Current EU energy policy is built on three key premises:
- That there is an urgent need to reduce the burning of fossils fuels to limit the build-up ofatmospheric carbon dioxide and lessen the chance of ‘dangerous’ climate change
- That an essential plank of the plan to achieve this is an obligation to meet targets for the useof renewable energy for electricity, heat and transport
- That where the EU leads, others will follow
Many people have recognised for some time that the second and third of these do not stand up to scrutiny. With the exception of hydropower (which has few opportunities for further expansion), current renewable energy technologies have too many disadvantages to make them sensible to deploy on a large scale. Wind and solar generation cannot provide a secure supply of electricity and are expensive ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Biomass, with its relatively low energy density, may be ok for domestic heating, but can only provide significant quantities of electricity if we rely on imports of wood chips. Commercial biofuels are of very limited value for emissions reduction and tend to push up food prices. None of these would be economically viable without never-ending subsidies from tax revenues and inflated energy bills.
While EU Member States artificially ramp up the cost of energy year by year, efforts to reduce emissions seem increasingly futile as China and other rapidly-growing economies build huge numbers of coal-fired power stations and export to us goods we can no longer afford to make ourselves. Clearly, others are not following the EU’s lead.
For years, critics have argued that following present policies will achieve very little other than to accelerate Europe’s decline into global economic insignificance. They make the point that, whatever the likely changes in global climate, we do not have the tools to reduce emissions radically without a massive reversal of the development we have enjoyed over the last century. The response to this has always been that there is no choice. Rolling out more wind turbines and solar panels, burning more wood and increasing the use of transport biofuels is an imperative, as the only means at our disposal to limit the potentially catastrophic consequences of ever-rising temperatures.
The scientific and political establishments had decided that something must be done and that future generations would hold us to account if we simply stood aside and left them to deal with the mess. The perfectly reasonable-sounding argument was that there might be a relatively small chance of catastrophe, but we would surely be willing to pay a suitable insurance premium to avoid it.
This basic underpinning premise on which everything is built – that there is a significant likelihood of dangerous climate change occurring without action – has itself been called into question many times by those of a sceptical nature, but it has remained largely accepted as a matter of fact by most of the media and among the general public, despite the growing opposition to renewable energy policy. But in the last few weeks this assumption has been more widely shown to be very shaky.
In the last newsletter (When evidence and models conflict) I highlighted the attention being given to the continuing flat average temperature trend, which brought current temperatures outside the band of values projected by climate models and used as the basis of IPCC reports. Although the temperature trend has been flat since 1998, the official line has been that such deviations from a steady trend line were not unexpected and did not suggest that global warming would be any less severe. In simple terms, climate change can only be discerned over a 30-year period.
This official refusal to question the party line has seemed increasingly blinkered as temperatures have stubbornly refused to rise and no convincing reason has been put forward to explain this (other than the simple fact that the influence of carbon dioxide may not be as dominant as we have been led to believe, something the IPPC is not yet ready to countenance). However, until recently, there had been no serious questioning by the mainstream media. With the publication of the most recent temperature trends, this has finally changed.
Perhaps most significantly, the Economist published a leader in which its previous blind acceptance of the need to decarbonise the economy has been significantly reined in (see Apocalypse perhaps a little later and more detailed discussion of the latest papers in the Science and Technology section, A sensitive matter). This publication may have a limited circulation, but it is widely read by opinion-formers around the world.
A few days later, the Sunday Times published a major article by Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and black sheep of the green movement: The joy of global warming. His argument, which he has made for many years and for which he has been widely criticised, is that global warming is real but something which future generations will both understand and be better equipped to deal with than us.
These stories, and their prominence, show a shift in the views which politicians and opinion-formers will read, but they are not a wholesale change of heart by the media (for those in doubt, see Climate change making extreme events worse in Australia – report in the Guardian). They may, as Churchill said in a rather different context, represent just the end of the beginning rather than the beginning of the end for climate change orthodoxy. But, given the increasing opposition to new wind farms and the now shaky nature of the justification for building them in the first place, it is time for our elected leaders to take note.
The Scientific Alliance
St John’s Innovation Centre
Cowley Road
Cambridge CB4 0WS
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