Holden's Law

I've been waiting in vain to see much holistic thinking when it comes to how we progress towards net zero. For example, the UK's headlong rush to announce the end of new fossil fuelled vehicles and gas boilers in new houses without appearing to have much of a roadmap on how to make it work in practice is striking. Somebody in what Keith Waterhouse used to call the Ministry of Guesswork has presumably projected how many vehicle charging points we need and had a look at the impact on electricity demand. But ministers seem to have accepted hand waving arguments about future energy production demand management - at least until the PM announced lots of new nukes. Without appearing to recognise the timescale mismatches, given the lead time for such projects.

In the meantime we have all but given up on fracking (which could potentially have usefully bridged some gaps) and, at least until the Russians invaded Ukraine, have implicity continued the line on energy strategy which has flowed through since Mrs Thatcher's days - we can just buy it in. I know fracking is controversial but I find it hypocritical to be dogmatically anti-fracking while consuming gas which has been transported around the world, in some cases from countries the anti-frackers would not want us to trade with. Thinking we can click our fingers and stop consuming oil and gas, like the Just Stop Oil protesters, is  wishful thinking. We need a robust and affordable plan.

However, my bigger problem is that I've become very gloomy about the prospect of protecting environment in the round.  What if, in some perverse Parkinson's law of unintended consequences, whatever we do we always end up doing some harm? This of course is redolent of the second law of thermodynamics, which says the entropy of a system must always increase. I've seen this law, which I found almost beautiful as an engineering student, described as the only definitively true scientific law*. What if, whatever we do to protect the environment, the best we can ever do is to theoretically break even on environmental damage - but in practice we won't do that. Entropy always increases and every human activity probably has some environmental disbenefit.

Take wind turbines. Yes they can produce electricity without burning fossil fuel, though only once they are made by mining and making the raw materials and fabricating the turbines using green energy. And finding a way of disposing of them at end of life which I understand is not available yet. And covering for them with no fossil sources when the wind doesn't blow, or blows too strongly. But even then there are impacts on wild life - unless Boris Johnson's question "can't the birds learn to fly higher?" is less daft than it sounds. I suspect there may always be some small environmental disbenefit from wind turbines however smartly they can be made.

Or take electric motor cars: their batteries need cobalt. 70% of the world's cobalt supply comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Which is, according to Christina Lamb "one of the most violent and corrupt places on earth", where child labour is common and working conditions appalling. Safety standards are non-existent as many of the mines are so-called "artisan" mines, operated by private individuals. Fatal accidents are covered up for fear that mines (if you can call holes and shallow tunnels in the ground mines) could be closed. Exposure to cobalt can cause long term health problems. It is ironic that the place we need to help clean up the planet is one of the most polluted in the world. "Without DR Congo there is no electric car industry and no green revolution" says the head of a UK based campaign group.

Most of the cobalt is sent to China, where 80% of the world's cobalt supply is refined. Not all of the mines are operated by the artisans. China itself operates many of the Congolese mines - in some cases, allegedly, after paying minimal compensation and using aggressive tactics to buy the land. Once processed there is no way of  telling how the cobalt was sourced. It is sold to battery component manufacturers in China and South Korea, who supply corporations such as Apple who, after and Amnesty report in 2016 now track the supply sources to check child labour or unsafe conditions are not involved. However, according to Seema Joshi, head of business and human rights at Amnesty International, "some of the richest companies in the world are still making excuses for not investigating their supply chains". Think of that when you hold your smartphone.

And reflect also on the fact that the UK's target of phasing out fossil-fuelled vehicles in the next 20 years requires the number of electric vehicles on our roads to increase by a factor of 40. (Er, only 40?) Extrapolate that across the world and one wonders about the viability of electric vehicles as a large scale transport solution. Meanwhile Bill Gates is putting money into finding new sources of cobalt in the earth's crust.

Or maybe we can make better batteries that don't need cobalt. Or go the hydrogen fuel cell route, as often advocated by Jeremy Clarkson. I'm a great believer in the utility of the idea generating method where you ask "what if we could....?" Sure, clever people working on battery development will be thinking about how we do it without cobalt. But the next step in that process is to stay "what you do is..." and come up with a plan. One that works. I believe we don't yet have those plans to get us to net zero. We have a target but not what the financiers would call a "bridge": a clear route to deliver the strategy which can be planned in detail and against which progress can be monitored.

Meanwhile we are bombarded by contradictory information about what we as individuals should be doing. For example, the canard that driving to the shops uses less energy than walking, as some have claimed. This is because the energy cost of producing the extra calories you need to eat exceeds the energy cost of the drive. (I've seen the calculation). It's nonsense of course as it ignores the fact that we need exercise for our health - and we don't necessarily eat fewer calories sitting on the couch. So it's more than a bit theoretical, but it shows how some of these "decisions" aren't as obvious as they seem.

 
The author Michael Schellenburger is more specifically downbeat on some things than I am, while arguing that the environmental apocalypse is a myth. He says most forms of renewable energy such as solar and wind power are impracticable for large scale use in much of the world as they require huge amounts of land and damage wildlife and that becoming a vegetarian reduces one's emissions by less than 4%. However, he also claims man made climate change is not causing mass extinction, as only 0.001% of the planet's species go extinct annually and carbon emissions are declining in most countries (though maybe not fast enough). 

However, I also read that 40% of the invertebrate life on the planet is under threat. That sounds ominously serious for food chains and our ability to feed ourselves.

In an interview in the Irish press in March 2019 Roy Harper said there are just too many of us. The need for population control was much debated when I was a schoolboy but it's not fashionable to say it these days. Indeed one runs the risk of being called an advocate of eugenics. But it's true. There are too many of us and there will be a lot more yet. When there were fewer of us and we didn't do as much harm the earth could compensate and recover. If Holden's gloomy Law of the Environment is right and we inevitably end up doing some damage then we can minimise that damage but there will always be some. Multiplied by a lot of people, who have come to totally dominate the natural world.

Entropy always increases and maybe the modern human lifestyle always does some environmental harm.

This need not be a definitively gloomy prognosis if we find ways of making the harm so small that the planet remains sustainable in the long term.  After all one day the sun will become a red giant and Earth will be incinerated. I just don't see the route map to sustainability in the meantime at the moment.

* To be more specific, Carlo Rovelli argues in his fascinating book The Order of Time, that the second law is the only basic law of physics that implies the existence of time. None of the other basic laws (Newton's mechanics, Maxwell's electricity and magnetism, Einstein's relativity, the Schrodinger/Heisenberg/Dirac quantum mechanics or the laws of elementary particle physics) distinguish the past from the future. The book is intended for a lay audience and I highly recommend it, though I would accept it is somewhat challenging for non-physicists, like me.

**Congo's miners dying to feed world's hunger for electric cars, Christina Lamb, Sunday Times 10 March 2019

The argument that walking to the shops does more harm than driving dates back a long time, for example The Times, 4 August 2007 (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/walking-to-the-shops-damages-planet-more-than-going-by-car-vfbwcgpj3bp) credited the argument to a Green party candidate and author, Chris Goodall, who wrote a book called How To Live A Low Carbon Life, though the story has been repeatedly picked up since

Shellenburger's book "Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All", is summarised in "On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologise For The Climate Scare", in Forbes magazine. However some reviews say the book is full of "bad science" e.g. see https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/07/review-bad-science-and-bad-arguments-abound-in-apocalypse-never/