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All over Ontario, giant wind turbines are sprouting up across the rural landscape and ruining people’s lives. Ordinary people are trying to fight them off in court, but they don’t have a chance. The multinational wind industry has a lot more money than they do. The law is on Big Wind’s side. So is Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government, which has pledged to triple the number of wind and solar generators and stick taxpayers with the bill.
But the fundamental problem with Big Wind is much bigger than its cost and unreliability. The problem is that today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us from the effects of climate change – and we’re wasting our time by trying.
That’s the conclusion Google has reached. Google has invested many years and significant resources in tackling the world’s climate and energy problems. Its biggest initiative was called RE<C (Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal), a massive effort to find renewable energy sources that could compete in cost with coal.
Last week, Ross Koningstein and David Fork, two of the engineers at the heart of the RE<C project, published an article describing what they learned, and why Google threw in the towel. “We had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists,” they wrote. “We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope.”
The trouble is, the problem is just too big. Even the best-case scenarios would not achieve anything like the reductions needed to stabilize carbon emissions at a level that many scientists think is necessary to stave off climate change. Nor would they affect the high level of atmospheric carbon dioxide that already exists. “If all power plants and industrial facilities switch over to zero-carbon energy sources right now, we’ll still be left with a ruinous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere,” they write.
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