The Failure of Industrial Climate Solutions
The United Nations Climate Change Meeting COP 29 will be held in oil-exporting Azerbaijan. Like COP 28 in Dubai, this will be another pro-fossil fuel COP, pretending that ‘Green Energy’ will reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
The current strategies to stop climate change have been a complete failure and a waste of trillions of dollars.
The levels of CO2, the main greenhouse gas, continue to rise. It broke a new record of 427 ppm in May 2024, the highest in 800,000 years. The ocean and land temperatures broke new record highs, with 2023 being the hottest year in recorded history for air and sea temperatures. The world passed the 1.5C (2.7F) goal of the Paris Agreement that year and is on track to shoot way past this. The emissions rate has increased from 2 ppm per annum in the decade before the Paris Agreement to 3 ppm last year. This is 50% more per year now than in 2015.
This extra energy has fueled a fivefold increase in extreme weather events (floods, storms, droughts, fires, etc.) in the last 50 years. The hotter temperatures mean droughts, storms, and fires are more frequent and stronger. As warmer air holds more water, destructive torrential flooding events such as Hurricane Helene, which devastated many towns and rural communities in the USA, and a flash flood caused by record-breaking rainfall in late October in Valencia, Spain, which killed over 178 people, are increasing. Severe droughts, fires, or storms have adversely affected nearly everywhere in the last two years.
Switzerland’s glaciers have shrunk by over half in the last 85 years, and their melting rate is accelerating.
Sea levels are rising, affecting vulnerable coastal communities. One bay in the Mississippi Delta lost 430 square miles (1120 square kilometers) of land between 1932 and 2016.
The COP 28 Climate meeting showed no agreement to phase out the leading causes of CO2 emissions – fossil fuels, deforestation, and the loss of soil organic matter. The meeting agreed that fossil fuels will be part of the energy mix to reach net zero by 2050.
There were agreements to slow down the rate of destruction of tropical forests. Brazil was the only country where ongoing forest clearing has been marginally reduced. However, this slight token reduction has been overtaken by the most significant loss of rainforest due to massive and widespread deliberately lit fires, exacerbated by the worst drought in recorded history that dried up many rivers.
The rate of destruction of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems continues to increase. Stopping and reversing the loss of soil organic matter, which is one of the significant sources of CO2, is not even mentioned in the formal agreements.
The destruction of forests and soil organic matter is to supply export commodities to the world’s wealthiest economies, not to end hunger, as there are more food-insecure people now than ever. This is a massive contribution to CO2 emissions. These forests and soils previously removed CO2 from the atmosphere. Their decaying and burnt biomass has become a significant emitter. Industrial agricultural degenerative practices continue to destroy soil organic matter, oxidizing it into CO2.(1)
The scaling up of renewable energy systems has not reduced the rate of emissions. It cannot do this because while, in theory, they may replace some of the fossil fuel emissions, they cannot replace the massive emissions from destroying forests, pastures, and soil organic matter.
CO2 lasts over 1000 years in the atmosphere because it has a half-life of over 300 years. Unless the excess is removed, it will continue to trap heat and energy and increase the disruption of our climate. Just scaling up renewables is insufficient to stop the increase in catastrophic climate disruption events such as droughts, floods, storms, and fires.
Industrial Scale Renewable Energy Systems are Making Things Worse
Many current renewable systems are making the problem worse, not better because they take an industrial approach instead of a nature-based one. The rollout of wind turbines and large-scale solar farms is generating a lot of negative sentiment.
Wind Turbines
Wind turbines are making negative headlines because of low-frequency noise, causing a range of health issues for neighbors, the death of birds, especially endangered and rare species such as eagles, the death of whales, the clearing of ecosystems, and ruining the ascetics of natural environments by turning them into industrial landscapes.
Hundreds of millions of trees and thousands of acres of forest are being cleared to facilitate wind turbines and solar cells. Scotland has cleared over 16 million trees for wind turbines, and thousands of acres of high-diversity tropical forests are being cleared in Australia for wind turbines.
Germany is clearing up to 120,000 trees in one of its few old-growth forests. This ancient forest, which included trees around 1000 years old, was the setting for many of the Brothers Grimm’s stories.
The 1,000-year-old forest is being destroyed for wind turbines.
Numerous battles have been and are being fought between communities and some environmental groups to stop the construction of more wind turbine farms. Overall, the environmental movement is silent on the environmental damage they cause, which is causing rifts over climate change.
Wind turbines do not remove CO2, but the trees they have cleared remove CO2, so these wind turbines are contributing to the increase in CO2 emissions. Further, researchers have shown that scaling up wind turbines will increase temperatures rather than cool the climate.
“We find that generating today’s US electricity demand (0.5 TWe) with wind power would warm Continental US surface temperatures by 0.24C [0.5 F]. Warming arises, in part, from turbines redistributing heat by mixing the boundary layer.”(2)
Instead of meeting the 1.5C (2.7) Paris temperature goal, scaling up wind turbines will increase global warming.
Solar Panels
Similar issues are occurring with solar electric panels, including the loss of farmland for food production and the clearing of natural ecosystems. Solar panels cover millions of acres of valuable farmland and high biodiversity ecosystems. There are huge concerns that this covering of some of the world’s best agricultural lands will cause a significant reduction in food production. The American Farmland Trust forecasted that 83% of new solar energy projects will be on agricultural lands.
Globally, to achieve Net Zero, there are proposals to build solar projects on thousands of square miles to meet the ‘clean’ energy needs. If they are built, the scale of clearing these ecosystems will be one of the most significant environmental disasters on the planet.
The government of one Australian state has estimated that 70% of the farmland will need to be covered to meet its energy demands. Plans to clear over 2,500 square kilometers (965 sq miles) of biodiverse tropical Savanna woodland in Australia to export electricity to Singapore have been approved.
Europe plans to cover parts of the Sahara with solar panels for its electricity needs. The researchers who studied this large-scale proposal found that it had many damaging consequences, including causing a (2.7 F) 1.5C increase in temperature and global shifts in weather, drought, and forest degradation.
“…unintended remote effects of Sahara solar farms on global climate and vegetation cover through shifted atmospheric circulation. These effects include global temperature rise, particularly over the Arctic; the redistribution of precipitation (most notably droughts and forest degradation in the Amazon) and northward shift of the Intertropical Convergence Zone; the northward expansion of deciduous forests in the Northern Hemisphere; and the weakened El Niño-Southern Oscillation and Atlantic Niño variability and enhanced tropical cyclone activity.”(3)
This and other research shows that the large-scale rollout of solar panels will seriously exacerbate climate change instead of mitigating it. This is because they only capture around 15% of the solar energy, and the other 85% is reflected in the atmosphere, heating it.
Communities are unhappy at the loss of their farm and forest landscapes, the toxic metals that leach into the environment, and the radiation caused by being in proximity to solar farms. Solar panels don’t remove CO2—plants and soil do! Instead of clearing ecosystems for renewable energy, we need to regenerate them.
High voltage Power Lines
Rural communities are protesting the thousands of miles of new high-voltage transmission lines proposed or constructed across their farms and landscapes to connect the new renewable systems to the existing power grids. They have serious concerns about the radiation emitted by these lines.
The loss of visible amenities and the beauty of the rural landscapes due to their hills, farm fields, and forests covered with wind turbines, solar panels, and high-voltage lines scarring the natural vistas and turning them into ugly industrial precincts is a significant area of contention.
Waste disposable – renewables are not renewable!
Compared to traditional energy systems, renewables’ short life cycles of around 20 years result in toxic waste disposal problems. Every solar and wind system will have to be replaced by 2050 to achieve the mythical goal of net zero.
Old wind turbines are buried or left in piles on the ground. The disposal of used solar cells creates similar degenerative environmental waste problems. Toxic heavy metals and forever chemicals leach into the environment. Because they are rarely recycled, renewable energy systems are not renewable.
Degenerating the Environment to supply the raw materials for renewable systems
Renewable energy systems require multiple mines to provide the metals and other compounds needed for manufacturing and constructing them. Some of the last uncontacted tribes in Indonesia are fighting to save their rainforests and traditional cultures from destruction caused by nickel mining for batteries and solar cells.
Nickel mining for electric car batteries is destroying the last uncontacted tribes and their rainforests in Indonesia and Brazil – emitting CO2
Cobalt mining in Africa for batteries and electric cars exemplifies the worst cruelty, exploitation, and oppression of workers, especially children.
Lithium mining for batteries causes widespread destruction and poisoning of ecosystems.
Biofuels
Biofuels, on the whole, are highly problematic. Large areas of food-producing farmland are used to fuel cars, trucks, and airplanes rather than feed people. Worse still, vast areas of tropical forests have been and are still being cleared for biofuels, such as palm oil and GMO maize. They are not greenhouse gas-negative because fossil fuels are used in their production. Burning them for fuel produces CO2, the main greenhouse gas. The synthetic nitrogen fertilizers they use are produced using fossil fuels, and their use causes nitrous oxide emissions, a greenhouse gas much more potent than CO2. Quality lifecycle assessments of all the parameters used to produce biofuels show that they contribute to atmospheric greenhouse gases. They constitute a significant part of the problem, not a solution.
Nuclear Power
The most significant increases in electricity use come from the huge banks of computer servers used for The Cloud, AI, and Cryptocurrency. Computer companies such as Microsoft are building nuclear reactors to power their servers. Nuclear fuels are touted as a clean and reliable source of energy. It is now far more expensive to produce than renewables such as solar and wind. The nuclear fuel cycle causes massive environmental problems that have never been solved despite endless promises. The mining and processing of uranium causes long-term environmental damage that continues for centuries and significantly contributes to greenhouse gasses. The issue of disposing of spent nuclear fuel rods and cooling water still has not been solved. Most of them are stored in unsafe temporary sites.
Nuclear fuel rods begin to emit highly lethal gamma rays after 1 to 2 years in the reactor core. Spent fuel rods are stored in pools of water for decades as they cool down and are unsafe to approach unless shielded by many feet of water. This storage water becomes radioactive, and so far, there is no safe way to store it. In August 2023, the Japanese government began releasing hundreds of tons of radioactive cooling water from the Fukushima nuclear accident site into the Pacific Ocean as they could not store it safely. Many experts state that this radioactivity will bioaccumulate in marine food chains, causing long-term health and reproductive problems for multiple species and people who eat seafood across the Pacific, including North America. China consequently banned the import of all Japanese seafood.
Spent nuclear fuel poses an extreme radiation hazard for hundreds of thousands of years. Ten years after removal from a reactor, the toxic radiation exceeds 10,000 rem/hour. The fatal one-time exposure dose for humans is 500 rem.
The decay of nuclear fuel is measured in half-lives. For example, a standard estimate of the half-life of spent fuel is 24,000 years. This means that after 24,000 years, half of the fuel is left after 48,000 years, and a quarter is left. After 72,000 years, an eighth is left, and at 96,000 years, a sixteenth still exists. Uranium 233 from fuel rods using thorium has a half-life of 159,200 years. After 636,800 years, one-sixteenth remains polluting the environment. The considerable accumulation of many thousands of tons of spent fuel and other highly radioactive waste means that the toxic radioactive residues are considerable even after millions of years.
Most spent radioactive fuel is stored for decades in temporary unsafe pools of water. There are proposals for longer-term sites such as salt mines and deep underground granite caverns, most of which have been canceled due to technical problems and community opposition because they pose risks of leaching into the wider environment. Toxic radioactive leaching is already happening where spent fuel has been stored in European salt mines. There is zero credible science to show that any storage system can be safe for the millions of years needed before the radioactivity has decayed to normal background levels that are considered safe. Scientists cannot predict that the storage caverns will not be damaged by earthquakes, leaching, or other events and cause the release of these lethal poisons into the environment.
The meltdown risk continues, with Chernobyl and Fukushima still causing problems decades later. Both accidents caused massive spikes in cancer rates in communities exposed to the clouds of radioactivity.
The issue of wars causing meltdowns is genuine, with Europe’s largest nuclear reactor subject to shelling in the war between Russia and Ukraine and Israel threatening to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites. Decommissioning nuclear power plants takes decades and billions of dollars and requires extensive use of greenhouse gas-polluting fossil fuels. The radioactive parts need to be disposed of, and like the spent fuel rods and cooling water, there is no proven safe way to do this.
The fact is that nuclear power is too dangerous and expensive.
Geoengineering
Geoengineering experiments have already started, such as spraying sulfur dioxide from planes to block the sun. These are potentially the most dangerous and damaging. Blocking the sun will adversely affect agricultural production and all ecosystems. All life relies on solar energy to power photosynthesis, and blocking it is an existential threat. The effects on long-term weather and climate are entirely unknown and impossible to predict with our current state of science in modeling weather and climate systems. The proponents of these geoengineering proposals must be called mad scientists who do not care about the long-term dangers they create, which are the equivalent of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS)
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is promoted as a carbon draw-down technology for reducing GHG emissions. A review of all the major carbon capture projects found that over 70 percent were used for enhanced oil recovery. Oil and gas companies use the captured CO2 to pump more oil and gas out of depleted wells, producing more GHG emissions. The study reviewed 13 large-scale CCS projects currently in existence worldwide. It found that seven underperformed, and one was questionable. Nearly 90% of the proposed CCS capacity in the power sector failed at the implementation stage or was suspended early. Only two projects in the gas processing sector demonstrated some success.
The report clearly shows that billions of dollars have been invested into this sector with very few results. The carbon capture sector is still a net emitter of GHGs. Billions more dollars are being budgeted for industrial CCS projects.
The storage of captured CO2 in underground aquifers, disused oilfields, under ocean sediments, and specially constructed caves in bedrocks is highly problematic. No studies show that any of these systems are stable over the long term and will prevent CO2 from being emitted back into the atmosphere. The most effective CCS system is a plant—especially trees, shrubs, and perennial grasses.
The Industrial Systems have Failed
The mainstream proposals are failing. They must be modified to stop the environmental and social damage they are causing. There are ways of doing this, and they must be a priority when scaling up these technologies. Unfortunately, this is not the case at the moment. The leading environmental NGOs must take full responsibility for ignoring the damage and not insisting on solutions that regenerate the planet rather than actively promoting industrial-scale constructions that degenerate it and will leave a lasting legacy of destroyed ecosystems and long-term toxic pollution. These systems mainly use taxpayer subsidies and incentives to make large corporations richer.
While rooftop solar, local microgrid systems, and energy efficiency can play minor roles, these will never keep up with the insatiable demand and growth in energy, particularly electrical energy.
So far, renewables have not made any difference to the emissions rate, which continues to increase. Scaling these technologies up to levels many hundred times greater, which are needed to replace fossil fuels, will cause a massive loss of ecosystems and increase environmental damage and community conflicts. Currently, they are not solutions. The growing evidence shows they are emerging as significant environmental problems and sources of community conflicts.
Nature-Based Regenerative Solutions as a Priority over Industrial Degeneration of the Environment
The following article in this series will show how scaling up nature-based regenerative solutions reduces emissions, removes enough CO2, and cools the planet to reverse climate change.
References
- Ronnie Cummins and André Leu, The Regenerative Agriculture Solution: A Revolutionary Approach to Building Soil, Creating Climate Resilience and Supporting Human and Planetary Health, Chelsea Green, September 2024
- Lee M. Miller and David W. Keith, Climatic Impacts of Wind Power, Joule 2, 2618–2632, December 19, 2018
- Lu, Z., Zhang, Q., Miller, P. A., Zhang, Q., Berntell, E., & Smith, B. (2021). Impacts of large-scale Sahara solar farms on global climate and vegetation cover. Geophysical Research Letters, 48, e2020GL090789. https://doi. org/10.1029/2020GL090789