Book review
H. Scheer, Energy Autonomy: The Economic, Social and Technological Case for Renewable Energy , Earthscan, London (2007) ISBN 9781844073559 310 pages, £19.99.
Rakesh Kapoora, 
Available online 31 May 2009.
Article Outline
This book is a persuasive plea for renewable energy as the only permanent, long-term, sustainable solution to the availability of energy for living in the twenty-first century and beyond. It puts forward the argument that renewable energy is the bedrock of a new kind of social organisation that is built on ‘energy autonomy’ – a decentralised society that derives energy from locally available renewable sources of energy. Energy autonomy has geo-political, economic and ecological implications that are simultaneously global and local. ‘The central political motive for a renewable energy strategy leading to energy autonomy is the possibility of guaranteeing or restoring the right of self-determination for states and civil societies and, within these political civil societies, maintaining democracy and general economic freedom’ (p. 283).
Scheer sees energy autonomy both as an outcome of the shift to renewable energy and as the hard core of a practical strategy in which autonomous initiatives by individuals, organisations, businesses, cities and states are required to get things moving.
Scheer argues cogently the case for renewable energy based on the four elementary differences between nuclear and fossil energy, on the one hand, and renewable energy, on the other (p. 20–21). These differences are about the ecological impacts, the availability over time, the geographical distribution and the costs over time of the resources.
- • The use of nuclear and fossil energy entails massive environmental disturbances and pollution of water and air. Even besides the problem of climate change, there would be still be a mass of ecological reasons speaking on behalf of an energy shift.
• Fossil energy can be depleted, and its continued use must inevitably lead to rising costs and supply bottlenecks. Only inexhaustible renewable energy opens up the prospect of a permanent, secure energy supply for people everywhere.
• Nuclear and fossil energy reserves lie in a relatively limited number of producing regions around the globe, thus requiring lengthy supply chains. This inevitably entails major outlays in infrastructure, leads to growing dependence, and provokes economic, political and military conflicts. Every form of renewable energy, by contrast, fits in with its natural surroundings and can be recovered directly with much smaller infrastructural requirements.
• Fossil and atomic energy as a result of the above-mentioned differences are becoming increasingly expensive, both with respect to their direct and their indirect costs. Renewable energy, by contrast, becomes increasingly cheaper in the course of continuous technological improvement, industrial mass production, and intelligent new forms of application.
In addition, there are numerous macro-economic advantages of renewable energy:
- • Its indigenous availability and thereby the currency savings it affords along with the improvement in the balance of payments from cutting back on energy imports.
• The replacement of commercial fuels by free primary energy. Unlike large power plants, which cannot be distributed broadly enough, production of decentralised power facilities is possible in almost every country.
• The avoidance of infrastructure creation for transmission over long distances.
• The promotion of crafts and agriculture that comes from solar construction and biomass utilisation, which means the promotion of small- and medium-sized businesses and thereby regional economic structures.
• The broad distribution of income because of the emergence of decentralised entrepreneurial forms.
• The avoidance of ecological follow-up costs.
• The reduction of health cost for catastrophe prevention and compensation.
• The avoidance of international security costs.
These salient characteristics, Scheer argues, ‘compel a clear affirmation of renewable energy against any notorious attempt at relativising or devaluing it’. Yet, the irony is that renewable energy has hardly made significant advances globally to displace fossil fuels from their pre-eminent position, and may not be able to do so even in the next few decades! The question Scheer asks is really pertinent – ‘Why, thus far have there been no political initiatives promoting renewable energy as a future economic project with the same kind of clear-cut ambition that made it possible to build the modern railway, space travel, nuclear technology and (most recently of all) information technology?’ (p. 13).
1. Vested interests and mental blockages
He notes very rightly that the real problem for renewable energy is truly neither technological or economic, but rather political and mental: the political problem takes the form of countless arbitrary administrative hurdles, and the mental problem lies in the need for a change of attitude (p. 55). It is on account of the political as well as the mental obstacles that the ‘deceptive global consensus’ for renewable energy that seemed to have emerged in the seventies did not work.
A number of books in the seventies and the early eighties proclaimed the dawning of the solar age, such as Self Reliant Cities by David Morris, Rays of Hope: The Transition to a Post Petroleum World and Blueprint for a Solar America by Denis Hayes. The Union of Concerned Scientists, including several Nobel Prize winners, published a 1979 study that described in detail the possibility of a complete reorganisation of US energy supplies towards renewable energy by the year 2050.
But the mindset and the vested interests against renewable energy were too powerful. ‘In order to undermine renewable energy's development, the energy business pulled out all the stops, down to the systematic purchase small solar companies that were eventually shut down… In his book The Sun Betrayed, a thriller about business crime, Ray Reece describes how this ‘three billion dollar business’ deliberately thwarts the solar break-through – with tactics that include the friendly embrace of solar actors in order to crush them. Both President Carter and Congress got cold feet and flinched about carrying through with pro-solar decisions they had already initiated. This was a surrender that Barry Commoner, the pioneering thinker of the US solar movement, was already noting in this 1979 book The Politics of Energy when he remarked that there was apparently a political taboo about offending the interests of the private energy business. Finally, there was a definitive backlash when Ronald Reagan became president in 1981’ (p. 9). Thus the US – and along with it the world – lost its solar model.
In the first decade of the 21st century, Germany, at the forefront of the renewable energy movement in Europe, faces a very similar threat of backlash. ‘As always, the dominance of the current energy system is so great, and its sphere of influence so far-reaching, that a fresh setback can’t be ruled out’ (p. 11). The conflict between the electricity corporations and the sponsors of renewable energy is bound to overshadow all previous conflicts over renewable energy. If the electricity corporations do not succeed soon in stopping the expansion of renewable energy at the level of political action, they will be forced to shelve their own plans for expansion. The conflict about the Renewable Energy Sources Act is a historical turning point, in spite of the relatively small share of renewable energy in Germany's electricity supply. How this conflict turns out will decide what strategies for renewable energy are adopted in other countries (p. 299).
In the words of the Luxembourg MEP Claude Turmes, ‘Europe's biggest problem is that we have seven electricity producers who control 60 percent of production, 70 percent of the entire European network, and 95 percent of compensation of current in Europe. The people who sit on coal and nuclear power plants will simply not allow a shift to renewable energy’ (p. 172). And according to Taro Kono, a Japanese member of the Lower House: ‘the corrupt politicians, shameless bureaucrats, and dirty supply companies form an iron nuclear triangle. Every attempt to increase the share of renewable energy is seen as a danger to what is regarded as in our own best interest: promoting the nuclear industry’.
So, on the one hand there are strong vested interests that will not allow renewable energy to come up. On the other is inertia, indifference or a lack of focus and clarity about the issues involved. For instance, Morocco has one of the most favourable regions in the world for wind energy, but its energy dependence stands at 95 percent! Taxi owners and transporters do not use bio-diesel despite easy availability and despite complaining about high petrol prices. The ‘pure solar house’, can already be built in an architectonically ambitious manner without additional costs, but even in sun-drenched countries one searches in vain for such buildings (p. 267). It is considered as self-evident that every household has to pay for garbage collection, but avoiding energy emissions is deemed infeasible, although it would cost less than garbage collection!
The doubts, disinformation and arguments spread by the opponents of renewable energy distort the issues and hinder a proper understanding of the merits of renewable energy. Scheer identifies seven such dubious techno-economic premises and another six questionable premises of political action (p. 16–19). These premises assert that renewable energy has insufficient usable potential, that it is only an option for the long run, that large power plants are an absolute necessity, that renewable energy has to be compatible with existing structures of energy provision, that renewable energy is dependent on subsidies, that global treaty commitments are indispensable to the widespread use of renewable energy, etc.
The hue and cry over the ostensible subsidies to renewable energy, for instance, is used to divert attention from the fact that subsidies for nuclear and fossil energy have been (and still are) many times higher than subsidies previously provided for all forms of renewable energy. For nuclear energy, total subsidization worldwide comes to at least US$ 1 trillion; for renewable energy, by contrast, subsidies amount to US$ 40 billion at most over the last 30 years, including market introduction programmes (p. 104).
In 2001 the energy scholar Andre de Moor presented a calculation of annual subsidies in the amount of US$ 244 billion, of which US$ 53 billion were for coal, US$ 52 billion for petroleum, US$ 46 billion for natural gas, US$ 48 billion for electricity, US$ 16 billion for nuclear energy and US$ 9 billion for using renewable energy. The subsidies for renewable energy were a mere 3.7 percent of the total (p. 131).
Even the WTO has so far done nothing about the absurd imbalance between the duty-free status enjoyed by primary fossil energy trading and sometimes high tariffs on trade in renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies.
Scheer emphasises the need to push these intellectual hurdles aside in order to release renewable energy from the prison to which it has been confined by the established system. ‘The energy debate needs to be conducted in a way that highlights fundamental contrasts – and not just as a discussion about energy, but as a societal debate. The contrasts need to be made clear: energy that is ready for the future versus energy imprisoned by the past, common good versus egoism’ (p. 271).
Whether or not renewable energy will be able to become the most important and widespread source of energy in the next few decades will have enormous political and economic implications. Politically, if renewable energy does not succeed, the danger is that the electricity industry will transform into a transnational ‘energy state’ that will help in the dissolution of the nation-state and its replacement by the ‘market state’. Scheer quotes the work of the energy scientist Cesare Marchetti on a super-centrally organised Hydrogen Age, and of the US historian Philip Bobbitt to show that the vision and the ideological underpinnings of this scenario are already being spelled out. A victory for renewable energy, on the other hand, will mean the advent of decentralised, democratic societies and nation-states.
Economically, a victory for the electricity companies will mean the ultimate triumph of market forces along with the emergence of the market-state. On the other hand, the triumph of renewable energy will mean a process of creative destruction – a ‘re-founding of the economy’ and the re-invention of businesses/sectors along sustainable lines. This process will involve investments in and rise of numerous small and local/regional renewable energy companies and the dissolution of large, established energy corporations. And the winners will not only be the manufacturers of renewable energy technologies. For instance, the car industry needs to abandon its 100-year alliance with the petroleum industry, developing electric cars and those using bio-diesel. The aircraft industry needs to prepare intensively for the time when fossil aircraft fuels will be subject to taxation or perhaps no longer even be available. Air travel is a potential sector for using hydrogen, because hydrogen can be produced at airports and supplied without additional infrastructure expense. Rail companies have to develop locomotives that can operate using fuel cells. The electrical and IT industries have to develop new storage batteries and technologies. Agriculture has to be re-invented through the integrated cultivation of plants for food, energy and raw materials. ‘In short, not only will new industrial enterprises emerge when renewable energy prevails, renewable energy will also open up opportunities for old branches of industry’ (p. 282).
2. The way forward
Given the intellectual and attitudinal hurdles and the vested interests around fossil and nuclear energy, what is the way out? Scheer's own task in his work as a politician (a member of the German Bundestag) and through this book is to broaden the energy debate, clear the disinformation and build the perspective and the public opinion that can lead the way for renewable energy. He feels that an informed and motivated public is critical – even just 5 percent impassioned believers may be enough to turn the tide. He calls for the champions of renewable energy to get down to work developing scenarios for concrete opportunities in their local areas, regions and nations… They only need to learn some lessons from the protagonists of nuclear energy, who were able to cast a spell on a whole generation from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Scheer gives us an important insight in pointing out that the attempt to solve the world's energy problem by way of consensus-oriented global negotiations will not necessarily work. The attempt to globalize political responsibility, unfortunately, ends up as generalising and diluting that responsibility. ‘All the evidence points towards the need to use unilateral initiatives as a way of pushing ahead with the shift to renewable energy; this can also happen when well-meaning governments undertake immediate joint initiatives on their own instead of waiting for the day when they can rally every last ill-intentioned government to their side’ (p. 161).
Besides the specific strategies suggested by Scheer, he lists the ten general maxims of political action that can be used to achieve an irreversible breakthrough to renewable energy within a few decades (p. 286–296). These maxims reflect the fact that renewable energy offers a completely new paradigm for the organisation of society, the economy and politics. They go against the dominant centralising, globalising paradigm of development that has been directing us for the last century and ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution. These maxims spelt out by Scheer will hopefully provide much greater clarity and focus that the champions of renewable energy need to make a winning effort.
Among the most important of these maxims is that we need a new global economic development model which will re-orient both industrial and developing countries towards renewable energy. The necessity of this change is underscored by the fact that the global fossil/nuclear energy system continues to exclude a third of humanity from what it supplies. For these excluded people, renewable energy provides the wonderful opportunity to leapfrog – they can immediately skip the development that led industrial societies on the path towards ever more centralised energy conversion using large power plants and refineries (and with the sprawling energy supply structure this required).
Once the necessity of switching to renewable energy is accepted, the world energy map will have to be redrawn, many existing power plants will have to be shut down and the existing oil and gas producing nations too will have to rebuild their economies based on small and medium enterprises.
Scheer has produced an important and timely book that can help catalyse the efforts for the advancement of renewable energy. His arguments and facts – many of which have not been mentioned here given the limitations of space – are rigorous and compelling. The protagonists of renewable energy have much to learn from this book in order to broaden the debate and take the movement forward. Substantively, the one issue that may need rethink considering developments in the last few years is the question of using land for producing bio-fuels, but this is understandable considering that this book was originally written in German in 2005. After the false start of the seventies, it seems that now the time of the idea of renewable energy has indeed come. Scheer is right in proclaiming that ‘the reasons for a shift to renewable energy are so compelling that this transformation would have to be undertaken even if all the [incorrect] horror stories and statistics about its cost turned out to be true’ (p. 270). Making renewable energy the foundation for a sustainable future is now a priority for the human condition.
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