It’s no secret carbon emissions have become a major concern in the last few years, with everyone talking about carbon footprints, and ways to ditch fossil fuels. But how much of it is real solutions, and how much is just green washing and deflecting responsibilities from the real polluters to the masses?
It’s on us all… until it’s not
We’re always told it’s on us all to fix global warming, that we should all watch our carbon footprint and lower it… but is that really the case? Data released by the Stockholm Environment Institute paints a different picture.
Just to make the numbers a bit cleared:
- The top 0.1% are responsible for nearly 60% as many carbon emissions as the bottom 50%
- The top 1% are responsible for twice the carbon emissions of the bottom 50%
- The top 10% are responsible for 49.5% of emissions, as much as the bottom 90%.
I encourage you to look at the data and see it for yourself, but there’s really no other conclusion one can reach: The elite have disproportionate carbon emissions.
Cars, and the electric faux-revolution
For better or (mostly) worse, cars have been an ever present element in our lives for as long as any of us can remember. Cars also just so happen to pollute quite a lot. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the average passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of CO2/year (for context, the average carbon emissions of someone in the bottom 99% is about 4.1 metric tons of CO2/year).
The high emissions primarily come from burning fossil fuels, which most cars still use. The solution? According to real life Tony Stark, Elon Musk, the solution is electric cars, after all, they don’t burn fossil fuels, so they can’t pollute, right?
Well, maybe they don’t pollute as much during operation, but the batteries that power this electric future absolutely are not clean. Between the environmental impact and slavery, mining lithium is anything but a clean operation. Mining lithium can be done ethically and with a minimal environmental impact, but in the rush to power the electric car revolution, no one has time for ethics and the environment.
And even ignoring all of that, lithium batteries aren’t exactly safe either. Remember the Galaxy Note 7? For those of you who don’t, the phone came with a battery defect which caused phones to spontaneously explode. Quite bad, eh? Now you might think they’d have fixed this if they’re planning to put batteries hundreds of times larger in cars, right? Not quite. Lithium is just really dangerous, and even small defects in the battery can result in very strong fires which are really hard to put out.
In reality, electric cars are just more of the same, with some old issues replaced by others. A true solution to car-related pollution would be better city planning. Mixed zone planning means people don’t need to leave their neighbourhood for anything. Good public transport means that even when they want to leave, they can take a bus, tram, train etc which provide a far better economy of scale than everyone taking their own car on the same route.
If you want to learn more about this, then I recommend you give Not Just Bikes a watch. Adam Something touches on the topic as well, although mostly by critiquing examples of how not to do it.
Moving away from fossil fuels
Renewable energy sources have been getting a lot of the spotlight lately, with solar panels, wind turbines, and hydroelectric power plants being the favourites. Geothermal energy has been getting some spotlight where it’s feasible as well, but it’s definitely not as popular as the former three.
All in all, they’re fine sources. The main issue with them is they’re not constant energy sources, usually running in periods of surplus and deficit, but this problem is somewhat alleviated by gaint water batteries which can store large amounts of energy fairly efficiently (claims range from 70% to 87%) at a low cost and with minimal environmental impact.
Even with massive energy storage, however, these sources aren’t always available, and in some cases they struggle to meet the energy needs of the regions they serve.
A rather controversial other source of green energy is nuclear power. To say opinions are split on it is an understatement. Since the 1980s, France’s main source of electricity has been nuclear power, with it covering 71.67% of the country’s energy production (the largest in the world). Go to Germany and it’s a completely different story, with exactly 0% of the country’s energy needs being met by nuclear power.
This disagreement over nuclear power is a rather old one, with critics usually citing nuclear weapons, nuclear waste, the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, and the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident.
So, let’s go over each point!
Nukes
The link to nuclear weapons is kind of real, but irrelevant. Turns out governments aren’t really going to drop nuclear weapons research if they don’t have nuclear power. Most research into modern nuclear reactors also has little to do with nuclear weapons. Saying we should ban nuclear power plants because of nuclear weapons is like saying we should ban gasoline because German troops used gasoline for flamethrowers in WWII.
Waste
Nuclear waste is undoubtably a pain in the ass, but it’s manageable. Much of the waste can be recycled back into nuclear fuel which can then be used again in nuclear power plants. What can’t be recycled is usually stored in a manner to prevent it from interacting with the biosphere until its radioactivity levels return to what is considered safe. Nuclear transmutation is also sometimes employed, forcing the nuclear waste to convert to even more unstable nucleides, causing it to decay into stable atoms much faster.
Chernobyl
By far the worst nuclear disaster in history, and as such point 1a on everyone’s list when opposing nuclear power.
Covering all the details of the disaster is honestly worth a documentary (several have been made), so I’ll only go over the important points:
- the reactor design used was old and with known defects
- despite that, the reactor was ran in an unstable configuration which led to the disaster
- following the meltdown of Reactor 4, Soviet authorities were far more concerned with maintaining their public image than with minimising the damage.
Chernobyl is absolutely a story of disaster, but it’s a disaster caused by incompetent authorities more concerned with their own image than the well being of the people.
Fukushima
On the 11th of March 2011, a tsunami hit the coast of Japan. Following that, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant shut down its reactors, but the reactors could not be properly cooled following the shutdown as the majority of the backup diesel generators were damaged by the tsunami.
The company operating the power plant, TEPCO, notified authorities immediately of the situation, which was followed by a prompt evacuation.
The result was a total of 1 death (4 years later from lung cancer), 6 cases of cancer, and 2 workers hospitalised with radiation burns attributed to the nuclear meltdown. The evacuation and fear of radiation killed more than the actual radiation, with 51 deaths being attributed to the stress caused by the former two. A far cry from the death toll of Chernobyl.
The accident also revealed that TEPCO had several reports, both internal and from nuclear safety organizations, warning of some of the questionable design choices of the power plant and their potential risks in case of a tsunami, but the company decided to ignore them.
If nothing else, the fact the death toll was so low following the incident despite the power plant’s operator’s disregard of these reports shows just how safe nuclear power actually is. The reactor was well designed, so had it been well maintained, it would’ve been fine during that tsunami, and no one would’ve remembered that day.
So is nuclear safe?
Yes. Nuclear energy is completely safe, and once again, don’t take my word for it, just look at France, they’ve been operating nuclear power plants since 1956, and in those 68 years they’ve only had 12 nuclear accidents with a total death toll of 0 across all of them.
So how does nuclear power fit in with green energy?
Despite the nuclear waste, nuclear power doesn’t actually pollute during operation. With no emissions during operations, and plenty of ways to deal with the waste cleanly, nuclear power actually makes for an excellent backbone for the energy needs of countries that for one reason or another can’t rely on renewables. And at the risk of sounding like a Frenchman, just look at France and how well they’ve been doing with nuclear power. Clearly it’s not the devil as some countries cough Germany cough think. And speaking of Germany, in their quest to ditch nuclear power, they’ve resorted to lignite, probably the dirtiest kind of coal there is, mined in open pit mines that need to be seen to be believed.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. source
So, how exactly is this better than nuclear?
Closing notes
Kinda bit more than I could chew with this article, but I hope I got some points across. Green energy has come a long way, but still had a way to go. Nuclear energy can fill that gap in the meantime, allowing us to completely phase out fossil fuels. In all this talk about a greener future, you also need to pay close attention who is telling you what can actually be done, and who’s trying to sell you snake oil so they don’t have to give up their billion dollar yacht. While we all have a part to play in this by virtue of all living together on the same rock floating in space, individually changing our habits can’t stop pollution and climate change, we need systemic changes, we need good policy, and we need to take away the private jets of the ultra rich as they are far more responsible for pollution and climate change than billions of other people.