The gravity of the situation – hasn’t dawned yet but it will, so keep calm and carry on.

I remember when nature documentaries used to be uplifting affairs, about the diversity of life on our green and munificent globe. These days the genre is almost always accompanied by a sense of threat. I have to admit I long for a nature documentary that celebrates some wildlife without explaining how my lifestyle is contributing to destroying what I have just watched. I’m not contesting it, it’s just that the message has moved from one of “what a delight”, to one of “OK, we have a job to do”. Fair enough. Our innocence has in many ways left us. We can no longer look at the beauty of nature around us without seeing the pressures we put on it.

Snake oil – swallow this and all will be healed

Many “solutions” are peddled to us though, as if this CO2 (and other greenhouse gas) hockey stick is some temporary blip that progress and technology and innovation will fix in the summer. Do this or that and all will be well. It’s a bit Jekyll and Hyde, one moment we see a monster in the mirror, another moment we see a mixture of Houdini and some magician pulling a string of rabbits out of energy hats.

To be fair there are lots of great things happening, and much to be encouraged by. I’m no doomsayer, we all see that people are thinking a lot, and starting to see ways forward on things – yet the issues we are facing are ones that will take generations to fix, and history on that time scale is a very roller coaster type of affair.

Personally, I am immediately suspicious of anyone that says some new thing is going to make all the problems go away. It won’t. The problem is far more deep seated in excessive consumption and enormous disparities in wealth around the globe, and the ease with which we collectively detach as a society our consumption from the costs incurred by the production. Our politically encouraged energy infrastructures are not comprehending the consequences of their demands. It is the little shop of horrors on a global scale. Nothing is emission free. Everything has environmental costs. 

Less is more

The thing is, that a lot of what we have to do is about discovering how to use less energy, and living simpler lives, without abandoning modernity and retreating into caves. It’s not impossible, generations before us did it pretty well without all the benefits of technology, so with a use of technology that “seasons” what we do, we should be at an advantage.  We are extremely poor at managing our own expectations though. We want more. We want the world to be green and David Attenborough to be happy again, but we still want more stuff. That process of diminution in energy demand I suspect is unlikely to happen in just a few generations, and will need political-will for it to happen. That only happens when people - at least at some level - want it to happen. 

The insistence on lifestyles that involve huge amounts of travelling both for goods and people, and huge amounts of metal refining and chemical production, amongst other things, is something we have long insisted on. We should not see reflection on this as an exercise in self-flagellation necessarily, as our national structures are rigged to encourage this. Yet we cannot absolve ourselves either, since the governments establishing those structures are doing our bidding most of the time. We send them mixed messages. We want to save the polar bears and we want our SUV’s and we want delicacies from the other side of the planet on demand. It’s not about giving everything up, it is about counting the true cost more routinely and budgeting, behaving, for our planet’s long-term welfare.

We won’t fix this with a few tweaks at home

This is not some universal guilt trip I’m trying to impose. Our entire infrastructures are geared to encourage an energy use that is relatively profligate and individual centred, and it is quite difficult to live outside those systems for any of us, wherever they are, whoever we may be. We aren’t going to fix this as individuals changing our own habits (though it’s important to try). What we do as individuals does count, but the biggest value it has is in getting in the habit of thinking about it.

The changes needed are at more drastic levels. The sheer scale of energy that is involved in metal refining, cement, paper, data-storage and exchange, food production, chemicals and plastics, isn’t something our light bulb protocols will fix. We’re not totally innocent or off the hook though - the answers do probably involve quite a lot more sharing, and well, we know how we bad we all are at doing that. Not to mention more walking and riding when our car is oh-so-cosy. Those toddlers having tantrums about their toys taken off them – that’s us with our energy. 

For the energy we do use, efficiency is an unavoidable imperative, as is the cheapest simplest, most readily deployable energy storage we can muster. Energy efficiency. Cost efficiency. Land-use efficiency. Raw material and labour efficiency. Making the most of what we have been provided with. The primary energy graphs so widespread in energy discussions don't tell that story. That's because how much useful work we can reap from that primary energy differs enormously across the different options - differences of 70% versus 20% and lower. Some sectors deliver much more useful work punch than others and we need to choose wisely. Efficiency matters, wherever the energy comes from - and beware that the most inefficient sectors tend to use those primary energy graphs the most. They conveniently sidestep an awkward truth.

The closer we can get our energy the better. Energy distribution systems are frequently old and inefficient and expensive to build and to maintain. Better options are emerging but undoing the old and replacing with new doesn't come cheap or easy or without a resolute determination to incentivise and facilitate its long term planning.

The long and winding road

What’s the point of what I’m trying to say here? Well just that amidst all the daily joys of life that will continue (it’s not Armageddon), there is a long hard multi-generational slog that awaits us. Nuclear fusion isn’t going to come to the rescue. Geothermal, wind or solar aren’t going to come to the rescue. Electrification isn’t striding to the rescue. Biofuels aren’t coming to save us. Carbon capture isn't an angelic deliverance. Hydrogen certainly isn’t going to come to the rescue. Critical minerals from the asteroids aren’t going to save us. Geoengineering on Venus isn’t going to magically provide planet B for overflow either. 

Some of these things might help, but they are not the cavalry coming riding over the hill. We do need saving, and change. Insane amounts of greenhouse gas emissions are a big problem and cannot go on like this. Superman…?

Advances may help us achieve items on the checklist, in our repertoire of changes for coming decades, but there is a real challenge ahead, and the magnitude of it is not abated by an incremental energy tweak here or there, or even breakthroughs here and there. They all come with baggage and cost. None of these things on their own can ever tackle the underlying scale of where we are at or where we are headed. 

It’s not the resource, it’s the scars incurred getting it out

As a geologist I know there are huge resources still to be found, but while there are a few specific [chemical] elements that do pose problems (not as many as we might think), the issue is less the resource than the costs of extracting it – environmentally, socially, financially, temporally. Do we want to spend all our money and time as a society expending the days of our lives on ever more profligate use of energy? The truth is we can’t even if we wanted to. 

The crux of the matter is that eventually there has to be a deliberate choice to decelerate. I don’t like analogies of driving over cliffs unless we brake, as I think the immediate apocalyptic “into a chasm” thing is overdone. Without denying the severity of what could happen if we do nothing, nothing is not on the cards really, and hyperbole always works into the hands of cynics who would reject any need for change. I think we do run a risk of running out of fuel and being stuck in a desert though, with a long hard dry thirsty walk to the nearest town if we don’t wise up. We need to do some stopping and “fill up”. Not on petrol, but on strategy. Long term strategy. Not strategy for the next AGM or the next election.

Overhauling totally how we do energy - to something much more intensely local, making the most of whatever we can in local resource without invoking huge infrastructure costs for distal distributions, is at least one fundamental order of the day. Those big far away things for energy supply will continue to be needed but getting out of the habit of defaulting to reliance on them at a local building scale will emerge as a priority. New builds need to be really new.

Not a retreat to the dark ages

Many changes are doable. We are not in an "all is lost" situation. The existence of the future does not have to be miserable, just a lot less focussed on repeated and unnecessary consumption. Incentivisation for building things to last, penalties for things that don’t, recycling what we can when stuff is finished with and incentives to design for that.  Making the most of what nature has put on our doorsteps too, and wood not least amongst them. Yet humanity does not yet seem in the right frame of mind to adopt the kinds of national energy overhauls that will be needed – both policy and infrastructure. 

To name a few, bike lanes not roads, electric trains not cars. Heat pumps and district heating not combustion. Local wind and solar where it can be had. The potential energy of water at a height - on big and little scales. Lots of things seem possible, but they are frequently high capital expenditure up front for long term gain and involve disruption to instigate.  Let’s not beat around the bush, that’s going to be difficult. It won’t typically happen by choice, but studies show that in general we don’t object too much if shared incremental costs bring about the kinds of changes needed to give long term environmental security. 

Inter-generational perseverance

Call me a pessimist but I can’t foresee energy overhaul happening on anything near the scale it needs to in my lifetime. What would be nice to see though is an honest recognition of the scale of the endeavour, and a ditching of the habit that says some new gadget or gizmo or approach is going to suddenly make our trash smell like roses. It won’t. 

The dream that we can just magic up some trite solution to an energy monster grown on a windfall of hundreds of millions of years of stored energy consumed in one and a half centuries, needs to disappear in a puff of logic. I do wonder how many generations of incrementally increasing trauma will have to be endured before the message sinks in deep enough for people to vote for change – that remains to be seen. 

Change does mean disruption, so national energy infrastructure overhauls do not come without sacrifice of convenience, or without compromise. There’s only so much disruption we can take at once though and that’s as it should be - we have to live too. No-one, with the best intentions in the world is going to achieve it overnight. It is going to take time, but we have to at least think about starting. We are starting, but this habit of promoting some new technology as something that will allow our merry old habits to continue in growth ad infinitum – it isn’t helpful.

Strangely perhaps, the biggest lessons in all this may well come from those who currently have the least in the energy arena. The first shall be last and the last shall be first. Latecomer’s advantage to do things differently and make new infrastructures without having to dismantle or disrupt old ones. 

It’s going to be a long haul, there isn’t any quick fix, but let’s hang in there, do what we can, and trust that eventually the message will sink in. The great, great, great grandkids might just get it.