TEDxVancouver - Patrick Moore - 11/21/09

I was born and raised on the north end of Vancouver Island in the rainforest by the Pacific I grew up playing on tide flats by salmon spawning streams and developed a love of nature at an early age but then I had to come to Vancouver to go to school I ended up at the University of BC studying the life sciences which had always been my greatest interest biology genetics biochemistry some forestry and then I discovered ecology the science of how all living things are interrelated and how we are related to them I became a born-again ecologist and soon enrolled in a PhD in ecology at the University of BC and became radicalized during the height of the Cold War in the height of the Vietnam War I joined this little group in the basement of the Unitarian Church who were planning a protest voyage against us hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska we sailed a little fish boat across the North Pacific had tens of thousands of people marching in the street blocking the border between the United States and Canada to get attention President Nixon canceled those hydrogen bomb tests as a result of the overwhelming public opposition we'd helped create this was the last hydrogen bomb the United States ever detonated and it was the birth of Greenpeace I spent the next 15 years after getting my PhD full-time and the leadership of Greenpeace around the world next we went on to French atmospheric nuclear testing than saving the whales on the oceans of the surround the world and then toxic wastes and uranium mining and nuclear energy and all the other issues that you've heard of during my nearly 40 years as an ecologist and environmentalist I have somehow evolved into an environmentalist that supports nuclear energy and is somewhat skeptical of human-caused climate change now on nuclear energy I'm not out of the ordinary there's lots of environmentalists today who have decided that nuclear energy is the most effective technology to knock out fossil fuels to actually replace to coal plants with one nuclear plant something you can't do easily with wind and solar but we'll get to that but it most of the other environmentalists like James Lovelock the father of the Gaia hypothesis Stewart Brand the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog Steven Tyndale former executive director of Greenpeace UK and even Bob Marley they have decided they support nuclear energy while Bob did while he was alive and most of the reasons for this is climate change most environmentalists who have decided we must embrace nuclear technology it's because they're concerned with fossil fuel consumption co2 emissions and climate change that's not the main reason I support nuclear energy although it is part of it you see people should should sort of wake up to the fact that the climate stopped warming more than 10 years ago 1998 was the warmest date the warmest year we've had in the last hundred years since then there has been a slight cooling trend yes the Arctic ice was lowest in 2007 in any summer since we started measuring it only in 1979 so we don't really have a very long dataset here but for the last two years it has been rebuilding Antarctica never did get warm it has remained cold and the sea ice around Antarctica has not shrunk in the slightest and you can find this easily on the Internet then there is the fact that hurricane intensity is about 50 percent of what it was 10 years ago and it has been a steadily declining intensity since about 1998 the time of the warmest year so it is worth actually looking at this then there is the issue that actually it would be a lot worse if it got 2 degrees colder than it is today than if it gets 2 degrees warmer in terms of agricultural production in particular I ask you why are there 300 million people in the United States and only 30 million people in Canada all huddled up against the 49th parallel one word cold sometimes I think that's why they let us have it but it is an absolute fact that the most biodiversity on this planet is in the tropics the second you move from the tropics into places where it freezes in the winter biodiversity drops by over 90% because adaptation to cold I'm glad I didn't have to make that swim across the North Pole adaptation to cold is a very specialized evolutionary adaptation only a few species have it our species Homo sapiens at ten degrees Celsius naked outdoors will freeze to death in not many hours doesn't take freezing it only takes 10 degrees Celsius and we can't survive in that so I'm not going to dwell on climate change a great deal because personally I think it's not a crisis or an apocalypse and I don't even know if we have any way of actually controlling it and why is it cooling now when all the climate models say it's supposed to continue to get warming I'm going to wait and see what happens because I don't think we know at this point and therefore I don't believe we should adopt policies that are going to cost tens of billions of dollars and put hundreds of millions of people into energy poverty and make food far more expensive for people who can barely afford it already there are 800 million people in this world who don't have enough food and policies that make energy more expensive make food more expensive so why do I support reducing fossil fuels because I do very strongly actually there are a large number of good reasons first is the climate change issue I agree that even though we don't know exactly what's going to happen with the climate it would be a good idea to slow down the rate of increase in co2 in the global atmosphere as a precautionary measure at least but secondly nothing causes more damage to human health in the way of pollution than burning fossil fuels in this world this we know for a fact it's not just a theory we know that coal plants in particular emit sulfur and particulates and mercury and far more radiation than a nuclear plant does they are the worst forms of polluters in the world so that's a good reason what about conservation we are burning about 300 million years worth of fossil fuel creation in a few centuries here this is hardly a model for our kids to look up to maybe there should be some fossil fuels left for people 500 years from now instead of us just wasting them all but fossil fuels account for 85 percent of global energy today that means only 15 percent of our energy comes from something other than fossil fuels one of the reasons it would be good to reduce fossil fuels below their present use they are continuing to grow unfortunately despite all our talking and our good intentions one of the reasons would be good for us to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels is as they run out the shock will be less severe to our economic system I think it is crazy for Al Gore to suggest that in 10 years from now we will not be using any fossil fuels that that is apparently his goal and politicians the world over are clambering over each other to make more wildly ridiculous promises about 80% reduction in fossil fuel or a carbon neutral world personally I do not think a carbon neutral world is feasible not with this many people and not if people are going to bring themselves out of poverty in the developing countries it's just not going to happen and maybe it isn't necessary to have a carbon neutral world but it sure would be a good idea if we weren't 85 percent dependent on these non-renewable precious resources especially when there are other technologies that can do the same job cleaner and more sustainably speaking of which but with a geopolitical reasons I just forgot those there last but certainly not least Mideast oil the u.s. transportation system is absolutely dependent on it Russian gas the whole of Europe is now absolutely dependent on it these are the two primary potential centres of instability politically reducing dependence on Middle East oil and Russian gas would be a good thing for world peace I have a little ditty that goes renewable sustainable clean and green we bandy those four words about as if they all mean the same thing when they certainly don't we all know what renewable is that's good renewable is good but it's easy to use a renewable thing unsustainably like the buffalo for example atlantic cod fish these were renewable resources that were used unsustainably then sustainable we know what that is it means it will last a long time we can keep doing it because it doesn't run out lots of sustainable resources are non-renewable like iron ore for example there's enough iron ore in the Earth's crust to last for a million years there is no possibility that we will run out of iron but there are non-renewable resources that are very finite oil is a classic case then there is clean clean means it doesn't pollute this is a good thing so we want sustainable clean technologies they don't have to be renewable if they're sustainable and clean then there's a green and I certainly agree with mark on the unfortunate aspect of this word green basically the word green just means someone's trying to sell you something now it has become a marketing term it has no merit in technical or scientific explanation it doesn't work for me so I think the two middle words are the most important sustainable and clean let's look at the choices we have here let's start with renewable energy I mean I'm in favor of renewable energy but I just think the green movement has picked the wrong ones wind and solar being the two centerpieces of how we're supposed to get off fossil fuels actually the most important renewable energy in the world is wood from trees about 75 percent of all the world's renewable energy measured in units of energy is from wood mostly for cooking and heating in the developing countries but also in the wood industries most of the energy that is used to make timber and paper is biomass from parts of the tree that are not suitable for the final product another 22% or so of our renewable energy in this world is hydroelectric energy only about 2.5 percent of all the renewable energy in the world is wind solar and all the others added up together most of it is wood and hydro then we come to nuclear energy nuclear energy is not renewable but it is extremely sustainable there is enough nuclear fuel to last for thousands of years then there's thorium another radioactive natural element in the Earth's crust which is far more abundant than uranium and actually many people believe it is a better nuclear fuel than uranium for energy production so we got no problem with sustainability it's also clean it does not emit the air pollutants that come out of coal plants and it does not emit greenhouse gases there's about a 2 percent co2 emissions in the full lifecycle of nuclear compared with coal for example the reason wind and solar are not sustainable in my view is twofold first if you go to Germany where the prices of each of the technologies for producing electricity are fixed by law it's called a feed-in tariff brown coal is 2.4 cents euro 2.4 euro cents per kilowatt hour nuclear is 2.5 cents gas is 3 cents wind is 10 cents and solar is 57 cents they have pay they're paying every year in Germany 9 billion dollars for solar energy and getting less than 1% of their electricity from it and then there's the wind which you've got 12,000 megawatts of it one day and that night it dies off and you got nothing the next morning it's too expensive and certainly can't be afforded by people in Africa Latin America or most Asian countries the only place wind and solar is being installed in any amount is where there are either legislated requirements for utilities to buy it or legislated prices that they have to pay for it if it's installed nowhere else is solar and wind energy being installed on any large scale the second problem is the intermittency that is inherent in these two renewables hydro electric is base load continuous biomass can be base load continuous ground source heat pumps or geothermal heat pumps are base load and continuous and I'll get to them because they are a big part of this solution but wind and solar are both intermittent we cannot run factories and hospitals and schools and businesses and homes on technologies that disappear for three or four days at a time sorry can't go to work today the wind isn't blowing and the Sun isn't shining this just will not work they can only be very niche solar is only useful off the grid when there's no alternative but a gas or diesel generator and wind has a small role to play albeit there will be one for it but at ten cents a kilowatt hour it's three or four times more expensive than the conventional coal and nuclear power plants one of the reasons if you look around the world at greenhouse gas emissions coming from various countries you will see that what makes most of the difference given an relatively comparable per-capita GDP is the electricity technology that that country is using Sweden Switzerland and France have the lowest per capita co2 emissions in Europe why because of a combination of hydroelectric and nuclear electricity Sweden is 45% hydro 45% nuclear and 8% biomass which is wood from their forests virtually fossil fuel free electricity Switzerland is 65% hydro because they got a lot of mountains with rivers and 35% nuclear France is 80% nuclear and 10% hydro with some gas and renewables but basically mostly fossil fuel free actually Canada is 65% hydroelectric and 15% nuclear for 80 percent non fossil fuel generated electricity more or less the exact opposite of the United States which is 70 percent fossil fuel 50 coal and 20 gas and about 22% hydroelectric percent hydroelectric 20% nuclear and all arrests just a little sliver of the wind and solar etc so my argument is that it is impossible with renewables alone even with hydro because even though hydro produces 15% of the world's electricity today about the same as nuclear which is about 15 percent compared to all the rest put together which is less than 1% fossil fuels therefore produce approximately 70% of the world's electricity there is no way that the renewables alone can replace the fossil fuels in a big way especially with a growing economy and population and the fact that we are going to need more electricity in the future not less why because if we clean up our electricity system it doesn't make any sense to plug a hybrid car into a coal-fired power plant and it doesn't make any sense to run a ground source heat pump in your house on a coal-fired power plant you're just shifting the pollution from one place to another but if the electricity system is clean that is hydroelectric nuclear some wind and some biomass then there are 750 million cars in this year in this world that can be equipped with batteries in the not-too-distant future it'll take 15 or 20 years for this to come in in a big way but it's coming so we need more electricity clean electricity to charge all these batteries at night is when we're going to want to charge them off-peak and when you have our cars parked in the garage at home then we can use that clean electricity to run heat pumps in every building every building in the world can get off gas a heat pump replaces the gas furnace the gas hot water tank and the air conditioning with more efficient systems that use no fossil fuels you could build a house on a glacier I don't recommend it but you could and put pipes in the ground and extract heat from the ice and heat your house to a comfortable temperature that's the miracle of geothermal heat pumps they work anywhere in the world for heating cooling and domestic hot water solar hot water as was shown earlier is also a very important and cost-effective use of solar energy but solar voltaics I don't think they're going to ever figure out how to get the Sun to shine at night or on cloudy days so we've just picked the wrong renewables to focus on in these cases China today we here is building all these coal plants and it's true but China is also now the world's leader in hydroelectric production the Three Gorges Dam itself is the equivalent of 40 coal-fired power plants they are also at this moment building 16 nuclear plants in China nine in Russia six in South Korea six in Taiwan one in Finland two in france 53 in total under construction now around the world Sweden has reversed its moratorium on nuclear and has announced it will build new plants Germany just in the last elections has reversed its position on nuclear and will keep its nuclear plants running and no doubt will build more in the future Italy has just announced it will build nuclear plants for the first time Spain has just announced it will keep its nuclear plants running this is the nuclear Renaissance it is happening around the world and the reason it's happening is because it is the best form of electricity running 24/7 safely and reliably to replace fossil fuels for the future I know that to many people this is something that is going to be big cognitive dissonance but it's happening right now all around the world people are making these decisions and I don't believe that it is going to change unless something completely new comes out of the blue but the vision is clean electricity getting off 85% fossil and getting the fossils down to 25 or 30% someday in the quite distant future it will take to do that if we move in the right direction clean electricity charging batteries in all our private vehicles to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels for transportation running heat pumps in all our buildings to reduce our dependence on gas and other fossil fuels for heating cooling and and hot water production and that actually could achieve a 50% reduction in fossil fuel use worldwide thank you very much you

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Id: kHZKo13HV2A

Length: 20min 31sec (1231 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2010