This!

I see where you're coming from, and I agree that the arguments highlighted in the article are rather unconvincing, but messing up with ecosystems ALWAYS triggers unintended consequences. Some might be good, others terrible.

I wouldn't be as definitive about the "good" in it as you make it sound.

Sure, but will the unintended consequences be worse than not importing 8% of UK energy from North Africa? Because that will have consequences too.

How about cutting down UK energy consumption by 20-30%?

How could that be done?

Lots of comments on hackernews/reddit appears to be the go-to method thus far.

Insulating houses and offices (windows, roofs, walls).

Imposing more stringent insulation and energy requirements on new builds.

The UK housing stock is very badly insulated.

Yes, insulate as well. But a person living in a single glazed warehouse conversion with no insulation but next to a tube stop and a food shop will use quite a bit less energy overall than a person who lives in a passive house but has to drive 10miles to work. Restoring walkable town centres and discouraging car use in towns and cities that worked fine before cars would save more energy and would be quicker and less disruptive than trying to insulate every old victorian house. Insulating old houses is technically hard to do right and different houses need different solutions. If it’s done badly it will cause health problems from black mould and structural problems from condensation causing timber joists and rafters to rot where they pass through the insulation into the masonry walls.

Sure I agree liveable city neighbourhoods are also a good goal, one the UK gets right a lot of the time (certainly more so than the US for example).

Re bad insulation, don’t do that then, a gov scheme with regulated contractors could ensure that but it is much better to use less energy heating old leaky homes.

PS Insulating 19C housing can be done well, here is a good example: https://historicengland.org.uk/research/heritage-counts/2019...

Insulation cut my mother's home energy costs by 60% this winter. And her home wasn't as poorly insulated as UK homes seems to be according to what I read (and in general, it was a bit above the average French home).

Granted, heating is around 15% of the total equivalent Co2 we use, but reducing that by 60% would prevent 8 to 9% of produced energy to be used. Also would cut costs for a lot of the poorest.

If insulating UK cost around the same price (or even more, because the windfall will be in UK taxpayer pockets), I think it should be done first.

UK home owner here. House is sticks and bricks, built 1920ish but heavily modernised. Insulated to modern building regs, including extra steels and structure to account for snow loading on the roof. When it snows here (very infrequent) our house is the only one that it sticks to. Also acoustically insulated between floors. Ground floor (first floor elsewhere) - we hung safety barrier netting between the joists and ran 125mm of loft insulation between the joists to insulate from below but still allows some air movement and avoid condensation.

Underfloor heating ... electrical underfloor heating - across the entire house. Now our theory was that if we got our 'leccy from renewables, we were pretty "green". We do have gas but that is only used for cooking (hobs only - not the oven) and hot water.

When say our kitchen floor decides to switch on, that's 4KW. Each room has its own circuit and we switch off the unused ones. After a power cut the blasted things revert to defaults and switch themselves back on, I have to cut them off at the consumer unit to be sure. I am three years into experimenting with Zwave zone controllers but they cost a fair bit and I need to be absolutely sure about safety before I deploy all 10 zones. I'll probably install a separate cut off switch per zone with a few temperature probes as well as the controllers with their own sensors but that is a while off for now. Home Assistant with Node-Red runs this lot and more. Safe power control does need some care ...

Electricity here is roughly three times more expensive and rising than it was before a bunch of homicidal Russians decided to fuck up their neighbours. My bills are quite heavy and it doesn't help that I run quite a lot of IT stuff here! I'm very lucky that I can afford all this but not everyone can.

I don't think that UK housing, in general, is any worse than the rest of Europe with respect to insulation. I lived in West Germany for some time back in the day and I studied Civil Engineering so I think I have a fair handle on the issues involved. We have just as many horrors in our housing stock as everyone else.

Interesting, I'm in a house of a similar age/construction but not very well insulated apart from the loft. Have you written up any more information at all; costs too? Assuming you have a cavity wall, did you insulate that?

I'm a bit wary about filling the external wall with polystyrene balls or whatever. I need to determine whether there are enough brick ties installed and that they are working. Brick ties are basically bits of heavy wire that should be laid in the mortar that hold the two rows of bricks together.

The idea of filling the cavities of a fairly old brick built building with some form of insulation is sound but does need care. In the UK (and elsewhere too) we generally go for "sticks and bricks" construction. The external "box" is often a double skin of brickwork. My house is roughly six meters by 12 meters (20' x 40') in plan. Each storey is about 2.5m high - that's why you see wood in 2.4m lengths (allow for bits above and below).

So let's look at the structural components: Take a wall 12m long x 5m high. The wall is constructed of two skins of brickwork. Brickwork is very good in compression but not so good in response to a lateral force. If wind is allowed to whistle inside our brickwork it will basically raise the pressure inside the gap between the two skins of brick. If you pump something into the gap that will also exert a lateral force. To stop your walls collapsing outwards, you should have brick ties installed and they should be in reasonable condition and the mortar should be gripping them effectively.

You can go for external or internal insulation instead. External means cladding of some sort and internal means you will lose some internal floor space.

The biggest gain of all is insulating the loft - heat rises. You should aim for a good 250mm of "wooley" or equivalent.

In general I'd suggest looking for draughts and plugging them. Do be careful that ventilation is still maintained.

Increased heating efficiency (heat pumps, insulation, solar water heaters, etc)

More public transport (including less cars AND EV cars)

Less frantic production, transportation, storage, and consumption of useless throwaway crap

and several other things besides...

Why not try to do both?

That is completely impossible. The UK uses 5x as much energy as it currently generates in electricity, mostly for heating and transport.

I'm not saying that laying cable from Africa to the UK is the best solution, only that the UK needs a solution if it is to go net zero.

Why not both? Even if the UK does that, we still need far more green energy to stop putting carbon in the atmosphere.

UK per capita energy consumption has been declining for a while. This is pretty typical in the developed world, largely driven by efficiency gains.

It’s a bandaid solution for the UK to maintain growth sans environmental consequences.

Maybe that’s okay if North Africans own the means of production and transmission giving them the ability to turn those consequences into opportunities elsewhere.

There is a scale to influencing change in the environment. Any amount of change is not "messing up" with ecosystems, as you put it.

Unintended consequences are possible/likely/imminent, but that doesn't mean they are unexpected/uncontrollable/cataclysmic.

I disagree, because I think the scale is relative to the size and complexity of the ecosystem you're touching, not the size of your influence. They're unpredictable and unexpected, and that's why we tend to refer to them as unknown unknowns.

But like you said, they're not necessarily catastrophic or cataclysmic.

Back to the context, I just don't think someone can say for sure that changing the very nature of a thousand square miles piece of land in the middle of some of the least studied terrain types will be great and won't have any bad consequences.

I didn't say that the scale wasn't relative to the size or complexity. I'm saying that any amount of change in an ecosystem isn't necessarily "bad" as you appear to be stating in your previous post.

Contextually, I can see why you're a skeptic of this amount of land changing having an undeniable "good" influence, but the size could absolutely not be a factor as much as you believe it to be.

This is valid, but have to use some sort of heuristic or things will continue to get worse as we struggle to assign probabilities to the manifold possibilities.

To be fair, all industry is "messing with ecosystems", and in particular the energy industry is doing so with far more per-kWh impact, and globally. This is very much like the "birds vs. windmills" arguments. Yes, it's important to recognize externalities to any decision and have a plan for mitigation where needed. But at this scale, "look-here-is-a-problem" tunnel vision just creates paralysis.

Their arguments really are ridiculous.

It ignores the fact that climate change is disproportionally going to affect Africa and that doing nothing does not mean the status quo remains for nomadic tribes.

It means more desertification, less grazing area and greater poverty.

Sources please. AFIK there is no conclusive data out there backing the idea Africa will just turn into MORE desert from climate change.

I'd also like you to provide data showing green energy initiatives will reverse this trend anytime in the near future.

Africa is an already impoverished nation, how does greater grazing area help them? Are they going to use it for large amounts of livestock they can sell/slaughter? Is that making them less impoverished right now?

What will make Africa less poor is a lot of infrastructure, likely built off the back of fossil fuels. You know.. they same way all western nations industrialized and got to the point they could sit around worrying about whether they were hurting the environment instead of worrying about whether they have enough dung to burn so they can keep warm.

I think they are referring specifically to the local tribes, for whom yes it might be a problem.

Yes... and you think putting windmills and solar panels on their grazing land won't be an issue?

I'll ask again, how does this get them out of "poverty"????

The IPCC fact sheet on Africa [1] confirms the core point of the GP: Africa has been and will continue to be disproportionately affected by climate change.

The African _continent_ would be best served by every possible acceleration of green energy initiatives that would hold climate change below 2 degrees (an increasingly unlikely goal).

There has been continuous hypocrisy in the West over climate change. But burning fossil fuels to do ??? development would pull Africa deeper into the trap it's already in; a trap of wealthy country's making.

1. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/outreach/IPCC_A...

Please provide an example of an industrialized nation that became industrialized exclusively from "green" energy.

> Africa is an already impoverished nation

I have no idea what you're on about. Africa isn't an impoverished nation, nor is it a wealthy nation.

The nations in Africa have a GDP per capita ranging from about $1k (way less than Haiti and Afghanistan) to nearly $40k (similar to Croatia and Greece)

projects like the green wall exist for a reason

It’s different, but hard to say if it’s better or worse globally. Dust from the Sahara plays a major role in cloud formation and transporting nutrients to the Amazon basin.

I doubt it would be significant for the Amazon in the short term, but it could mean less frequent but larger tropical storms in the mid Atlantic which then pound the east coast. Perhaps it’s a net good globally and just bad for America and the Caribbean, I don’t actually know.

However, these plans don’t actually involve that much land so the net effect is probably minimal compared to the gain from reducing natural gas useage.

> Putting solar panels in the desert is good for the environment

Instead of altering unique grassland and desert ecosystems, and displacing nomadic tribes, the better option for 'the environment' and its peoples would be to build nuclear power plants.

Nuclear power plants are great, but you need to maintain an energy mix that doesn't make you dependent on a single source.

Consider the French nuclear infrastructure; by Sept 22, 32 of 56 reactors were off for maintenance or technical problems. Several reactors were affected by a welding issue that created cracks and made them inoperable.

Edit: typo.

There's also the small matter of fuel. France sources most of its uranium from Niger. You can bet nobody is getting French standards of pay, healthcare, holiday, or pensions in those mines.

This argument applies to pretty much all sources of energy. Resources needed to build solar panels also don't come from France. And good luck to build those without relying on fossil fuel.

Regarding nuclear, the next generation of power plants could operate with uranium-238 which is very abundant.

You're not wrong, and I'm as pro-nuclear as it gets (would love to see moonshot-scale projects to fully nuclearize as much of the globe as possible), but... we can have both.

If large scale solar deployments in the sunniest, most hostile parts of the planet are available sooner than our nuclear dreams could come true, then I say hurrah.

nuclearize the moon! Tether it with a giant space cable, made of sustainable materials of course. then watch all the pro mooninite folks come out of the woodwork and defend the hunting grounds of the moon master and his inalienable(pun intended) rights to all things moon.

> most hostile parts of the planet

It seems like you missed the point of my comment, and maybe didn’t read the article very closely. Whether one leans towards conservation of culture and ecology or not, it’s fair to say that reducing land use is important for said conservation. Even if you don’t hold such concerns, that doesn’t change the validity of the argument.

> would be to build nuclear power plants.

...which also give power at night, which is a must!

...but: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/002/500/574/f4e...

edit: I know that this is some political compass meme, but i know way too many real-life people who are into green everything, but are afraid of nuclear.

It's a little unfair categorization of why people are averse to nuclear energy. It really doesn't help that both government controlled and commercial operations have traded-off costs for safety leading to high-profile incidents. Nuclear energy has robust and passive fail-safes, like MSR designs, but it has a branding issue, and that's thanks to misincentives for cost-cutting on critical systems. New nuclear has to provide better assurances to the public, and how it does that, I'm not so sure.

Deserts and nomadism are romantic in literature and movies only.

In real life, deserts grow.

https://www.google.com/search?q=desertification&oq=desertifi...

Desertification destroys formerly fertile ecosystems. People die. The few extra-adapted species and the few people that remain are not an argument for protecting deserts.

> Deserts and nomadism are romantic in literature and movies only

The inhabitants of the land defend their way of life, which is more an existential concern for their culture, not so much romanticism. From TFA:

> Salime says “8,000 villagers lost their access to collective pastures,” as well as sources of water, firewood, and traditional herbal medicines. There was “widespread disappointment” at the community benefits from the project, concluded Boris Schinke at Germanwatch, a Bonn-based nonprofit watchdog on environment and development issues.

> One is near Chbika, a small coastal resort close to the city of Tan-Tan, where the submarine cables from the U.K. will reach land. This is not empty desert. The area is inhabited by Regeibat and Tekna nomads who traditionally range across wide areas of the Sahara seeking pastures for their sheep and camels.

> Atman Aoui, president of the Moroccan Association for Mediation, an NGO, sees large renewable projects such as the Noor solar park as part of a wider attempt to take control of desert regions that have previously been the domain of tribal groups.

As for deserts, they aren't all lifeless places. They have ecosystems and endemic species of there own. Once again, from TFA:

> Tunisia is developing two schemes – the TuNur and Elmed projects — that aim to send power to Malta and Italy from solar complexes near the oasis town of Rjim Maatoug in southwest Tunisia. The area to be annexed is rich in salt-tolerant desert shrubs such as traganum and ephedra and is close to the largest salt pan in the Sahara, the Chott el Jerid.

Of course, whether you (or anyone else in particular) cares or not is a matter of subjectivity. But from a conservation stand-point (ecologically and culturally) these don't seem like good outcomes.

> The inhabitants of the land defend their way of life

There always are people who defend their existing way of life, regardless of anything. Even slavers defended their way of life. There being people sticking to their nomadic way of life of scarcity and hardship in the desert does not justify having millions of people regularly die on the other end of the desertification caused by that desert.

> millions of people regularly die on the other end of the desertification caused by that desert

This is speculation, not argument. Regardless, also in the article you’ll find how solar farms are cordoned off areas, razed clear of vegetation, and impassable by anyone, while using up water reserves used by inhabitants. Even by some consequentialist end-justify-the-means argument, the ends don’t look good for the people living off that land. Once again, you might not care about that, but that’s not my point

the damage done by building so many panels is greater than the benefits of putting those panels in the desert

panels don't produce that much power, you need a lot of them

One of the pictures in the article shows one of those giant mirror arrays. They have one in the Eastern CA desert near Vegas. They reflect all the energy in a big circle into a single point, which when you look at it is at like, a near-sun-level of brilliance, where it (presumably) boils lots of water to run turbines or whatever.

Perhaps they're going to use those instead of all the rare earth complexity that is photovoltaics.

Those designs do 'eventually' use water to run turbines, but the primary thing that gets heated and has that heat harvested (to boil water) is sodium.

> Perhaps they're going to use those instead of all the rare earth complexity that is photovoltaics.

Photovoltaics (aka Solar panels) do not use a lot of rare earth materials.

From one of the links below:

> Unlike the wind power and EV sectors, the solar PV industry isn’t reliant on rare earth materials. Instead, solar cells use a range of minor metals including silicon, indium, gallium, selenium, cadmium, and tellurium.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/11/28/are-rare-earths-used-...

https://ratedpower.com/blog/rare-metals-photovoltaic/

those mirror things use natural gas to start up, so not very green

15 years ago it looked like solar thermal might be the way to go. But it turns out that, once people started manufacturing a lot of solar PV panels, they got really good at it. Solar PV costs dropped 90% in a decade.

At this point, in most cases, it would probably be foolish to build a non-PV solar power plant.

> Putting solar panels in the desert is good for the environment.

This is categorically false. Solar panels actually increase the ambient temperature in the area [0]. Directly under a panel will be cooler, but those areas are 1. Heavily disturbed, with most the native plants an animals destroyed on installation and 2. Small compared to the total affected area.

Solar fields take up a large amount of space and installing a new one involves damaging a lot of native landscape.

Despite the drawbacks I think that solar is usually quite a bit better on net than the energy it's replacing, but we should still be clear about the costs and drawbacks.

[0]https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35070

In this case the ecosystem in question has even less in the way of native plants and animals (to my understanding) than the semi-arid American Southwest landscapes usually examined in research papers on the topic. But yes the general point holds that a cost-benefit analysis is worthwhile, though here it likely is quite net-good.

I happen to spend a lot of time in desert areas that have seen a lot of solar development in recent years and the places I am familiar with are anything but desolate; generally they are teeming with native flora and fauna. Unfortunately solar development has been harmful to these regions.

That said, developing solar has significant benefits to other regions. Mining and burning more coal or other legacy power source does even greater damage to different areas so I get it, solar isn't something we should block reflexively. But there are still costs and tradeoffs to consider, and plenty of room to improve as we transition off of fossil fuels.

If you think natural desertification is bad then you should be fine with climate change. It'll create more growing area due to higher temps.

You seem to have a bit of cognitive dissonance happening with your thought process here.

You want climate change if it's caused by "green energy" but not if it's caused by fossil fuels? Is that your stance?

Changing the natural state of the desert environment is good for the environment? the desert is full of plants and animals that are adapted to it already.

Hasn't North Africa only been a desert for a few thousand years? It's not exactly some perfectly balanced ecosystem that has existed for a million years or something. Really, it turning to a desert was an ecosystem collapse... Second, Africa is HUGE. The amount of land they would be using for this must be minuscule compared to the area of this ecosystem. Third, not all ecosystems are equal.. The biodiversity of some areas is so much higher than others, it's not comparable. An acre of rain forest must be worth more than an acre of desert.

Just because an area has gone through climate change in the past is not an argument that current climate change, which is happening at an accelerated rate, is acceptable. It is that rate of change that makes our current risk so high.

Having said that, I agree that the impact of putting solar panels in this are is likely much less and more local than the impact of burning the fossil fuels that they solar would offset.

> It's not exactly some perfectly balanced ecosystem that has existed for a million years or something.

There are no ecosystems like that. It's not even a possibility.

My point is that this one in particular is pretty new, and was previously completely different (wet and green). I doubt there has even been enough time for much balance to have been achieved. Also some quick googling claims that the amazon rain forest has existed for millions of years (between 10-55 MILLION years), seems pretty well established to me...

There are ecosystems that are millions of years old. The oldest rainforests have existed for nearly 100 million years.

For anyone interested to learn more: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daintree_Rainforest#History_...

And if you somehow were able to visit it 80 million years ago, you'd notice that it's completely different now.

80 million maybe. 8 million maybe not.

Wrong again; you would also notice that it's completely different 8 million years ago.

It's not difficult to distinguish between a population that migrated one hundred years ago and the source population it was drawn from. 8 million years is... longer than that.

No, it's called a continuous ecosystem because it remains very similar. Selective pressure would be very similar, unlike the rare case of certain populations changing significantly when facing a very different situation.

You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a pine tree from 100,000 years ago to one today, let alone 100. Or a rabbit, snake, bee, fish, or bird.

> You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a pine tree from 100,000 years ago to one today

Perhaps. Certainly if you put me in front of the two trees I wouldn't be able to tell you which was which. But that's a different question than whether I can tell the difference. If you put me in front of a pine and a fir I couldn't tell you which was which, but it wouldn't be at all difficult to tell the difference.

It might also be relevant that the last time I had any significant contact with any conifer was quite a few years ago.

> it's called a continuous ecosystem because it remains very similar. Selective pressure would be very similar

This is a myth. Specifically, it's the myth of the "living fossil". It's a popular concept, but not a scientific one.

The majority of people can't tell the difference between a coral snake and a king snake. That's not evidence that coral snakes are similar to king snakes.

> Perhaps. Certainly if you put me in front of the two trees I wouldn't be able to tell you which was which. But that's a different question than whether I can tell the difference. If you put me in front of a pine and a fir I couldn't tell you which was which, but it wouldn't be at all difficult to tell the difference.

No, I mean you couldn't tell the difference, other than it being a different tree. If you had a bunch of trees from 100,000 years ago and a bunch from today, you would not be able to sort them.

> It might also be relevant that the last time I had any significant contact with any conifer was quite a few years ago.

Pick almost any life form. Grass, bird, fish, snake.

> This is a myth. Specifically, it's the myth of the "living fossil". It's a popular concept, but not a scientific one.

It's not that myth at all, and has nothing to do with it.

> Not relevant. It also isn't difficult to tell the difference between two populations that were divided by a barrier 100 years ago. Things drift.

The point is that there was no barrier. Most things don't drift very fast at all. Most species in an old ecosystem could have evolved more than a million years ago and had little change since then.

There are species that have existed for millions of years, you do accept that at least?

> Most things don't drift very fast at all. Most species in an old ecosystem could have evolved more than a million years ago and had little change since then.

No, that is the myth of the living fossil. It baffles me how you can deny this. What you are describing is an ecosystem composed entirely of living fossils. Living fossils don't exist.

It is not in fact possible for a species to have evolved more than a million years ago and had little change since then.

> I mean you couldn't tell the difference, other than it being a different tree. If you had a bunch of trees from 100,000 years ago and a bunch from today, you would not be able to sort them.

This might or might not be true, but it's pretty likely. If you give me a year to do the job, though, I'll be able to sort them.

By definition, energy = transformation of the environment. The more energy we use, the more we transform our environment. Which most like isn't good for the environment, and eventually for us since we depend on this environment too.

I've read enough history to have heard that same argument as to why moving rivers away from the Aral sea would be fine.