Barcelona Metropolis

I am often asked these days: what about the energy transition, what about the desire to decarbonise society, have we given up the fight against climate change? This brings us to another question: what have we done in recent years to combat climate change? And the answer is simple: nothing or virtually nothing. Despite all the rhetoric on the table, the world’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have grown steadily in recent decades; they increased only slightly less during the 2008 economic crisis and the months of the lockdown owing to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. All the purported improvement in EU GHG emissions has been brought about by outsourcing the most polluting activities to China, so that CO₂ emissions would be recorded there. In addition, total emissions are rising due to the shipping of raw materials and processed products to China. A recent assessment of the actual CO₂ footprint showed that our emissions are 30% higher than those reported, if the emissions associated with our consumption of products from China are taken into account.

So does this mean that the transition to renewables is futile? Shouldn’t this lack of real and radical changes in GHG emissions spur an increase in renewable energy installations? No, it shouldn’t. Because, although it is not acknowledged, renewables on a massive scale are not economically competitive, and the only thing that matters here – and has always mattered – is economics. We will not do anything that harms the economy, and the propagated renewable transition model does not allow us to maintain an ever-growing economic system, which is the foundation of our capitalist system. It is not that electric renewables (the only ones being talked about, as if there were no other renewable energy models) are useless: they have their niche, their range of applications and their window of contribution. But it is totally unrealistic to suggest that electric renewable energies will replace all current energy consumption and that we will continue to do things the way we do them now. Critical materials are lacking to bring the rollout to fruition on the scale that would be needed; fossil fuels are in short supply too, and it is not always easy to harness electricity. Here’s the crux of the matter: regardless of how much we are led to believe that we will all have electric cars, it will not be viable for a myriad of reasons, starting with the shortage of battery materials. Green hydrogen is even worse as an energy carrier: it is difficult to handle, it also requires a great deal of scarce materials and the energy losses of converting electricity to hydrogen are prohibitive, so much so that the IPCC’s own Working Group III report claims that hydrogen technology has not reached maturity for mass deployment.

Does this mean that we are condemned to a relentless increase in CO₂ emissions to prevent putting a stop to this crazed, ecocidal and suicidal economic system? If it were up to the economic system, no doubt. But it is no longer only up to it. In this religion of growthism that they want to pass off as “economic theory”, it is not considered that the planet imposes biophysical limits, because, although it is enormous, it is still a round ball and, therefore, finite. Devotees of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Growth are incapable of understanding that not only can’t the planet absorb all the waste we generate, but also that it cannot give us all the resources we wish to consume at a growing rate.

The same thing happens with oil. Despite technical improvements introduced over the decades, the oil that remains is increasingly harder to extract, is more expensive and is of poorer quality. This has been known for 50 years, when geophysicist Marion King Hubbert first said so. However, with improvements in exploration and extraction, oil availability continued to increase every year until 2005, around the time Marion King Hubbert had predicted in 1970. At that time, conventional crude oil production peaked; since then, it has not risen any further and is dropping faster and faster. To offset this decline, many other substances have been introduced: unconventional oils, imperfect substitutes. But these unconventional oils also have their limits and are more expensive to produce. Worse still, the oil companies are losing money, hand over fist. That is why, since 2014, the world’s oil companies as a whole have cut spending on searching for and exploiting oil fields by 60%. There is no more profitable oil left in the world: some small deposits are still being discovered and exploited, but for decades only five billion new barrels are found each year, whereas we consume 36 billion barrels. Since 2018, total oil production (conventional and non-conventional) has fallen, and has already dropped by 5%.

There is an oil shortage, but there is also a lack of investment in refineries for the same reason: because oil companies will not be able to make the investment profitable. This makes some fuels more difficult to produce and affects diesel and paraffin in particular. Diesel production is falling faster than oil production: we are already 15% below 2015 levels and it is getting worse. And diesel is the lifeblood of the system: all machinery runs on diesel. We are seeing problems in many countries, across all sectors: transport, mining, fishing, agriculture...

The problem of falling production is not just in oil. Coal peaked in 2019, although production is still on an undulating plateau. Uranium is in a worse situation: it peaked in 2016 and production has already fallen by 24% – do we now understand why half of France’s nuclear power plants are closed? As for natural gas, production has not yet peaked, but almost, and for Europe it is already as if it had peaked. 

All this was happening before the war in Ukraine: it was the cause behind the high prices in late 2021. The war has only accelerated this process. When it ends, hopefully soon, we will not go back to what was there before: we will simply have gone further down the spiral of energy decline and environmental degradation.

Does this mean we cannot do anything? Of course not. First of all, we must abandon the suicidal idea of perpetual growth on a finite planet. We must start talking about degrowth. Relocation. Rationalisation of cities. Urban and peri-urban vegetable gardens. The infrastructures we will need when we have no cars. How we will transport goods without so many lorries. And we will have to do all this in the midst of a changing world made more complicated by climate change. A world in which we want to live and that we will have to make much more habitable than it is today. When will we start talking about it?