Why technology alone won't solve climate change, by Rebecca Spencer.

The UK will be building a new generation of nuclear power stations, calling nuclear power 'electricity without carbon emissions'.[1] Various developments, including hydrogen, carbon capture, biofuels and cleaner coal are frequently trumpeted as ‘the solution’.

These technofixes have several things in common – they are promoted by governments and business, they envisage no reduction in overall energy use, and they fit neatly into free-market economics and centralised politics. Crucially, all the techno 'solutions' offer lucrative opportunities for corporations. But do they, and can they, work?

Fuels made from plant material are increasingly available; particularly biodiesel from vegetable oil and ethanol (alcohol) as a petrol substitute. Biofuels produce levels of carbon similar to fossil fuels, but carbon from burning biofuels is carbon taken in by the plants as they grew. This makes biofuel ‘carbon neutral’ - if one ignores the energy used in biofuel growing, refining and transport.

This issue aside, biofuels are highly flawed. The largest sources of biofuels are palm and soya oil (biodiesel) and wheat and sugar cane (ethanol). In Brazil and Indonesia soya and palm oil are grown on former rainforest land. Releasing greenhouse gases by clearing rainforests far offsets any reduction in emissions by replacing fossil fuel. In addition, biofuel crops compete for land with food. To make the EU self-sufficient in biofuel, for vehicles alone, would require around 200 million hectares of crops – 55% of the total land mass of the EU.[2]

So why are biofuels being promoted? One reason is that biofuels can be distributed and used in much the same manner as the fossil fuels they replace, and easily adapted to bulk production and distribution. The big oil companies are already heavily involved in biofuel development and promotion, hoping to maintain their dominance.

This aims to separate out carbon dioxide where released and isolate it from the atmosphere by injecting it underground - into oil and gas fields and deep aquifers. This increases fuel use by about 15-37%, not including transport and injection.

Storage is the main problem here – it is not known whether the gas leaks again, releasing the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In addition, if the stored carbon dioxide leaked suddenly, this could have catastrophic effects, suffocating humans and animals. A sudden release of naturally formed carbon dioxide from Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986 killed over 1,500 people.

CCS is being promoted by the oil industry primarily because it permits continued use of fossil fuels – business as usual with a bit of extra processing - failing to deal with the source of the problem.

Not an energy source but a means of storing energy. On its own it plays no role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. What hydrogen could do is enable power sources which generate electricity in one place – e.g. wind power – to be used for powering transport, with hydrogen as an intermediate form. However, the storage and transport of this very low-density, highly flammable gas would require expensive new infrastructure. As with biofuels, it is partly being promoted because the companies best placed to build, control and profit from that infrastructure are the oil companies.

‘Cleaner coal' is based on improvements to existing coal burning processes and CCS. At best this aims to reduce emissions from coal-fired power stations to about the level of gas-fired stations. In addition, many of the proposed technological developments could not be retrofitted to existing power plants, meaning they would only be useful if new coal-fired plants are to be built – which would themselves lock us into climate-damaging technology for the lifespan of the new plant.

There are various proposals in existence for ‘curing’ climate change. Releasing cooling sulphate aerosols into the upper atmosphere, for example, or launching mirrors into orbit to reflect the sun’s rays. One could liken this to trying to solve the problem of being too hot on summer nights by putting ice cubes in your duvet. These proposals have three things in common – they are currently experimental, if not purely speculative, they attempt to solve a complex systemic problem by attacking one area of the system (often not the area where the actual problem lies) and they assume that whatever ‘solution’ they propose will not produce its own negative side-effects.

One of the worst effects of the corporate technofixes described above is that they take away research funding, investment and, crucially, attention from other approaches to dealing with climate change. Energy conservation, which very few businesses stand to make money out of, gets pushed down the agenda.

Non-corporate technologies also get pushed off the agenda – home or community-scale energy generation is still seen as the preserve of middle-class cranks. Sources of fuel that are mainstream in other countries are marginalised - for example, Sweden and Germany are fast developing small and medium scale anaerobic digestion plants producing biogas (methane) from rotting agricultural, municipal and food industry waste.

If you have any comments or contributions to this new area of Corporate Watch's research please get in touch on mail@corporatewatch.org.

References
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5166426.stm
[2] Alasdair Cameron/Earthscan ‘Green or Grey – sustainability issues of biofuel production’ March 2006 www.earthscan.co.uk/news/article/mps/UAN/638/v/1/sp/332436698322330468652#notes