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More and more and more
By
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz
2024
“Let us face it: there has never been an energy transition out of wood. Neither in the nineteenth nor the twentieth centuries, neither in the poor countries nor rich ones. The perfect symbol of this non-transition is to be found in the heart of the region that is supposed to be its birthplace: between Leeds and Sheffield, in the middle of the English countryside, stand the seven cooling towers of the Drax power station.
When it was inaugurated in 1974, this power station was designed to burn coal from the Yorkshire mines. In the 1990s, after it was privatised, Drax imported its coal from Australia, Russia and South Africa, a total of 9 million tonnes a year, making it one of the largest thermal power stations in the world. In the mid 2000s, with the help of generous subsidies and under the guise of climate change, the plant was gradually converted to ‘biomass’: a euphemism for wood, which it imports in the form of pellets, mainly from the United States and Canada. Drax claims to produce carbon-free electricity, which is doubly false: on the one hand it contributes to the degradation of forests, and on the other, its operation depends from start to finish on oil, which fuels the forestry machines, lorries, crushers, and ships that cross the Atlantic. In 2021, Drax burned more than 8 million tonnes of wood pellets, more than the UK’s entire forestry production, to meet around 1.5 per cent of the country’s energy needs. (52) That also represents four times more wood than was burned in English in the mid-eighteenth century: a fine result after 200 years of energy transitions. Drax demonstrates the impasse represented by a transition running backwards, with a fossil-fuel economy claiming to be organic again, without shrinking in size – and the same could be said of the biofuels that are supposed to decarbonize air and sea transport.
The example of the Drax power station and, more generally, the tripling of wood energy use in rich countries in the twentieth century, the explosion of charcoal use in Africa since 1960, the tripling of coal worldwide since 1980, oil use that continues to grow year after year despite or thanks to repeated oil crises, and the crucial fact that these phenomena are interlinked – all of these should have led us to abandon the ‘energy transition’ as an analytical tool a long time ago, or to use it very cautiously as a normative (or even downright “utopian”) concept. Now that we are two thirds of the way through this book, one question remains unanswered: how has the stagist vision of energy history been able to endure? How was ‘transition’ able to take hold at the end of the twentieth century, when the whole energy dynamic of the time contradicted it? How did this notion become, from the 1970s onwards, the normal, consensual future, that of governments, companies and experts who claim to be guiding us towards a carbon free future?”
From Chapter 8 The Petrolization of Wood
52 https://www.drax.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Drax_AR2021_2022-03-07.final_pdf p46
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My reactions to this book:
I experienced this to be the toughest book to read since I read Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 when I was a kid, over 60 years ago.
Those were made-up stories. This is a book of fact after fact, the sum of which has been to undo my hope for stopping Earth’s climate collapsing.
The facts in it convince me there is no ‘energy transition’, no replacement by or dominance from sustainable energy. Every drop of rain and skerrick of sunlight or wind that’s being harvested is driven by and depends almost entirely on coal, oil, timber or non-renewable energy.
Even my ‘sustainable’ house was made 28 years ago because coal, oil, timber founded the manufacture and installation of the bits and pieces of every solar panel, rain tank, pipes, screws, trades travelling to and from the site.
Refreshing for its lightly, tightly expressed detail, extraordinary for its scholarship and independent bend I am wholly refreshed in thought and spirit from it. Its made clear stuff I had not seen through. It has convinced me we humans cannot save ourselves from our pollution. We and most life we know or don’t will go by 2030 to 2040.
Why so soon?
Earth’s food growing capacity is collapsing. The ocean and atmospheric currents which create the seasons to grow food are slowing and changing and the key currents are coming to a stop or changing direction. With no food there’s no life for humans and other creatures.
Now, I’m moving on again, to work out how to live for and with hope, laughter and the best emotional and physical health I can find. To live as well as I can til I die. Music, gardening, cooking, reading, sitting empty-handed in a park or café, marvelling at how my nose breaths in air, keeps the oxygen and exhausts the carbon dioxide, the light from the sun a few minutes old with warmth in it. I’m rich. And would want to live this way, end of Earth as I know it or not. Thank you, lovely Earth and sun.
Michael Mobbs, February 2024
And this is a useful blog: https://home.solari.com/toward-a-more-complete-and-honest-energy-accounting/ - for example:
“Solar has a bit of the same definition problem as coal. What sort of solar is EPG talking about in its analysis? Photovoltaic (PV), I presume. Solar thermal power and end uses can be very efficient and can have a good EROEI, but PV electricity production is a very different case. What’s the efficiency of the panels and inverters?
The best panels we’ve seen in mass production so far are about 22% efficient, before the DC output is inverted to AC.
But Boeing was producing 40% efficient panels more than 30 years ago for the space program, where weight and efficiency are critical. Somehow that technology hasn’t seen the light of day ever since. Not only were the Boeing panels efficient, but the amount of silicon required for those panels was fairly trivial, which dramatically reduces the embodied energy of the panels. I ran the numbers on the technology when I worked for the Oregon Department of Energy and found that those panels would produce enough energy to repay their embodied energy in a bit more than five years.“
Article about food collapse:
“ . . . a scientific paper published last week, showing that the chances of simultaneous crop losses in the world’s major growing regions, caused by climate breakdown, appear to have been dangerously underestimated. In mediaworld, a place that should never be confused with the real world, celebrity gossip is thousands of times more important than existential risk.
The new paper explores the impacts on crop production when meanders in the jet stream (Rossby waves) become stuck. Stuck patterns cause extreme weather. To put it crudely, if you live in the northern hemisphere and a kink in the jet stream (the band of strong winds a few miles above the Earth’s surface at mid-latitudes) is stuck to the south of you, your weather is likely to be cold and wet. If it’s stuck to the north of you, you’re likely to suffer escalating heat and drought.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/15/food-systems-collapse-plutocrats-life-on-earth-climate-breakdown