Teach A Man To Fish

Because Krissa didn't tell me a new edition of New Scientist had arrived earlier this week, on the train on the way home last night I read a report from 2002 from a forum on Environment and Energy and the issues faced by the UN and the world as it attempts to meet the 'Millennium Goal' of reducing the number of people living in abject poverty - or less than $1 a day - by 50% by 2015. Here's a summary. The report from the forum assessed ways in which this goal might be achieved with sustainable development and renewable energy generation. A grand aim.

Here's the situation. I'm going skip the school-essay style definitions of everything as I go along. You're not stupid, and I'm not one for sweeping generalisations, so know that when I say things like 'developing nations' and 'developed world' I know the definitions are vague and general and potentially contentious, but I'm using them anyway.

The developed nations became so through an unsustainable manner of development - unreplenishable resource uses like mining and deforestation. These primary industries paved the way for secondary industry - the mass manufacture of goods in all their forms, and to gain the energy to do so they burnt wood, coal and oil in great quantities. At the time of the Industrial Revolution leading scientists were convinced that what made things burn was caloric, an odourless, invisible, weightless gas that some things possessed and others didn't. When you burnt something you exhausted the caloric, and that was that.

The developed nations are where they are because they burnt one hell of a lot of stuff, and are still doing so.

The consequences of this can be debated endlessly - the climate of the world has always been in a state of flux, so when you point to rising temperatures, rising sea levels, and unusual climate activity, there is no threshold over and above which you can turn around and say, "Now. Now we definitely have global warming. Let's sort this out." The signs are strong, but there is no court making a judgement. It's not a matter of overwhelming evidence - it's a matter of a will to accept it, and at the national level there is no impetus to do so, especially if you stand to be economically disadvantaged through accepting that evidence as proof.

Energy is the great enabler, and if the poorer nations of the world are going to develop, they're going to need a lot of it. In both demographic structure and national infrastructure, many nations are in a similar situation to the developed world prior to the Industrial Revolution - a lot of subsistence agriculture, primary industry and widespread poverty. (I'm not saying they're backward. See the disclaimer at the beginning of the post.) They are also poised to make use of their assets - those nonreplenishable resources - and burn and mine and chop down as much stuff as they can to get as rich as they can. Welcome to the Global Market Economy.

If we accept that global warming is a reality, the developed world is responsible, having emitted billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases over two centuries of mass industry. And not only is the developing world more at risk from the dangers that climate change is bringing - they are less able to protect themselves or co-ordinate damage mitigation programs - the world as a whole is possessed of the knowledge that if climate change is to be stopped, the path the developed world took to its current wealth and prosperity should not be walked again.

Because climate change is still up in the air, if you like, a good example of the 'Don't do as I do, do as I say' problem is the global acceptance that CFCs were damaging the ozone layer. Freon, once the world's most popular refrigerant, contains CFCs. CFCs cropped up in all sorts of places - in aerosol propellant, plastics, refrigerants...freon was one of these refrigerants. It was phenomenally cheap in comparison to the next best non-CFC refrigerant. Of course the biggest users of freon and other cheap and cheerful CFC products were the nations of the developed world, but when they began phasing CFCs out, they also began to put pressure on other nations to do so. Infrastructure has slowly switched over to production of non-CFC refrigerants and plastics, and this change, spread over the planet, cost a lot of money; a cost that not all consumers, companies, or countries could bear easily.

I think there are a lot of links and similarities between industrial development and the nuclear question.
Allow me to make an understatement when I say nuclear weapons are bad news. The US, China, France, the UK, India, Australia and now Pakistan have nuclear weapons, with the possible additional inclusion of North Korea.
The attitude I see is very much one of a parental discouragement. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, just to quote from the Wikipedia summary, is there to:

"encourage international co-operation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and to pursue negotiations in good faith towards nuclear disarmament leading to the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons."

I would say that the current international policies towards Iran are very much against the first section of that quote, and there doesn't seem to be much disarmament going on right now. The nations with nuclear weapons want to hang on to them, and at the same time discourage anyone else from getting them.

Us? Oh we need them. But you really shouldn't. They're nasty, terrible things. Yes. Not worth the effort. Trust us on this, we've dropped a few. Okay? Are you going to be a good boy?

I want to bitch about India getting nuclear fuel and technology from the US which, because India hasn't signed, is in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, whereas Iran, who signed the Treaty in 1970, is being challenged over every step they take towards any kind of nuclear technology. Yes there are other issues there, but I'm already a long way off my point.

Poverty must be eliminated. The developing world needs energy.
How is this going to work?
Could the developed world make (and absorb the cost of) a huge reduction in emissions so that the developing nations can utilize resources in the old fashioned way?
Could the developed world pay for the poorer nations to develop entirely on renewable and sustainable energy sources?
Both of these options require a huge amounts of money (and to justify them, acknowledgement of an advantage already taken that they would rather someone else didn't also take) from the developed world. I can't see either of them happening.

Renewable energy policy offers a way in which we can use the resources we have to tap into near-infinite sources of energy. And while the efforts of enormous wind farms are dwarfed by the output of even the smallest fossil fuel and nuclear power stations, it may be that the generation strategy that got us this far using those energy sources isn't the best path with renewable energy, and by that I mean maybe centralized generation isn't the way to go.

Combined Heat and Power, or CHP, used to be a technique used for big, industrial-scale facilities, most notably a power station in Scandinavia that instead of the usual enormous cooling towers used the waste heat to heat a nearby town. Now the same principle is being applied on a smaller, house-by-house scale. Gas boilers are a common fixture in homes in the UK, and instead of burning gas to heat water for central heating, Home CHP can burn gas to generate electricity and heat your home. The old CHP schemes paid for themselves through the scale of the spaces they heated, but new technologies, improving the efficiency of systems, mean that right now you could pop one of these things into your home and it would pay for itself in electricity savings in eight years.
Which isn't mindblowing, but when you're playing games with money, economies of scale can change everything. Part of the reason it takes 8 years to get your money back is the efficiency of the unit...the other is how much the unit cost in the first place. If production of home sized CHP units goes up, the price goes down. If everyone bought home CHP, the costs would go down and it would make more and more sense. But you're still burning gas.

So how about home wind power? Home water power? Home geothermal energy? Home biomass and biogas?

The technology has a way to go for the mass market, but in order to get across the production volume threshold where economies of scale can operate, a little subsidised push might help. And the technology is already getting that. In an information-driven world, pushing forward ideas and technology costs money, and technological advancement needs to be rewarded through the possessor of that technology having a market advantage and intellectual and physical copyright on what they have created.

With market help for both the technology and the production of energy generators, the threshold for economies of scale can be reached sooner, with better knowledge. And if, internationally, technological advances crucial to the development of mankind and to the preservation of earth's climate are recognised and singled out for programmes to spread these technologies and their effects throughout both the developed and developing worlds, not through charity but through the encouragement and manipulation of economic and market forces, well...that would be great.

It's one of the greatest challenges to our society at the moment; it won't end poverty overnight, it is only a part of the problem. It is part and parcel of poverty, hunger, strife. But it is a part of the problem with light at the end of the tunnel, regardless how long or difficult the journey along the tunnel might be, and I think I need to get back to being a part of it.