Connected green thinking

By Brian Clegg

The problem with much of our approach to the environment is that it’s driven by fuzzy feelings, rather than logic and connected thinking. This has come up recently in respect to missing links in the renewable energy grid, but can also be seen in our approach to electric vehicles, the knee-jerk environmental reaction to nuclear, the way environmentalists embrace organic food and much more.

Way back, I wrote a book called Ecologic to try to address this lack of clear thinking. It won a prize, but didn’t have much impact other than getting me labelled a ‘green heretic‘, which I have accepted as a badge of honour. Sadly, though, bringing logic to green issues continues to be a problem.

The example that brought this to mind was the news that the massive Scottish Seagreen offshore wind plant has only been able to provide one third of its potential capacity this year – it sold 1.2 million gWh to the grid, where it could have provided 3.7 gWh. The reason for the disparity is that the the connectors carrying energy to England can only handle 6.3gW – nowhere near enough. And even with new connectors planned by 2030, there will still be far more produced than Scotland and the connectors can make use of – literally a lack of connected thinking.

I ought also to briefly revisit organic food: I recently saw a questionnaire designed to measure your environmental effectiveness. It asked if  you encouraged people to use food at home that is LOAF (Locally grown, Organic, Animal-friendly, Fairtrade). Locally grown is good environmentally (as long as it’s not, say, tomatoes in hot houses). Animal-friendly and Fairtrade are both ethically positive, but don’t necessarily have an environmental benefit. But organic methods are simply not an environmentally sustainable replacement for conventional farming on large scale – organics are emotional-sell products, primarily used as a marketing tool.

It’s time we focused on results, rather than feel-good in the move to be green.

This has been a Green Heretic production. See all my Green Heretic articles here.

Image by Eduardo Aparicio from Wikipedia

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.