The case for an environmentalism that builds

The sheer majesty of a five-megawatt wind turbine, its central support the height of a skyscraper, its airliner-wingspan rotors tilling the sky, is hard to deny. The solid-state remorselessness with which a field of solar panels sucks up sunshine offers less obvious inspiration, but can still stir awe in the aficionado. With the addition of some sheep safely grazing such a sight might even pass for pastoral. The sagging wires held aloft by charmless, skeletal pylons along which the electricity from such installations gets to the people who use it, by contrast, are for the most part truly unlovely. But loved they must be.

If the world’s climate is to be stabilised, stopping electricity generation from producing fossil-fuel-derived emissions is crucial. So is greatly increasing the amount of electricity available. With more generating capacity, it will be possible to power motor vehicles and warm homes with electricity, rather than by burning dirty fuels. Expanding access to power for people in the poorest countries will reduce emissions from biomass burning and greatly improve living standards. More copious and reliable electricity will be needed for effective adaptation, too. If heatwaves are not to become ever more lethal, grids in developing countries will have to reliably power wider use of air conditioning in energy-hungry cities.

The trouble is that the scale of the changes needed to adapt the world’s electricity grids is vastly underappreciated. Too little investment is taking place. Planning rules get in the way. And, in a deep and damaging irony, some of the biggest advocates of slowing climate change do not accept the logic that to do so requires building more.

As our Technology Quarterly explains, expanding and greening the grid will be demanding—and phenomenally expensive. A recent report by the Energy Transitions Commission, a global group of experts, sees the split in costs between the new generating capacity needed for an ample supply of clean electricity and the distribution, transmission and storage systems needed to make that supply useful as a roughly 55:45 proposition. The 45% that goes on grids and storage comes to about $1.1trn a year between now and the middle of the century. For comparison, the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental think-tank, reckons that worldwide spending on electric grids is currently around $260bn a year: far less than is needed and, tellingly, less than is invested in upstream oil and gas.

In addition to investment in new projects, existing ones must be speeded up. Too many that need connections are delayed by red tape, as are vital new transmission lines. Reforms to planning rules must make it easier to build big and often unpopular bits of infrastructure.

If those plans are to work, and to do so legitimately, there also needs to be less objection to building in the first place. That would make timid politicians more comfortable with legislation designed to streamline things; it would hasten the arrival of essential new capacity; and, by reducing uncertainty, it would lower the cost of capital.

One way forward is incentives. Modern grids allow for more local energy markets; they make it more feasible, say, to lower the cost of electricity to people who have a wind farm nearby, or whose land is needed for transmission lines. A scheme whereby some postcodes in England have lower electricity prices when the winds spinning a nearby turbine get stronger seems to have proved popular. Variable prices can both favour people near renewables and improve overall grid efficiency.

The design of such incentives will be important. Research undertaken in Germany shows that when landowners get money but the community at large does not, opposition can increase. Even when everyone gets a share, enthusiasm may not follow; being offered money makes people worry about what, exactly, they are giving up. Other European studies show that clear communication about the decarbonisation a project is designed to bring about works in a way cash does not.

We had to loot the planet in order to save it

That leads to the crux of the matter. The strongest objections to building are often lodged in the name of the environment, and by those keenest on a greener future. The skyline must be preserved, they might say, or the woodland is too ancient to fell, or the colony of terns too important in and of itself.

But climate change is a problem of a different magnitude from almost all other environmental concerns, and of a different kind. That it was brought to the world’s attention mostly by the environmentally minded is to the movement’s credit. But it cannot be tackled merely with the values central to classical environmentalism. Those most anxious to achieve the energy transition must acknowledge that more building is the most practical course of action.

And it is economic growth that will make possible the building of new transmission lines, gigawatt-scale renewable power installations and, indeed, the mines from which the minerals these things need are sourced. To demonise it, as some environmentalists do, is to expose the world to more climate change, not less. Many environmentally minded politicians now boast of the “green jobs” that their policies will bring. Seeking extra jobs makes sense only in the context of the continued economic growth they make possible.

Those who believe there is no way to stop climate change through growth are fond of quoting Albert Einstein to the effect that “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” This has two difficulties. One is that there is no evidence that Einstein actually said it. The second is that to change the way the world thinks, person by person, is a yet more ambitious task than changing the ways in which the world generates and distributes its electric power.

If the energy transition cannot be achieved with the habits of mind already available, it is hard to see that it can be achieved at all. For some of those who see themselves as green, that may be a counsel of despair. To those who want humans to flourish on a planet they can care for, the idea of an environmentalism that builds must be a call to action.

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