From Pictet North America, December 6, 2023:
Your latest book, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure, takes aim at the mainstream media and particularly popular science, technology and environment writers who make sweeping and unfounded claims. What damage do you believe this does?
In a world that runs on extremely truncated attention spans of 140 characters and constant scrolling, reporting like this simply shouts: “no need to worry.” Brilliant technical dei ex machina will always come to our rescue. There’s no need for rational behaviour or thinking about minimised impacts and maximised efficiencies. There’s no need either to promote the ethos of restraint and responsibility. Just consume as much as possible. It will get fixed…
What are some examples of the most “overhyped” inventions we’ve seen in recent years, perhaps specifically in the climate and energy space?
That could be a long list. I’ll limit it to just three prominent items.
Nuclear fusion: in 2022, after some important experimental progress that still left the technique decades from any profitable commercial deployment, we were once again told (quite mistakenly) how close we are to this ultimate energy solution.
Small modular nuclear reactors: I heard Alvin Weinberg, who was involved in the Manhattan Project as a young man and later became director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, talk about them for the first time in 1982. If we had a small commercial reactor for every mention of their imminent arrival during the past four decades, the world would not know what to do with all that power.
CO2 sequestration by exposed mantle rocks (in Oman and elsewhere): in theory such rocks could store hundreds of years of anthropogenic carbon emissions; in practice, though, I wouldn’t add this to your pension portfolio. How could it be done on the requisite scale?
From what you’ve said in the past, you are sceptical about the potential of carbon sequestration. Why is that? And why do you think it has been overhyped as a possible solution?
The appeal is obvious: it’s a classic tailpipe solution. Rather than replace the offending process, we continue business as usual but then capture its undesirable by-products − in this case CO2 released by burning fossil fuels - and bury them out of sight. But mass balances and cost considerations are enormously challenging. To sequester just 10% of all CO2 emitted from fossil fuel combustion, we would have to develop a new global industry that could handle the same mass of CO2 annually as the global mass of crude oil production. And the process would have to work in the opposite direction by spending huge amounts of money and energy to force billons of tons of supercritical CO2 fluid underground rather than bringing highly profitable oil above ground.
One of your arguments seems to be that we’re putting too much emphasis on new inventions that hold the vague promise of overhauling everything. In your opinion, what would be a better course of action for us to take?
Most people don’t seem to realise the extent of the inefficiencies and waste defining our actions, especially as applied to energies embedded in the supply of existential necessities. Here are just three notable examples:
We pump, treat (or desalinate) and dis-tribute drinking water, but frequently lose 30–40% of it through leaky pipes and defective plumbing.
We synthesise and distribute nitrogen fertilisers (at very high energy costs) and then often lose 50–70% of the nitrogen after the fertilisers are applied.
And we extract, process and distribute natural gas to heat homes and then lose a large part of that heat through single-pane windows and poorly insulated walls. I could go on and on.
A rational society would first try to mend its grossly inefficient ways rather than bring in new energy sources to perpetuate the existing inefficiencies.
You’ve written in the past that hydroelectric power deserves to be shown more love by people who are serious about the energy transition. You’ve said something similar about nuclear power. Is there a danger that we ignore these solutions in favour of the latest “shiny” invention?
Hydrogeneration was the original green solution. The first small hydro plant began working in 1882, the same year Edison built his first coal-fired station, and it remained a great favourite for a century. Then attitudes shifted, hydro became an environmental problem and eventually the World Bank stopped financing any new projects in low-income countries with large remaining hydro capacities. This is most unfortunate because the world – both rich and poor − still abounds in opportunities to build lots of small hydro stations whose combined capacities would be a welcome adjunct to intermittent electricity supplies. China, of course, has kept on building on a gargantuan scale as hydro became a critical part of their generation. Why should Africa, with its large hydro potential, be deprived of the same chance?....
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