Renewable Energy Installer February 2014 | Page 10

News: Profi le
Jeremy Leggett: History
isn’t necessarily destiny
It happened to the Mayans,
Romans and Aztecs but can
modern society avoid its own
catastrophic failure? The
Solarcentury chairman and
author of Energy of Nations tells
Paul Stephen how renewable
energy can save humanity from
being trapped in a carbon bubble
which is about to burst
PS: Many have gone before you to
warn of the perils of our addiction to
diminishing fossil fuels. Why did you
feel compelled to publish your new book
at this time in particular?
JL: In 2012, watching capital continue to fl ow
into coal and tar sands, and the new story
of shale riches emerging, I wondered how
best I could make a personal contribution
to sounding the multiple alarms needed. I
zeroed in on a lesson of neuroscience and
psychology: the one that shows people prefer
stories to textbooks. As the narrative unfolds,
hopefully it will offer insights into how brains
work in the incumbent energy market that is
stoking such catastrophe for the world.
In Energy of Nations you outline
the biggest threats to humanity as
oil depletion, climate change and
stock market collapse triggered by
its valuation of overestimated or
unburnable fossil fuel reserves. Which of
these do you fear becoming reality the
most?
Oil supply. Society is so very oil dependent.
And the willful blindness by the energy
incumbency to decline rates in existing crude
fi elds is so acute, the cheerleading about
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unconventional oil so horribly effective. Most
people lap it up as humans much prefer
believing in comforting narratives than
uncomfortable ones.
What part does renewable energy have
to play in averting any possible crisis?
We can soften the landing, if renewables
deployment accelerates. Beyond the carbon
crash, we can and must lead the rebuilding,
amid the ruins.
Yes. This is a big difference from the run up
to the 2008 fi nancial crisis, and crash. Then,
only a relatively few maverick economists and
far-sighted fi nancial journalists were blowing
whistles. Now it is a more numerous group.
What message should renewable energy
installers take from this book?
The incumbency tends to refer to renewables
advocates as insurgents, and much of ‘Big
Energy’ and its political and institutional
support base has declared open civil war
on us. We need to fi ght. Every solar panel
installed is a recruiting poster for recruits to
the insurgency. But beyond manufacturing
and installing, we need to organise better than
we do at the moment, both to sell our counter
vision to the undecided, and to combat the
dirty tricks that are - as I describe in the book
- being deployed against us. Can we rely on humanity changing its
ways in time to prevent disaster?
The systemic risks I talk about in energy
markets require a clean energy mobilisation
akin to the system change in 1939 and 1940
that saw automobile and other factories
essentially shut down and replaced with tank
and warplane factories. What that system
change required was the ‘power of context’,
and that power of context did not materialise
until Hitler invaded Czechosolvakia (in the
case of the UK). The threat of climate change,
a carbon bubble or an oil supply crisis do
not yet have a power of context, for many
people, and hence we have no critical mass for
mobilisation, internationally. We ought to have,
given the data. The lessons of 1939 show that
we can change very quickly though. We have
enough lessons around us to have a chance at
showing that history isn’t necessarily destiny.
Is the ‘energy incumbency’ beginning to
wake up to your message that peak oil
is now upon us? The Energy of Nations: Risk Blindness and
the Road to Renaissance is published by
Routledge. ISBN-13: 978-0415857826