OPINION | JEREMY GORDON
Jeremy Gordon is an independent communication consultant with 15 years of experience in the international energy industry. His company Fluent in Energy supports partners of all kinds to communicate matters of clean energy and sustainable development.
Playing leapfrog
Developments powered by small reactors could leapfrog fossil fuels and unlock huge resources that will support emerging electric vehicles, battery storage and renewables industries, says Jeremy Gordon
THE UNIT: Illustration copyright Alexy Kovynev The result is a familiar one. The cumulative impact has
amassed to the point that scientists inform us we are causing a mass extinction and gradually warming up the Earth with all sorts of unpredictable, but mainly very bad, consequences. Even while we make progress to undo some of the damage and see, for example, a recovery of wildlife in industrialised Western Europe, some major indicators — like the amount of CO2
we emit — continue at record highs. We haven’t even levelled off the CO2 line yet, let alone
bent it towards the net zero level we talk about hitting in just 29 years’ time. (By that time, NEI’s youngest readers will surely be leading a nuclear industry far larger than today’s.) For these reasons it is generally accepted that ‘business
“They did not tell me that the shift turnover at this plant is once per six months!”
OR THE LAST TWO HUNDRED years our species has used natural resources very freely. The general mode of development has been to proceed apace until the negative impacts on air, water, wildlife and so on become apparent to policy-making elites through lost profits or grievous injury
to innocent people. At that point we have tended to slow down a bit and think about changing to other methods — but we have not normally changed our goals.
12 | October 2021 |
www.neimagazine.com
as usual’ is the wrong approach, and that incremental change will neither be fast enough nor eliminate the underlying attitudes in governance and culture that caused the crisis. So what are the other options? One approach with a lot of intuitive support is to
constrain our resource use and limit ourselves to the so- called ‘planetary boundaries’ so that we stop compounding our impact. While most of the world’s population will continue to increase consumption and their standard of living, developed countries would have to hold steady. They would have to adapt to making less impact, which might mean actually doing less and consuming less than they do now. Most of us are already doing this somewhat in our personal lives, but it is obvious that the world’s most powerful countries are not going to accept standing still and letting their advantage disappear. Nor will they somehow be able to recognise the ‘next big thing’ that increases resource use and stop someone from inventing it. (Bitcoin, anyone?)
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