If you like your YouTube content to have plenty of references to global elites, industrial complexes, “freedom” and the conservative conspiracy theory of a “Great Reset”, then the British comedian and actor Russell Brand’s channel might be for you.
Brand has more than 6 million subscribers on YouTube and this week his channel turned to the Danish political scientist, Bjørn Lomborg, for a “debate” (not really a debate) on climate change.
“I know that polluting the planet cannot be good on a spiritual level and there seems to be significant evidence to suggest that man-made climate change is real,” Brand said.
During the segment on Brand’s “Stay Free” show, viewed 315,000 times in the four days after it was published, Lomborg argued that renewable energy was too expensive and appeared to try to undermine the role that batteries play in storing renewable energy.
The Guardian commentator and environmentalist George Monbiot wrote last week that Brand had seemingly shifted from “challenging injustice to conjuring phantoms”.
A charismatic figure who had helped energise young people disillusioned by politics was now wasting his talent on “tired and discredited tales”, Monbiot said.
Lomborg has been a regular commentator on climate change and energy in conservative circles for more than a decade. He says climate change is real and caused by humans but its impacts are overblown, the policy responses to it are inefficient and expensive and the world has bigger problems to solve.
Lomborg told Brand: “One study in Nature magazine showed the average American by mid-century, if we actually tried to do the [US president Joe] Biden plan to cut emissions to net zero by 2050, would cost in the order of $11,000 per person per year. So it’s not going to happen.”
The problem with Lomborg’s argument is the authors of that study have been asking him for 18 months to stop using that figure as they said it was a misrepresentation of the findings, with one saying Lomborg’s continued use of it was “obscenely reckless”.
The $11,000 figure was left out of the main study because the authors said the modelling that produced it was not reliable once economies started to cut emissions by more than 80%.
Lomborg has rejected their concerns and has continued to use the figure to bolster an argument that net-zero policies will be too expensive to society.
Flat battery claims
During the interview, Brand asked Lomborg why you couldn’t store solar and wind power for the times when the sun didn’t shine or the wind didn’t blow.
“Right now,” Lomborg said, “the world has batteries to store enough electricity for one minutes 15 seconds. By the end of this decade we will have 11 minutes.”
The conclusion any observer might reach here is that batteries can’t possibly provide enough cover for renewable energy.
Australians have heard this argument deployed by some commentators – and the opposition leader, Peter Dutton – when talking about big battery projects in South Australia and Victoria.
But this argument is mostly a strawman. Batteries are not being deployed to provide backup for the whole electricity supply; nor are they the only technology that will allow electricity grids to become almost carbon-free.
“It’s a bit like adding up all the world’s supply of chocolate biscuits and then adding [up] the calories that people need and then saying everyone’s going to starve because there aren’t enough biscuits,” says Alison Reeve, a climate change and energy expert at the Grattan Institute.
Reeve says batteries help keep electricity grids in balance and they may occasionally have to pick up shortfalls in supply of wind and solar but they will not be alone in that task.
She says the use of technologies including biofuels, green hydrogen, pumped hydropower, electricity demand management and a small amount of natural gas are in plans to decarbonise electricity grids while keeping electricity supply affordable and reliable.
“I’m not aware of any utility-scale grid anywhere in the world to deploy batteries as the only alternative for [balancing] solar and wind,” she says.
Tilting at windmills
In an interview with the Sky News host Andrew Bolt, the former deputy prime minister and now Nationals backbencher Barnaby Joyce made a very strong tilt at windmills this week.
“Every time you see a wind tower … they try and meme them up as some kind of benevolence … it’s not,” he said. “It’s an abhorrence. It’s intermittent power that forces up the price of your electricity bill.”
Energy systems experts have repeatedly outlined how soaring electricity prices in Australia have had nothing to do with the increasing amounts of renewable energy in the market and everything to do with rising gas and coal prices and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Joyce went on to argue the billions being spent on expanding the Snowy hydroelectric scheme (he said the cost had blown out to $20bn but the actual figure is more like $6bn) should instead be spent on upgrading every coal-fired power station in Australia to “high-efficiency low-emission” plants.
These would “belt massive amounts of power on to our grid, forcing down the price of power”, Joyce claimed.
The problem with that power is that it is more expensive than solar and wind and is still incredibly bad for the climate.
A UN report in 2021 looked at the full lifecycle emissions of different electricity generation technologies. The “cleanest” coal plant still emitted 751g CO2 a kilowatt hour, compared with about 8g each for the cleanest wind and solar electricity.
Joyce’s logic here is interesting.
Spending money on Snowy Hydro 2.0 to store cleaner and cheaper energy = bad. Spending the same money to refurbish ageing coal fleets to pump out dirty and expensive power = good.
