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Discuss the current environmental policy challenges with regards to the renewables sector.

 

There are several challenges here. One is that a general consensus has arisen that a reduction in the carbon waste which enters the atmosphere from traditional forms of power generation is necessary to slow or reduce dangerous climate change. This means a move from an economy based around the generation of power from coal, oil, and to an extent gas, and towards one based upon renewable, abundant, and satisfactory replacements.  The challenge is that hydrocarbon power is a really efficient and effective form of power for electricity grids, cars, aeroplanes, heating, and factories. It is also globally used by competitor economies. Switching from it might therefore limit the capacity of economies, create advantages for competitors, lower living standards, and reduce the amount of investment capital available for the development of renewable resources.

A second challenge is that the renewables sector is one covering a great many things. Some of these things, whilst improving all the time, are not stable replacements for the power that hospitals, infrastructure and families need; electricity generation by wind or solar power is not appropriate except as a ‘top up’ to grids at the moment, and needs subsidy to encourage development and take up. In addition, the creation of solar panels, windmills, lighter bikes and cars, and carbon-free materials requires the use of resources which are depleted, or which in production generates high energy demand and pollution. Carbon in the form of oil is also built into the plastics industry at a basic level, and the use of plastic and carbon fibre-based machinery or items which accompany renewable energy therefore has a carbon cost.

Making carbon-based energy more expensive might also simply encourage the use of ‘dirtier’ substitutes which are also carbon based. If oil and coal were made expensive to use, wood burning, pulp and paper burning, and methane-producing activities might increase. This, along with ‘fracking’ (which would become relatively cheaper if oil extraction and burning were more expensive) would represent a government failure.

A third challenge is that some renewable use displaces rather than eliminates power generation; electric cars and bicycles, as much as mobile phones and bitcoin, require electric infrastructure and more, not fewer, power plants. More pedestrianisation and public transport implies the redesign of cities away from efficient car journeys and supply systems based on trucks, which may mean more pollution, not less, as buildings and roads are changed and petrol-based transport is caught in more congestion and delay. A concentration on renewables may thus raise prices in supermarkets, putting more of the poor further into poverty, and resulting in more cheap imports and more production of inferior goods.

A fourth problem is that the cleanest form of energy is nuclear. Nuclear is also very cheap, until its safety, precautionary, and catastrophic costs are considered; it is very useful until it goes wrong, and protecting against it going wrong adds greatly to its expense.

Finally, switching to renewable energy will not help cope with global inequality, limit the use of non-renewables elsewhere, provide a replacement for mass employment and structural unemployment, limit and reduce global populations, nor will it in itself reduce wealth inequalities. Climate change is also not fully predictable; slight variations in temperature rise could, for instance, lead to more food production and lower prices in Eurasia and North America, leading to global growth which, paradoxically, could encourage renewables.

Limiting oil and oil-based products, on the other hand, could simply hobble responses to unusual weather, greater population density, or downward temperatures in other parts of the world. If cheap and abundant power is restricted, a burden in terms of the increased expense of refrigeration, clothes and dish washing, and transport, will also fall more on the poor than the rich. Artificial fibres, plastics, and fertilisers are also all substantially oil-based; would not using so much oil for power, either by new technology or the deliberate regulation or prohibition of oil-based products, leave more for the fibres, plastics, and fertilisers, or less, as the oil extraction industry became less profitable? Would a Jeavons paradox develop, in which, because a thing was perceived to be running out, more of it was used, apply?

It must be a good thing not to deplete resources, and to use renewable power wherever possible. It is necessary to understand the variety of economic pressures and challenges associated with the idea, however.

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