Eco heroes leave reality to ‘someone else’
CHRIS UHLMANN
We need a name for the carbon clergy’s wildly popular game of proclaiming large numbers linked to short deadlines for scrubbing the economy clean of fossil fuel. Let’s call it Eco-Bluster Bingo. Anyone can compete but the only Australian professional leagues are in state and federal parliaments. There you get paid to play and Canberra’s league is first grade. You win if you outbid an opponent with an improbable emissions-cutting target set on the nearest horizon. More points are awarded if you land both target and deadline on an elegant zero or five. The coveted prize is the adulation of much media, the envy of fellow players, and the gratitude of the legion of green industry carpetbaggers who feed on taxpayer dollars like sharks on the carcass of a whale. You also get to denounce the loser as a morally bankrupt planet wrecker to your modest posse of followers on Elon’s X, Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Instagram, and Beijing’s TikTok. The true savants of Eco-Bluster Bingo score bonus points for rote denouncements of all forms of Earth-devouring mining and the use of gas, nuclear energy (or any wind farms in your electorate’s line of sight) on the road to the promised land of Net Zero. Then, feeling properly smug at sitting week’s end, our champion hops into an imported commonwealth car – best if it’s one of the new electric BMW iX40 SUVs – for a trip to Canberra Airport to sip fine wine from gas-furnace glass in the Chairman’s Lounge, before burning jet fuel to fly business class back to her/his/their capital city. There they can climb into a minerals-hungry Tesla (its battery fully charged of black or brown coal-generated electricity) for the drive on oil-based tyres across bitumen roads to an inner-city estate built with the fossil fuel children of bricks, steel and concrete. Over an Aperol spritz (delivered from Padua by diesel-burning ships and trucks) our hero’s pampered Eco-Superego hides the primal Id of their existence: fossil fuel is almost as essential and invisible to sustaining their life as the oxygen they breathe. Nothing in the built environment, including the clothes they wear and the fertiliser-fed food they eat, is fossil fuelfree. How do they square the circle of rank hypocrisy in the distance between what they say and how they live? Douglas Adams gave an insight into this in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He wrote that developing an invisibility shield had proved impossible so the problem had been overcome by hacking the brain. Scientists discovered the next best real invisibility is to hide something behind an “SEP field”. The book’s narrator explains: “The Somebody Else’s Problem field … relies on people’s natural predisposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain.” Every Eco-Bluster Bingo player is wilfully energy-blind and minerals-blind. So the technical and physical barriers to building their nirvana are literally invisible to them because turning their unicorns into work horses is somebody else’s problem. Meanwhile some grunt, somewhere, has to have a crack at working out how our hero’s Greenwished(™), bulldust numbers can be transformed into something approaching reality. Doing that demands writing reports chock full of heroic assumptions about billions of tonnes of yet-to-be-mined minerals, imagined engineering feats and uninvented industrial processes running on imaginary fuels. These studies in fantasy are then proffered as proof of concept. Nor do our ecowarriors ever trouble themselves with debating tricky technical arguments. Why should they when they wield the One Ring that rules all 1 Greenwishing(™) arguments; casting the verbal spell of “climate change denier” and turning your opponent into a reactionary toad. This charge has now spread like Covid beyond heretics questioning “The Science” to include anyone raising concerns about retooling the world around weatherdependent power in the space of a generation. The totems of solar panels, and particularly the three-armed crucifix of the wind turbine, are sacred symbols and despoiling them is now a thought crime. Outside this climate church there is no salvation. But let’s nail just one rational heresy on the door of this church. Where will the minerals to build the bridge to net zero come from? Has anyone, as the Americans would say, done the math? Physicist and former Australian mining engineer associate professor Simon Michaux, from the Geological Survey of Finland, has calculated the material challenge of meeting the stated emissions reduction ambitions of the EU, China and the United States. He found that the available minerals demanded by the transition to net zero were a fraction of what will be needed to meet every country’s pledges. Out of the veritable periodic table of elements the green transition will demand let’s take one mineral: copper. In a paper produced this year, Michaux notes, “The human species produced approximately 700 million tonnes of metal over the 4000 years prior to 2020. For global economic demand for copper to continue its current trajectory of growth, another 700 million tonnes would need to be produced in the next 22 years.” The world’s pre-eminent expert on energy systems, Professor Vaclav Smil, has calculated the amount of copper needed to electrify just the world’s vehicle fleet, noting the average electric vehicle contains about 80kg of copper, “compared to less than 15kg in an internal combustion engine car”. “Replacing today’s 1.4 billion ICE vehicles by EVs would thus require more than 90 million tonnes of additional copper supply during the next 27 years,” he said in a paper for the American Society for Mechanical Engineers. Smil went on to detail the staggering amount of mining that would be needed to extract that copper, given the very best mines have only 0.6 per cent of metal in the copper ore. “This means that the extraction of an additional 90 million tonnes of copper by 2050 would require drilling, blasting, removal, processing and waste deposition, amounting to about 15 billion tonnes of rock, a mass equivalent to the world’s annual extraction of all fossil fuels and of all metallic ores, combined.” So, a big job then. Just for the copper needed to electrify the world’s vehicles and not counting the 610 million tonnes of copper that will be required for everything else. And once we have solved the copper question, we can turn our minds to finding the dizzying array of other elements needed for this witches’ brew. It is impossible to predict the future but this much is certain, the path to net zero won’t be mapped in fantasy numbers. That is a road to nowhere. Technology may save us. Faith won’t.
