Owen Jennings
‘So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot’
George Orwell
Carbon Free by 2050 is playing with fire. More accurately the aim is to achieve net-zero carbon dioxide emissions globally by 2050. It is what the ill-informed kids are yelling for in the streets. It is what the informed, but hypocritical, big kids in politics are yelling for in their parliaments and on the hustings.
What does ‘net-zero carbon dioxide, globally by 2050’ actually look like?
It means building three large nuclear power stations every two days until 2050¹. Almost unbelievable. That is never going to happen, even if the ‘greenies’ ever got sensible enough to figure out that nuclear power is an obvious way to move toward weaning ourselves off fossil fuels. Sensible and ‘greenie’ just do not go together. After all, they would not have prevented the building of more hydro in NZ – the lower Waitaki, the Mokihinui and others – had they not been daft and hypocritical.
Another way to gain some idea of what Carbon-Free by 2050 looks like is that it would take the deployment of approximately 1,500 (2.5 megawatt) wind turbines, across about 300 square miles of land, every day till 2050. That means covering an area equivalent to the whole of New Zealand – every square km – every year for over 30 years.
The Democrats in the USA, who have collectively gone stark, staring mad trying to out-green, out-liberal and outdo each other are promising those Americans silly enough to listen that they will make their world Carbon-Free by the year 2030. That means building nearly 5 large nuclear plants every day till Dec 31st 2029. Truth, reality, common sense and freedom are all casualties in this childish one-upmanship campaign.
Of course, there are neither the resources, the skills, the time nor the inclination to achieve any such Carbon Free goal. But in this age and on this subject politicians get a free pass from the popular media so they simply say what a gullible population will lap up.
In the UK the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced that it would cost over one trillion to go Carbon-Free and that it would involve cuts to health, education and welfare, but the millennials yelled all the more loudly. They have swallowed the meme, “there is no future, anyway”.
Europe was rushing into Carbon-Free by 2050 until wiser heads from the old Eastern European bloc put their hand up. “It’s alright for you”, they said to Germany and France, “we need to catch up to where your standard of living is before any restrictions apply”.
The reasons behind their obstruction should be blindingly obvious. The world cannot replace fossil fuel energy with renewable or sequester enough CO2 to achieve the Carbon Free by 2050 goal so the economies of the world need to be collapsed.
Yes, collapsed. Not modified. Not slowed down. Not tinkered with. Collapsed.
Even allowing for a huge investment in new technologies and a spate of innovative responses there is simply no way to meet the 2050 target without dramatically curtailing a very large percentage of all economic activity.
New Zealand is heading down a treacherous path. Current plans will cost the economy more than a trillion dollars in GDP foregone over the 32 years. Two million hectares of pastoral land will be lost to trees under the Productivity Commission report proposals. Trees planted for profit from the timber employ people but trees planted for carbon credits will be left untended so employment levels will fall. Exports will shrink and the downward spiral will spin out of control.
We simply cannot move the goods around that we need to carry out almost every activity we know. Take your breakfast this morning. The cereal came from grain grown in Australia. The grain was planted from seed collected by diesel-driven combines, cleaned and dried by oil-fired driers, in a building powered by electricity from oil and gas production. The seed was put into bags made from plastic and carted hundreds of miles by diesel trucks to a farm. Planted and tended by a diesel tractor, harvested by a diesel combine, sorted and dried by gas/oil driers, carted by trucks and trains fired by diesel to a storage area kept at the correct humidity by electric and gas-fired technology. More cartage to a bakery. Baked in gas ovens, sugar added that was transported from a couple of thousand kms away and processed by fossil fuels. Salt added with similar origins. Dried fruit also with a similar fossil-fuelled background.
Put into plastic bags and cartons made from trees all transported using more fossil fuels. And the cereal hasn’t even left the factory in Australia. Ok, cross cereal off – we will eat toast. No, sir. It has a similar fossil fuel history. Alright, let’s open a tin of peaches…. hang on, how did the peaches get to your supermarket? Coffee? Heck no. It came by oil-fired ship, dried by electricity, packed in plastic. Darn, let’s settle for a glass of milk. Nah! No fertilizer on the farm has cut production. Electricity is needed to milk the cows but it is too unreliable so dairy farmers need a diesel standby or milk by hand. Milk is heading to $10.00 a litre but it is rarely available. And you haven’t even left your freezing cold house yet and tried to get to work. And what work can you go to?
Electric cars were popular for a short time but reality has now hit home. Electric trucks? They move but cannot pull any weight. When you need to charge them up on a still, cold night the power is off.
Try naming a commercial activity that can exist without fossil fuels. There isn’t one. Try changing to 100% renewables. Easy for the first 25% – 30% then it gets difficult. The last 30% – 40% is impossible. So the world will grow trees to offset the “impossible” portion. The UK expects to put 30% of its highly productive farmland into biomass and peatland restoration. Pray, where is the food going to come from?
New Zealand will be a haven for carbon credit-seeking, international companies. Green MP’s who once denounced overseas investments are swallowing dead rats to let our food-producing land go to trees. It’s more than conceivable that our food production will be more than halved.
The further one progresses into the process and stops idly boasting about targets the more bizarre the whole deal becomes. If you have started to think that maybe there is some other agenda at play here, like defeating nationalism, forcing socialism, creating a single world government you are forgiven.
At the core of all this humbug is that strange socialist phenomena that sacrifice is OK when “society” should do it. When it comes to me having to make major cut backs it is just too hard.
It is the Al Gore syndrome. “The world must cut fossil fuel use but I need to fly in by private jet to tell you”. “You all must use less electricity but I need extra lights in my mansion”.
Is this all going to happen?
Not a bolter’s show.
The vast majority of the population will not put up with the shenanigans. They may trim a few things around the edges but the wholesale wrecking of an economy is never going to be tolerated. We can’t eat trees. We need another 100 years or so to significantly reduce oil dependency to reduce pollution. We will live with a couple of extra degrees of warmth, build a few sea walls, concentrate on fixing poverty and the housing crisis and live happily ever after.
¹ Roger Pielke Jnr. Blog.