Over the past few years, the whole world has done something really amazing.
A combination of personal sacrifice, leadership, science, mass production and distribution, and that whole world working towards a common goal, has resulted in saving many hundreds of millions of lives — who would have thought it would have been possible?
Unfortunately, having done all that, the world feels in a more precarious state than ever.
Recessions, rising costs and interest rates, wars, starting to feel the effects of climate change with more fires and floods, and not knowing where it will all end. With all this going on it is easy to feel powerless, and not think too much of the future, rather try to get through each day.
To believe the challenges are up to someone else to fix, and to resist the sort of disruptive changes that could make a difference.
The alternative to that perspective is understand that we do now have the power to make a significant difference to the biggest challenge of them all, climate change.
If we actively participate in making a better future, no matter how small we start, we can start to create the confidence that change can and will happen, and the world we leave our children will be as good as the one we have enjoyed.
This problem is one of technology. The technology we have been using to make life easier for ourselves, produces pollution in the form of CO2, which is warming the planet up, so we have to move to new technology that does not have that side effect.
Luckily, new technology has now been developed to the point to it is better than the old in every way, so we can base our energy on electricity and use solar, wind, batteries, electric transport and heatpumps, to cover our needs with renewable energy.
The problem with the old technology is that combustion is the formation of CO2, rather than it being a small unfortunate by-product. What we burn combines a carbon molecule with two oxygen molecules to form CO2 while releasing energy. This means every piece of wood, coal or litre petrol, forms three times that weight of CO2 in the atmosphere.
For every New Zealander that is the volume of a five-storey commercial building every year. We can therefore individually make a big difference by "stopping burning stuff".
While this is reasonably straightforward, the message is getting hijacked and confused from many different sources.
The misinformation we should not believe is:
- Biofuels (wood or other forms) are an alternative to clean renewable energy.
The idea here is that it is OK to pollute the atmosphere with additional CO2 because the carbon in the biofuel came from the atmosphere and the plants will in the future will take out again. The problem with this argument is that there is a time-lag of 50-100 years before the CO2 you are putting in now will be taken it out, and putting any further CO2 when there is already too much will always be a bad idea.
- Batteries are bad.
There appears to be a general impression among many that lithium-ion batteries are intrinsically bad. While mining is disruptive to the environment and like any industry can be poorly managed, the whole idea of batteries is that they will replace the need to mine and burn fossil fuels, which are mined then burned once, creating masses of CO2 pollution in the atmosphere. Lithium, on the other hand, will be used to power batteries thousands of times, then recycled to be used again
. There is plenty of lithium (and other minerals) for our future needs, and even if there wasn’t, sodium can be used as an alternative.
- Hydrogen is the fuel we should wait for.
Creating green hydrogen for use takes three times as much electricity than if you use that energy directly, as well as there being significant problems storing and distributing it. It has now been shown that cars, trucks and heavy machinery can run directly off electricity, so that is the way they will go.
Large ships and aeroplanes have yet to clear path forward, though it is now looking like the new generations of batteries will be able to cover the short-haul flights in the near future.
- Solar, wind and batteries will not provide constant supply and create a stable grid.
This is an issue the whole world is working on, and showing that it does work. The key to success it to have an oversupply of wind and solar, and of course in our case having geothermal and hydro with a degree of storage, makes things easier. When considering our future demand, it is also worth noting that a lot of this will be required to recharge batteries, and in the case of cars, these will have large batteries that offer significant flexibility as to when they are charged, helping considerably balance the grid, and being able to take advantage cheap wind and solar when there is an oversupply.
Rather than waiting and believing those with a self interest in resisting change, this is what we need to do.
- Understand that we are all the problem and the solution. The changes and choices we make will make the difference.
- Convert everything to electric by using new technology. Solar, EVs, heatpumps and batteries mean everything can run on renewable energy and we no longer need to burn anything.
- Understand that it is a great financial investment to "go electric", not a cost.
- Encourage everyone to do the same. If each of us can convince two other people we will get exponential growth and the problem is solved.
- Stephen Macknight is a chartered professional engineer, who has been researching technology use and climate change.
