The God Species: How Humans Really Can Save the Planet.... Mark Lynas

diesel in electric generators on every one of its 300 or so inhabited islands, and shift instead to an energy system entirely based on renewables. It would have to do this in a way that would not raise people’s energy bills, and would provide opportunities for new business. I found myself in a world where discussions of wind and solar hybrids, battery storage options, biomass and waste-to-energy, and electrical grid load-balancing came to the fore. I began to think less like an ideologue and more like an engineer.

      This, on a far grander scale, is the same challenge that confronts the world. To achieve the planetary boundary of 350 ppm, the global economy needs to be carbon-neutral by mid-century and carbon-negative thereafter. Meeting this target means we all – Greens included – need to start thinking like engineers. This is a huge industrial building project, converting the energy basis of civilisation from fossil fuels to a variety of cleaner sources. If we do it right, it will not be a burden or a cost to the world’s economy, but a source of enormous potential future growth, innovation and job creation. The sheer amount of economic activity implied by the transition is staggering: to reduce the emissions of the United States by a third, for example, would (using current technologies) involve constructing 145 nuclear plants, 33,000 solar thermal power stations and 130,000 large wind turbines. In Germany, the same ambition of a 30 per cent emissions cut implies 21 nuclear plants, 4,800 solar stations and 20,000 additional windmills.⁵⁷

      Different technologies can be substituted according to different circumstances or national preferences, of course. The Austrians, for example, despise nuclear power. (The country spent $1 billion building a nuclear plant, and then had a referendum in 1978 that was won by the anti-nuclear lobby. The plant, called Zwentendorf, was never opened, and coal-burning power stations built instead.) For the Maldives I would not suggest any nuclear power stations, because each island operates as a separate independent energy entity and nuclear plants are simply too big to be appropriate. Moreover, the country is drenched in solar radiation for most of the year – its main constraint, in fact, is the land space needed to capture the sun’s energy. But very large, densely populated nations outside the tropics are likely to need substantial nuclear generation. This may be difficult for many Greens to swallow, but as I will show in future chapters, nuclear power is nothing like the environmental threat it has long been made out to be. Instead, by displacing coal from our energy mix, it can be a net win for the biosphere. China, for instance, has 13 operational nuclear plants and 150 more under construction or on the drawing board.⁵⁸ Each 1-gigawatt nuclear plant will displace 6 million tonnes of annual CO₂ emissions, making this one of the best pieces of climate-related news anywhere in the world.⁵⁹ That should be the end of the matter so far as environmentalists are concerned: nuclear is Green.

      To cut global emissions in half by 2050 (with growing energy consumption in the meantime) would require the construction of 12,000 nuclear power stations – with one plant coming online every single day between now and then (assuming we start in 2015). I mention this only as an illustrative exercise, for no one – not even the nuclear industry – suggests that we try to deal with climate change using nuclear power only. Such a level of new-build sounds impossible, but consider that over the last fifty years humans have constructed two large dams per day, half of those in only one country – China.⁶⁰