Low Impact

There have been a lot of books published lately that aim to provide a quick and easy introduction to environmental issues. They perform a valuable function in making information about sustainable living accessible and easy to understand. The flip side is that in many cases, they don’t have much detail – should you happen to get involved in a workplace debate with your resident climate change skeptic, you may quickly get out of your depth!

“Greenhouse Solutions with Sustainable Energy”, by Dr Mark Diesendorf takes a different tack altogether.

This is a book crammed with tables, graphs, figures, and summaries of countless reports. It is not a coffee table book by any stretch of the imagination, but its real strength is that it provides you with an actual education about many of the issues surrounding climate change and the potential solutions.

Dr Diesendorf teaches at UNSW, and has previously been a Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO. In this book, he takes a 3 step approach. The first section provides a bit of a grounding on some of the underlying issues with reducing our greenhouse gas emissions – including a fantastic introduction into the mechanics of our power grid and such concepts as peak load and base load. The next section details some of the proposed solutions and strategies, such as wind power, nuclear power, geo-sequestration and urban design. And finally he covers methods of progressing these solutions by means of government policy, and individual action.

The information content is very dense – each and every page is packed with facts. This can make it heavy going, but its well worth the effort. As the climate change debate becomes more and more public, spin is becoming increasingly evident, and certain urban myths on the topic are becoming “common knowledge”. This book arms you with the information to appropriately judge some of the arguments being put forth on climate change strategies.

As an example, one argument I’ve heard over and over again is that wind energy can never play a significant role in Australia’s energy mix because its “unreliable”, and can’t contribute towards our base load. Basically the argument is that because the wind is unreliable and intermittent, you can’t source any significant portion of your electricity from wind in case the weather is calm. Sounds fair enough.

But Dr Diesendorf points out that it is very rare for all of Australia to be experiencing calm weather at any one time. In fact, a study of 30 years worth of wind data in the UK found that at no time did the entire country experience low wind speeds throughout that would result in no power generation, and that on average, conditions where more than 90% of the country was experiencing low winds occurred for 1 hour per year!

Another popular claim is that nuclear power should make up the majority of our power source, because it emits no carbon. Again, this sounds reasonable – nuclear fission, unlike the burning of coal, does not result in the production of carbon dioxide (it does, however, result in the production of some pretty nasty waste!).

“Greenhouse Solutions” points out that this only takes into account the actual fission process. The act of mining the uranium from the ground can be a very greenhouse intensive process as heavy machinery digs into the ground, extracts uranium ore from tonnes of surrounding earth and processes it. Its not the nuclear power plant that emits the CO2 – its the mining operation to get the fuel! Compare this with wind and solar energy where, once built, the power generator requires no mining or other inputs to support it.

I think this is a great book. If you’re looking for a little more “meat” in understanding the issues beind climate change and the possible solutions, then this is a highly recommended read. Be aware that its not necessarily an “easy read book” – lovers of luscious colour photos need not apply! – but the effort is well rewarded.

Categories: book, efficiency, environment, green, media, reduce, solar, transport