Green Jobs and the Ethics of Energy - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 141

costs and the benefi ts were often being distributed unequally across society and
even though it became clear that the leaks, emissions and spills were also having
major impacts on the natural environment as well as on humans. Technologists do
what they can to minimise that but mostly nevertheless have continued to use fun-
damentally dangerous, dirty and high impact technologies.
However, the situation has now changed. Firstly it has become clear that the fos-
sil energy reserves will run out: the debate is just about when, not if. Have we
already reached 'peak oil', or will that point (when extraction rates reach their maxi-
mum and then begin to fall) be in a decade or so? Will peak gas follow soon after,
even given shale gas fi nds? Peak coal, perhaps a bit later (Patzek and Croft 2010 ).
There are disputes and debates about the timing, but everyone agrees that these are
all fi nite resources. Sooner or later, we have to move to other sources. But then
comes our second new point: we may not be able to burn off all the remaining fossil
fuel resources without seriously damaging the climate system; we may have to leave
them in the ground.
Climate change is the big fossil fuel show-stopper. It stops us taking the appar-
ently easy way out of switching back to coal when oil and gas run out. Burning coal
is much dirtier in emission terms than burning gas, and converting coal into vehicle
fuel or gas also has major issues. Whatever mix of fossil fuels we used, the scale of
the potential environmental and social impacts could dwarf anything we have expe-
rienced so far (IPCC 2014 ).
Some look to nuclear energy as the solution. But that too relies on fi nite resources,
and several studies have shown that reserves of uranium are already limited and
unsustainable (EWG 2006 ; Dittmar 2013 ). The use of fast neutron breeders or per-
haps thorium, or even, one day, fusion, might extend the life of the nuclear option,
with unknown costs and risks, but not indefi nitely (Abbott 2012 ). We need longer-
lived energy sources, and we are unlikely to fi nd them in the ground, at least not on
this planet.
Fortunately, as noted earlier, there are a range of alternative energy sources
which are not based on fi nite reserves, but on natural energy fl ows in the environ-
ment, which should continue more or less unabated as long as the planet does - they
are naturally renewed and low or zero carbon (Boyle 2012 ). Large-scale hydro may
be an exception, but the renewable sources are mostly environmentally benign,
based on intercepting and redistributing a fraction of the natural fl ows and not
releasing trapped energy from fossil or nuclear sources. There may be some small
local impacts and disturbance (e.g. visual intrusion from wind farms), but nothing
on the global scale associated with burning fossil fuels.
Large hydro apart, the technologies themselves are also in the main individually
smaller scale than conventional power plants, and less aggressive in the way they
convert energy fl ows into useful energy, since in most cases the energy fl uxes and
power densities are much lower. Using diffuse and variable energy fl ows, not
intense-stored energy sources, is of course a problem in terms of high-yield energy
production, with implications for land use and meeting energy demand with vari-
able renewables like wind (Elliott 2013 ). However, these are not unsurmountable
problems. For example, offshore wind uses no land, and there are many ways to