An old friend recently sent me a YouTube video titled “What’s Wrong with Wind and Solar?” The video claimed, in part, that solar and wind were much less efficient at energy conversion than coal plants, and therefore society should stop building solar and wind facilities and invest in more coal-powered energy production. This friend, I’ll call him Dennis, and I were very close in high school and our families interacted through church. He still lives in our hometown outside Chicago, and when my parents passed away I hired him as the property manager for our family home until it was sold a few years later. So I know him well, and we have respect for each other and share memories that go back decades.
But over the years, our political views diverged dramatically. While I still found him a pleasant person to be around, he quoted more and more often from the Trumpian playbook. We both acknowledged, usually with guarded smiles, how much we disagreed, but both of us wanted to keep the peace, and during those times when I went back to check on the house we would share a bottle of wine, lay aside our political differences and talk about old friends, family and the Cubs.
Thus it surprised me when he sent me this video and asked for my opinion. In the past he had shared various articles and bits of propaganda with his mailing list, as people do, but I rarely responded. Perhaps because of my career as an ecologist he assumed that on any topic related to the environment I could speak with authority. (The question reminded me of when I was an undergraduate student in wildlife biology and my father asked me why his favorite tree had died; he was quite displeased when I told him I had no idea.) So even though what I know about the economics of renewable energy amounts to the fact that I still have to pay my PG&E bill even though I have 24 solar panels, I was encouraged that Dennis was questioning this assertion and I decided to watch the video and attempt to answer.
I knew the task would not be particularly difficult because the video was short and included no references or data for the claims it made. I also noted that the speaker was representing a self -described conservative think tank, funded in part by Exxon, but still I wanted to know if these assertions were backed by data. I do not have a background in energy, economics or chemistry, but I do have GoogleScholar. The societal costs and benefits of Google are for another conversation, but the access to science provided by this tool is, in my opinion, the internet at its best. (There are several other academic literature search engines, such as Microsoft Academic and Scopus, that I am less familiar with that provide a similar service.)
For many people, science is scary and inaccessible. And for hundreds of years, it seemed that most scientists wanted to keep it that way. Scientific discoveries are not “real” until they are peer-reviewed—evaluated by other experts in a particular field and the methods and data of the research deemed valid—and published. For reasons unknown to most people, including me, the scientific publishing business has historically made access to these publications so expensive that only scientists at large institutions or with personal wealth could afford them.
But people have started resisting the entrenched institution of scientific publishing and are attempting to make advanced science available to anyone who is interested. Two terms for the new approach are open access, which usually refers to the absence of a paywall to read a PDF online, and open source, in which researchers share all the data, programming, imagery and other information used to reach their conclusions. These efforts appear to be working; in the last few years, the University of California system has made arrangements with the world’s largest scientific publishers to provide free access to all research conducted by U.C. scientists.
What did all this mean for my efforts to respond to Dennis? It meant that I could find, via GoogleScholar, a paper titled “The study of the environmental efficiency of energy production from various sources of raw material,” published in 2019. In the abstract, which is included in every scientific paper and provides a one-paragraph summary of the material and conclusions, the authors stated: “We present very brief characteristics of the main sources of electricity production: coal, gas, oil, hydropower, nuclear, solar, and wind.” Within the paper was a table providing the energy input and output data for all these sources, and the authors ended with this conclusion: “All calculations and studies…show that the main emphasis in the development of energy in our time must be placed on the solar and nuclear. This will allow humanity to solve a number of very painful issues and will give time to bring the technology of thermonuclear production of electric energy to industrial production.” Whether I agreed or not with the use of nuclear power as an energy source wasn’t the point; this was one paper, and combined with several others I found, I could present to Dennis that there were no valid scientific reasons, if we wanted to reduce carbon in the atmosphere, to continue to focus on fossil fuel-based energy.
Whatever happens to our planet in the future, historians will almost certainly look back on this period vis-à-vis climate change and wonder why we didn’t pay attention much sooner. Scientists have been predicting the impacts to ecological systems from climate change for decades. G.S. Benton, from Johns Hopkins University, wrote the following in 1970: “The effect of carbon dioxide is to increase the earth’s temperature by absorbing outgoing terrestrial radiation. Some years from now, man will control his climate, inadvertently or advertently. Before that day arrives, it is essential that scientists understand thoroughly the dynamics of climate. Only by such an understanding and by active intervention can man assure himself in the long run that this planet will continue to be a suitable place to live.”
Whether globally or within our own communities, given the access to science that the internet now provides, non-scientists should be encouraged to look deeper at policy positions ostensibly based on science. I was struck recently by a comment made by Thane Kreiner, executive director of MALT, as reported in the Marin I.J.: “Protecting Marin’s agricultural land has numerous ecosystem benefits including carbon sequestration, riparian zone conservation, and preservation of wildlife corridors. From a biological perspective, grazing animals are part of this region’s ecosystem; without them, many native species would go extinct.” From an ecological perspective, I posit that the last statement is just not true. But I would be happy and even excited to converse with Mr. Kreiner about where he got this information and on what data he is basing his assertion. If we can each reference data-based conclusions that are in conflict, then more research and data are needed. But if this is his opinion, then he should be presenting it as such.
GoogleScholar and other tools can aid society in accessing the extraordinary knowledge of the natural world that science and discovery provide. My hope is that, combined with human imagination and compassion, non-scientists will embrace science as one of the most important tools we have to address challenges such as climate change, energy production, disease, environmental protection, food production and the overall quality of our lives.
Dr. Cathy Schwemm, an ecologist, lives in Tomales.