Today I read that Portugal produced 70% of its energy from renewables in the 1st quarter. This is a dramatic increase. Is it possible to run a modern developed economy totally on renewable resources as its set up today? We obviously covered this in our book. This is part of what we said.
“In our opinion, resource constraints will force globalisation into reverse, to be replaced by extreme localisation. There is no simple substitute for the oil which keeps the ships, planes and lorries moving goods around our globalised economy.”
The problem is there is a lot more than to energy than electricity. There is confusion in the articles about this news-story, most them describe electricity but talk about energy. To run an economy entirely on renewables means renewable heat, renewable transport and renewable materials (like plastics) in addition to electricity. As we described in “No oil in the lamp”, this is a much more tricky proposition. Using energy demand now taken from David Mackay’s book “Sustainable energy without the hot air” and making reasonable assumptions on what the UK could produce from the governments 2050 pathway analysis (both expressed as kWh/per/person) we found a gap. This energy gap was about the size caused by what David Mackay calls “stuff”, this means material goods. In our view (expressed in our book) “stuff” being oil based is not replaceable. In our view neither is a lot of transportation. Not having much “stuff” would roughly plug the gap for the UK. [Mackay has done analysis for the US as well in the same way in the book.] As Christians we think this is where the bible comes in as we wrote;
“The most challenging question is, should we use renewable energy to continue our current, highly energy-dependent lifestyle? Our view is that we should not. The reasons for this are very simple. Access to cheap energy has allowed us to do great ecological and social damage to ourselves. It has made us more insular, being increasingly cut-off from our fellow human beings (despite or perhaps because of easy foreign travel and electronic communications), disconnected from nature and materialistic. Even if we had plentiful cheap renewable energy we would use this to do other harm to our shared planet. We realise this is an unpalatable message (perhaps impossible for a politician to voice). But at the same time it is one that fits in very well with many passages in scripture, one example being Matthew 6v19-20: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal “. In the remainder of this book, we examine how Christians can face the challenges and opportunities that will come our way in the next few years, as the energy crunch starts to take hold.”
Neil