A farm is just another place to put a solar array. This is an energy technology that conceals the truth: We are trying to change things without changing things
the concerns about the eco=impact of manufacturing and siting more wind & solar & batteries etc are well-taken. it all must be done in eco-harmony, with nothing made that can't be recycled, with as little eco-impact as possible, and with no disturbed eco-system left un-remediated. .
but we have no choice except to convert our global energy supply to renewable sources.
we can certainly lower our consumption with increased efficiency and by diminishing many forms of consumption (we can start with billionaire yachts...and with factory-produced meat consumption).
we can also lower population growth, and then population itself, by supporting the natural progress of the empowerment of women, which constantly results in lower birth rates, and will continue to do so the foreseeable future. sooner or later, Mother Earth will synch up with human mothers in terms of what our sustainable number really must be.
wind turbines require an acre or less of land per tower. the bird kill problem must be dealt with. there are health issues to be dealt with, and possible marine impacts off shore.
solar panels must be self-sustaining, ie the factories that make them must themselves be solar-powered. agri-voltaic means the panels on farmland must be high enough off the ground to allow crops (obviously shade plants).
ultimately wind and agri-solar must be a player in keeping farmers on the land with the added income they can provide. and covering every rooftop with solar panels before we encroach on farmland is best of all, especially considering the transmission costs that will avoid.
again, there are emf, dirty energy and other factors to account for....and to be solved.
lithium for vehicle batteries will be hard to replace in the short-term. but sodium will very soon be far cheaper and more sustainable for steady-state facilities.
all this is easy to attack. but no one should do so without comparing the lethal costs of continuing with King CONG (coal, oil, nukes & gas). our species will not survive with the continued use of fossil/nuclear fuels.
we can certainly envision a simpler, cleaner existence for human civilization with far less energy use.
but that will also have its own costs, especially in the challenge of supporting a (for at least the next century) growing human population, and a planet filled with humans who are not being adequately fed, housed, kept healthy, educated, etc.
we are not looking at a vector right now where simplification of our existence on this planet will happen fast enough to allow us to phase out fossil/nuclear fuels in time for our survival.
increased efficiency will help. but the transition to renewables is an absolute necessity.
raising the issues of their ecological impact is essential. we most certainly need to solve them as we evolve to a green-powered earth.
it will be a close call. but writing off these technologies rather than solving their flaws is not an option. fortunately, they are simpler, cheaper, safer, cleaner, more reliable and more job-producing to deal with than the fossil/nuclear curse that threatens to kill us all.
our survival on this planet means going green in a sane, responsible manner. calling out these new technologies' flaws, and seizing the opportunities to correct then, without negating them altogether, should allow us to do just that.
I’m not used to this site since this is my first comment! I did not mean to send it so soon. So, continued:
3) it seems that future civilization will require a different approach to energy, at least so fossil carbon release is balanced by systems which re-absorb the carbon. As of today only natural systems do that
My main comment, though, is that you need to understand how low photosynthetic efficiency is in plants like corn. Just looking at the plant and sunlight - not figuring in the hardware, transportation and all fossil energy inputs annually - the fixed carbon per unit of energy efficiency is less than 3% (probably far less; one needs to wade through lots of research literature to get to the numbers). This capture of energy in the corn belt happens in about 4 months. Compared to modern photovoltaics at around 20% efficiency and capturing photons of energy all year, corn ethanol looks futile. There is a huge ecological and carbon footprint for solar to be sure, but in the energy game there is no free lunch anywhere. If human society is in over-shoot of physical and biological limits technology alone won’t save us alone. But human cultures can adapt and thrive under new circumstances which change the paradigms of what matters. Modernisms myths and our mind-numbing hubris tell us that our current is the only way. But it’s not.
Besides the incredible amount of mining for renewables, solar panels increase the heat island effect and wind turbines use diesel and leach microplastics and fibreglass. Siting them also often leads to deforestation and bat/bird or whale deaths. And the UK is officially spraying the skies to dim the sun, even though most governments have been doing it for decades, which will make solar panels nearly pointless.
The Photovoltaic Heat Island Effect: Larger solar power plants increase local temperatures
solar panels can do well on farms if they're installed high enough off the ground to allow agriculture to flourish underneath. in many cases their shade actually enhances productivity. it's call agri-voltaics. but rooftop is the most efficient in part because there are no transmission costs, which can be considerable.
I fail to understand why people can't understand that the earth has FINITE RESOURCES, while we live in a suicidal system that requires INFINITE EXTRACTION AND GROWTH. This idea, this understanding, this is the crux of our problem. People have been trying to bring this essential, fundamental, question into the foreground of finding solutions for years. People want to keep talking about generating energy. Whelp, if we were gifted with unlimited energy with no negative environmental problems, we would still be looking at feeding 8 billion people with severely damaged ecosystems. Even if we went to "net zero" within 4 weeks, we would still be facing increased temperatures, contaminated soil, major loss of biodiversity, including pollinators, compromised fresh water sources.
I'm just scratching the surface.
We need to change the way people think and live. We need to change the way our world works, socially, politically and economically. We've been doing everything wrong for 50 years.
Agree wholeheartedly, thank you for the pragmatism. There is no silver bullet, no single issue fix or business as usual option… all you need to do is ponder the fact that 96% of the mammal biomass on the planet is humans and livestock and an ‘ah ha’ will be yours.
By the way I live in Aurora in east-central Nebraska - some of the richest and flattest ground in the Great Plains - where irrigated corn and beans rival Iowa’s yields. It is essentially an industrial desert with much fewer farmers than when I was growing up here in the 60s and 70s. Fortunately there are many good things happening here as far as high diversity grassland and wetland restoration (check out prairieplains.org). Quality of life is good and many small towns in NE are thriving. But the idea of a photovoltaic farm on a few sections out of the county with more than 300,000 acres of crops does not offend me. And what if this pv energy was a way to supply Aurora and surroundings as a matter of community self-sufficiency, like a major grid issue of storm disaster. Nebraska is a public power state, so the present economics are maybe not ripe, however a local population - a true community - could conceivably adapt to their local energy supplies as they used to. But technology gives us new choices for this local context.
I don’t disagree with your skepticism of renewable energy development, however it bothers me that increasing reliance on fossil fuels or biofuels has its limitations. All fossil fuel utilization will expand until it can’t, meaning:
1) huge additional fossil fuel infrastructure development - on top of what has already had negative impacts on large landscapes and waters, not to mention more than 100 years of ever-growing fossil carbon footprint.
2) increasing financial costs to retrieve harder to access deposits
3) increasing damage to remaining ecosystems with all their species, intricate cycles and interrelationships, etc.
I totally agree with your assessment. And then there is the
Jevons Paradox
The Jevons paradox is that efficiency enables growth. New technologies that can produce more goods from a given amount of resources allow the economy as a whole to produce more. More resources get used overall- not less.
This is the magic of industrial capitalism and the secret of growth. Economists have known it for a long time. So why is it called a paradox?
English economist William Stanley Jevons gets credit for being the first to point all this out. In 1865, Jevons found that as each new steam engine design made the use of coal more efficient, Britain used more coal overall, not less.
That's interesting. Thank you. I think the same applies to all these strategies for energy efficiency. If you are more energy efficient, you save on energy and just use that savings to do more stuff or spend the money on something else. Our industrial consumer society has an unlimited appetite for energy. What do you think?
I'm inclined to think that we're better off promoting solar-and-wind used wisely to reduce emissions, than ONLY advocating for that we go "cold turkey" and radically reduce energy usage. We SHOULD radically reduce energy usage...but maybe recognize that stopping an addiction "cold turkey" can be too much for the patient to bear....?
Interesting feedback. You’re asking me??? I’m flattered, but I’m just a guy with a computer.
Here’s where my mind goes. I think the biggest blind spot among those who broadly advocate for sustainability is these two things: We don’t understand how Energy and Extraction grow with GDP and that GDP, Energy and Extraction are doubling about every thirty years, or growing by 10x per century. In 100 years, the economy, energy and extraction are 10x what they are now. In 200 years, they are 100x and so on. In 600 years, it’s a million.
How do we solve that problem?
This is Tom Murphy’s message.
We need a fundamentally different way of thinking.
Similarly, there’s this whole idea of anthropogenic mass, the total mass or weight of everything humans have made. When my grandparents were born around the turn of the 20th century anthropogenic mass was about 3% of biomass. Now it’s 100% of biomass and set to be 200% and 300% in this century.
And then the question is … is this making us happy? Is this increasing our true “standard of living”? How many people would like to get out of that cubicle and work on a regenerative farm? But the economics are not there. Why are the economics not there? Because we’re so busy building anthropogenic mass in the service of people we don’t know or don’t like or both, and in the service of industries we would not want or need if we had the choice.
What are we doing? And why? I think these are the questions.
I hope I’ve responded to your question.
When Lincoln debated Douglas in the 1858 Senatorial race, Douglas was treating slavery as a political question. Lincoln decided to go deeper and define it as a moral question. Sometimes, you have to go deeper to change the conversation. If you don’t like what people are saying, change the conversation.
You and I, the little people, are not driving this conversation. Commercial interests, in bed with politicians, are driving this conversation. They will continue to keep it at a superficial level if we let them. But we have the power to change the conversation, and arguably, we don’t have much choice.
Everyone, please spread this post far and wide. There will be no real change to benefit society until people understand everything in this post.
fossil/nuclear fuels are killing us all.
the concerns about the eco=impact of manufacturing and siting more wind & solar & batteries etc are well-taken. it all must be done in eco-harmony, with nothing made that can't be recycled, with as little eco-impact as possible, and with no disturbed eco-system left un-remediated. .
but we have no choice except to convert our global energy supply to renewable sources.
we can certainly lower our consumption with increased efficiency and by diminishing many forms of consumption (we can start with billionaire yachts...and with factory-produced meat consumption).
we can also lower population growth, and then population itself, by supporting the natural progress of the empowerment of women, which constantly results in lower birth rates, and will continue to do so the foreseeable future. sooner or later, Mother Earth will synch up with human mothers in terms of what our sustainable number really must be.
wind turbines require an acre or less of land per tower. the bird kill problem must be dealt with. there are health issues to be dealt with, and possible marine impacts off shore.
solar panels must be self-sustaining, ie the factories that make them must themselves be solar-powered. agri-voltaic means the panels on farmland must be high enough off the ground to allow crops (obviously shade plants).
ultimately wind and agri-solar must be a player in keeping farmers on the land with the added income they can provide. and covering every rooftop with solar panels before we encroach on farmland is best of all, especially considering the transmission costs that will avoid.
again, there are emf, dirty energy and other factors to account for....and to be solved.
lithium for vehicle batteries will be hard to replace in the short-term. but sodium will very soon be far cheaper and more sustainable for steady-state facilities.
all this is easy to attack. but no one should do so without comparing the lethal costs of continuing with King CONG (coal, oil, nukes & gas). our species will not survive with the continued use of fossil/nuclear fuels.
we can certainly envision a simpler, cleaner existence for human civilization with far less energy use.
but that will also have its own costs, especially in the challenge of supporting a (for at least the next century) growing human population, and a planet filled with humans who are not being adequately fed, housed, kept healthy, educated, etc.
we are not looking at a vector right now where simplification of our existence on this planet will happen fast enough to allow us to phase out fossil/nuclear fuels in time for our survival.
increased efficiency will help. but the transition to renewables is an absolute necessity.
raising the issues of their ecological impact is essential. we most certainly need to solve them as we evolve to a green-powered earth.
it will be a close call. but writing off these technologies rather than solving their flaws is not an option. fortunately, they are simpler, cheaper, safer, cleaner, more reliable and more job-producing to deal with than the fossil/nuclear curse that threatens to kill us all.
our survival on this planet means going green in a sane, responsible manner. calling out these new technologies' flaws, and seizing the opportunities to correct then, without negating them altogether, should allow us to do just that.
I’m not used to this site since this is my first comment! I did not mean to send it so soon. So, continued:
3) it seems that future civilization will require a different approach to energy, at least so fossil carbon release is balanced by systems which re-absorb the carbon. As of today only natural systems do that
My main comment, though, is that you need to understand how low photosynthetic efficiency is in plants like corn. Just looking at the plant and sunlight - not figuring in the hardware, transportation and all fossil energy inputs annually - the fixed carbon per unit of energy efficiency is less than 3% (probably far less; one needs to wade through lots of research literature to get to the numbers). This capture of energy in the corn belt happens in about 4 months. Compared to modern photovoltaics at around 20% efficiency and capturing photons of energy all year, corn ethanol looks futile. There is a huge ecological and carbon footprint for solar to be sure, but in the energy game there is no free lunch anywhere. If human society is in over-shoot of physical and biological limits technology alone won’t save us alone. But human cultures can adapt and thrive under new circumstances which change the paradigms of what matters. Modernisms myths and our mind-numbing hubris tell us that our current is the only way. But it’s not.
Besides the incredible amount of mining for renewables, solar panels increase the heat island effect and wind turbines use diesel and leach microplastics and fibreglass. Siting them also often leads to deforestation and bat/bird or whale deaths. And the UK is officially spraying the skies to dim the sun, even though most governments have been doing it for decades, which will make solar panels nearly pointless.
The Photovoltaic Heat Island Effect: Larger solar power plants increase local temperatures
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35070
Nice post. BGL is an excellent book. My last post also tried to highlight the impossibility of so-called renewables https://open.substack.com/pub/gnug315/p/our-planet-sized-gordian-knot
On a side note, I have lost all hope for any non-catastrophic outcome.
solar panels can do well on farms if they're installed high enough off the ground to allow agriculture to flourish underneath. in many cases their shade actually enhances productivity. it's call agri-voltaics. but rooftop is the most efficient in part because there are no transmission costs, which can be considerable.
I fail to understand why people can't understand that the earth has FINITE RESOURCES, while we live in a suicidal system that requires INFINITE EXTRACTION AND GROWTH. This idea, this understanding, this is the crux of our problem. People have been trying to bring this essential, fundamental, question into the foreground of finding solutions for years. People want to keep talking about generating energy. Whelp, if we were gifted with unlimited energy with no negative environmental problems, we would still be looking at feeding 8 billion people with severely damaged ecosystems. Even if we went to "net zero" within 4 weeks, we would still be facing increased temperatures, contaminated soil, major loss of biodiversity, including pollinators, compromised fresh water sources.
I'm just scratching the surface.
We need to change the way people think and live. We need to change the way our world works, socially, politically and economically. We've been doing everything wrong for 50 years.
I fully agree. We are trying to change things without changing things. We are participating in the illusion of progress.
Agree wholeheartedly, thank you for the pragmatism. There is no silver bullet, no single issue fix or business as usual option… all you need to do is ponder the fact that 96% of the mammal biomass on the planet is humans and livestock and an ‘ah ha’ will be yours.
By the way I live in Aurora in east-central Nebraska - some of the richest and flattest ground in the Great Plains - where irrigated corn and beans rival Iowa’s yields. It is essentially an industrial desert with much fewer farmers than when I was growing up here in the 60s and 70s. Fortunately there are many good things happening here as far as high diversity grassland and wetland restoration (check out prairieplains.org). Quality of life is good and many small towns in NE are thriving. But the idea of a photovoltaic farm on a few sections out of the county with more than 300,000 acres of crops does not offend me. And what if this pv energy was a way to supply Aurora and surroundings as a matter of community self-sufficiency, like a major grid issue of storm disaster. Nebraska is a public power state, so the present economics are maybe not ripe, however a local population - a true community - could conceivably adapt to their local energy supplies as they used to. But technology gives us new choices for this local context.
I don’t disagree with your skepticism of renewable energy development, however it bothers me that increasing reliance on fossil fuels or biofuels has its limitations. All fossil fuel utilization will expand until it can’t, meaning:
1) huge additional fossil fuel infrastructure development - on top of what has already had negative impacts on large landscapes and waters, not to mention more than 100 years of ever-growing fossil carbon footprint.
2) increasing financial costs to retrieve harder to access deposits
3) increasing damage to remaining ecosystems with all their species, intricate cycles and interrelationships, etc.
I totally agree with your assessment. And then there is the
Jevons Paradox
The Jevons paradox is that efficiency enables growth. New technologies that can produce more goods from a given amount of resources allow the economy as a whole to produce more. More resources get used overall- not less.
This is the magic of industrial capitalism and the secret of growth. Economists have known it for a long time. So why is it called a paradox?
English economist William Stanley Jevons gets credit for being the first to point all this out. In 1865, Jevons found that as each new steam engine design made the use of coal more efficient, Britain used more coal overall, not less.
That's interesting. Thank you. I think the same applies to all these strategies for energy efficiency. If you are more energy efficient, you save on energy and just use that savings to do more stuff or spend the money on something else. Our industrial consumer society has an unlimited appetite for energy. What do you think?
They are only pushing solar and wind in order to keep industrial society going. We have no time to waste.
Another trenchant essay. Kudos!
And yet...
I'm inclined to think that we're better off promoting solar-and-wind used wisely to reduce emissions, than ONLY advocating for that we go "cold turkey" and radically reduce energy usage. We SHOULD radically reduce energy usage...but maybe recognize that stopping an addiction "cold turkey" can be too much for the patient to bear....?
Interesting feedback. You’re asking me??? I’m flattered, but I’m just a guy with a computer.
Here’s where my mind goes. I think the biggest blind spot among those who broadly advocate for sustainability is these two things: We don’t understand how Energy and Extraction grow with GDP and that GDP, Energy and Extraction are doubling about every thirty years, or growing by 10x per century. In 100 years, the economy, energy and extraction are 10x what they are now. In 200 years, they are 100x and so on. In 600 years, it’s a million.
How do we solve that problem?
This is Tom Murphy’s message.
We need a fundamentally different way of thinking.
Similarly, there’s this whole idea of anthropogenic mass, the total mass or weight of everything humans have made. When my grandparents were born around the turn of the 20th century anthropogenic mass was about 3% of biomass. Now it’s 100% of biomass and set to be 200% and 300% in this century.
And then the question is … is this making us happy? Is this increasing our true “standard of living”? How many people would like to get out of that cubicle and work on a regenerative farm? But the economics are not there. Why are the economics not there? Because we’re so busy building anthropogenic mass in the service of people we don’t know or don’t like or both, and in the service of industries we would not want or need if we had the choice.
What are we doing? And why? I think these are the questions.
I hope I’ve responded to your question.
When Lincoln debated Douglas in the 1858 Senatorial race, Douglas was treating slavery as a political question. Lincoln decided to go deeper and define it as a moral question. Sometimes, you have to go deeper to change the conversation. If you don’t like what people are saying, change the conversation.
You and I, the little people, are not driving this conversation. Commercial interests, in bed with politicians, are driving this conversation. They will continue to keep it at a superficial level if we let them. But we have the power to change the conversation, and arguably, we don’t have much choice.
What do you think?