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Shibboleth thank you for not haranguing Michael.
I appreciate your condescension.
If by far the greatest proportion of the terrestrial biosphere Carbon is stored in the top soils,
why ignore that “store” why pretend that the only component that is important is burning Carbon fuels?“More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy”
book review by Adam Tooze
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n01/adam-tooze/trouble-transitioningVibe shift
this is going to fry the brains of some of our contributors.
I doubt they will respond.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5YXrNUpGfE
The world, the Western World, has come recently to understand that a man is unlikely to become a Lesbian.
The world may discover than the Great barrier Reef is not ceasing to exist because of Global warming.
The world, may discover that scientists discover that Global Warming has been over emphasised.
My goodness, perhaps we have been hoodwinked.Thanks AG. Unfortunately the review is behind a paywall, but here is another:
https://theartsdesk.com/books/jean-baptiste-fressoz-more-and-more-and-more-review-fuel-thought
If you are bothered about climate change – and who isn’t? – you’ll soon come across references to the “energy transition”. Example? Look, here’s one in this week’s New Scientist, a full-page ad from Equinor, the rebranded Norwegian state-owned oil and gas giant. Why is Equinor, now styling itself an energy company, still exploring for new oil and gas deposits?
Because, they say, demand will persist for decades to come, so it’s “the responsible thing to do” – even though the company is also investing in renewables, albeit only a quarter as much, to help “speed up the energy transition”.
Transition here is a vaguely reassuring term that helps with the greenwashing while Equinor continues doing what it knows how to do: unearthing more fossil fuel. And that, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz reckons, is typical usage. It’s a notion based on sloppy history, which holds that there have been energy transitions in the past – from wood to coal, to oil and gas. People know how to transform energy supply, the argument goes, and one more such switch will allow them to maintain a habitable planet. Meanwhile, we can pave the way for the transition while keeping the oil flowing. And not just oil companies, but pretty well everyone else, from the IPCC to supposedly radical renewable energy think tanks, have bought into the idea.
Yet the evidence, Fressoz argues convincingly, is against them. Following his mentor, the English historian David Edgerton, he shows how new technologies routinely beguile us, fostering the illusion that earlier ways of doing things are obsolete. What actually happens, though, is that old and new co-exist, often in mutually dependent fashion.
Just the same happened with new energy sources, Fressoz shows. The “coal age” saw a continued use of wood. That goes for wood as fuel. Half the world still cooks on wood-fired stoves. But his analysis concerns materials as much as energy. Coal brought a huge new demand for timber to fashion pit props for the mines and sleepers for the new steam-powered railways. Similarly, oil was first raised using wooden derricks and shipped in wooden barrels. Later, derricks, oil drums, tankers and ever-longer pipelines needed steel, from coal furnaces.
Bringing in materials strengthens Fressoz’s argument, and allows him to fill out his catalogue of increasing consumption with some telling examples. A canter through the history of lighting, for instance, shows how commentators routinely exaggerate the impact of innovation, while neglecting to document actual adoption, or its material consequences. At the same time, his material history leads to some analyses that feel like digressions in a book about energy. The fact that cardboard consumption for packaging has expanded enormously is important, but seems a bit of a side issue in our efforts to stem global heating. (Looking that passage up, I note in passing that Allen Lane – generally a high-class publisher – offers this book with no index. There are only a couple of hundred pages of text here for your 25 quid, although followed by no less than 90 pages of notes, but the book is dense with information. Any use of the print edition after first reading is infuriatingly difficult.)
Two thirds in, Fressoz moves on to rehearse how the idea of energy transitions took hold. That’s a tale involving population biology, source of the S-shaped “logistic curve” that marks the origin, ascent in numbers, and levelling off of a species filling a new niche, use of the same curve to map the trajectories of new technologies, and a lot of wishful thinking on the part of fossil fuel companies and advocates of new energy technologies, including nuclear power and renewables.
Fressoz comes close to dismissing logistic curves entirely, although there are clearly cases where technology adoption follows a path of that kind. The rise of, say, digital photography or mobile phones fit the classic curve pretty well. There are even examples in the energy sector. Recall the mass installation of gas boilers for central heating in the UK in the 1960s and ‘70s, and the feat makes it a bit easier to believe we could equip millions of houses with heat pumps if we really wanted to.
But his general oft repeated point clearly holds. Our energy sources are entangled and mutually interdependent – his term is symbiotic. Developing new sources of energy has, so far, made little impression on old ones, and has led to massive increases in use of materials.
The book is offered as a new way of thinking about the climate challenge. I’m not quite convinced it does that. From a UK perspective anyone who has looked seriously at the numbers will already know that our relatively good progress on reducing emissions is largely due to achieving one thing that is fairly easy: substituting coal burning in power stations for gas (less bad) and renewables (actually what we need). The recent final elimination of coal from our electricity supply is certainly a Good Thing. Unfortunately, nearly everything else we need to do to achieve net zero is really difficult. Lower carbon transport, heating, and agriculture, not to mention cement manufacture and steel-making, have barely begun.
Nor are any of the main political parties interested in explaining how hard it will be to go further. Rather, we have a new government that maintains, for example, that expanding airports in pursuit of growth is compatible with progress toward net zero because one day there will be sustainable aviation fuels and carbon capture, even though these are largely imaginary technologies.
We need to hold on to the idea of an energy transition, though, even as Fressoz is right to insist that nothing like it has ever happened before. That makes it much harder to plot how it might go. It will entail building out an entire new energy system. We have made a start on that, and could probably manage much more. But so far there’s little progress on the other necessity posed by global warming: dismantling all that fossil fuel infrastructure. That is far more challenging, and as Equinor’s ad shows the campaign to pretend it can be postponed goes on. So, the book ought to be read by anyone who does not already buy Fressoz’s simplest, most powerful message: “Combating global warming means achieving an unprecedented transformation of the material world by sheer force of will, and in an extraordinarily short space of time.”
If you are bothered about climate change – and who isn’t? – you’ll soon come across references to the “energy transition” shibboleth
But how we keep this countries lights on, when carbon based fuels are to be banned, will come to bother everybody. If you examine today’s electricity output for the UK it shows that 2/3rds is from carbon based fuels, with about 1/5th from renewables.
Some of that 2/3rds could be made up by increased nuclear…. but the rest?As to keeping the country operational when renewables fail, the only option proposed by the alarmists is to do without. Makes memories of the three day weeks seem like the good old days…_
The last hour before midnight and 84% of our electricity is produced from carbon based fuels.
Wind, 9%, and zero solar. When is the penny going to drop that this can’t go on. The road to NetZero is frozen with frost here…_
DiggerUK
you make a very good point.
If more than half our Electricity production, in the United Kingdom, is at times North Sea Gas/L.N.G.,
how can we get to Net Zero in only four or five years time?We could get to NetZero with the right plan, not that I believe NetZero is even desirable.
It could be achieved without the lights going out.
A massive expansion of nuclear would be required. Because we can’t have a 100% nuclear power source it would need fossil, hydro and pumped hydro to balance the system and plug the gaps. Simples…_
The climate alarmists are pursuing the implementation of the “Climate and Nature Bill” in to law. The details beggar belief.
In a nutshell, they want to introduce laws that would ban the use, production, extraction, import and export of all carbon based fossil fuels. My interpretation is that they would even close down the wood chip bio fuel power stations.
It is due its second reading this Friday January 24th…_About forty thousand acres of land will be needed to construct Anglea Raynor’s one and a half million extra homes.
Once built on, this land will no longer be an active part of the carbon cycle.
About 80% of the terrestrial biosphere carbon, is or should be “stored” in the top soil.The governments only seem to consider burning carbon fuels as a problem.
They barely mention steel production, they barely mention concrete production, they barely mention top soil.
Why is that?It seems the UK landmass is 60 million acres. My maths works Angelas land grab at 1/1,500th of our acreage. I don’t see a country covered in concrete any day soon.
As to the carbon capture in soil, it needs remembering that not all soils hold the same percentage. There also comes a level were the soils are saturated’ and won’t absorb anymore. It’s a while back, but I did spend time looking in to it. The Soil Association produced some easily readable articles…. lot’s of them.
Needs to be kept in mind that land is half the area of water, which is more influential. It is also noticeable that carbon and carbon dioxide seems to be lumped together by many and only adds to the confusion…_
Quote Daily Express
“Last year, the U.K. shut down its last remaining coal-fired power station which if it had been in operation on January 8, would have prevented even a hint of an energy shortage.With further closures of at least two nuclear power plants planned in the coming years, there are fears that the U.K. will be left reliant on weather-dependent sources and susceptible to shortages.
Ed Miliband was grilled on the near miss by a select committee where he rejected the notion the Britain came close to being plunged into darkness.”
I do not know why they describe it as a notion?
There have been very recent descriptions in the BBC where they claim the grid needs to be expand by five times, if we are to achieve virtual Net Zero in four or five years time.
If the U.K. are to become a top AI data centre for the World, if we are to ban all vehicles unless they run on batteries, if all new home must be heated by electricity, if we will only make steel using electricity, we can’t just rely on solar and wind.Shibboleth
odd
But here the archived version of Tooze:
Trouble Transitioning
Adam Tooze
https://archive.is/0HPfzThanks for No. 2
Thanks again, AG. An excellent and engrossing review, I’ll certainly be looking out for the book. Very much concur with his observations and would hope that other contributors might be so enlightened.
Excellent letter in The Guardian this morning regarding the Government’s claims over nuclear fission.
Sirs,
I can’t help thinking Ed Miliband has not been accurately briefed when he says a government funding pledge means Britain is within “grasping distance” of “secure, clean, unlimited energy” from nuclear fusion (Ministers pledge record £410m to support UK nuclear fusion energy, 16 January).
Before we start talking about nuclear fusion via magnetic confinement as a commercially viable source of energy, five main challenges have to be met by the scientific community, each one of them a potential showstopper. We have to demonstrate:
1) That we can run a burning plasma for hours (if not in steady state) with Q=40 (Q being the ratio between power coming from the fusion reactions and power used to heat the plasma) without disruptions. If all goes well, at some point in the future, the ITER fusion project your article mentions will run a burning plasma with Q=10 for about 10 minutes.
2) That we can handle and exhaust the heat escaping from such a plasma and impinging on the first wall of the confining device.
3) That we can breed in the blanket of a power plant more tritium than we burn in the plasma. (Tritium is not readily available in nature and must be produced.)
4) That the materials used to build such a plant can withstand the neutron fluence coming from the burning plasma without losing their structural properties and without becoming excessively radioactive.
5) That a fusion reactor can be operated reliably and maintained by remote handling, minimising the downtime needed for maintenance.
These are massive scientific and technological challenges, the solution of which (despite progress being made) is not in the near future. The reward for finding a solution will be immense and therefore research must continue with humility and tenacity, but there is no room for overoptimistic or triumphalist statements, which can only undermine the credibility of the scientists and engineers working on the problem.
Luca Garzotti
Abingdon, Oxfordshirehttps://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jan/22/nuclear-fusion-its-time-for-a-reality-check
The Future of Sea Level Rise – with Professor Peter Wadhams, Oceanic Physics, Oxford University. Uploaded 22/1/25
https://youtu.be/cqY7uzropm4?si=nZuTfPl_oQzS7CY0
The documentary Eating Our Way to Extinction featured a brief segment of our interview with Prof. Peter Wadhams. This video presents the complete interview, offering a wealth of critical information about global environmental issues and ecological sustainability. Discover Prof. Peter Wadham’s valuable insights into how our food choices impact the planet and learn more about the urgent need for sustainable practices. Watch now to gain a deeper understanding of the ecological challenges we face and the steps we can take to mitigate them.
Summary:
Professor Peter Wadhams describes the Arctic as the area of the planet experiencing the most rapid climate change, warming three to four times as quickly as any other region. He warns that the impacts of climate change seen first in the Arctic will eventually affect the rest of the world. The interview details the causes and effects of climate change, including rising sea levels, methane emissions, and extreme weather events. It also touches on the role of governments and individuals in mitigating these changes.Professor Wadhams says that a change in food choice, specifically switching from a meat-based diet to a plant-based diet, is one of the few areas where individual choices can have a significant positive impact on global warming.
– This is because animal husbandry is a substantial source of methane emissions, a potent greenhouse gas, and requires large amounts of land that could be used for growing plant-based food or forests.
– He argues that reducing meat consumption would have an immediate and substantial impact on the climate, unlike many individual actions that have negligible effects.
– While acknowledging that many lifestyle choices are constrained by infrastructure and social factors, he emphasizes that food choice is one area where individuals have direct control and can make a meaningful contribution to mitigating climate change.Key points:
– The Arctic is warming 3-4 times faster than any other region, making it a key indicator of global climate change impacts.
– Individuals can make a difference by choosing plant-based diets to reduce methane emissions and by pressuring politicians to take action.
– The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been criticized for underestimating sea level rise and downplaying the threat of methane emissions.
– Wadhams stresses the need for a global effort to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, similar to the Manhattan Project, to address climate change effectively.
– Sea ice retreat increases warming due to the albedo feedback effect, where dark open water absorbs more heat than white ice.
– Melting ice sheets, particularly in Greenland, are accelerating sea level rise, posing a major threat to coastal cities.
– Methane released from melting permafrost and continental shelves intensifies warming, creating a positive feedback loop.
– Changes in the jet stream due to Arctic warming are causing extreme weather events, impacting global food production.
– Governments have been informed about climate change but have failed to act decisively due to political self-interest and lack of public pressure.
– The timescale for action is short, and the consequences of inaction will be catastrophic and irreversible.
– 2050 is seen as a critical deadline, after which the impacts of climate change will be severe and potentially irreversible if significant action hasn’t been taken.not sure if my post was received.
I’ll try again.
Seems to me that another excuse to syphon off wealth from the people is underway.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/41-billion-world-bank-climate-finance-unaccounted-oxfam-finds
Up to $41 billion in World Bank climate finance unaccounted for, Oxfam finds
Published: 17th October 2024Up to $41 billion in World Bank climate finance —nearly 40 percent of all climate funds disbursed by the Bank over the past seven years— is unaccounted for due to poor record-keeping practices, reveals a new Oxfam report published today ahead of the World Bank and IMF Annual Meetings in Washington D.C.
An Oxfam audit of the World Bank’s 2017-2023 climate finance portfolio found that between $24 billion and $41 billion in climate finance went unaccounted for between the time projects were approved and when they closed.
There is no clear public record showing where this money went or how it was used, which makes any assessment of its impacts impossible. It also remains unclear whether these funds were even spent on climate-related initiatives intended to help low- and middle-income countries protect people from the impacts of the climate crisis and invest in clean energy.
“The Bank is quick to brag about its climate finance billions —but these numbers are based on what it plans to spend, not on what it actually spends once a project gets rolling,” said Kate Donald, Head of Oxfam International’s Washington D.C. Office. “This is like asking your doctor to assess your diet only by looking at your grocery list, without ever checking what actually ends up in your fridge.”
The Bank is the largest multilateral provider of climate finance, accounting for 52 percent of the total flow from all multilateral development banks combined.
https://gridwatch.co.uk/
currently 34% of our electricity in Great Britain is being generated by Natural Gas.
Some of that Natural Gas is transported across the North Atlantic, from U.S.A. most coming from the Gulf of Mexico.
7% Biomass is produced by Biomass , add these two Carbon sources together you get 41% quite a lot more than Wind and Solar.
The wood is harvested by using fossil fuels, then transported to the Eastern Seaboard of U.S.A. using fossil fuels, then transported across the North Atlantic using fossil fuels.
Yet by 2030 we must greatly reduce Carbon.
How will this happen, in less than five years?Here we are again, last hour before midnight with temperatures which mean you could safely turn your fridges off, if you kept them outside.
The amount of electricity from renewable sources is less than 40%.
Nuclear and Biofuels are going full blast, with imports at more than 15%.
If wind drops out they only have CCGT (Gas) to save the grid.You can’t organise a countries economy with such a high chance of the lights switching off, factories closing down and businesses incapable of functioning…_
A judge in Scotland seems to have decided that the Conservative government made an error in granting extraction licence for Rosebank.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3e1pw7npklo
Our new Chancellor claims the most important thing for the country is growth.
Does she think we can have growth without energy?
Quote BBC
“In his judgement, Lord Ericht said a more detailed assessment of the fields’ environmental impact was required, taking into account the effect on the climate of burning any fossil fuels extracted.”Why would a judge be able to stop an oil field that a previous government have agreed, years ago.
Why would that judge’s view be more important than the wish of our government.
On the say so of this court case, thousands of jobs may be lost.
The country is losing jobs at an astonishing rate.It is not the judges fault, the judgement had to be made in line with the law. The judge wasn’t wrong. It’s the law that is the ass.
The comments are well worth reading. Normally for the BBC they are predominantly pro alarmist. Not today. Here’s my fave.
“Bad news for energy security
Bad news for the economy
Bad news for the planet. . . as we import more from worse sources further away
Good news for short-sighted eco-warriors who can’t see the future further than the end of their nose”Thumbs up are five to one in support…_
“Rosebank is critical for the United Kingdom’s economic growth,” a spokesperson said, adding that it was investing £2.2bn in the project and a pause would have meant job losses and a cut in tax income for the Treasury.
Well, the new Labour Government are scraping the barrel for every quid they can get.
It is a no brainer.
Drill Baby DrillI see a small flicker of hope for the downfall of NetZero. Rachel from accounts needs a lot of money for her ‘economic development’ plans and is eyeing up the billions that Miliband has got stashed away in his cocoa tin.
It looks likely that NetZero plans might be ‘deprioritised’ They can then be quietly dropped. Nothing to get shy about here, move along please…_My post from the 21st raising concerns about a Climate and Nature Bill being debated may have alarmed some of you. Don’t worry, be happy…_
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8xqv1l4qxno
