Category: Climate change

A few months ago, I went to see Simon Reeve talk at The Hexagon in Reading. I love Reeve’s travelogues, which provide such a rich sense of places I’m very unlikely ever to visit – their flora and fauna, their people. Reeve is certainly very watchable and engaging to listen to.

I confess I was a bit disappointed by him, though. His main message to all of us in the audience was to live adventurously … which sounds good on the face of it, but not when it’s defined narrowly in terms of international tourism. He did, in fairness to him, say that adventures don’t have to involve travelling to remote places: that it’s possible to have adventures much closer to home. But he didn’t really emphasize the latter much. There was more enthusiasm in his voice when he talked about the benefits of eco-tourism for native peoples …

I guess I’m not convinced. It seems to me that, if our priority is to support native peoples around the world, we can always donate through charities like Practical Action, Oxfam, the International Red Cross, Global Giving, etc.; and skip the climate damage caused by travelling there and back! And/or we can buy selectively – e.g. Palestinian olive oil, by way of a single and topical example to convey what I mean.

Here’s a personal instance of an adventure much closer to home. Looking back over 2024, it feels like I’ve been on a local journey. I’ve ‘discovered’ acting in a theatre this year. Treading the boards. OK, I’m never going to be professional – West End audiences can breathe a sigh of relief – but I don’t think I’m all that bad, people enjoy the local performances at our theatre in Reading, the cast enjoy putting them on, and surely it’s the enjoyment that counts? In my latest role – the unstable father in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – the directing team opined that I’d ‘been on a journey’. And that is what it’s felt like. My personal journey of adventure without travel in 2024.

A minor example. At any rate, the point is that surely not all journeys require flying thousands of miles in a plane.

Resentment

As the world heats up, and the prospect of ever more frequent and serious climate-related food wars grows, it’s easy for greens like me to fall into the trap of feeling a bit resentful. After all, here we are, eating our soya beans and avoiding airports, while all around us are people who continue with their burgers – and Christmas turkey – and winter getaways in the sun. We’re trying to do our bit for the planet, we say to ourselves, but it all seems to be in vain as so many people aren’t.

Perhaps, though, if we feel resentment, we’re just slipping into the same mind-set as those we resent? The mind-set that a good life is, really, one with a lot of meat in it, and travel, and stuff. If we didn’t feel that, maybe we’d be less inclined to feel resentful.

In his book The Art of Travel, the philosopher Alain de Botton describes an eccentric Frenchman who spent a fortnight ‘on holiday’ confined to his bedroom. Each day, this crackpot would ‘explore’ an item of furniture in it, or an object or piece of art he’d not really looked at properly before. Of course, neither de Botton – nor the eccentric Frenchman I think – is seriously suggesting we spend vacations in our bedrooms. But there is this serious point being made: what matters is not how much we see, but how much we notice what we do see.

The good life

It seems to me that the good life isn’t one that needs a lot of meat, or stuff, or two houses, or travel. It needs the effort, the practice, of noticing what we see, however seemingly limited our personal journey, and – in the spirit of Christmas – doing our best for the people and other life forms we bump into on the way. Granted, we need to avoid becoming parochial, we should help people who live far away if we can, but I do wonder whether we really need to travel extensively as a precondition either to understand them or to be helpful to them.

Nobody’s perfect. I can think of some bon viveurs who I’d rather spend time with than some fellow greens. The latter probably think the same about me! And maybe the occasional journey – at a frequency of once every five or ten years, say – could take in an exotic location. But there are so many personal journeys which can be done so much closer to home that there’s really no rush …

And in the meantime, I think I’ll concentrate on not feeling resentful. For two reasons. The first is that being restrained in my own consumption of resources – of materials, or space, or energy, or food, or land – does make a difference I believe, even if it often doesn’t feel like it. But secondly, and more importantly, because it’s wrong-headed. My happiness is found when I discover I don’t need to consume much after all.

It’s found when I successfully re-imagine what it is to be a bon viveur.

In Britain, the National Energy System Operator has recently published its report: Clean Power 2030. It’s a very helpful report. It’s especially helpful to put its figures into context. And to appreciate just how difficult it is to maintain our lifestyle without reliance on fossil fuels.

The NESO report envisages around 70 GW of wind power and 50 GW of solar power by 2030. The figures today are about 30 GW of wind and 15 GW of solar, so NESO is envisaging roughly a tripling of the combined capacity of wind and solar.

Of course, electricity makes up a relatively small share of our energy usage, most of which is comprised of heating and transport requirements and all the ‘stuff’ in our lives. If we look at our primary energy consumption – e.g. the Energy Institute’s 2024 Statistical Review of World Energy – we see that total primary energy consumption in the UK was about 7 exajoules (EJ) in 2023. That’s lower than it was in 1965 (8 exajoules) – though it doesn’t take account of our import-dependency. The UK is highly import-dependent and has become more so in the last sixty years.

Globally, the Statistical Review reports that primary energy consumption has quadrupled since 1965, rising from 156 EJ then to 620 EJ in 2023.

Let’s play with some numbers – and be even more ambitious than Clean Power 2030. Let’s assume there’s 100 GW of wind capacity and 100 GW of solar capacity. Let’s assume a generous average load factor of 50% for all that wind capacity, and a figure of 10% for solar. And let’s add in tidal power – not really considered in the Clean Power report. David Mackay, the tragically-died-too-early author of Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, was a big fan of tidal power and reckoned that in aggregate – barrage, tidal stream, lagoons, all combined – there was potentially 240 TWh per annum that could be generated in British waters – a long-run figure after decades of investment.

Where does this get us? Well, all of that wind would generate 1.6 EJ, about 23% of our current requirements. All of that solar would generate 0.3 EJ, about 5% of our requirements. And tidal power 0.9 EJ, or 12% of our requirements.

Totting up these fantasy numbers, we get 2.8 EJ, 40% of our national energy consumption in 2023. And that’s an overstatement, because of our import-dependency which isn’t captured in the Statistical Review numbers . More realistically, the 2.8 EJ is probably about a third of our (current) energy thirst.

Message? We simply cannot power our lifestyle from British renewables alone. We either need fossil fuels to continue to support it, or we need a breakthrough in nuclear fusion, or we need an incredible diplomatic effort to cover the Sahara with solar panels and transport the energy around Europe.

And/or we need to think about our lifestyle. Less stuff anyone? More communal living? Less foreign travel?