it was noted that “monetizing” externalised costs was messy and unclear – and it was probably better to craft legislation that just avoided certain aspects of those anticipated externalities.
“The monetization methodology was identified as one of the most complex and incoherent elements and in the new proposal by the Commission (COM(2017)653 final) **the LCC and monetization of externalities has been removed and replaced by an absolute definition of clean vehicles in order to set consistent and coherent mandatory procurement targets.”** Page 13
https://iclei-europe.org/fileadmin/templates/iclei-europe/lib/resources/tools/push_resource_file.php?uid=WiTjlkpz
FINALLY – SOLAR JUST MOVED TO DOUBLING EVERY 3 YEARS!
“If this growth rate continues, there will be more solar installed in 2031 than all other electricity generation technologies put together.”
https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/2024/04/24/fastest-energy-change-article/
Eclipse,
I’m not going to respond to every one of your points here, but…are you seriously suggesting that it is on balance okay (if “morally messy”) for some people to be enslaved in order to maintain rich Western lifestyles? You frame it as “the fate of this world’s biosphere,” but I’m pretty confident that the biosphere will survive in some form or other without humanity, probably until the sun burns itself out. If there are ways to keep this planet habitable for humans without enslaving anyone, shouldn’t we do those things instead, even if it would mean a drop in standard of living for the West?
One of the reasons I grow a lot of my own food is because of labour justice issues in horticulture. In an ideal world there would be legislation to ensure that whoever is picking my strawberries or lettuce or whatever is paid a fair wage for work that is safe and humane. That is not the world we live in. Current legislation and its enforcement in the UK is entirely inadequate, and so I grow my own strawberries and my own lettuces instead of giving my money to those who unfairly exploit labourers who are particularly vulnerable because of, for example, the hostile immigration environment here. On a tenth of an acre (split over three sites, all rented) with no livestock, I can’t completely feed the three adults in my household, but I can say that our grocery bills are going down year on year instead of up as my skills and the soil health on my growing sites continue to improve. (I’m also not prioritising staple calorie crops, as much due to lack of storage space as anything else; a two-bedroom terraced house in East London doesn’t have a root cellar and every autumn my kitchen becomes an almost-unnavigable a maze of winter squashes, drying beans, apples, demijohns of wine, fermenting pickles and so on… I could really, really do with a garden shed converted into a summer kitchen for some of this stuff.)
Not everyone has my access to land and the time to tend it, of course, but some of that is because we have structured our society in a way that means corporations have to put shareholder profits ahead of the wellbeing employees, customers, or society in general. That is the same issue of externalities as you identify in solar panel manufacture. The history of the enclosures is relevant on this point, and land access promises to be a huge issue moving forward.
Finally, since it seems you’re a podcast listener, you might enjoy Nate Hagens’s podcast “The Great Simplification”.
Hi Kathryn,
no – I do not support Chinese slavery in solar panel camps, nor modern Neoliberal slavery in clothing sweat-shops, child labour from ‘externalised’ sources in other countries, or poor farmers. My main point in raising the slavery issue was to show that this Chinese paper measuring ‘externalised costs’ by a Chinse group of academics was not entirely objective! I would support paying extra for solar De-risked from China (until such time as the new perovskite tech and economies of scale finally bough that price back down again). Do we really want to be beholden to an autocratic regime just like Germany was when they were buying tens of billions of dollars of Russian gas while Russia invaded Ukraine?
Also – I hate corporations and am probably more into some kind of Democratic Worker’s Co-op. Just saying those words makes me a Communist in some eyes – but Seaspray Cranberry juice is a worker’s co-op in America, and of course there is Mondragon in Spain.
No – Nate Hagens is not a podcast I enjoy – and I’ve already got my work cut out for me with “Planet Critical”. It would be one or the other. Nate Hagens has adopted so many of the myths against renewables that I basically see him as a Doomer version of Bjørn Lomborg. Nate accepts a bad EROEI for renewables when all modern papers show it to be otherwise. Nate accepts Simon Michaux’s arguments when a non-technical like myself can show Michaux’s arguments to be fault. (I mean – just substitute his NMC batteries strawman for sodium and pumped hydro and his OWN PAPER shows we have the minerals!) https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/michaux-sans-batteries/
I’ve met misanthropic Doomers that imagine that cheer on the potential collapse of civilisation as the only hope nature has. They forget that Neolithic hunters wiped out many megafauna with spears – and that the modern world (for all its many crimes against causing the crimes against nature in the first place) now has the wealth and education to support threatened species breeding programs. Medieval kingdoms razed half the forests in Europe for grazing space and wood for fires. But once they discovered coal – some of those forests started growing back. The 20th century is known as the era of coal and oil, but the 21st century will be the era of steel and silicon in wind and solar as we abandon even coal.
Consider tens of millions of starving people pouring out of dying cities. It will be like the siege of Paris when they ate Castor and Pollux, their zoo elephants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor_and_Pollux Many conservation parks and biological breeding programs would crash and burn along with the economy. But also many worthwhile scientific institutions, cultural artefacts, and bold accomplishments in art and science and architecture would also crash and burn.
As Monbiot wrote to the Dark Mountain project in 2009,
“You would purge the planet of industrial civilisation, at the cost of billions of lives, only to discover that you have not invoked “a saner world” but just another phase of destruction.
Strange as it seems, a de-fanged, steady-state version of the current settlement might offer the best prospect humankind has ever had of avoiding collapse. For the first time in our history we are well-informed about the extent and causes of our ecological crises, know what should be done to avert them, and have the global means – if only the political will were present – of preventing them. Faced with your alternative – sit back and watch billions die – Liberal Democracy 2.0 looks like a pretty good option.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/aug/17/environment-climate-change
It’s all such an unnecessary fantasy – like watching a Max Max movie and wondering if that were the answer. But we are on the verge of an exponential explosion of renewables, of building Ecocities out of recyclable materials, of meeting all human needs for a modern and convenient lifestyle, and finally reversing population growth into population decline. There will admittedly be a pulse in mining – but then it will radically reduce as the energy transition finishes and we start recycling the first generation of wind and solar. And don’t forget all the steel in the oil kit – with 40% of cargo ships no longer needed! I’m hoping PF can scale economically – and bankrupt the modern livestock industry that feeds so few people after taking up 34% of the non-ice land on earth.
Basically, we need to Decouple from nature so we don’t eat her to death! http://www.ecomodernism.org/manifesto-english
It’s good to be reminded how long and how indiscriminately George has been spraying his “billions will die” shtick around at all sorts of people – Paul and Dougald, Jim Thomas & of course now me. Shades of Margaret Thatcher – ‘There Is No Alternative’ to liberal capitalism. Jim’s critique of George’s hunger mongering in the piece I previously linked is a masterpiece of restraint. Funny now to think that George and I originally connected over a shared critique of ecomodernism: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2015/sep/24/meet-the-ecomodernists-ignorant-of-history-and-paradoxically-old-fashioned
I do wish that ecomodernists would make more effort to understand why some of us think their own prescriptions are paradoxically old fashioned (not least around modernisation and agrarian transition), are doomed to failure, and indeed put multitudes at risk of death. This isn’t only about energy. Even a successful transitioning of the existing energy economy to low carbon alternatives wouldn’t abate many of the major risks. But I’ll write more about that presently.
Hi Steve L,
I found an article about solar potentially halving again in price.
I have no idea how the geopolitics is going to play out – but IF the west decides to ‘De-risk’ the actual solar wafers and build it ourselves – here is a technology that might help bring the (western escalated) price of solar back under control again.
“An international group of researchers have developed a new bifacial solar technology that they claim can not only generate power with greater efficiency than traditional solar, but at significantly less cost than existing solar panels.
Scientists from the University of Surrey in England, working with colleagues at the University of Cambridge, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xidian University, and Zhengzhou University, have developed a flexible perovskite solar panel that use electrodes made of tiny carbon nanotubes.
These are able to generate more power with greater efficiency and at a significantly reduced cost.
Using single-walled carbon nanotubes as both front and back electrodes – offering high transparency, conductivity, and stability – the bifacial perovskite solar cells boast a bifaciality (the ratio of rear efficiency in relation to front efficiency) of over 98% and a power generation density of over 36%.
Nanotubes such as the ones used here – measuring only 2.2 nanometres across, slightly thinner than a strand of human DNA – provide improved electricity conductivity, stability, as well as greater mechanical flexibility and durability.
The researchers also demonstrated an “exceptional” power-per-weight of 73.75Wg, which they claim is “the highest value so far” seen.
Power generation was notably higher compared to monofacial silicon cells, with a power output of approximately 35kWh during sunnier periods, compared to approximately 28kWh for monofacial cells.
Even in winter, the bifacial cells “could harvest albedo energy efficiently,” producing approximately 13kWh, compared to 11kWh for monofacial silicon cells.”
https://reneweconomy.com.au/new-bifacial-solar-technology-generates-more-power-at-much-reduced-cost/
I’ll add a comment about the mentioned 2024 study in Nature, since it’s new territory on the topic of this essay (“The energetic implausibility of manufactured food revisited”).
That study (El Wali et al., 2024) looks at what it calls “cellular agriculture”, lumping together microbial protein (MP) and cell-cultured recombinant proteins (RP). The study results (drumroll…) actually hurt the case for microbial or cellular proteins.
Their results show that replacing all livestock protein with “cellular protein” would actually increase the overall CO2 emissions (!!!), which they try to counterbalance with the reduced CH4 emissions if livestock are eliminated. However, when considering the combined effects of CO2 plus methane emissions for livestock protein, the results were inconclusive. “The 30-year period of the studied dynamic model (2020–2050) does not allow a conclusive statement on the long-term environmental costs or benefits of the livestock replacement model with cellular agriculture…”
That study would have had more realistic results (which would have been even worse for “cellular protein” proponents) if it had based its calculations on the more complete energy accounting done in the Leger et al study (which Chris Smaje used), instead of basing its calculations on the Jarvio et al study (which Chris previously discussed).
Still, that study (El Wali et al., 2024) gives an unintended black eye to the “cellular agriculture” proponents, since it found that replacing meat with cellular protein actually *increases* the overall CO2 emissions. Even when the methane emissions from livestock are considered, the study found that the overall effect on the environment could still be worse (inconclusive results) with cellular protein when compared to livestock protein.
It’s too bad they didn’t also run the numbers for a full replacement of animal protein with plant protein, as an alternative scenario for comparison to cellular protein. For this farmed plant protein scenario, the global food energy demand should go down (below current demand) significantly, due to the protein-creating inefficiencies of the current livestock industry (feeding soybeans to cows, for example). Compare this decrease in energy demand (for farmed plant protein) to the increase in energy demand resulting from cellular protein — the study found that with PV-powered cellular protein replacing livestock protein, the total energy consumption for global food systems would be nearly double the current level (an 83% increase, which would be even higher if the more-complete energy accounting of the Leger study had been used).
Likewise for that study’s calculations of GHG emissions, it would be nice to see the numbers for how their cellular protein scenario compares to farmed plant protein (with or without some default livestock). In scenarios without any livestock, and without the related methane emissions, the overall GHG emissions would surely be less for the farmed protein scenario, when compared to the cellular protein scenario. The study already suggests this, as it says that without the methane emissions from livestock, cellular protein would result in higher CO2 emissions. It follows that the cellular protein would result in more GHG emissions than farmed plant protein.
El Wali, M., Rahimpour Golroudbary, S., Kraslawski, A. et al. Transition to cellular agriculture reduces agriculture land use and greenhouse gas emissions but increases demand for critical materials. Commun Earth Environ 5, 61 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01227-8
Hi Steve,
no – the study did not conclude that Precision Fermentation increased GHG! Not by a long shot.
First – I’m not sure the authors fully appreciated how fast the energy transition is accelerating if they think a third of it will still have to be done by 2050!
Second – the paragraph you are referring to is not the type of PF that Monbiot and I are on about. There’s Microbial Protein (MP) which turns electricity and a few minerals into food. Then there’s Recombinant Proteins) which sadly still require old fashioned photosynthesis and arable land and soil and the carbon emissions of all that to grow sugar cane or corn for corn syrup – as they then give this feedstock to a different bug that converts them into dairy-like products for ‘vegan’ milk etc. I’m glad people are playing with this tech – but I don’t see it as the PF Monbiot and I are excited about.
The paragraph you must be referring to spells it out.
“Sensitivity analysis
A sensitivity analysis was conducted to examine the spectrum of changes in the main results. Two parameters among the cellular agriculture production acted as the dependent variables: (1) electricity consumption with an input increase of 20%, and (2) glucose production with an input increase of 20%. Details on the sensitivity analysis modelling can be found in Supplementary Method 2. The inventory inputs can be found in Supplementary Data 9–11 for the cell-cultured RP, and Supplementary Data 13 for the MP. ”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01227-8#MOESM2
I hope this helps.
Regards,
Eclipse
Actually, everything I wrote in my comment about that study still stands.
What they call “cellular agriculture” is meant to replace livestock protein (meat, dairy, and eggs). They looked at MP as the meat protein substitute, and RP products (proteins excreted by Genetically Modified fungus/yeast) to substitute for dairy products and eggs. The data they used for MP production came from the Järviö (et al.) study which Chris discussed above, and specifically references the hydrogen-oxidizing bacterial process used by Solar Foods (for making the “Precision Fermentation” bacterial protein powder which George Monbiot touted in Regenesis).
Here’s an important line from the El Wali (et al.) study: “When differentiating between the different gas types [CO2 and methane] in the studied model, the overall CO2 emissions followed an increasing trend following the replacement progress of livestock with cellular agriculture by the year 2050.” So their results do show that replacing livestock protein with “cellular agriculture” increases the overall CO2 emissions. This result is for “PF” bacterial protein powder substituting for the meat protein component, plus the RP products substituting for the dairy and egg components.
Monbiot’s “Precision Fermentation” bacterial protein powder is framed by its proponents as being a substitute for meat, but it’s really a substitute for plant-based protein powder which already exists and is widely available in several types (e.g., pea, soy, hemp). The hyped-up food items being made with bacterial protein powder as an ingredient could be made with existing plant protein powders instead. The bacterial protein powder unfortunately requires large amounts of energy to produce, unlike plant-based protein.
Making bacterial protein powder, with its high energy requirement, is actually counterproductive when a full transition to renewables is a goal (still unachieved). Plant protein could be used instead of bacterial protein powder, and all the saved PV-generated electricity could be put to better uses, bringing us closer to a full transition to renewables.
I don’t understand why people think re-forested land isn’t going to pretty quickly fill up with deer, who also fart methane. We could, of course, eat the deer, but then we’ve really just gone from farming cattle on pasture to farming deer in forests. Both of these are many times better than industrial models where livestock eat the over-produced grains of the monoculture cropping system instead of grazing, but I don’t think anyone here is seriously advocating for continuing with that. (There’s a huge difference between cutting hay for your animals to eat over winter — and tree fodder/tree hay is a thing here — and purchasing the cheapest feed you can find; this is one of the reasons I don’t have any livestock in my own systems.)
Apologies, I’m short on time at the moment to respond to Eclipse’s comment, and I see other people have been contributing to the debate – thank you. I’ll just make a few brief points for now, but may come back to some of this in more detail presently.
The El Wali study appears to use the rather incomplete and unclear energy data from the Jarvio study – and I’ve got nothing to add really about that over my remarks above.
Regarding a clean energy transition, I understand how some people think it might be feasible within a reasonable timescale, albeit more on paper than in real-world scenarios, especially real-world geopolitical scenarios. But given that it hasn’t started yet, there are numerous unresolved issues with it and the timescale for it is so incredibly tight, I can’t really understand why anyone would think it’s such a shoo-in – especially to the extent of throwing in the additional vast energy costs of cellular food, which isn’t really necessary anyway as per Steve’s comment.
Relevant questions about transition minerals to my mind are not how they compare to fossil fuel extraction, but whether they’re feasible and sustainable in their own terms. The IEA among others raises serious questions about this. And while, yes, they believe fossil consumption will peak in the 2030s, some of their scenarios project only slow declines thereafter. There are plenty of reasons to think that full decarbonisation of the existing political economy is unlikely.
In relation to this:
“you think you can quote some kind of Neo-Romantic Amish Manifesto for society and everyone is suddenly going to walk out of the cities and everyone who owns land in the country is going to say “Here you go old chap – here’s your farm and your farmhouse and a few year’s budget to retrain. You good old pal?” I mean – for real?”
That sounds a lot like Monbiot’s mischaracterization of my position. Frankly, I want to give more of my attention to people who are interested in seriously characterizing different future pathways and their problems, including lower-energy and agrarian localist futures. I’m not so interested in dualities like Modern High-Energy Global Consumer Capitalism versus Neo-Romantic Amish Manifestos, especially when ideological space is accorded only to the former term to breathe.
10 TIMES TODAY’S SOLAR
OK, that’s the energy cost of this. I’m going with Chris’s higher energy cost figures to feed the world – as the higher energy to food ratio seems to be backed by the latest papers. (Reminder – I’m a social sciences environmentalist – not an engineer. Of course I’m going with the peer-reviewed papers!) 10 times today’s solar. Is that achievable? The IEA says “Solar PV accounted for 4.5% of total global electricity generation, and it remains the third largest renewable electricity technology behind hydropower and wind.“ https://www.iea.org/energy-system/renewables/solar-pv
So hydropower has been built across the last century, and wind got a head start on solar back in the day. Solar is still coming third place in accumulated deployment – but as we saw above – it’s GROWTH RATE is first place. It will soon outstrip all the others.
10 times TODAY’S solar means the goal is 45% of today’s enormous electricity demand to feed the world. Is that worth it? From a carbon point of view – of course it is! If greenhouse gases were 4 blankets overheating our planet, 3 of them would be fossil fuels and 1 of them would be agriculture and land use changes.
https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data_.html
So 75% is fossil energy – the 25% is food and land use. The figure Chris gave us was in solar power – and we’ll return to that in a moment because it’s got such a great punchline! But at the moment we can see that it APPEARS we are struggling to replace the 75% which is fossil fuels like oil and coal – especially as Chris rightly points out they are STILL GROWING! (For now.) Do we really want to add another 25%? Well, with wind and solar both contributing to growing all our food through Precision Fermentation – yes! Because if we see the goal as removing all 4 blankets worth of climate heating and saving the biosphere, doing 45% solar to reduce that 25% carbon emissions AND save the biosphere from farming land use seems worth it!
So the goal is 45%. Solar power has been doubling every 4 years for a few decades. Do the maths and in 12 years solar hits 32% and then jumps to 72% by 16 years. (That’s without considering wind – which is also growing exponentially but behind solar.)
Now here’s that punchline I promised above. Solar just started a doubling trend of EVERY 3 YEARS!
Blakers: “If this growth rate continues, there will be more solar installed in 2031 than all other electricity generation technologies put together.” https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/2024/04/24/fastest-energy-change-article/
IF it can continue at that rate it will hit 75% of today’s electricity in just 12 years, and probably hit 45% somewhere after just 10 years.
MINERALS – IF YOU HAVE IEA REFERENCES AND SPECIFIC MINERALS OF CONCERN – PLEASE SHARE
Assertions are one thing – evidence another.
Remember – every energy transition technology has a viable substitute for rare earths and critical minerals. There is no getting around this. Some are already deployed at scale – some just about to be commercialised. But what happens when the price of one brand goes up? Stimulation into more exploration and processing of the rare minerals in question – while the alternative brands get mass produced up to scale and then suddenly explode exponentially and take over. See “Abundant energy from abundant materials” on my blog. I should go searching. There’s probably better papers on it all by now. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/materials/
“There are plenty of reasons to think that full decarbonisation of the existing political economy is unlikely.”
I am slowly working through your “Angels on a pinhead” article. I’m not sure there are any new Renewable Sceptic arguments there. Also – quoting Michaux is NOT a good look. Have you seen what he’s into lately? The guy sounds like a quack with “UFO technology” and everything he goes on about in his desire to build a little Venus Project cult.
DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION
Subsistence farms create poverty, higher food prices, and higher population growth. Someone’s got to work the farm when you’re too old and infirm. Someone’s got to look after you in your old age. So when subsistence, you have lots of kids. The State can’t look after you – they’re bankrupted by everyone working in their fields and not having enough money to pay decent taxes. Educate women and children and give them different opportunities and dreams – and they’ll have less kids. That’s the Demographic Transition for you. It seems you want to reverse this?
Also, ‘industrial feedlot cities’ can be great if we design them well and green up the economy.
I’m into Ecocities and a (mostly) Decoupled economy. I’m into political change and removing Corporate power – and quite like the idea of worker co-ops instead of stock-market owned corporations.
But here’s the magic from an efficiency point of view. Cities enjoy an efficiency bonus. The basic rule of thumb? Every time you double a city’s population you get an extra 30% GDP for free. To illustrate, say you have 5,000 people in one town and 5,000 people in another separate town. The total GDP would be the GDP of 10,000 people. But if all these people lived together in one single town of 10,000 people, they would get the GDP of 13,000 people. That’s the work of an extra 3000 people – for free. Just because living together shares resources and gets things done more efficiently. They’re not even sure when this bonus stops – it might be as high as a city of 40 million. https://news.mit.edu/2013/why-innovation-thrives-in-cities-0604
You would destroy all this with mere name-calling. There can be beauty in cities, diversification of jobs, and wealth created to share around more fairly than we do today.
Back to the land in a chaotic scrabble for a piece of farmland – while everyone’s getting poorer -and more and more tempted to just march in and raze the last nature reserves to the ground. If your family is going to starve – you’ll slash and burn that last forest. You’d eat the elephants in the zoo. Remember Castor and Pollux – eaten by the starving citizens of Paris in the famous siege.
It’s only the wealth of some nations that’s keeping many species from going extinct. If society collapses – nature is NOT going to do well!
TONE OF ARGUMENT?
For context I’m an Australian born White Male with parents that migrated from England. With my social sciences background – I’m ashamed at much of Australia’s history with our First Nations. But when I listened to you interviewed on Planet Critical – I learned that because I support PF I’m part of “imperialistic technocratic forces” that “kick indigenous people off their lands”. I’m even responsible for “robbing them of their culture – and language – and ability to think!” Not only this – I’m for “forcing people to live in industrial feedlot cities”. Because I want PF to feed the world, return 34% of the grazed land back to nature, create habitats, and regrow the razed forests that would amount to about 3 to 4 TRILLION trees which would return CO2 to preindustrial levels and give the biosphere a chance! Call me crazy – but that sounds awesome. All because it divorces the solar collection area from arable land. All because solar panels to hydrogen to bacterial is 10 times more efficient with land than soy beans. But because I love the idea of Precision Fermentation – somewhere in raising a family and being a climate activist and wanting clean energy I somehow accidentally put on a brown shirt and started goose-stepping down Sydney’s streets!
Wow – talk about giving people ‘ideological space to breathe’! Then Rachel had the gall to ask why PF supporters got so upset in this debate? Gee – I wonder?
At this stage in my game, I’m prioritising engagements with people that I think are likely to be constructive, informative and/or nourishing. That feels unlikely in your case, so I’m pretty much going to move on, but thanks for commenting here. I do intend to come back to the renewables issue on this blog at some point soon, and I’ll take a look at some of your points in that context.
The IEA report I was thinking of is this one: https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/ffd2a83b-8c30-4e9d-980a-52b6d9a86fdc/TheRoleofCriticalMineralsinCleanEnergyTransitions.pdf
Re Michaux, there seems to be a bit of an ad hominem flash mob vibe building about him among renewables proponents that’s evident in your comment. Better to stick IMO to points of empirical disagreement.
There’s way too much tendentious argumentation in your ‘Demographic Transition’ & ‘Tone of Argument’ sections for me to feel inclined to write a significant reply. I’ve written quite a bit on agrarianism and urbanism over the years, and don’t buy into your framing of them.
Regarding the ‘Tone of argument’ section … well, I haven’t relistened to the pod with Rachel but I’m pretty certain I didn’t say that people who support manufactured food are responsible for robbing indigenous people of their ability to think etc etc. And if I did, sorry, it must have been a slip of the tongue. As to your “return grazed land back to nature, create habitats, and regrow the razed forests that would amount to about 3 to 4 TRILLION trees which would return CO2 to preindustrial levels and give the biosphere a chance” that just begs so many questions, many of which I’ve discussed at length in my books and on this blog. I’m interested to discuss those issues, but again only when I think the discussion is likely to be constructive and nourishing.
BTW I’m not wild about anonymous commenters. IMO a pseudonym should put a special onus on its user to be a generous listener.
So … moving on now, thank you.
Hi Chris,
I understand. Also – I want you to know that my conversational tone is usually a little more polite. I had some frustration to get out after that podcast where Rachel attacked PF motives, and you basically just agreed with her. If you were just being polite and humouring her – I apologise – but it was hard to pick that from that episode. Maybe try listening to the relevant sections again?
There is a reason I’m anonymous. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/about/
But I hear what you are saying – the internet is a vast place and there are plenty of trolls. I don’t count myself as one of them because unlike trolls – conversations like this have actually changed my mind over the years. I’m wired a bit weirdly in that I’m a bit lazy – and unless I’m being pushed by conversations like this – I’m not likely to read the harder material I need to grow.
Thanks for your time. And even though I disagree with your conclusions, thank you for being the sort of person to think through the big issues and not just settle for the infotainment culture we’re saturated in. Conversations like this help iron sharpen iron.
As long as I watch my tone – do you mind if I continue with some of the conversations with others in these comments? There are some points I would like to follow up?
Go well,
Eclipse
Thanks, I appreciate that response (& its tone). Certainly your comments have helped push me to look again at the renewables issue, which I hope to do in due course. Meanwhile, yes I’m happy for you to keep commenting here. The bar for getting blocked is quite high, but politeness certainly helps to keep it aloft
Eclipse, you have alot of energy and I don’t want to waste that. What is jarring is the western midernist position that you get to tell everyone else what to do. Apart from the questionable ethics of this view, which Chris is pointing out, it lacks practical action. Who will implement your vision, does anyone else have a say? Perhaps speak to some of the indigenous people in your area for some assistance in defining the right story and wrong story in your thoughts. The western modernist position as viewed from indigenous traditions is narcissistic. From my limited understanding alot of aboriginal story is specifically to deal with narcissism within the human condition.
If you are listening to Rachel’s excellent pod casts then you will have heard from the latest one that the building industry has to reduce by 96% in the next 7 years, to remain safely within planetary boundaries. This staggering fact must surely curtail our dreams of a completely new infrastructure of energy.
Our mental energy can now focus on low energy, agroecology and rewilding, with a focus on hyperlocal economies functioning within the capacity of the bioregion, through direct (local) democracy and people’s assembly. If the next step is anything it will be done together through a deepening consensus with all beings in the earth.
Hi Joel,
My views come from listening to people much smarter than myself. I’m nothing – a burnt out peak oil activist with a social sciences background and 20 years of engaging with different civilisational models and technological and cultural changes.
Chris Smaje seems to be telling us that 4.4 billion people need to go back to the land. So let me turn your questions to myself back on that project.
“Apart from the questionable ethics of this view… it lacks practical action.”
That is – it’s one thing to waffle on about ‘everyone’ going back to the land – it’s another thing to actually PLAN it! Data Scientist Hannah Ritchie who has looked at the stats says:-
“Most (84%) of the world’s 570 million farms are smallholdings; that is, farms less than two hectares in size.1 Many smallholder farmers are some of the poorest people in the world. Tragically, and somewhat paradoxically, they are also those who often go hungry.
A shift towards small-scale farming can be an important stage of a country’s development, especially if it has a large working age population. But, it’s gruelling work with poor returns: small farms can achieve good yields but need lots of human labor and input.2 Labor productivity is low.
This is why countries move beyond a workforce of farmers: younger people get an education, move towards cities, and try to secure a job with higher levels of productivity and income. A country cannot leave deep poverty behind when most of the population work as smallholder farmers…
…Increasing the productivity of smallholder farming is a crucial step in countries transitioning from poverty to middle-incomes. Raising the output and incomes of smallholder farmers should be an important focus, even if they produced very little of the world’s food. This is because most of the world’s farms are smallholders, and they are some of the poorest people in the world.
We should avoid the romanticization of a future where most still spend their time working the fields for small returns. That would be a future where hundreds of millions continue to live in poverty.”
https://ourworldindata.org/smallholder-food-production
Then try Monbiot – these objections NEED to be addressed.
“Lands of Plenty
We benefit above all from a different legacy: the marvel of the past 50 years of falling hunger during a time of rising population, a marvel we in the rich world scarcely acknowledge, so comfortable has it made us. This remarkable phenomenon was widely considered, just 60 or 70 years ago, simply impossible.
There are three things upon which I think we can all agree. First, that this marvel came at a great environmental cost. It was delivered through hungry and thirsty new crop varieties, reliant for their survival on lashings of agrochemicals, unsustainable water use and practices that can accelerate soil degradation. Second, that it also involved severe social and political dislocations, including land-grabbing, enclosures and rising corporate power and concentration. Third, that it might now be running out of road: the prevalence of global undernourishment rose from 613 million (median estimate) in 2019 to 735 million in 2022.
The immediate reasons for this partial reversal are the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but there are also three deeper and increasingly urgent issues: the decline of crucial resources, such as soil and water, environmental shocks hammering farm production, and the global food chain’s loss of systemic resilience.
So the question – one of the key questions of our time – is how we can feed a population likely to rise to 9 or 10 billion by the middle of the century before starting to decline, reliably, equitably and at a much lower environmental cost. In other words, how we might feed the world without devouring the planet, the subject of my book Regenesis.
There are, as I found, plenty of possible ways forward. But there are no ways backward. If we were to seek to restore the agricultural systems of, say, 60 or 70 years ago, a time, remember, when many people were deeply pessimistic about human nutrition and expected global starvation as the population rose, their grim predictions would materialise. Why? Because productivity was much lower than it is today. In 2023, a world of 8.1 billion people suffers far less hunger and famine than the world of 3.2 billion did in 1963, the year of my birth.
Let’s pause to consider this for a moment, because it is one of the most remarkable (and, bizarrely, least celebrated) transformations of our time.
The numbers who died in famines were especially high in the 1960s, as a result of China’s Great Leap Backwards. An estimated 16.6 million perished during mass starvation events in that decade. This compares to 8.8 million in the 1950s and 3.4 million in the 1970s. But 3.4 million, by comparison to more recent figures, is massive. Between 2010 and 2016, the most recent years in the standardised dataset, 255,000 people died this way, all of them in the famine that afflicted Somalia. Since then, there have been four major famines: in Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia (again) and Tigray, in which, in total, hundreds of thousands died. All four were caused by conflict. Famine is also much less geographically widespread than it used to be: it now tends to be confined to one nation or province at a time, rather than afflicting vast areas.
To grasp just how astonishing this decline in mass death through hunger has been, we need to look at the death rate in famines as a proportion of the population. A century ago, the rate stood at 82 per 100,000 people. In the 1930s, it was 56, in the 1940s, 79, the 1950s, 32, the 1960s, 50, the 1970s, 8.4, and on down to the most recent figures: 0.5. At no known point in recorded history has the third horseman wielded less deadly power.
There’s a similar trend in total deaths from malnutrition (in other words not only those that occurred in the mass events known as famines). These fell, on a fairly steady trajectory, from 656,000 in 1990 to 212,000 in 2019.
What lies behind these extraordinary trends? There are several reasons, but let me dwell on two of the crucial ones. One is the much greater availability of food per person. This is also a remarkable phenomenon. Our World in Data, which collates such global figures, shows that between 1961 and 2014 the world’s production of cereals rose by 280%. This is twice the increase in the global population during that period (136%). It was achieved almost entirely through higher crop yields per hectare.
Another is the long-distance transport of food, something that many of us have railed against, but which, for all its downsides, makes an essential contribution to falling rates of hunger. The reason is simple: if there is a bad harvest or outright crop failure in one place, food can now be shifted from regions with a crop surplus, either through trade or through aid and famine relief programmes. The extreme globalisation of the food system has introduced new sets of problems. But without long-distance transport, many more would starve.
Returning to earlier modes of subsistence is a formula for global catastrophe on a scale that defies imagination.”…
…”He explains this contention as follows: “The narrative of agricultural improvement has always had this class element to it – a concern with class improvement for unmanaged farmers as well as agricultural improvement for unmanaged farming.” Yup, that’s the real agenda: a cunning plot to improve farmers’ table manners. My interest in high yields couldn’t possibly be because I worry about how, without them, 8 billion people might be fed.
But this is by no means the end of it. If you believe that enough food should be grown to feed everyone, you are also guilty of “productivism”, “consumerism”, even “colonialism”.
This brings us to the issue he carefully swerves throughout the book: that a certain number of people requires a certain amount of food, and this food has both to be produced and to reach those who need it. If there’s not enough food, or it’s not accessible and affordable to everyone, people will starve. It seems extraordinary to have to point this out.
One of the reasons why high yields ensure that more people can be fed is that more supply reduces the price of food, making it more accessible to the poor. Chris flatly rejects this reasoning. He asserts that “Low food prices, high yields and overproduction are absolutely at the root of food system problems, including global poverty and hunger.” He then goes on to make two statements that left my jaw on the floor:
Lower food prices are “the last thing the global poor need. The result is usually more poverty, more hunger”.
and “Higher food prices might alleviate hunger globally”.
You might have imagined that such astonishing statements would be carefully explained and evidenced. But they are asserted without justification. The closest he gets is to point out that, in countries like the UK, people spend more on housing and energy than they do on food (which is true) and that the cheapness of this food helps the owners of housing and energy to generate more profit, which might be true, but would need some unpacking.
But this says nothing about the situation of the global poor, the subject of those two astonishing statements. So let’s just take a moment.
The global definition of an affordable diet is one that costs 52% or less of average household expenditure. Using this definition, 3 billion people – over one-third of the global population – cannot afford a healthy diet. In other words, buying adequate food would mean spending more on it than on housing, energy, education, health, transport, clothing and all other items put together.
Importantly, the 3 billion below the line include not just urban people and rural people working in the non-agricultural economy, but also many subsistence farmers, some of whom cannot produce enough food, and of sufficient diversity, to meet their nutritional needs.
In some countries, a healthy diet costs more than the median income: even if people spent all their money trying to purchase one, they still couldn’t afford it. Yes, the problem is poverty: a gross maldistribution of wealth. Yes, this maldistribution urgently needs to be addressed, which is why we need political and economic change, not just new technologies. But while I have seen no evidence (and Chris provides none) that higher food prices alleviate global hunger, there is a wealth of evidence that they exacerbate it.
Is it really possible that you can write a book on food and farming and fail to grasp this basic fact? Yes, it seems it is. Saying No to a Farm-Free Future is a powerful lesson in how motivated reasoning can lead you to an utterly perverse and ludicrous position.
Let Them Eat Nothing
So how does Chris Smaje believe people should be fed? After launching such a ferocious attack on evil bastards like me, you might expect him to produce a clear alternative. But another remarkable aspect of this book, and of the movement it speaks to, is how vague it becomes on such trifling matters as producing sufficient food for 8 billion people. Here are the most specific phrases I could find, while trying to decipher how he proposes that everyone on Earth should be fed.
“Predominantly local self-provisioning of food, fibre and other material requisites of life”
We should “gain autonomy and feed ourselves”
People should “spread themselves out in the landscape and make low energy livelihoods there”
“Repeasantisation, where commercial farmers step off the productivity treadmill and …. orient themselves instead to more autonomous local agricultures geared to local needs”
“We could boost urban food provision by increasing the number of allotments, community gardens, market gardens and truck farms on brownfield sites”
So the question which arises – and please forgive this ecomodernist, urbanist, productivist, consumerist, colonialist framing – is who, in this world of “self-provisioning” and “repeasantised” commercial farmers, will feed those who do not feed themselves?
Most of the places where large numbers of people live do not have sufficient fertile land nearby to support them. A paper in the journal Nature Food found that only a quarter of the world’s people could be fed with staple grain crops grown within 100 kilometres of where they live. The average minimum distance at which the world’s people can be supplied with staple foods, it found, is 2,200 kilometres. Much of the world’s food is grown in vast, lightly-habited lands (US plains, Canadian prairies, Russian steppes etc) and shipped to tight, densely-populated places.
These are the numbers to which people of Chris’s persuasion most furiously object, even though they have no answer to them. Why? Because the numbers are incompatible with their worldview. They show that, while agrarian localism might be great as far as it goes, it simply cannot, by itself, meet the challenge of feeding the world.”
https://www.monbiot.com/2023/10/04/the-cruel-fantasies-of-well-fed-people/
Joel said: “Perhaps speak to some of the indigenous people in your area for some assistance in defining the right story and wrong story in your thoughts. The western modernist position as viewed from indigenous traditions is narcissistic.”
Hey – when Americans could insanely vote for a malignant narcissist like Trump in 2016 – maybe they’ve got a point! I’m not defending any and everything about the modern world, modern culture, modern consumerism, modern corporations, and modern entitlement culture. But as an environmentalist who also happens to love technology and some aspects of the modern world – I’m going to do my best to defend a vision of a Bright Green future. Starving the world ain’t it!
But who said British conquest of these lands didn’t so traumatise the indigenous peoples here that a good fraction of them are not functionally living their culture – but are urbanised – or worse – out in an isolated bush town raved by alcoholism? (Many indigenous towns are ‘dry’ because the elders have seen what alcohol does to their communities – and there is statistically less alcoholism in the indigenous population as a result. But those communities that are hit by drink culture are hit hard!)
So what are the stats? “In 2021, 37.1% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people lived in capital city areas, compared to 34.7% in 2016. Around half of those living in South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia lived in capital city areas.” https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/australia-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-population-summary
Look what’s happening. The jobs are in the cities. Cities have their ‘City Size Bonus’ of 30% GDP for free every time you double the population. Cities can be hell holes – or we can make them awesome.
“building industry has to reduce by 96% in the next 7 years,”
Yeah, right. Because the dozens of climate and environmental programs I scan and listen to just somehow missed that fact. What – is this the next Simon Michaux I have to go and study for months just to learn that the basic premises are all cherry-picked myths? My sister in law has a Phd in Ecocity design and guarantees there are enough bountiful materials to construct beautiful, modern, convenient Ecocities for all. We published her book (my wife is a graphic designer). It’s a masterpiece of beauty and practicality and hope. After all – she designed for hope. A young bloke in my earliest peak oil group committed suicide – and it changed her whole approach from “do something because otherwise there’s doom ahead” to “Let’s do this other thing because it is so GREAT!”
Converting 4.4 billion people into poor peasants does not sound great. I fear both we and the biosphere would lose a lot!
please forgive this ecomodernist, urbanist, productivist, consumerist, colonialist framing
There is always space for forgiveness! From what you have said you have experienced significant trauma and it sounds like the book that came out of that has been part of the journey of your healing. I’m not about trying to trash that in any way. However, local agrarianism will not be an impediment to that vision in any way, it will be the industrial corporate global governance systems to which the city is attached.
I would like to suggest the work of Tyson Junkaporta, and in particular his book, Sand Talk. There is an amazing youth organisation in Australia, called Aime, who Tyson is working with –
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6NPrR9n5JqgUuNA01jIwkL
We all want a bright green future, and there is no reason that cities, working within planetary boundaries can’t exist. Ancient Athens was governed by the farmers that fed the city, London was supplied by the market gardens that surrounded it. There are questions of scale to discuss, and along with that is appropriate technologies of scale. It is industrialisation, mass production, global supply chains and the enclosure of land, the separation of people from provisioning themselves outside of wage labour, that we have to be wary of. Having an open out look, open to iteration will be key as we face an uncertain future.
You could also read Chris’s book, which is nothing like the hysterical hatchet job that Monbiot presents, which you quoted here. Its well written, entertaining and informative book that adds to the picture of what tools we have at hand going forward. I warmly recommend it.
So … I’m not aware of having told anyone that 4.4 billion people need to go back to the land. If I did, again apologies. I have no idea how many people will go back to the land. Just being able to have reasoned public conversations about ruralisation without endless accusations of being a death-monger would be quite a win IMO.
Ritchie’s & Monbiot’s framings of smallholder farming, hunger and poverty are really problematic. They regurgitate neo-Malthusian corporate/neoliberal talking points, and neglect vast bodies of social science and activist understandings of hunger, poverty and food system dynamics. I’ve addressed the kinds of issues raised by them recently on this site, and in both my books. I’m not going to keep going over the same ground – there are mature bodies of social science around these issues, and I can’t honestly take their positions around food seriously until they better engage with them.
A few resources in relation to this off the top of my head:
Jim Thomas: https://gmwatch.org/en/106-news/latest-news/20310/
Glenn Davis Stone ‘The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World’
Alex de Waal ‘Mass Starvation’
Million Belay: https://nation.africa/kenya/blogs-opinion/blogs/-the-global-food-fight-and-africa-s-forgotten-farmers-4426380
Ieuan Churchill: https://isj.org.uk/environmentalism-in-crisis-neoliberal-conservation-and-wilderness-romanticism/
Eric Holt Gimenez: Can We Feed the World Without Destroying It?
Jim Handy: Tiny Engines of Abundance
…or even this, from George Monbiot MkI: No Man’s Land
I think Joel is right to raise the issue of problematic modernist assumptions – also briefly discussed in Chap 6 of my book. Notions like returning grazed land ‘back to nature’, solving climate change by mass afforestation, and conniving at the moral messiness of slave labour for the good of the biosphere exemplify it. I will probably dive a bit deeper into this aspect of this debate in my next post, although it may be a while in coming.
Hi Chris,
It’s going to take a while to get my head around your small farm links and what they mean.
But Joel is WRONG if he thinks helping forests regrow across the grazed areas I’m thinking of is ‘afforestation’. I’m aware that just planting a tree seems to be this magic cure-all people think will solve climate change – even if they’re doing mass monoculture plantings of trees in grasslands that have never seen forests across the last few Milankovitch cycles! The biodiversity and ecosystem damage is real – and mentioned in an ABC Future Tense recently. About half way or 2/3rds through? “When good intentions fuel further environmental problems”
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/futuretense/when-good-intentions-fuel-further-environmental-problems/103744240
What some PF advocates point out is that if we just reforest the areas we historically already chopped down for livestock grazing (or the soy beans we feed to livestock) would be such a vast area it would solve climate change. Not Afforestation – Reforestation.
We have lost a third of our forests to both crops and grazing – 2 billion hectares. It took 9,000 years to lose the first billion hectares – an area the size of the United States. Then in the last 100 years we cut down the next billion hectares! 2 Billion hectares of forest are gone – a third of the world’s forests – largely to grow crops and graze cattle. “Two billion hectares of forest – an area twice the size of the United States – has been cleared to grow crops, raise livestock, and use for fuelwood.”
https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation#the-world-has-lost-one-third-of-its-forests-but-an-end-of-deforestation-is-possible
FOREST DENSITY: The biologists give a mid-range of forests at 1,600 trees per hectare
https://nhsforest.org/how-many-trees-can-be-planted-hectare/
Multiplied by the 2 billion hectares of forest to be regrown that’s 3.2 TRILLION trees.
There are many amazing super-sized trees – and many smaller ones. I’ve read around – but an average could be about a tonne per tree fully grown. We’re talking about global averages – because of course we want not just bulk trees replanted but biodiverse trees appropriate to each location to bring functioning biospheres back! Now while some experts say tree planting can disrupt soil and for the first 7 years actually INCREASE CO2 EMISSIONS in the area (a weird counter-intuitive fact of soils and forests I did not count on!) – once this really kicks off we’re talking about 25 kg per tree per year stored carbon. https://ecotree.green/en/how-much-co2-does-a-tree-absorb
3.2 TRILLION trees * 25 kg CO2 per tree per year is 80 giga-tonnes sequestered per year, or over twice the 36.8 Gigatons of ENERGY CO2 we emit each year. (Not forgetting the other 25% from land use – which of course also involves the animal grazing I hope PF replaces!)
Also, those areas could become fully functional animal habitats and ecosystems – which when at their peak store far more carbon in functional soils etc than just the trees.
When mature we know that just 1 TRILLION trees would sequester a third of our historical carbon emissions.
Once these trillion trees are fully grown, these new forests could capture between **488 and 1012 billion tons of CO2**. That’s about ¼ to ⅓ of all human CO2 emissions so far (**2.2 trillion tons**).
https://www.plant-for-the-planet.org/trillion-trees/
Therefore 3.2 TRILLION trees would pretty much sequester all historical emissions!
There are a lot of problems with this kind of thinking, as discussed in my book.
– Extent of ‘old growth’ forest cover is uncertain & much contested. Official definitions are often based on only 10% tree cover & define grazed land as ‘degraded’ by fiat. So in many cases afforestation & not reforestation is the right word.
– Trees only act as net carbon sinks for a few decades early in their lifespans. Ecologist William Bond writes that afforestation to sequester carbon is “a short-term response that puts off serious action on global warming for a few more years. But will planting trees have the desired effect of cooling the planet? The science is surprisingly thin…” (Open Ecosystems, p.141)
– Grasslands can also be carbon sinks. It’s necessary to consider the net carbon benefit of afforestation projects, not the absolute gain compared to an imputed zero.
– Tree cover is conditioned by fire and grazing regimes, both natural and anthropogenic. Claimed sequestration gains for afforestation need to account for this. In a lot of places, the loss associated with wildfires would be high, especially in the context of ongoing climate change. Likewise with wild ruminants.
– There are a lot complexities about N and water limitation with afforestation, e.g. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017EF000622
– 1,600 trees/ha is an incredibly high density. At that density, I could almost touch two trees with outstretched arms. Forestry Commission planting schemes in the UK generally stipulate 1,100/ha, with the assumption that most of these will be thinned out in the early years of growth. Which underlines the point that trees are a highly labile and unreliable C sink.
– High-density, unthinned afforestation would (fire & herbivory aside) represent heavily-shaded low-nature value plantation monoculture in many places. Bond again: “if the Bonn challenge gets anywhere near its target of ‘reforesting’ 3.5m km2 by 2030 it will ruin the biodiversity of old-growth grasslands for centuries, and will likely trigger a wave of extinction to the light-loving biota of the world” (p.151).
– Large-scale afforestation schemes implemented without regard to habitat diversity, local people and historic agroecological adaptations reflect the kind of colonial ‘one size fits all’ solutionism of ecomodernist approaches which are a target of my critique in ‘Saying NO…’. They divert attention from the primary problems of fossil fuel combustion and (land use) commodification and IMO represent another short-term technology of prevarication which misspecifies the underlying problem. And they do not represent a return to any ‘original’ pristine biome, a problematic concept in any case.
– All of which is not to say that agricultural deforestation is not a problem or that afforestation/reforestation isn’t often a good idea – albeit not usually for C sequestration reasons. One of the problems with takes like Monbiot’s, though, is that he invokes evidence for the worst contemporary agricultural impacts such as the deforestation of old growth tropical forests as if it exemplifies agriculture as a whole.
Hi Chris,
Thank you for your time in highlighting the problems with my back of the envelope calculations about 3 trillion trees. It does look like my initial source was VASTLY over optimistic about how many trees could be grown per acre as a global average. (It must have been measuring some very specific English woods of some sort!)
But I found someone who looked at replacing livestock with beans. Ripple – the Yellowstone Wolves guy who studies Trophic Cascades.
He answered a question I’ve been asking for a while. How much carbon could we sequester if we all stopped eating meat and instead ate big juicy Precision Fermentation (PF) bacon strips and chicken nuggets and hamburger patties? Well – we seem to be on the pathway to 2 degrees or higher.
But if PF takes over due to sheer economics – let alone all the environmental and food security benefits (it’s not just climate-friendly food – it’s climate PROOF food in that it is manufactured in doors immune from storms and floods etc!) – one of the main threats from climate change goes away. (Crop damage!)
Also – the number of trees and ecosystems restored when we stop grazing the land and leave it alone would soak up 332–547 GtCO2 – which would take us back into 1.5 degrees range. Awesome!
https://library.unccd.int/Details/fullCatalogue/200000554
Eclipse wrote: “How much carbon could we sequester if we all stopped eating meat and instead ate big juicy Precision Fermentation (PF) bacon strips and chicken nuggets and hamburger patties?”
The “precision fermentation” touted by Monbiot uses large amounts of of energy to produce dried bacterial slurry/sludge powder. Who is using PF to produce bacon strips and chicken nuggets and hamburger patties?
“But if PF takes over due to sheer economics…”
Now that’s another big “if”. There seems to be a lot of speculation and uncertainty related to the renewables transition.
I’m going to hazard a guess that you have never made your living from a small farm. If the impoverished small farmers that you are concerned about made more money, they wouldn’t be so poor. Why do they make so little money ? They are competing with industrialized global agriculture and food prices are really low. Think about the corn farmers in Mexico circa 2000. There are lots of other examples.
Most of your solutions appear rely on a lot of unproven tech and continued exponential grown. You must be familiar with the concept of overshoot. Wishful thinking won’t change things.
Carbon nano tubes for cheap solar panels ? That falls into the same category as fusion. Trying to solve a problem with more of the same thinking that caused it won’t work.
From an earlier reply – A mineral ? Copper.
Growing some graphene tunes out on the back forty….
Tubes, not tunes!
Autocarrot spoiled my attempt at humour.
Hi Greg,
copper? Even Michaux’s paper shows there is enough copper if we just swap out his ridiculous “NMC batteries that ate the world” with the 30% cheaper (and more chemically and thermally stable!) few HOURS of sodium batteries (rather than 4 WEEKS of NMC batteries!) Then just use a few days of pumped hydro for most cities (in the Sunshine Belt at least – where 75% of us live.) Oh – and if a particular state or town has a really bad week – chances are the other cities are fine and can share their 2 days storage with them. The world has 100 TIMES the pumped hydro we might need. Michaux just asserts that because pumped hydro requires a VERY specific type of topology – there are just not enough sites in the world. I looked and looked through his 1000 PAGE PDF – and there was just nothing.
But he let it slip in this next video interview. https://youtu.be/LBw2OVWdWIQ?t=1342
You won’t believe the source. Michaux used a feasibility study about pumped hydro in Singapore! I laughed out loud when I learned this. Tiny flat Singapore! Their highest hill is only 15 metres above sea-level! Gee – I wonder why THEY couldn’t find any sites? (Nudge nudge wink wink!) It’s consistent with so much of his work. Europe’s wonderful mountains and valleys, Australia’s vast areas with many many hills, America, South America, India, the super-continent, Africa? Nope. The world is like SINGAPORE I tell you! I call this strawman “Painting the world Singapore.”
Because sodium batteries actually perform better with an aluminium case, they don’t even use copper. The main minerals and metals Michaux insists we’re going to run out of suddenly vanish from his doomsday apocalypse – because sodium and PHES don’t use one of them. Sodium and PHES vanquish the “Batteries that ate the world!” and let us sleep at night. Without his 4 weeks NMC – the picture is rosy. His own paper shows us there is 4 TIMES the copper we need for the energy transition. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/michaux-sans-batteries/
But still – what if? What if there’s something we forgot and there’s a whole lot more we need for xyz? Or some new civilisation building project where we just WANT more conductive metal for some huge purpose we have not even imagined yet?
We can use aluminium instead – and there’s lots of aluminium.
For contrast the world’s most mined metal is iron ore – as we live in a largely steel civilisation. We mine over 3 BILLION tons a year. It’s 94% of all the metal we mine – all the rest are in the other 6%. We only mine just under 63 million tons of aluminium. https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/all-of-the-metals-one-visualization.html
Yet despite all that extra iron ore we mine – it’s still super abundant. It’s 5% of the earth’s crust.
(And now that we can use “Cross-Laminated Timber” to build bridges and skyscrapers we can learn to live with vastly less new steel in construction.)
So if iron ore is 5% – what is aluminium? Only about 8% of the earth’s crust! There’s 1200 TIMES more aluminium on earth than copper.
Aluminium is less conductive so you have to have 25% thicker wires – but that doesn’t matter as it is half the price and weight. HVDC lines are already aluminium.
It’s because it is lighter it is BETTER than copper in HVDC overhead powerlines. https://www.chaluminium.com/why-use-aluminum-wire-instead-of-copper-wire-for-outdoor-wires
“Among base metals, aluminium only copper is a better, but only by 33%, at the same time aluminium has an undeniable advantage – it is lighter. An aluminium wire have a 1.5 times larger cross section to pass the same current as a copper wire, but two times lighter. Weight is one of the most important parameters for high-voltage power lines that transmit power over long distances. Therefore, only aluminium wires are used in main overhead power lines.” https://www.aluminiumleader.com/application/electrical_engineering/
Aluminium can be used in EV motors and is already in internal wiring. It could work in wind turbine windings and can also be the main cables connecting the offshore wind farms to the land. This engineer’s guesstimate is that aluminium can do about 90% of the jobs of copper.
https://www.shapesbyhydro.com/en/material-properties/how-we-can-substitute-aluminium-for-copper-in-the-green-transition/
What are you talking about ? Copper is used for making motors, rewiring every house on the grid, wiring in cars, a larger grid to supply all the electricity needed, etc. Even Li batteries don’t use a significant amount of copper (~10%).
Eclipse – re your most recent comment, let’s not delude ourselves that anything is climate PROOF:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVaq3a-z9iU
Wind turbines aren’t immune either.
Hi Simon H,
Fox News? Seriously?
For instance, what reports show much many panels across those acres were destroyed? Did anything actually ESCAPE the solar panel? What brand of panel were they? What are these ‘toxins’ they are worried about – and do they actually leak out when the toughened glass is merely shattered – not the whole panel punctured? Now that it is 3 months later – what did the water tests say? Did Fox news ever report what the test results found if it was a negative? Are they honest enough to do that – or do the lie as much as Trump?
Do they know that MOST BRANDS of solar have toughened glass to survive golf-ball sized hail? It’s required under law in Australia! https://brighte.com.au/sustainable-home/solar/can-hail-damage-your-solar-panels
Anything above that is a freak hail storm and should be covered by insurance. It does NOT threaten the integrity of the grid because one of the key strategies with wind and solar is that they are SO cheap you can Overbuild their capacity, across a wide geographic area, for more grid stability. Wind and solar back each other up. If your wind and solar are not providing reliable power most of the time – you have not built enough!
Also Simon H,
utility scale solar can have sun trackers that swivel to follow the sun – and now that climate accelerated hail storms seem to be a bit more common – they are integrating storm prediction algorithms that will turn the solar panels away from the direction of the hailstones to protect them. https://www.wired.com/story/solar-energy-hale-protection/
Assuming they DON’T develop in both materials science (perovskites?) and glass strength (there are many new alternatives to invisible graphene sheets being developed) – then maybe the cheapest idea will just to have them swing upside down during a storm?
It’s not hard.
But given Ai can now design smarter batteries that generate more power with 70% less lithium, and permanent magnets that require NO rare earths (Simon Michaux eat-your-heart-out) – I never say never.
Maybe future solar panels will be able to last 40 or 50 years still producing maybe 80% capacity – and have almost bullet proof glass? Who knows? Materials science is going through as big a revolution as the energy transition – AND these 2 interact in interesting ways.
I guess it’s about cost and materials science. Will it be cheaper to use super-toughened glass, or just install trackers on all utility solar? Or will future solar panels be super-strong tiles people use for their rooftops because they are so strong and cheap with future economies of scale and new materials? I don’t know. There are solutions to these things.
G’day Eclipse!
I appreciate your thoughts in response.
There is some non-Fox news footage of a similarly devastating storm in Brisbane, end of October 2020, featuring ‘gorilla hailstones’, which was very similar to a storm that gave the village where I live a Mad Max style makeover within the time it takes to go a round in the boxing ring.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4jKj5RCtV0 – I think if you watch this for two minutes, or even 30 seconds, you have to agree that the way these hailstorms hit is a lot wilder such that a solution like ‘just turn the panel the other way’ won’t cut it, but maybe we should ask the guy’s cat).
But what does it mean for something to be climate proof, as you put it? I think we could get into the nitty gritty of the tech. You are, I believe, right about the golf-ball sized hail testing requirement for PV panels. But we differ in that your take on this subject is to overbuild and add complexity to tech, and forever tweak the design as circumstances dictate, while I’m convinced that’s not for me. I am interested in the trajectory of all this tech, and it does take smart individuals to keep coming up with the latest iteration of the cutting edge. But I don’t buy into it in the way you seem to, and I’m increasingly uncertain that it’s a trajectory that carries any wisdom, plus I suspect it’s running out of road.
But I am tempted to consider your notes on PV panels. From my experience, I think any tech bolted on to the outside of a building or simply out in the elements, will always be a challenge from a design perspective. If we agree the common static solar panel could be improved in some way, yes, maybe we could start with a solar tracker to up the efficiency by around one-third (by tracking the sun), coupled with a feature that will turn the panel out of the direction of any hailstorms, and we can do this if we add more complexity to the design in the form of motors and computers. Improvements in materials can be adopted as they come on line. I think if we swing the panel upside down (tricky on a roof, but maybe not impossible) we risk endangering the wiring box glued on to the back of the panel, but again we could get around this little wrinkle in the concept with another design solution. It’s not hard (to imagine), and I never say never either (even though I’ve just said it twice). But while I can and do cogitate on these things for years, on and off, the simplest design solution for me is elimination, going without, imposing limits, trying not to be forever capitalism’s puppet, or at least to shoot for being the smallest puppet I can possibly be.
Hi Simon H,
glad to year you are open minded enough to acknowledge there are many technically smart people out there watching the performance of this tech and tweaking it. Ironically, it’s the shorter life of renewables compared to coal stations or nuclear that accelerates this innovation we are discussing. EG: 20 years ago the EROEI was pretty poor – but now solar uses 1/3 the high energy-cost silicon it did 20 years ago. Wind turbines are so much larger and higher they also have an improved EROEI.
And there is a potential revolution in materials toughness coming with graphene-like structures from other materials.
I’m not sure what you meant by ‘running out of road’? It’s certainly not room – given renewables would only take 0.1% of the land on earth to supply all our power. https://theconversation.com/really-australia-its-not-that-hard-10-reasons-why-renewable-energy-is-the-future-130459
And maybe not even that?
ROOFTOPS: Half our rooftops would provide all today’s electricity. http://theconversation.com/solar-panels-on-half-the-worlds-roofs-could-meet-its-entire-electricity-demand-new-research-169302
NATURE journal reports floating solar on existing hydro power dams (already wired up!) would close global coal.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01525-1
NATURE also reports floating solar could power 154 large cities and thousands of communities – and save a huge amount of evaporation of fresh water. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01089-6
Floating on our calmest seas could provide 5 times the total energy a world of 10 billion could need!
https://theconversation.com/limitless-energy-how-floating-solar-panels-near-the-equator-could-power-future-population-hotspots-210557
Or did you mean mineral abundance – and running out of rare earths? Ai have designed EV batteries that use 70% less lithium, which in effect multiplies our lithium reserves 3 times. We already had twice what we needed for a world of 1.4 billion cars. (And I say this as a Solarpunk sort of guy that doesn’t even really like cars that much but prefers a Metro – the best EV – and a well designed walkable neighbourhood.)
Sodium batteries can be made from vastly available materials for grid storage, and there’s over 100 times the OFF-river closed cycle pumped hydro we could need.
So … not sure what you mean?
Eclipse!
By the ‘business as usual’ model running out of road, I simply meant take a good long look around.
We clearly differ in levels of optimism about both The Now and The Future. You’re at the perky end (“it’s gonna be so good, just you wait and see”), while I veer more towards the “ain’t gonna happen”/’misery loves company’ end. I think it’s futile trying to change each other’s basic standpoint.
That said, your line about solar parks enough for 50 billion people “floating on our calmest seas” gave me a good chuckle. Something about the serene weightlessness of it all/no drama at all/why didn’t we think of this before? type thing. Shiver me timbers!
I believe it’s important not to turn your lifeboat into a yacht.
Hi Simon H,
Hey – we all get discouraged with the world. I was discouraged by Brexit and Trump, and now it looks like a stubborn old man will not stand aside and we get another go at Trump. The new and improved Trump – backed by crazies that want to make him President for life. This is the Lincoln Project – those saner Republicans that left the party and campaigned against it when Trump took over. They’re summarising Project 2025 – which is basically a plan for a coup backed by some big names across American political life and church life. It’s just sad, and frankly, kept me awake last night. 4 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpLpOtFNFWg
But that’s about my own subjective fears etc – probably well grounded – as to what might happen in America if Trump is elected – and what it might mean for geopolitics.’
The difference between that and some comments here is that the comments here are flying against what we already know to be technically possible – and happening – and growing exponentially. It’s the difference between saying “I’m worried about Trump” and “It will take a million years – maybe 10 million – for mankind to learn to fly!” as the New York Times did 65 days before the Wright brothers did exactly that.
I love a good laugh – and also appreciate International Talk Like a Pirate Day. So I hope your laughter came from surprise – not cynicism – about the potential for floating solar. Because the guy who wrote that piece has the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for engineering. (The Queen Elizabeth Prize.)
I mean – when I first heard about floating solar all I could think of was BZZT BZZT as some poor installation engineer got fried doing electrical work on a lake. But hey – that’s my social sciences background showing up again – so I suspended by natural disbelief and investigated further. It’s now just plain standard! It costs 13% more – but solar keeps dropping in price so that will soon be mopped up. And the cool air flowing across from the water means the panels are more efficient on hotter days – producing more power. Finally – it helps slow evaporation of precious fresh water in our reserves. The biggest challenge? Bird poo from water birds. But they’re figuring the economics of that out as well.
Here’s a 10 minute summary – check the 10 km 2 float-a-voltaics farm in China!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98hZI5CfQXU&t=7s
Hi Eclipse,
briefly, the ‘game changing’ eDumper still appears to be in development 5 years on. Perhaps there are some technical issues still to be resolved. Interesting story though.
But when it comes to placing solar farms on calm seas, one must consider the corrosive effects of salt water, but also the involvement of Mother Nature, among other concerns, which you may think are all solvable given time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUgQWoa_Oco
Also, I’m not convinced reducing evaporation from bodies of water on hot days is a good idea.
Hi Simon H,
I completely hear where you’re coming from. Even inland lakes is probably a challenge – let alone if we throw in a hail storm! Fixing a rotating solar panel to a roof or the ground is one thing – fixing it to a raft bobbing around quite another.
But never say never – who knows where super-strong graphene manufacture will be in 5 or 10 years?
My guess is floating them on ‘calmer seas’ is archipelago speak for “We don’t trust our neighbours enough to rely on them.” Why would one invest so much money in something that could be smashed by waves – when it would be so much easier to sink HVDC cables to the calm ocean floor and draw power from wind and solar farms on land? Remember – just 0.1% of the world’s land would be all our power! https://theconversation.com/really-australia-its-not-that-hard-10-reasons-why-renewable-energy-is-the-future-130459
So this sea-going version of float-a-voltaics could be born of geopolitical concerns more than concerns for the global area used by renewables.
Hi Greg,
Maybe that’s part of it – but it’s also the vicious cycle of poor returns leading to poor investment in capital leading to poor outcomes and a downward spiral into poverty. They don’t have the means to lift themselves out of it – and if the whole world did this – who would buy their stuff and help them lift out of it?
https://agrifoodnetworks.org/article/smallholder-farmers-are-they-really-poor
SMALL FARMS POVERTY TRAP
Data Scientist Hannah Ritchie one more time.
“…it’s gruelling work with poor returns: small farms can achieve good yields but need lots of human labor and input… Labor productivity is low … This is why countries move beyond a workforce of farmers: younger people get an education, move towards cities, and try to secure a job with higher levels of productivity and income. A country cannot leave deep poverty behind when most of the population work as smallholder farmers…
We should avoid the romanticization of a future where most still spend their time working the fields for small returns. That would be a future where hundreds of millions continue to live in poverty.”
https://ourworldindata.org/smallholder-food-production
“Most of your solutions appear rely on a lot of unproven tech”
Not at all! Silicon solar works fine, today’s wind turbines work fine, seaweed protein works fine – but is small scale and just needs to be deployed. (It’s a permaculture of the oceans that feeds the base of the ocean food chain while just 2% of the oceans farmed this way could feed 10 billion people all the protein they need!)
Precision Fermentation SEEMS to work – and Solar Food just needs to bring the price of Solein down with scale. We’ll see. Also – technology breeds technology – at least for a while yet.
“Lever VC argues that despite notable advancements in CRISPR gene editing, AI and machine learning for bioinformatics systems, and high-throughput screening technologies, challenges remain in scaling up biological processes and lowering expenses to reach price parity with animal products.”
https://vegconomist.com/fermentation/report-five-disruptive-technologies-fermentation-industry/
Yes – I admit I like exponential growth. But just for a few decades. It’s an S curve of clean energy that will appear exponential but will eventually taper off as we meet all human needs for energy – and that in turn brings on a global demographic transition.
POPULATION BUBBLE: If we get the welfare policy settings right we could get down to 6 billion by 2100
https://earth4all.life/news/press-release-global-population-could-peak-below-9-billion-in-2050s/
“Earth 4 All” are a Club of Rome sister organisation.
https://earth4all.life/views/ipcc-report-the-1-5c-target-is-still-viable/
I will admit that my eyes glaze over pretty quickly when your replies read like an AI generated filibuster from a business as usual, ecomodernist, what-could-go-wrong-? perspective. Would, could and can are hopeful but kind of meaningless in the real world. Why aren’t all the woulds. coulds and cans happening now ?
At a very superficial level, if you are right, that’s great, I get my flying car. If you are wrong then it is catastrophe for the entire world, we are all going to hell in a high consumption hand basket.
If the SFF future is right, we live within our means, i.e the planetary boundaries. If the SFF future is wrong, nothing bad happens except that some people don’t get to live a lifestyle that is completely out of whack with what planetary systems can support. Exponential grown can only go so far.
Have a listen to this –
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-05-15/crazy-town-episode-88-escaping-imperialism/
It illustrates some of the problems of the ecomodernist world view. They are a bunch of old peak oil guys, you might even recognize some of them.
Hi Chris,
Was my answer to Greg above deleted? I’m pretty sure I tried to post it – and if it was a technical issue I understand. But I don’t think I called anyone names – but I did ask some pointed questions. Questions about how a Degrowth re-ruralisation is actually to work? How your movement is going? Why the global trend still seems to be moving into the cities when (IF you are right) they should be moving the other way? When is the peer-reviewed process expected to admit renewables cannot do the job we want them to – so society is forced to “Powerdown”? When do you expect the DER will be set up? (The Department of Emergency Ruralisation.)
Are those questions not welcome? Because I’ve certainly been asked to go fetch all sorts of mineral and resource and battery data to defend the peer-reviewed understanding of renewables over the last few weeks. I thought it was my turn to ask a few questions of Greg?
No, I haven’t deleted any of your comments – I’m not seeing anything in the dashboard that I haven’t approved. I don’t know what comment you’re referring to, but if you’d care to repost I’ll try to ensure it appears.
Not sure if your questions here are aimed at me or Greg, but for my part I’ve written quite a bit about the nature of agrarian transitions and I’m not minded to repeat it here (I and others have also written critiques of various positions you’ve taken to which you haven’t replied).
Presently, of course, there is no net global energy transition occurring and nor is there a net global increase in agrarian labour, so both perspectives involve peering into the dark glass of the future. There are academics like Jan Douwe van der Ploeg who are arguing that a re-peasantisation is occurring. And there are academics like Mike Albert pointing to the numerous economic and geopolitical stumbling blocks facing renewable energy transitions, even though, like you, he takes a more sanguine view of the technical possibilities than I do. Time will tell. I certainly haven’t proselytised the likelihood of a small farm future with anything approaching the confidence you have in solar-powered neoliberalism. I just think it’s our best bet for the future, but I agree with you that that remains a minority view. I suspect that by the time its wisdom becomes more widely apparent, it may be a bit too late for it to be much more than a lifeboat strategy, and multitudes will have died as a result of ecomodernist formulas for mass death. Just saying!
Hi Chris,
Thank you for your measured tone. I’m also relieved to hear I wasn’t deleted – because I have been in the past – and probably deserved it. (My emotions get the better of me late at night. If I started a youtube channel it would probably be something like “The Grumpy Greenie” ha ha.) For that matter – the way my brain works I probably wrote the comment in my notes – then copied it into your comments field and suddenly went to check something and just forgot to click “POST”. At least I’ve got my notes.
I admit to being late in this debate. I’m more comfortable defending renewable energy from the likes of Michaux than I am actually poking at your area. I’m not motivated to buy any books on this, but I am gradually working through any of the free material you have recommended to me so far. (It’s going to take a while just reading through the links you issued in your last post.)
Do you have a list of top 10 posts to read for an introduction to Emergency Re-Ruralisation? I’m keen to know what percent of society must go back to the land to decarbonise in your program, and how fast that could happen. Also – the sheer politics of it given there’s probably going to be mass migration between nations to achieve this if George’s population vs arable land geographic statements are correct.
Also as I have said before – I would call myself an EcoModernist only as far as it expresses my confidence in the Energy Transition (and a few other technologies like Ecocity building.) But if Monbiot is right about their political views – I may need to modify my moniker to “Social Liberal Ecomodernist”? For I believe in a big welfare program, government intervention and legislation to protect people and planet, and basically replacing Corporations with Democratic Worker Co-ops in this free (but regulated and guided) market.
Finally – have you looked at seaweed powder? For many nations “back to the sea” might be an option.
SEAWEED FARMS COULD FEED THE WORLD WHILE SAVING THE OCEANS! Dr David King was the chief scientific adviser to the UK government, and Dr Tim Flannery held the same position down in Australia. Both have done lots of work on how 3d seaweed and shellfish farms could feed the world WHILE ALSO restoring the ocean! Seaweed grows 30 times faster than any land plant – and does not use any arable land, fresh water, or fertiliser – or the embodied energy in delivering and maintaining all that.
JUST 2% OF THE OCEANS COULD FEED 12 BILLION PEOPLE while repairing the oceans. (Not that I’m recommending we get to 12 billion – it’s just what the paper says.)
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/01/sea-forest-better-name-seaweed-un-food-adviser
The seaweed powder can be a food supplement that goes in everything from dairy to bread. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666833522000302
The dried seaweed protein yield per area (in the ocean) is 2.5 to 7.5 times higher than wheat or legumes (on land). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7221823/ They also grow shellfish like oysters, scallops, and muscles in baskets under the seaweed lines.
OPTIONAL EXTRAS FOR THE KEEN:- 6 minute Youtube summary – the big ocean conservation groups sponsoring research into this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZW72i0DVqE
FREAKANOMICS interview seaweed pioneer Bren Smith: June 2021 – 43 minutes https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-the-future-of-farming-in-the-ocean-ep-467/
FARM EVEN THE NUTRIENT POOR OPEN OCEAN: Solar or wave powered floating barges could pump nutrient rich water up from 500 m down.
https://theconversation.com/how-farming-giant-seaweed-can-feed-fish-and-fix-the-climate-81761
“Presently, of course, there is no net global energy transition occurring”
Now that is some major denial, right there! You’re not looking at the curves the right way. You’re not looking at what has been achieved. The Energy Transition actually won decades ago when Germany started subsidising wind and solar. Momentum grew. China picked up the scent. Forget production lines – China has production CITIES! Whole cities in a long row, with 2 or 3 million people in each city. Manufacturing components of the energy transition, and then passing them on down the line to the next city. And again. Forget normal Neoliberal “economies of scale” – they have achieved something bigger. Something like a military-industrial complex devoted to selling one thing to the world – Energy Transition!
It’s like you don’t know the rules of the game, or have never read about adoption curves. You’ve missed the momentum building behind this thing. It’s like you’ve seen an old polaroid camera and claimed “The ultimate in camera convenience – it just won’t get better than this!” and somehow missed the digital revolution in everyone’s pocket.
I’ve shared this before. But I need you to do the math on it. Solar has a global doubling period of 4 years, and has done for a while now. Just do the math on that!
But it just stepped up. Now it’s 3 years. Last year just 50 GW of coal was built worldwide. Only 50GW in a world where there are developing nations craving more and more energy. The amount of solar deployed last year was 7 TIMES that – at over 350 GW! And you’re pretending you can’t see what’s coming?
“If this growth rate continues, there will be more solar installed in 2031 than all other electricity generation technologies put together.”
https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/2024/04/24/fastest-energy-change-article/
In 7 years how many people will have moved to the country to set up their small scale farms?
But I promise you this. Unless there is a major-powers war or nuclear apocalypse or some other super-virus calamity, in 7 years the evidence of an abundant Energy Transition will be IMPOSSIBLE to ignore. We’ll see peak oil demand by 2028. Many oil refineries going bankrupt by 2030 – 2032. Petro-tyrants panicking. Political instability across Saudi Arabia and Russia in the 2030’s. EV companies soaring. Whole new approaches to batteries as “Big Battery” bankrupts big oil. Oil won’t disappear in the 2030’s – not by a long shot! But it’s dominance will be over as it starts to decline.
On the dark side, there will be new challenges in defending the rights of indigenous as a minerals economy overtakes the fossil fuel economy. Some wildernesses might be permanently wrecked unless activists intervene. Many developed nations at least have legislation to rehabilitate landscapes after mining. Some semblance of ecosystems come back. We’ve got to nudge political forces away from corporate imperialism in poorer nations and towards something fairer in developed nations. Australia has a bunch of the minerals the Energy Transition needs. Let us provide you with everything you need – I don’t have any vested interest in my own economy booming! (winks).
In 10 years you’ll have to come up with a new narrative about why we need small scale farming – because this whole “peak energy” schtick will not have any credibility. The age of the peak oil doomer / Degrowther will have passed. Other kinds of doomsday story and Prepper philosophy will replace their echo-chambers. And gradually the smog will pass, the skies will clear, we’ll breathe fresher air – and we’ll get back some of the $5 TRILLION dollars on extra public health that fossil fuel particulates costs us! Looked at from that point of view – the Energy Transition will almost pay for itself.
@Eclipse,
It’s quite difficult to extrapolate indefinitely from curves. When I was a young teenager I was growing very fast indeed. If I had extrapolated from that curve for the next few years, I would have ended up about nine feet tall! As it is, I am only six feet tall. Just because I had the genetics and resources to grow very quickly for a few years does not mean that quick growth was in any way sustainable.
We can certainly encourage growth of non-fossil energy sources by throwing financial resources at that transition, but at some point we will encounter diminishing returns. At some point we will struggle to mine and process enough minerals to build more solar panels, or batteries, or grid wiring, or something else necessary for such a transition, and production of new solar or wind or hydro will slow or stop. That is not naysaying or doomerism, it’s just how conservation of matter works.
The question is whether we reach that limit before we run out of fossil fuels, or before we mess up the climate so much that it hardly matters. On the latter question we seem to be skating on very thin ice indeed, and EROEI on fossil fuels has been falling for a long while now. We will need a very rapid transition indeed if we’re going to pull this off.
But… electricity is only a fraction of current energy use. A quarter? A fifth? Something like that.
In my understanding, a transition from fossil fuels to electricity is non-trivial in at least three key areas:
1) arable farming (i.e. grains), which currently relies heavily on internal combustion engines and petrochemical fertilisers, not to mention dessicant herbicides and grain drying machines.
2) long-distance rapid transport of goods and people; last-mile delivery is very amenable to electrification or even using ‘acoustic’ bikes, but so far there aren’t electric cargo ships, electric semitrailer lorries, or electric cargo planes.
3) climate control of homes and workplaces, and domestic cooking; you may not need heating in Australia, but here in the UK we do, and there are many inhabited places in the world that get quite a bit colder.
Say solar and wind technology grow enough to replace domestic and even industrial electricity use — great! I would love to see that happen! Bring it on.
We will still need a way to grow food that doesn’t take 10kcal of fossil fuel for every 1kcal of food we produce. Small farms can do that. Many of them around the world already do.
We will still need a way to drastically change how much we transport things and people. Local economies can do that, but local production will probably mean goodbye to fast fashion and other forms of consumerism. Good riddance, I think, on balance — but currently that would look like an enormous cultural shift.
We will still need a way to heat, and
increasingly also to cool, our living and working spaces. Electricity can probably do some of the cooling, but that means we’ll need to do better than just replace current electricity demand. Electric heat is frightfully inefficient, and solutions like ground source heat pumps are seriously non-trivial to retrofit (at least the last time I looked into it) and would also represent a substantial increase in electricity demand if widely adopted, even if we also retrofit existing housing with better insulation (a thing we should be doing anyway, but aren’t moving very fast on at all). A coppiced woodlot and a properly designed rocket mass heater can take care of heating and probably cooking needs quite well with very little particulate pollution. It doesn’t work in a high-rise apartment block, though.
Furthermore, we need to pull off this transition in a context of rapid climate change, with all the challenges to agriculture and infrastructure that will bring.
And all of that is before we get into the issues with plastics!
I really recommend you actually read Chris’s books.
@Eclipse’
Chris is too nice to delete any replies unless you are way over the edge. He didn’t even kick me off after I called him out for being wrong, wrong, wrong about cows. In fairness, he made some good points so I backed it off to just a couple wrongs. ;^)
I’m good with giving as good as you got. Let’s see what you’ve got –
*Questions about how a Degrowth re-ruralisation is actually to work?
That depends a lot on the initial conditions. If we burn up all the fossil fuels that are readily available chasing pie in the sky, modernist futures, it is going to suck.
If we start recognizing that we really can’t have infinite (never mind exponential) growth on a finite planet and have to live with in the planetary boundaries (the sooner the better) we could probably pull off an 1850s to 1930s standard of energy and material consumption. Of course we know a lot more than we did back then so it would not be the same as living at that time.
Predictions are difficult, especially about the future.
*How your movement is going?
Great, thanks for asking. Every morning just like clockwork. Oh, wait. You think that SFF is a movement ? Degrowth ? Pick up any newspaper, watch any network news, listen to any broadcast news and see if you can find anything about degrowth or a Small Farm Future. Let me know what you find. Compare that to what you find for fantastic visions of the future. Ask yourself ‘why is that?’
If it wasn’t for the internet we would be at the point where the Greens were posting letters from Committees of Correspondence in the mail. Europe may have a little more awareness but not here.
This reminds me of conventional farmers fear of the organic movement.
*Why the global trend still seems to be moving into the cities when (IF you are right) they should be moving the other way?
We are still living in a business as usual capitalist system.
And by the way, people are moving out of the cities. Unfortuneately, they are coming this way with their high consumption lifestyles and are driving up land prices. People who grew up here can not afford to buy farm land anymore.
There is a reason that you you won’t find any mention of ideas that question (let alone threaten) the business as usual, modernist ideology in the mainstream media. The flow of information to the majority of people is very well controlled. If people started thinking for themselves, it would be bad for quarterly profits, the economy. Can’t have that.
And that is more or less the reason the any debate on any substantive issue runs the gamut from A to B. Anyone with half a brain knows what needs to be done but 1) it would be bad for business 2) politicians would not be reelected.
*When is the peer-reviewed process expected to admit renewables cannot do the job we want them to – so society is forced to “Powerdown”?
When their research funding does not come from the fossil or renewable (is it even rebuildable ?) fuel industry. If you have ever been within hailing distance of a researcher you know that publish or perish is not a joke. Grad students, lab space, overhead, the researcher’s salary, they all have to be paid through funded research. Who do you think coughs up that kind of money ?
Why do you suppose that current small farms get screwed when it comes to regulations ? Same deal. The big boys don’t want their apple cart upset. Look up a book titled Credo by Brian Davies. I believe it is out of print but your can read it free on line.
*When do you expect the DER (The Department of Emergency Ruralisation) will be set up?
Only after the economy is run completely off the rails by the modernist / capitalist / colonial system. Or when people get tired or carrying water up five flights of stairs to flush the toilet.
*Are those questions not welcome?
Absolutely. I’m glad that you keep coming back.
*Because I’ve certainly been asked to go fetch all sorts of mineral and resource and battery data to defend the peer-reviewed understanding of renewables over the last few weeks. I thought it was my turn to ask a few questions of Greg?
No problem. But you know I didn’t look up a bunch of corporate cheer leading. The people who are doing the reviews are people who support and whose careers depend on saying the ‘right’ things and toeing the party line. It is scary to look over the edge of the abyss.
One thing about all conventional reviewers/sources, they assume that there is an unlimited amount of cheap energy available to do all these fantastic things. It’s not there. Green hydrogen ? It is throwing at least 20% of the energy out the window. After that, where is the infrastructure to handle the universe’s smallest molecule ? Hint – it does not exist.
Maybe fusion will save the day. Except that there are several physical constants, the speed of light, the charge of the electron, acceleration due to gravity and the number of years before fusion is a reality. It ain’t happening.
Even the current ‘renewables’ are not replacing any fossil fuels, they are only adding to the amount of energy and materials being consumed.
Actually, it would nice if you are right. But I’m not counting on it.
In fairness, people who grew up in the city can’t afford to buy property in cities, either. I grew up in a succession of small Canadian cities and then moved to London and I can’t afford to buy property with housing on it anywhere in England.
But I think cities will keep existing in some form — almost certainly smaller than today, but still recognisably cities — as long as we
have staple grain agriculture. If the climate
becomes too unstable for that then I don’t
know if cities are going to work, but in that case, Chris’s small farm future will look pretty different too.
Cities have historically been centres of innovation and culture. They have also been rife with crime and disease. My impression is that in many periods of history cities have only maintained their population through importing new residents from the countryside, but that at different points growth has been due to a) enclosure of the commons in various forms or b) bumper harvests leading to population growth such that families didn’t have enough land access to give much to each of their offspring, so that some had to leave. I wouldn’t like to say how much of each was at play at any given time, and Old World enclosure was of course also a driver for colonialist expansion.
Hannah Ritchie really isn’t a reliable source for contemporary analysis of smallholder farming. Her takes are redolent of 19th/20th century modernisation theories purveyed by the likes of Lenin, and there are more insightful analysts to consider from that period anyway such as Chayanov. Some recent critiques of her and/or reformulations of the issues:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374459550_Recalibrating_Data_on_Farm_Productivity_Why_We_Need_Small_Farms_for_Food_Security
https://www.etcgroup.org/content/backgrounder-small-scale-farmers-and-peasants-still-feed-world
https://pure.coventry.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/58822927/Published.pdf
We’re not living in the same world now as the one in which classical modernist advocacy for de-peasantisation & urbanisation took shape – not even in the unlikely event of full energy transition.
An interesting rekindling of this debate going on in the threads above – thank you. I’m probably going to stop commenting now here, but I’ll write a bit more about it in another post in due course.
So I’ll make a few remarks in relation to recent comments, mainly @Eclipse’s, and explain some of my boundaries around this discussion.
– To my comment that an energy transition isn’t yet occurring, Eclipse says this is a major denial, and then swiftly moves on to making promises about what will happen in the future. The latest annual global data I have available from the Energy Institute (for 2022 – the 2023 figures will be out soon) show that more fossil energy was consumed in that year than in any previous year. So, as things stand, I would say there was no denial on my part, and there is no energy transition occurring.
– As I said in the OP, I think it’s quite likely that fossil fuel consumption will start falling within the next few years, while renewables will continue to rise. Then it will be more legitimate to start talking of a transition – but ‘transition’ implies certainty that these changing trajectories will persist long-term, and there are numerous reasons why they may not. I’m interested in having a rounded discussion about the possibilities for a genuine transition and the possibilities it will fail, but not so much in engaging with endless boosterism that will only countenance the former.
– Kathryn is right about extrapolation from curves. Existing tech adoption curves are based on time-series where energy availability, capital and economic connection are all increasing. Where that isn’t the case, the curves are likely to look different. I’m reminded of Branko Milanovic and his substitution of Kuznets curves with Kuznets ‘waves’. What are the chances that we’ll be hearing about the ‘omega’ pattern of the S-curve in the 2030s?
– In terms of patterns of electrical generation, prevalence matters as well as incidence, to put it epidemiologically. So, to take the example of changes between 2021 and 2022, fossil fuel-based generation increased by 1% in that period, whereas renewables increased by 15%. But fossil fuel based generation still accounted for 61% of all generation in 2022, while renewables accounted for 14% … and that’s only in the electricity sector. (Incidentally, 74% of all renewable electricity generation in 2022 occurred in China, the US and Europe, which has … certain implications).
– Bearing the previous point in mind, and much as I’d like to see fossil fuel investments and infrastructures crashing precipitously, I don’t think Eclipse is paying enough attention to the economic and geopolitical consequences of that, and the knock-on effects on the renewables sector. Likewise in relation to climate change. Which, among other things, inclines me to think the promises he’s making about the world we’ll soon be seeing aren’t the bankers he thinks.
– To the argument “In 10 years you’ll have to come up with a new narrative about why we need small scale farming – because this whole “peak energy” schtick will not have any credibility”, I’d say that there are plenty of narratives I and others have already written about why we need small scale farming that are energy-independent. But so long as an energy economy (fossil or renewable) resembling the existing one persists, such narratives are unlikely to have much short-term traction. I think they’d still be likely to have longer-term traction in view of nitrogen and other pollution limits, along with economic, geopolitical and cultural drivers. But anyway – the framing of questions like “In 7 years how many people will have moved to the country to set up their small scale farms?” so deeply misses the point of the case for agrarian localism I’ve made that I’m afraid the conversation on that topic ends there for me.
– …which brings me to echo chambers. As per some of Greg’s remarks, I think pretty much our entire mainstream civilizational discourse of techno-progress is its own echo chamber, which I have been fruitlessly banging my head against for quite some years now. I’m entirely happy to invest my energies in alternative echo chambers, as I laid out here: https://chrissmaje.com/2023/07/preaching-to-the-converted-or-my-week-in-the-science-wars/. I think Tom Murphy is also worth a read on this: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/10/the-cult-of-civilization/. Increasingly, I think it’s pointless to try to engage in debate across too big a divide in framing assumptions. I do still believe it’s important to be alive to criticism within interacting communities, but the ‘interacting community’ part is just as important as the criticism part. I’m also a big believer in mediation and restorative justice wherever possible. But ultimately, I think some of these trends are going to devolve into sharp conflicts – e.g. between people seeking to maintain grazing pastoralism and people hoping to sequester carbon with afforestation schemes. What are the chances of really hearing the different registers of human experience involved?
– Regarding peer review, again I align quite a lot with Greg’s view – despite my own experience as a writer and reviewer of peer-review publications being somewhat different. The conservatism and community-boundedness of peer review is both a strength and a weakness, but peer-reviewed studies of renewables transition possibilities in engineering journals do not convince me that this is the map of the unfolding future. As indeed is the case with perennial grains and cellular food, I see a surfeit of more lightly refereed and generalised ‘opinion’ pieces in academic journals in this area which tend to gloss over the hard technical details, or bury them deep in the text. Academic peer review has many strengths, but it was never designed to prove a particular civilizational course of direction is correct … nor could it ever do so.
– Regarding ecomodernism, it has its more statist and its more corporate modes, but ultimately we’re a long way down a state-corporate technocratic framing of contemporary problems which I believe is unequal to the challenge of renewal, and incapable of generating genuine community goods. Again, I’ve spent too long arguing the toss about this and I now want to focus more on building community goods to improve resilience against the technocratic missteps upon us. In fact, that is the focus of my next couple of posts…