Feed the world or heat it

Almost everyone is on board with renewables except those people truly incapable of not understanding how science works.

I took my brother for a treat last week and showed him my favourite monument to renewable energy: a local wind farm where I stop every time I pass it, day or night and alight the car to simply watch the blades as they whoosh around.

Ever the clown, my brother stood in the path of the passing shadows and with each sweep, he leapt over them like... well, like a clown. I upstaged him appropriately: “you always jumped at shadows”.

People do the maths all the time on the reality of renewable energy sources, and as expected the numbers vary in terms of what is needed to fulfil this ideal.

At present in the US, for example, if every car was replaced with an electric vehicle (EV), the country would need to produce anywhere between 35 and 90 per cent more electricity.

And that would of course be too much electricity for renewable sources to produce at present and so would require burning more fossil fuels.

I sat down with a chemistry student once and we calculated what area of sunflowers would need to be grown to run my diesel car if I were to (easily) convert it to biodiesel.

For one year (about 20,000km) it would require one hectare.

My back of the envelope has this: repeat this with every car on Earth and you lose 11 per cent of our food-producing land.

Not too bad, you might say, but that’s like Europe using land the size of Ireland to produce biodiesel — which it is doing, incidentally — and yet one hectare of solar panels instead of sunflowers could produce about three million kilometres in an EV!

Add this all together: we could starve to death while stopping global warming as our population grew.

Even Greta might agree.

Critics grab these numbers with all the talons they can brandish and do the old ‘see?! SEE?!’ routine.

Yet these limits to our technology are not hidden from those trying to perfect it; and any failings do not negate the evidence of climate change. But then, simple minds...

(While Edward Jenner couldn’t keep up with the small pox vaccine, were the streets filled with cries of ‘See? Smallpox doesn’t exist!’?)

A recent paper out of Zhejiang University has thrown the most current numbers at solar panel technology. Their nutshell: on forecasted technology, solar panel installation in 2050 would remove food-producing land needed to feed a quarter of a billion people.

However, much is going on behind the scenes and I take heart that persistent research is chipping away at the problem.

I read a paper last year which described a device under development that could float in the ocean, produce energy from solar panels and wave movement for consumer consumption, with enough energy left over to desalinate sea water while it was at it.

It couldn’t make coffee — otherwise I would have bought shares.

I think the front line to make all of this work involves co-operation and a common goal along with people making large sacrifices.

When we saw the Federal Coalition in opposition join with the Greens in 2009 to stop Rudd’s carbon tax, we saw stupidity.

Because the bill did not meet the Greens’ puritanism (of zero emissions), its defeat meant we have forfeited an estimated 20 per cent reduction in yearly emissions.

That means that Bob Brown and his gang have since added 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere. Nice one, Greens.

And the other hilarity which I am sure I alone saw was the day-to-day whine colleagues and friends had about expected increases in energy bills.

“So what will you do to reduce them?” I asked.

“Use less electricity.”

“Which means, until we get renewables perfected...”

“Burning less coal.”

“Bingo.”

Tune in next week for a possible conclusion.