Dave Waters, Paetoro Consulting UK Ltd

Energy and resource. It's not so very rocket science really - it's more about finding and valuing a new focus than any deliverance provided by some difficult new technology. New technology on occasion helps of course, and will continue to, but lots of existing technology to help sits out there already. We don't use it because we don't value it enough yet. The technology isn’t the bust. Our values are. We don't always have to make the technology cheaper (but it helps) if we value its deliverables higher. Values are about knowing our objectives, knowing the question.

The key objectives:

1. Avoid waste, and as far as possible learn to do more with less where resources are finite. Build to last and recycle what we can. That's less about personal guilt trips than planned long-term systems and policies in place to facilitate it. It’s also about counting the cost, assessing whether it’s worth it, and protecting those who fall below thresholds of ability to pay. That said, it’s not typically the energy-poor where options for decarbonisation are lacking – they don’t need so much of it. Renewables can ultimately talk reasonably well (not necessarily there yet) to smaller-scale local needs - it’s heavy industry and manufacturing that is harder to decarbonise.
2. Rely more on things that are continually replenished in abundance, at least as long as the local planet and star is stable. Try and be as local as we can to avoid transportation and distribution costs/losses, while also recognising sometimes that will be unavoidable. Recognise too that it’s not a simple swop of one energy type for the other. There is a gap. A hole. Hundreds of millions of years of chemically accumulated planetary “energy fall” aren’t going to be replaced by the breeze. Doing more with less will be needed. There is a word for that – efficiency. Love or loathe the word it's the one that describes this. Where there is a choice (there isn't always), options which favour expediency but carry in-built inefficiency will scupper these objectives long term.
3. Use things that cause less damage to the things that sustain and please us. Where that assessment is not unanimous, expert guided probabilistic assessment of different scenarios based on best estimates is OK. Disagreement is not a show-stopper, never was. Assess the chances and the stakes - current and future - and act accordingly. Knowing too that nothing is totally damage-less. Where damage remains unavoidable or might be, have pragmatic damage limitation/mitigation plans just in case… until we figure out something better. Brace, brace, brace.
4. Share more equitably to avoid conflicts that impoverish, impact, and sadden all. Apply careful second hand usage options wherever safe and practical - for example: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-08-25/used-solar-panels-are-powering-the-developing-world. Hand-me-downs might not be what we want necessarily, but they help fill a hole in the planetary budget. Make international alliances to help each other, and without being a doormat, don't default to a feeling of threat when others do too. Sometimes there may be threats but we shouldn't knee-jerkingly default to the idea. Other countries are allowed to help each other, it doesn't have to be zero sum of "they prosper we don't", and it doesn't mean they want to take over the world. That's not to say they don't you understand - although with the number of nukes still kicking round it's difficult to imagine anyone does, but other countries helping each other out is not a primary indication of that.
5. Reach a balance of the above that is sustainable long term for a projected global population stabilisation of 10 billion +/- 2 billion. The view on that number may change with time but this will do for now.
6. Value appropriately the things that empower us to do the above, recognising that values take time to change, and that what we value has always been a driver of growth and economic activity. Sometimes in quite new and unexpected directions.

It's not a given that these things will be achieved. Failure is possible. In fact failure to varying degrees is almost certain. "Enough" progress will do. Let's manage our expectations of the short term while being ambitious and determined for the long.

Neither is it a foregone conclusion that any of this is beyond the world. Perfection is beyond us of course, but something fit for purpose, better than the problematic status-quo, is likely doable. These objectives are not easy, but neither are they so very obviously in the too-hard bucket. They are more socially hard than technically. There are technical challenges of course, and some questions that are genuinely really hard to answer right now. Let's not fixate on those while there are things that can be done. Sometimes continually talking of how hard the really hard stuff is, holds up the easier stuff from getting anywhere.

Whether any convergence on something resembling a success case takes 100 or 1000 years, that is harder to say. It certainly won't take five. Or ten. Projections for 2035 are largely a distraction. Thinking a bigger, longer game is needed. 2135. 2235. The ongoing question though is how many things have to fail before we reach item 6, shifting our values, because without it none of the others even start to happen in a meaningful way.

KeyFacts Energy Industry Directory: Paetoro Consulting