Child mortality and ‘realignment of societal values’

Sir David King is perhaps the purest and sincerest climate change catastrophist prominent in British public life. At a time when his academic colleagues are beginning to express concern about  activist propagandising from the Ivory Tower (Büntgen 2024), correctly sensing that it is counterproductive,  Sir David continues to rush in where others are now fearing to tread. Writing, but really preaching, in the Guardian on the 27th of May he insists that:

Over the past year, land and ocean temperatures have soared, far beyond what was anticipated for an El Niño year. Global average temperatures have breached the 1.5C mark, indicating that climate transition has been unleashed. From record-breaking wildfires across continents to catastrophic floods threatening to submerge major cities, extreme climate events have become the new norm, causing massive loss of life and economic damage worldwide. […]

On our current path, civilisation as we know it will disappear.

This sounds like the opportunistic attention-seeking of a click-desperate columnist, but is in fact the studied utterance of a former Chief Government Scientific Advisor (2000–2007), head of the Cambridge Department of Chemistry (1993–2000), Master of Downing College (1995–2000), Fellow of the Royal Society, and recipient of the Légion d’Honneur, to mention only a few of his distinctions and achievements.

When such a person speaks in this way they mean it: this is a Message to the World. All of which makes it particularly interesting, and valuable, for alongside the grim warning there is a positive prescription offered as a means, the only means, to avoid the destruction of human civilisation. If he is literally and absolutely truthful about his diagnosis of looming destruction for global human society, then he must be equally committed to his remedy.

We can therefore park any quarrels we might have with his description of climate change and its impacts. For the sake of argument we shall accept them, and focus instead on Sir David’s recommendations for the mitigation of climate change, which go well beyond anything currently contemplated:

If we meet current commitments only – net zero by 2050 – perhaps some form of humanity will survive, managing the challenges of continued extreme weather events, ice loss, and sea-level and temperature rises. But we have agency to change this, and a thriving future is still on the table. To grasp it, we must embark on a radical journey encompassing an essential “4R planet” pathway.

The “4 Rs” are:

Reduce emissions, build resilience, repair ecosystems, remove greenhouse gases.

That is to say, in order of importance: 1) reduction of emissions of all greenhouse gases backed up by 2) a program to extract greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, supported by 3) proactive environmental intervention to restore degraded ecological systems that, in Sir David’s view, threaten disaster, such as the Arctic Circle. Alongside this there is to be major and extensive adaptation to protect human beings.

It hardly needs saying that this cluster of interlocking objectives stands to present Net Zero targets as Everest is to Parliament Hill.

If the latter is proving a difficult climb – and it is – on what grounds, does Sir David judge that his Everest is feasible?

The answer is strikingly disappointing. Sir David believes that in spite of deliberate obstruction by the incumbents in the oil, coal and gas sectors:

[…] the transition away from fossil fuels is already under way, with renewables, hydropower, geothermal energy, distributed energy storage, electric transport and nuclear energy already operating at competitive economic levels.

Since neither hydropower or geothermal are scaleable in a manner adequate to the global task, the core element here is the claim of economic competitiveness for ‘renewables’, in other words wind and solar. But, as many of our publications and those of others have shown, this is not, as a matter fact, true. If it were, wind farms would not be demanding further income support subsidies and mandated guarantees of market share on top of those that they have received in Europe in very large volumes since the early 2000s. Those demands for support are hardly surprising since audited financial statements reveal persistently high capital and operational costs.

Lord Frost recently made exactly this point when questioning his Conservative colleague and Minister of State for Energy Efficiency and Green Finance, Lord Callanan. The government’s response was simply to repeat the assertions that are in doubt, a tactic that works only because parliamentary exchanges are utterly inconsequential. Intellectual arguments are repeatedly lost in debate and yet civil service carries on regardless with its policy. For a discussion see Andrew Montford’s article on Conservative Home.)

On top of the capex and opex problems for wind (and solar to a lesser degree) we can note the highly significant  increase in consumer costs caused by the difficulties in managing the UK grid, where Balancing Services Use of System (BSUoS) charges now amount to between £3bn and £4bn a year, up from a few hundred thousand a year pre wind and solar. Stochastic generators cause these difficulties, but are spared the costs of addressing them, the costs of “distributed energy storage” amongst them.

But none of this is apparently important for Sir David, who cites as evidence for the ‘transition away from fossil fuels’ a single and presumably for him clinching example:

For instance, Kenya has already achieved more than 90% electricity production from renewable sources, an enormous advantage to its economy. The rate of global transition, properly led by government regulations and the removal of subsidies for fossil fuel recovery, could and should be increased tenfold.

Superficially, this may seem relevant. Kenya is a population of about 54 million people, which is comparable to the UK, which has some 68 million. However, Kenya generates only slightly over 12 TWh of electrical energy per year, whereas the UK generates approximately 325 TWh per year, about twenty-seven times as much, and twenty times as much per capita.

Examination of Kenya’s generation fuel mix brings out some other important facts.

Figure 1: Kenya’s generation fuel mix, 1990-2021. Source: International Energy Agency.

Kenya’s electricity system is not only small in itself, and very small in relation to its population, but it is overwhelming dependent at present on geothermal and hydropower, with wind and solar only minor contributors. Geothermal and hydro are decent technologies, and Kenya is fortunate to have them, but they are not globally scaleable, and even Kenya itself is looking to nuclear generation for its much needed future growth. It is also worth noting, as Sir David does not, that oil generators retain a substantial proportion of the Kenyan market, almost certainly because of their rapid flexibility, meaning that their importance to the system is well in excess of their share.

It is obvious, therefore, that the Kenyan example is quite inadequate to support Sir David’s belief that ‘the transition from fossil fuels is already under way’ and that a ‘tenfold’ increase in the use of renewables can be delivered through ‘government regulations’.

On the contrary, when we turn our attention to the relevant information, in the UK, and Europe more broadly, we see quite a different story: very large and undiminishing subsidy expenditures, and rising not falling renewables costs. Indeed, in the UK, electricity consumption is plummeting, down by over 20% since 2005, when the climate policy costs became salient. Far from being heralding a global shift to renewables, the real-world data makes distressed policy correction look more likely by the day, very probably meaning a return to natural gas at best, and perhaps even an emergency rebuild of coal, if public wishes for sustained prosperity are respected.

This all matters acutely, since nearly the whole burden of Sir David’s proposals falls on emissions reduction. He sees only limited potential for extracting greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, some 10–20 billion tonnes a year at best, and the repair of ecosystems is, while essential for him, a question of buying time. For instance, he suggests spending several billion dollars a year to provide artificial cloud cover for the Arctic Sea during the summer, and thickening the winter ice by pumping seawater onto its surface.

So there is really only one R of any importance: emissions Reduction. And the promise for this is based on wildly optimistic expectations for renewables, grounded on a single example, Kenya, which on closer examination is quite irrelevant to the global undertaking. In any case, Sir David’s claims about the energy transition are contradicted by all we know empirically about the costs of renewables in Europe.

Those expectations for renewables are also put in question by consideration of the basic thermodynamics of the fuels concerned. And this is something that we would expect an academic of Sir David’s eminence to have considered. The entropy of wind is very high, close to random heat in fact. It is instructive, for example, that while wind is ubiquitous in the world’s ecosystems, there are no living organisms deriving fundamental metabolic energy from it. Solar radiation is more favourable, and plants do employ it to support life, but the entropy, as seen from a point receptor on the surface of the planet – a leaf say, or a solar photovoltaic cell – is still high, due to fluctuations in quality caused by the rotation of the planet and the interference of the atmosphere. Plants require elaborate energy storage systems, and consequently are relatively simple creatures in every other respect.

Fuels such as wind and solar will therefore struggle to substitute for the extraordinary thermodynamic quality of the fossil fuels, which is, critically, derived only in part from solar radiation, with the bulk of it being the complexity of organic tissue created by natural selection, and most importantly the application of gravitational energy over hundreds of millions of years compressing the deposited biomass, increasing its temperature and causing chemical changes that elevate its energy state.

As any natural scientist will know, the thermodynamics of gravity are very special, and go a long way to explaining the extremely high energy density of fossil fuels. Indeed, there is a good argument to be made that the global civilisations that Sir David apparently wishes to preserve, at least in some form, are the creation of accumulated gravitational energy, not just fossilised sunshine.

I find it difficult to believe that Sir David is not aware that a societal system – an ‘ecological civilisation’ is his term – based on renewable energy flows of wind and solar will be very different in character from that which coal, oil, gas have created over the last five hundred. Indeed, he admits as much, writing that:

We must realign our political will, economic priorities and societal values to recognise that ecological wellbeing is matched to human wellbeing.

I began this discussion by saying that David King is sincere in his climate catastrophism. I still believe that. However, on reflection, I am not sure that he is equally candid in his recommendations for mitigation. He believes in them, but he does so for reasons that not quite foregrounded. Consequently, a casual reader of his article might think that the ‘ecological society’ he envisages will be broadly similar to the current situation: ‘ecological wellbeing is human wellbeing’. But that would be a mistake.

The clear implication of Sir David’s Guardian article is that we must redefine our understanding of human wellbeing, so that it is consistent with his definition of ecological wellbeing. What that would entail is not spelled out in detail, but logic suggests that it would involve some sort of transvaluation of all values, or at least many of them. Fossil fuel and its remarkable ability to change the world to our advantage has resulted in populations that are, by historical standards, very large, remarkably free, very well educated, long-lived and healthy. Sir David seems be hinting that those variables will have to be trimmed back. One wonders by how much, and whether anyone would notice. Perhaps the article contains a clue. Infant mortality for neonates in Kenya is nearly six times that in the United Kingdom.