A critique of Joëlle Gergis QE94: Highway to Hell

Joëlle Gergis’ Highway to Hell: Climate change and Australia’s future starts with climate science; it is chilling. We’re living through the climate of our making and degrading it in still more dangerous ways.

Gergis’ Australian readers will have experienced Black Summer in 2019-20, but not all the same way. I spent four days in temperatures over 42°C watching flying foxes dropping from trees at Adelaide’s colony. I worked with a team to rescue over 400. The animals handled the first day reasonably well. Deaths increased on the second. The third and fourth were catastrophic. We wrapped each rescued animal in a wet towel and lined them up like little burritos in cat litter trays repurposed as water baths. When you pick up a distressed bat, their panic becomes a fury of claws and teeth. But within seconds of hitting the water bath, sometimes before, they realise you mean them no harm and the transformation is as rapid as it is miraculous; instant calm.

In four days, some 8,000 animals died in the Adelaide colony. We piled the bodies before placing them in bin bags for disposal.

Gergis should know that my feelings about our changing climate are strong and visceral. But also as well informed as is possible for an amateur. There are close on 9,000 pages in the three sections of the most recent 2021-3 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report; I’ve read about 6,000.

But I have profound disagreements with Gergis on meat and nuclear power and, like many others with similar views, I resent any imputation that wanting nuclear power makes me a fossil fuel shill or climate change denier.

Meat? Gergis doesn’t mention meat. Precisely.

Quoting that IPCC report:

“…even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, food system emissions alone would jeopardise the achievement of the 1.5°C target and threaten the 2°C target.”

“Food system emissions” is just a meat-free way of saying meat production emissions without pricking meat-eater consciences.

In 2022, Australia signed the Global Methane Pledge. It calls for reductions of methane from agriculture, waste and fossil fuels; 30% below 2020 levels by 2030. The pledge begins:

… in order to ensure that [we keep] warming well below 2°C, while pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C, significant methane emission reductions must be achieved globally by 2030…

What proportion of agricultural methane emissions is from meat production? It varies between countries; but it’s over 99% in Australia and 93% in the US.

And yet, in a country with more cattle than people, Gergis’ essay doesn’t mention meat.

Gergis’ writing was funded by The Australia Institute (TAI), which in turn is funded by a cattle farmer; to the tune of millions of dollars. Gergis mentions methane from fossil fuels. But she ignores livestock methane which is almost double that amount.

The GMP notes that each tonne of methane produces warming in the next 20 years similar to 80 tonnes of CO₂. Which means that 2 mega-tonnes of sheep and cattle methane will have a warming impact similar to 160 mega-tonnes of CO₂. Our fossil fuelled electricity production generates just 155 mega-tonnes of CO₂.

And yet, Gergis’ essay doesn’t mention meat.

Should I question Gergis’ sincerity on climate action because of her meaty omission? Better that she acknowledge the climate action sincerity of many advocates of both nuclear power and of a meat and dairy free diet.

Among other non-fossil-fuel shills supporting dietary change and nuclear power is NASA climate scientist James Hansen. His 1988 testimony to the US Congress was the first many heard about global warming; even if they didn’t hear it until Al Gore’s 2007 film “Inconvenient Truth”.

In 2009, Hansen wrote Storms of my Grandchildren. It presents climate science for the non-specialist, but not just as a series of predictions and frightening scenarios. The book also explains how scientists reach their conclusions. I first read a very different book in the late 1990s. It presented the science as a collection of facts. But I wanted evidence and thought the ideas sounded ridiculous.

It wasn’t until 2005, after I started reading the actual science, the peer reviewed journals, rather than popular accounts, that I realised how wrong my earlier dismissal had been. Understanding, for example, how the Grace satellites measure ice volumes in Antarctica was a pivotal moment. After that, measurement by measurement, scepticism was replaced by awe, understanding and yes, fear.

In the final chapter of Storms, Hansen morphs into a science fiction writer. He describes planet earth in 2525; after its atmosphere has followed a course similar to that of Venus.

It is dead.

Hansen’s sci-fi character blames the anti-nuclear movement. He softens the charge a little by explaining that they meant well.

Hansen went on to calculate, with Pushker Kharecha, that nuclear power, in displacing coal, had averted the emission of some 64 gigatonnes of CO₂ while also preventing 1.84 million premature pollution-related deaths. We should be grateful on both counts.

I’ve no insight into Peter Dutton’s motivations for backing nuclear power, but it’s becoming obvious that building a first-of-a-kind (FOAK) renewable system, one without strong hydro or biomass backup, is more than an IKEA project. The technical challenges are laid out in the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) Renewable Integration Study: Stage 1 (RIS) and the subsequent Engineering Roadmap(s). Some of these are significant engineering challenges that have been worked on without success by engineers and scientists in many countries for a decade or more. You will find frequent references to problems:

“understanding is limited”, “understanding emerging issues”, “understanding of distributed energy resources (DER) compliance and technical settings”, “uncharted operating territory about which understanding is limited” … etc.

But while any of the technical challenges could cause long or interminable delays, I’d see the fundamental showstopper as more mundane: rooftop solar.

We’ve made this mistake before so it should have been obvious. Think about transport. Do you see good public transport in areas with high car ownership? Cars make mass transit intrinsically inefficient. If it survives at all, the quality is poor, the prices are high, or it is massively subsidised; usually all three.

Similarly, as rooftop solar penetration rises, investment in shared grid resources will follow the same fate. Shared resources must compensate for sunny times, when sales are down, by jacking-up prices at other times. Add home batteries and everything gets worse.

South Australia, the leader in rooftop solar in Australia, is the canary in the coal mine. A graph of wholesale electricity prices in August 2009 shows a tight elongated cluster with an average of $24/MWh. By August of 2021 it is a vast chaotic cloud of prices; whose average price has more than doubled.

In contrast, a grid focused on nuclear power avoids the technical FOAK grid redesign and rebuild problems while delivering equitable and cheap electricity because, even though reactors are (currently) costly, they make for a much cheaper, simpler grid.

The evidence is also clear that nuclear power is the most eco-friendly source of not just electricity, but also industrial heat.

A handful of years

Gergis supports renewables as a simple solution to many of our problems. Even better, renewables can be rolled out, she claims, “in a handful of years (p.47)”.

On the other hand, Gergis dismisses Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), writing that it is too slow: “it’s important to realise that CCS projects take around 10 years to progress through concept, feasibility, design and construction phases … we don’t have the time”.

And yet, she endorses batteries and electrification.

Everything in a battery, regardless of the chemistry, is mined. As is all the hardware needed for increased electrification.

Consider copper. A 2024 report of the International Energy Forum estimated that, globally, we’d need six new large copper mines every year through to 2050. Existing mines have falling ore-grades requiring more explosives and crushing for each tonne of output.

Explosives are one of those hard-to-decarbonise sectors which will need to expand to increase copper output.

A “large” mine in this report, produces 470,000 tonnes of copper annually; about double the output of Australia’s biggest copper mine, Olympic Dam. That mine took 13 years to open. In the period between 2010 and 2022, the global copper production increased by an amount equivalent to just one such mine per year.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) concludes similarly about the gap between the copper we produce and the copper we need in its recent Critical Mineral Outlook 2024. It notes, lest anybody underestimate the task, that we require, globally, about 80 million kilometres of new and refurbished electrical grid by 2040.

So much for copper. Regardless of the battery chemistries deployed, there will be many other new mines as well. Why does Gergis focus on CCS scaling problems but seem oblivious to mining problems?

Talk of “in a handful of years” seriously misleads people about both the scale of the problem and the state of our solutions.

Gergis’ knowledge of the planetary climate system is undoubtedly deep, but her understanding of the material world we are trying to change is far too shallow to reliably inform any advice she might make.

Despite her understanding of the dire consequences of warming the planet, when she considers nuclear power she cites three nuclear accidents amongst reasons for rejecting it, Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mile Island. If they are relevant to decisions about nuclear power, then why aren’t Plakalnitsa (Bulgaria), Mufulira (Zambia) or El Cobre (Chile) relevant when discussing electrification? These are three large copper tailing dam collapses, each of which killed more people than Chernobyl. Not all mined materials have the same risks and impacts. While we only (currently) produce about 24 million tonnes annually, copper mining produces about 50 per cent of the world’s tailings. In contrast, mining 8.7 billion tonnes of coal produces just 8% of tailings.

And Three Mile Island? Really?

In 2023, button batteries in Australia were sending some 20 children to hospital each week in Australia. TMI didn’t put anybody in hospital.

Gergis accepts gas for firming. But what about Ufa?

The Ufa gas explosion is one of many gas accidents which killed more people than Chernobyl. Ufa left some 575 dead and some 800 with horrific burns.

The accidents I’ve mentioned are all bigger than Chernobyl but haven’t been promoted for almost 40 years by activist campaigns to become instant trigger words which are factually vacuous, but very effective.

Gergis thinks the first nuclear plant would take 20 years in Australia. How much does she know? She claims we don’t have the “legal framework for nuclear power generation”. I’d suggest she contact Associate Prof. Edward Obbard, who teaches nuclear engineers at UNSW. He’d tell her the name of Australia’s nuclear regulator, ARPANSA. He’d explain that we already have the legal and regulatory framework to licence civilian nuclear reactors, assuming we remove the bans. He might also explain that Australia is a member of the Generation IV International Forum and contributes scientific expertise to reactor design projects within that organisation. He’d also explain that most of a nuclear plant isn’t actually nuclear; it’s turbines, generators and prodigious quantities of plumbing joining it all together. Not that developing a nuclear industry is ever easy but nuclear science is woven into the fabric of all science. Scientists from many fields use our research reactor. We also have a skilled thermal energy workforce. We certainly need to choose wisely which countries to emulate, and which to ignore. The Japanese built 60 reactors with a median build time of under 4 years; others have taken much longer.

I believe it is better to do something hard which many countries have made work, rather than to persevere with something that is not just hard, but is already throwing up unknown unknowns and will, at best, result in a dysfunctional and inequitable technology mix. We understand gridlock on our roads, we shouldn’t copy it to our power systems.