The Mendacity of the Renewable Energy-Bashers

I have been writing about energy issues for over a decade. In that time I have noticed, time and again, the reliance of those who denigrate renewable energy on "fighting dirty"--relying on shoddy, mendacious argument, and irrational appeals, to bully those who disagree with them. It seems only appropriate to say something of that.

Double Standards in Technological Comparisons
First and foremost I have been struck by the tendency of detractors of renewable energy to present a balance sheet consisting solely of its credits, not its debits--often while pretending to compare it with the more established sources, often without actually presenting the figures on that balance sheet at all.

For example, they are quick to point out that renewables have received subsidies, and that they carry ecological costs--accounting for greenhouse gas emissions during their life cycle. They do not, however, concern themselves with the fact that the same goes for fossil fuels and nuclear energy--as if they had no costs or problems at all, as if they were totally wonderful and perfect. The result is that there is no comparison among these diverse options to see how they stack up in these respects, no consideration of whether renewables may, in fact, be advantageous to some appreciable, worthwhile degree--only much harping on any imperfection they may have, as if this were an automatic deal-breaker.

This may be an oversight on their part--albeit, one which suggests a strong bias in their focusing on the downsides of renewables while ignoring those of established energy sources. However, it may also be a matter of their knowing full well how poorly their favored sources stack up in any such comparison.

Yes, renewables have received subsidies--feed-in tariffs and the like. But so have fossil fuels--which may now be getting the benefit of as much as five trillion dollars a year according not to Greenpace, but to that high church of neoliberalism, the International Monetary Fund. Nuclear energy, too, has been a beneificary of heavy subsidy, and produced great externalities. (The renewables-basher gets contemptuous if you mention Fukushima, but guess what? The clean-up bill for that disaster was estimated at $200 billion--three years and much bad news ago.)

Yes, renewables have not been competing on a level playing field--because that field has been tilted so long and so sharply in favor of the established energy sources.

Yes, while the spinning of a wind turbine does not in itself produce greenhouse gas emissions, the production, installation, disposal of a wind turbine entails carbon dioxide emissions. How much?

Eleven grams per kilowatt-hour.

It is not zero.

But compare that with the kilogram of carbon dioxide (980 g) produced by a coal plant, the half-kilo (465) by a natural gas plant, which means that a wind turbine generates 98-99 percent less carbon dioxide per unit of electricity. Rather than cause for despair about them this is a powerful argument on their behalf.

Treating Technologies in Isolation
The pattern of giving half of the picture or less in the manner described above extends beyond comparisons between renewables and more established sources to lengthy debunking of the prospect of one source of renewable energy carrying the whole burden--100 percent solar, for example. This is, in part, because the idea of such a "monoculture" is an easy straw man. By and large, proponents of renewable energy, cognizant of the limits of any one form of production, advocate a mix of technologies, to cover a wide variety of circumstances and locations--solar working with wind working with hydropower and whatever else may be available at a particular location that, much as nuclear and coal and gas complement each other in today's grids, would do the same in a renewables-based economy, substantially overcoming weaknesses such as the intermittency of sources. The sun may not shine all day--but when it is not shining, the wind turbines may be spinning.

They also tend to ignore the significant ongoing changes in the way grids as a whole are run--in particular, the shift from grids generating wasteful "baseload" energy ("too much when you don't need it, not enough when you do") to flexible, "smart" grids able to cope swiftly and precisely with shifting supply and demand. As Germany has demonstrated, where grids are sufficiently flexible and connectivity, they can already substanially handle the task of matching intermittent wind and solar to demand at least as reliably as a grid based on more traditional supplies. The incorporation of still other options, like dispatchable hydroelectric power (already well-developed) and solar thermal (pricier as an electricity producer, but relatively low-cost as a way of storing renewable solar energy for dispatch later), provides still more options.

Ruling Out Further Technical Progress
In addition to their tendency to give the advantages of renewables (and disadvantages of other sources) short shrift, and envision renewables-based grids in straw man terms, the detractors of renewable energy, when going beyond the question of whether the technologies can bear a given burden now to whether they can possibly do so in the foreseeable future, dismiss any prospect of improvement in their cost or performance. That the price of solar power-generated electricity fell by seven-eighths in the last decade (to name just one of the more striking of the field's many areas of progress), and thus holds out promise of further improvements, especially if proper support were provided, is, in their view, completely irrelevant.

Of course, one may be willing to grant the point that one cannot build on the basis of unrealized possibilities. Yet, it is another thing to take that as reason not to try and develop those possibilities if the resources are available; and still more, rule out the option for all time. Moreover, while such detractors are extremely exacting with renewables in this area, they are often quite bullish on the prospects of technical progress in the areas they favor, like palliatives for the carbon emissions of continued fossil fuels consumption. Remember how Carbon Capture and Storage was going to save the world?

Once more, a double standard is in evidence.

"Too Good to Be True"
As might be guessed by anyone who has had much experience of specious argument, and those who offer it, the renewables-bashers cross the line into appeals to "truthiness"--the "quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true." How so? Simply put, much of their appeal rests on the idea that the promises made for renewables are just "too good to be true"--an appeal to cynicism and pessmism as such.

Why is that the case? One reason is that the pervasiveness and prestige of the idea that the world must always not be as we would like it to be, that the cosmos is rigged against any chance of human happiness (the "tragic view"), is somehow the beginning and end of wisdom--and that anyone expecting better is a fool--can scarcely be overstated. The idea that we cannot have a green modernity, being unpalatable, consequently seems the "truthier" for being unpalatable. Truthier, too, because of the pompous aloofness with which such words are often spoken, the comfortable being so inclined to lay down the "hard facts of life" to those they see as inferiors; and because of the simple-minded equation of irony with wit, the more for how snobbish irony can be. And truthier because we live in such a postmodernist, end-of-history cultural atmosphere, where people in middle age have no memory of a major problem being solved, only of endless talk, broken promises, betrayals, as things go on getting worse, much worse, especially in regard to the environment. (The environmental movement has won battles, but just about never any big ones, while everything we see in 2019 tells us just how badly they have been losing the war--for decades.)

It seems to me that it might even be the case that, even if people suspect the claims that a renewable energy-based modernity is unworkable are untrue, they are susceptible to going along with it because of that same harsh experience in these decades--that Big Business never loses a fight, that a greener economy can only happen at their sufferance, and that if this means atomic energy, nuclear or nothing, as their shills and their trolls so endlessly insist, then that is preferable to the alternative.

All of this derives additional force from the identification of aspirations to a world which is happier and greener with the countercultural "hippie," still after all these years held up as a straw man for the contempt of the right-wingers who won that particular kulturkampf and never let anyone forget it--hippies contrasted with the "practical men" (I suspect the gendered aspect of this is relevant) laying down the "hard facts of life."

Looking back over it all, one can see how many are intimidated, if not persuaded, by all of that. But to say that it is a logically compelling argument is something else.

There, they lose and lose decisively--and no one should ever forget that.