Green Jobs and the Ethics of Energy - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 146

still for a major confrontation and certainly continued struggle (WFTU 2011 ;
Lanchester 2012 ).
The Marxist and radical view has also been updated into an analysis of the limits
of technological advance. For example, in his seminal 1976 topic 'The Poverty of
Power', Barry Commoner argued that the cost of new more advanced capital plant
was rising faster than the increases in productivity it would yield, so there would be
a shortage of capital for continued expansion (Commoner 1976 ). He focussed on
energy technology and illustrated his analysis by showing how nuclear power
plants were far more capital intensive than those they replaced, but did not yield
suffi cient extra profi ts to sustain further investment. On this view, the capitalist
system was running out of productivity gains. It has replaced most labour, so there
were few savings available from further replacement or exploitation (with lower
wages), and there was no way for its raw capital base in the energy sector to improve
and expand.
In the event, new energy technology emerged that, for the moment, has avoided
or limited this problem, most notably gas-fi red combined-cycle turbines. From the
1990s onward in the UK and then elsewhere, there was a 'dash for gas', coinciding
with privatisation and the liberalisation of electricity markets, with cheap simple gas
turbines using the cheap natural gas that had been found in the North Sea and else-
where (Roberts et al. 1991 ). This was cheaper than nuclear and even coal in the
UK. It was a signifi cant transition (Winskel 2002 ). Moreover, although not the ini-
tial aim, using gas in more effi cient plants also to some extend reduced the emerging
problem of carbon emissions. However, this was no long-term solution. North Sea
gas reserves have declined, and despite the recent discovery of shale gas reserves,
the overall resource is limited and gas is still a fossil fuel. So although emissions per
unit of energy produced are around half that from coal, expanding the use of gas
would still lead to climate problems and in any case cannot be continued indefi -
nitely. Like the other fossil fuels, gas is a fi nite resource (Maggio and Cacciola
2012 ).
If the capital expansion process was to continue, then given environmental and
resource limits, a new technology would be needed. The initial default focus was
back to nuclear: surely this could be made cheaper with new technology? That was
the view that seemed to inform the compilers of Table 5.2 . So far however the reality
has proved different. Nuclear has become increasingly expensive, in part due to the
need to ensure its safety after a series of major accidents (Elliott 2010b , 2012 ).
It is one of the few technologies with a negative learning curve, with its cost
going up not down as the technology develops (Gruber 2010 ).
As high-grade uranium reserves are depleted, the situation will get worse, since
it will cost more to produce the fuel (Harvey 2010 ). Enthusiast still point to new
technologies that they claim will be better (e.g. fast breeders using thorium), but
they are long off, with many unknowns (Ashley et al. 2012 ), and it is clear that the
renewables are already doing much better, with costs falling dramatically (IRENA
2012a ; IEA 2013 ; WEC 2013 ).
The battle over technology choice still continues, but the case for renewables has
become much stronger. For example, when in 2012 German utility E.ON withdrew