I’m sorry Ed Miliband, your big green energy plan is all fantasy
Ed Miliband’s green vision is admirable, but the history of energy consumption shows it is all but a fantasy, writes Paul Ormerod
The energy secretary, Ed Miliband, has attracted criticism in large sections of the media. But he has, unlike some of his Cabinet colleagues, a clear vision about what he wants to do while in power.
Miliband aims to transition the UK away from fossil fuels and towards homegrown clean energy.
He reinforced his message only last week by relaunching a creation of the Sunak government, the Net Zero Council. The purpose of the Council is to provide advice to the government in support of net zero strategy development.
Miliband has come in for a degree of ridicule over his volte-face over the third runway at Heathrow, which is being championed by the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves. Yet this simply reinforces the view that he is serious; real world politics inevitably involves compromises.
Miliband’s plan to transition the UK economy onto a net zero basis is both enormously ambitious and very costly.
But a fascinating new book by a world expert in the history of science and technology raises the point that it simply may not be feasible.
The all-consuming history of energy
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz was previously at Imperial College and is now based in Paris. The central theme of his book is set out, perhaps somewhat enigmatically, in the title: More and more and more: an all-consuming history of energy.
Conventional accounts of the history of energy offer a simple narrative. At any point in time, there is a dominant technology and associated material, which is then replaced by a new, superior combination.
For much of human history, energy was provided mainly by human labour. There was some wind and water power, water mills for example. The main material was wood, used to keep people warm and to build ships and houses.
The Industrial Revolution ushered in the age of steam and coal. In turn, coal gave way to hydrocarbons, namely oil and gas.
The next phase, according to the adherents of this orthodox view, is the replacement of fossil fuels by various forms of renewable energy.
Fressoz pulls no punches: this view of the world is completely wrong.
History does not show a sequence of neat transitions. As the distinguished Columbia historian Adam Tooze puts it in a review of Fressoz: “Economic growth has not been based on progressive shifts from one source of energy to another, but on the accumulation of ever more and different types of energy. Using more coal involved using more wood, using more oil consumed more coal, and so on”.
Ed Miliband’s plan rests on fantasy
In short, what is being proposed by Ed Miliband and the net zero adherents is without precedent in human history. No new energy technology has ever suppressed and eliminated its predecessors.
Perhaps this can be summed up in a single fact: wood was the dominant material for centuries before the Industrial Revolution at the end of the 18th century, but more wood is being used now than ever before.
Fressoz accepts that different kinds of material used to create energy are in part substitutes. Yet the striking feature of the relationship between them is that it is symbiotic. New energy sources create new demands for those which already exist.
A very positive development is the reduction in the carbon intensity of production which has already taken place. In 1980, 450 grammes of carbon dioxide had to be emitted to produce a dollar of global GDP. By 2020, this had fallen to 260.
A crucial factor behind this shift was the move to more expensive energy sparked by the quadrupling of the world oil price by OPEC in the early 1970s. Incentives were created to innovate to save on energy.
Much more can be done, and incentives and innovation are key. But creating a purely green economy appears to be a fantasy.
Paul Ormerod is an honorary professor at the Alliance Business School at the University of Manchester and an economist at Volterra Partners LLP