There’s Green. And there’s Green

Two very different ways to see climate action

I have known the bare facts about climate change for a very long time but for years it was unreal, something that I knew was happening but did not think of in the way I would of (say) impending war. Even when I started researching my PhD on climate and agriculture in 2003, I felt oddly dispassionate although we knew by then that we might be in serious trouble.

I can remember when it did first chill me to the bone. It took me by surprise. It was 2007 and I was in Bangkok; the British Council had flown five of us 6,000 miles to discuss climate change. We had just finished a day with colleagues at Chulalongkorn University and colleague Matt and I were on our way to buy Thai presents for our respective partners.

“I’m getting frightened,” I said, quite suddenly. “The climate, I mean.” I waved vaguely at the street. “What’s going to happen? To all this?” – I waved vaguely at the street – “to us?”

Matt was briefly taken aback, but he recovered. “There’s no point in thinking like that,” he said firmly. “Do something about it.”

Mike Robbins

He was right of course. And I’ve just read two books by people who really want to do something. Both are Green Party members; one is a former party leader, while the other has twice stood for Parliament as a Green candidate. They are both good books, but they present – unintentionally, I think – two very different ways of being green. The contrast has made me wonder what kind of environmentalist I am, and has crystallised my own feelings somewhat.

First, Natalie Bennett’s book is titled Change Everything. She is not joking.

*

Bennett was born in Sydney in 1966. She graduated in agricultural science then became a journalist on the Northern Daily Leader in Tamworth, New South Wales. She later served as a volunteer for some time in Thailand before joining the Bangkok Daily Post. In 1999 she moved to Britain, where she had a successful career in Fleet Street, ending up as editor of the Guardian Weekly. In 2012 she decided she’d had enough of journalism and stood for and won the leadership of the Green Party, which she had joined some years earlier. She served two two-year terms, and although not in Parliament, she led the party into the 2015 general election.

I was overseas but remember hearing her interviewed during the campaign and thinking her more sincere, and clear about her beliefs, than the other party leaders; she did not evade a question, and was clearly not in thrall to spin-doctors. But not everyone was as impressed (there was a  notorious interview on LBC that did not go well), and she decided not to seek a third term. Even so, the Green Party had done well under her leadership. She now sits in the Lords, where she is active.  

Change Everything is Bennett’s statement of belief for Britain. She begins by stating simply that our whole moral and economic system is wrong. Green philosophy, she says, “believes in the power of human caring and creativity when freed from the deadening hand of our present oligarchy.” Our system has, she says, ossified; we have been run by a bunch of Oxbridge PPE students who have all read the same political philosophies. …the key ideas that neoliberal and social democratic visions …share in their narrow, so similar, understandings of the world.”

In fact, since the July 2024 election many of these Oxbridge PPE graduates are gone from government. But Labour seems bound by at least some of the same ideas, so Bennett still has a point. She challenges several fallacies, as she sees them: that we must have growth; that everyone must have a ‘job’ in the conventional sense, regardless of its value to society; and that individuals, and nations, must compete with each other.

Her thoughts on work are especially well put. In our system, there are plenty of things that need doing but aren’t done because they don’t pay. But many conventional “jobs” don’t pay anyway, so that people need some sort of income support. Bennett’s answer is Universal Basic Income, or UBI; that is, everyone receives an income that enables a decent life. They can seek work that gives them additional earnings if they wish – or they can rely on UBI and develop their own talents and interests, and/or do work that needs doing in the community.

I am sympathetic to UBI and want to believe it might work, and it might even become an imperative as technology, including AI, displaces existing jobs. But I can’t forget a magazine article I read in about 1970 (yes, I was very young). It assumed that technical progress would give us the time and resources to be everything we wanted. Several random people were invited to try the activities they would pursue; one had a flying lesson, another went hospital visiting. But this future never happened. The magazine assumed the wealth created by new technology would reach everyone but that is not how the world works; the internet and e-commerce have created massive wealth, but it resides with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. UBI is not possible without a redistribution of wealth. Moreover it will mean some people working, others not; the venom already directed at folks on benefits should warn us how this might be taken. I would like to see UBI. But I think Bennett is asking for more than she realises.

There is much more in this book. On education, for instance; Bennett hates the way we bully children with exams, SATS etc. In her view it achieves little and just makes them miserable. I am strongly with her here. (She has recently advanced these views in the Lords while speaking on the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.) I also agree with her on government’s insistence on ‘economically useful’ subjects; in recent years we’ve seemed to know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

She rails against wastefulness – in the fashion industry, for example, which generates piles of unwanted clothing, and the commercial horrors of Christmas, which have always grossed me out as well. And in general, she wants some big changes to the way we live and think. She refers to “the key ideas that neoliberal and social democratic visions of society share in their narrow, so similar, understandings of the world.” It is unfair to bracket the social-democratic tradition with neoliberalism in that way. But it’s true that Labour, and its equivalents elsewhere, now share the same ideas of growth and linear progress. Bennett does have a point here. And in general, there is a lot to like about her thinking.

Into the phalanstery?
But I have some misgivings. Bennett has strong views about some things. These include gene editing, which she opposes (again, she has recently spoken on this in the Lords). She is not wrong to have reservations about this; I also do. But the examples she uses in the book, Roundup-ready crops, are not a good example of what crop breeders actually do with molecular markers. And she can be sweeping; the US is, she says, a “white-settler empire” – a brusque dismissal of a complex country of 331 million where I lived for years and have much-loved friends.

More seriously, Bennett’s vision is a little all-encompassing for me. Utopianism has a long and troubling history, from Charles Fourier’s 19th-century phalanstère, or phalanstery – a quite detailed design for a commune – to the collective farms of the Soviet era. In the last century, attempts to impose left- and right-wing utopian visions on populations have had terrible consequences. There is an inherent link between utopianism and authoritarianism, because the utopian seeks to define so many aspects of human activity. There is a sign of this when Bennett talks about advertising of consumer goods that she feels (often rightly) we do not need. “The Green alternative is to clamp down on this unhelpful, stressful bombardment,” she says. “There is no ‘right to advertise’. We can choose what to allow.” Can we? She asks, for instance: “Do we really need ‘smart toasters’?” No, of course not. But if my neighbour wants one, have I the right to stop that – or forbid someone from advertising them?

Mike Robbins

It would be insulting to suggest that Bennett herself is authoritarian. Politically, she wants more freedom, not less; she questions (rightly in my view) whether the UK is really a democracy and sees the urgent need to reform the system. On a deeper level, her ideas on UBI and education are clearly aimed at letting the individual develop in their own way. Moreover smart toasters are a bad example; there are some constraints we might have to accept in future (including on what we eat; more on this in a minute). Even so, it is best not to have too broad a vision of the world you want.

But maybe we do need that green view of the world? If you acknowledge the threat of climate change but want to keep your way of life, you’re in effect saying we can fix climate change with technology. Bennett wants more than this. There is no technology in this book, she says: ”All those things are important and necessary, and there are lots of books about them, but their authors generally have a vision of a business-as-usual society with modern technology. …I mean something far more fundamental and transformative.”

However, one can want a better world, as she does – but still accept that it’s only science and technology that will save us right now, and that for the moment they are the priority. Which brings me onto the second of these books, Chris Goodall’s Possible.

The road to Net Zero
Chris Goodall is a researcher and writer on green technologies and their economics. He runs an interesting, if intermittent, green newsletter, Carbon Commentary. He also lectures, has the odd green business venture and has twice stood as a Green Party candidate for Oxford West and Abingdon (most recently in 2024 against the high-profile LibDem Layla Moran; he did quite well).

I first heard of him in 2016 when he published The Switch, in which he set out the potential for solar power – which he foresaw being our main source of energy by mid-century. I think he might have overestimated solar in relation to wind. Even so, progress since 2016 tends to bear out many of his predictions; for example he saw potential in perovskites, and it looks as if he may have been right. A later book, What We Need to do Now (2020), set out the potential for green hydrogen – Goodall is a hydrogen fan; but, almost as an aside, he doubted that it would be economic for road transport. I thought this odd at the time. But again, he’s turning out to be right.

Now, in Possible: Ways to Net Zero (Profile Books, 2024), he has sketched out just what we need to do to get to net zero by 2050. Goodall is not here to spread impending doom but to show us how it might be avoided. To this end he sets out how the main challenges really can be met, including in hard-to-emit industries like shipping, steel and ceramics. It is an ambitious book but practical and focused, and I found it very encouraging.

Goodall’s basic thesis is simple: To get to net zero we’ll have to electrify pretty much everything, including heavy machinery, so that we can run on renewable energy. But there are three major obstacles. First, we will need one hell of a lot more electricity. Second, intermittency; we’re going to need to store a lot of power to guard against drops in solar and wind energy. And third, we must mitigate emissions from industries that can’t be electrified – because they use processes that require too much heat (steel, ceramics), or because batteries are too heavy (aviation).

On the first point, Goodall says we produce about 27,000 terawatt hours globally a year and that this could rise to as much as 90,000 by 2050 if we are to realise net zero. Given that four-fifths of the world’s energy supply does still come from fossil fuels, is this really possible? He thinks yes, that the current rate of expansion in green energy as documented by the International Energy Agency (IEA) has us on target to get there. Still, in the UK’s case we will need about twice as much electricity as we have now. But Goodall quotes a study that thinks we can do it using solar and wind with hydrogen as storage, and without the need for gas-fired backup. He admits not everyone accepts that (and is not against nuclear if we need it, but doubts if it is economic).

For intermittency, he thinks we will need three basic types of storage: Batteries for very short-term smoothing-out; pumped hydro for slightly longer duration; and stored hydrogen for longer periods. The first of these is working increasingly well in California, so why not in the UK. But pumped hydro involves large construction projects, which will be subject to delays and cost overruns (Australia’s Snowy 2.0 is a warning here). Moreover England’s topography is not great for such schemes, although Scotland’s is better.

As for hydrogen, Goodall thinks the UK needs to store two months’ worth. But this is an awful lot of hydrogen. To put it in perspective, the boss of Centrica, Chris O’Shea, has just (May 2025) said that the UK has about 12 days’ supply of gas – which is easier to handle than hydrogen –  and half of this is in a single place, the Rough storage facility, the future of which is under discussion. Goodall sees the hydrogen being stored underground/undersea, perhaps in what used to be gas storage facilities. He is not being fanciful; large-scale geologic storage of hydrogen is widely seen by scientists as feasible if the geology is right. (In fact Centrica wants to use Rough partly for hydrogen.) Even so, the amount of new storage needed would be huge. And this assumes we can make enough green hydrogen, which will require a lot of green energy.

But Goodall sees nothing insuperable and maybe he is right. What is great about this book is that he is clear about the difficulties faced – then explains how they can be overcome. For example, the third obstacle is hard-to-mitigate industries; Goodall has talked to people who work in these (they include cement, steelmaking, glass and ceramics and shipping) and found that they are pursuing solutions and making them work. One of the most encouraging initiatives he looks at is Sweden’s H2 Green Steel, now renamed Stegra, which is building a steel plant with an integrated electrolyser to make hydrogen in situ, using hydropower. It is not the only initiative of this type.

Equally interesting is his look at shipping, which is one of the most polluting sectors and seen as very hard to mitigate. But ships could be fuelled with e-methanol, which can be made from captured CO2 and green hydrogen; and Maersk have already built a dual-fuel containership that uses methanol. This could also have other uses; not long after reading the book I heard about the Farizon G2M, a Chinese truck that runs on methanol made from captured industrial CO2 emissions.

The caveats
I had the odd doubt when reading this book. Goodall believes that carbon capture and storage (CCS) will be necessary on a large scale, involving the capture of CO2 at its point of emission from industrial sites and its storage underground, possibly in depleted oil wells or aquifers. One objection to this (which Goodall acknowledges) is that it can be a disincentive to industry to cut its emissions. In fact there is much controversy over CCS on these grounds, especially in the UK following the 2024 announcement of a £22bn investment in it by the Labour government. And there may be other pitfalls; what about leakage from insecure sites, resulting in unaccounted-for carbon emissions? I have even wondered if this might be dangerous, especially if the CO2 is under pressure; it is, after all, an asphyxiant and about 2,000 people died after a release from Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986.

Goodall would obviously understand these objections but thinks we cannot afford not to include CCS, at least for now. He may be right, but I would rather see any captured emissions turned into useful products – something Goodall alluded to in The Switch but says little about here, although he does discuss e-methanol for shipping. The potential for greater use of CO2 was outlined back in 2019 in a report by the International Energy Agency, Putting CO2 to Use: Creating Value from Emissions. This report did see the difficulties, in particular the amount of hydrogen that might be required to produce fuel from CO2. But Goodall is well aware of this and since the book was published he has argued on Carbon Commentary (January 2025) that CCS might make more economic sense than synthetic fuels, at least for now.

I also questioned some of Goodall’s chapters on food and agriculture. This is an important source of emissions, but some of it can be mitigated. He looks at livestock farming, a source of emissions, and the sequestration of carbon dioxide through agriculture, which is a potential sink. The latter was the subject of my own PhD and I later wrote one of the first books about it (Crops and Carbon, Routledge 2011). Goodall may underestimate the difficulties in getting useful data on the carbon content of a farm; it is not solely about measurement. That presents challenges of its own, but there are also difficult questions around baselines, additionality and especially permanence.

Mike Robbins

But more worrying for me is his approach to livestock farming. Goodall points out, rightly, that our taste for red meat is a major driver for climate change. Cattle and sheep are ruminants, and their digestive processes emit large amounts of methane. Goodall says cattle farming is responsible for about 8% of global emissions. He does not say where he got this figure, but it’s in the ballpark (the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization thinks it’s 7%). We are going to have to confront this.

However, Goodall may not understand the importance of crop-livestock integration in the maintenance of soil fertility, especially in regions where farmers cannot afford N fertiliser (a serious source of emissions in itself). In fact he is quite dismissive, saying many researchers regard rotation with livestock as ‘nonsense’. In fact, it is an important part of many farming systems, and maintaining carbon sinks in agriculture may be difficult without it. He also advocates the use of no-till agriculture to increase soil carbon content; this is not wrong, but it usually involves the use of crop residues and again, in many farming systems these are needed for animal feed. Getting rid of animals is not the answer. They are often essential to the farming system and would not always be replaced by crops – in fact, in large parts of the world this might be disastrous, especially on steppe.

There is also a trap that some Greens seem too ready to walk into: a culture war about eating meat. The fact is, people do. And whether they should or not, they are not going to want to be lectured about it. Or about their choice of toaster.

It’s not easy being green…
But in general, Goodall’s is a pragmatic approach: How do we do this, and save our necks? Bennett by contrast has firm ideas about who we should be. Moreover, although she never says it, she seems somehow to feel that technology shouldn't save us; we should change who we are instead. It would be wrong to see this as a gulf between two individuals; Goodall, like Bennett, is a committed Green, and Bennett does do real-world politics – her record attests to that. In fact they probably know each other. I doubt they would see themselves as having any real ideological difference. Even so, these two books seem to exemplify two very different approaches to being green.

I am happiest with Goodall’s. There are three reasons: Practicality; the dangers of culture wars; and my distrust of utopianism. The last two, in particular, are real threats to the Green movement and they are interrelated.

First, practicality. We are already set to overshoot the 1.5 deg C target agreed at Paris, and this was not random; it was based on what was seen as sustainable. I don’t think we can wait for human beings to become perfectible in nature. We need science and technology to save our sorry ass right now.

Second, renewables have become the subject of a culture war launched by the right. This was predictable. In the UK it’s been spearheaded by Reform, a right-wing political party that gets its funding from sources close to fossil fuels. We are dealing with some quite unpleasant people and we should not hand them sticks to beat us with. I don’t think we’re going to have much luck ordering people to completely change their lifestyles. It’s not a question of whether they should or not; they won’t do it. And telling people whether or not they are allowed a smart toaster, or trying to make them stop eating meat, will be a gift to the other side whether it is justified or not. No-one likes to be approved and disapproved of.

But third, anything that smacks of utopianism should be avoided. Governments must, sometimes, tell people what to do. They must never tell them what to be. Bennett is an exception in some ways, perhaps, because so much of what she wants is profoundly decent, and her concern for individual freedom is clear. In general, though, utopianism has an awful history. Those of us appalled by climate change must work for and with all decent humans, including those with smart toasters. If we don’t, we may one day look just like the fools that have brought us to this.

 

Mike Robbins

Natalie Bennett's website includes updates on her work in the Lords.
Chris Goodall’s Carbon Commentary can be found here and also here.

The pictures in this post were taken by the author at a climate-change demonstration in New York on September 21 2014. More of them here.

Thanks to Neil Monk for taking a look at a draft of this piece.

Mike Robbins's book On the Rim of the Sea is available as a paperback or ebook. More details here. Follow Mike on Bluesky or X or browse his books here.

 

 

 

Flash fiction: A Man For All Seasons

Net Zero. The Stranger’s Bar. And a three-line whip

Ned wobbled a little as he crossed the Lobby. But he managed a bow to the Speaker’s chair as he entered the chamber and made his way safely to his usual seat. From this he looked down on the orderly scalp of the Shadow Environment Minister, whose hair had been coiffed with precision for tonight’s debate; it had, like her staff, learned to do as it was told.

“Old Ned Fiddler looking a bit unsteady,” a young MP had muttered back in the lobby. “Does he hit the sauce often?”

Sir Thomas More

(Hans Holbein the Younger)

“Never did much,” said the lobby correspondent with him. “Too busy shagging research assistants. But I think the new party leadership is getting to him.”

It was. One of the Whips had called into his office in Portcullis House that morning to discuss the Environment debate for later.

“We’re a little anxious about you, Ned,” he said. “We need to land some punches on the government tonight. Need to show all those Reform voters that we don’t like Net Zero either. Are you going to speak?”

“If I’m called,” said Ned.

“You see, when it comes to Net Zero, you’ve been a little…” The whip looked up at the ceiling and down again. “A little unsound, if I may say so. We were a little concerned after the select committee… at your comments on wind energy for example. A little too approving. Our voters do not want these ugly things in their back yards.”

“You would prefer me to tilt at windmills?” asked Ned.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Never mind. Fear not, I am sure I shan’t disappoint you.” He picked up a sheaf of notes and waved it at the whip, who had, he noted, cut himself shaving. “I have written a paean to fossil fuels that will warm the cockles of your heart.”

“Splendid.” The whip got up to go. In the doorway, he turned. “We realise of course that your seat is a little vulnerable to Reform. You may wish to be a little surer of your place in the Lords. Should anything untoward happen at the neck selection. After all, it’s a three-line whip.”

“Fear not,” said Ned, and added quietly:

“And, as time requireth, a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of as sad gravity. A man for all seasons.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It was written in 1520, of Sir Thomas More.”

“Oh.” The whip looked confused. ”Well, I’m sure we can rely on you.”

He went. Ned regarded his retreating back with distaste. Over thirty years in the House, he thought, and I’m expected to endure threats from these smarmy little creeps. He looked again at his notes, in which he had collated all the threats to birdlife from wind turbines and bemoaned the loss of farmland to solar panels. He thought for a moment. Then he picked up the wad of papers and dropped it in the bin. Next he opened his desk draw and took out a very old brown envelope from which he drew several sheets of foolscap paper, yellow with age. He placed them in a clear plastic folder. 

Then he went to the Stranger’s Bar and had two gin and tonics and a Glenlivet.

 

*** *** ***

“Mister FIDDLER!”

He swayed slightly as he rose to his feet.

“Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.” He looked round the chamber. “I need not long detain you …Bustards!”

Trevor Littlewood/Wikimedia Commons

A ripple ran through the chamber. The Environment Minister raised his eyebrows. Madam Deputy Speaker seemed about to intercede on a point of parliamentary language so he continued hastily: “Great bustards, to be precise. As the House will know, these birds have been reintroduced to these islands and it has been put to this House that wind turbines are a risk to them. Are we to let the planet fry because of the infinitesimal risk that some silly bustard might fly into the blades? I am reminded that, a few days after the destruction of the Möhne dam, The Times received a letter that purported to be from some learned academics concerned at the fate of some rare crested ring-tailed lesser-spotted Nubian warbler or the like thought to have been breeding on the reservoir. Still, this is not about bustards. Is it?”

He paused for a moment, then grasped the yellowed sheet of foolscap. “I should like, Madam Deputy Speaker, to read briefly from the diary of my great-uncle Christopher. He writes, on a day in June:

I have been thinking of the seasons and their immutability, which is a comfort in these times; one knows, doesn’t one, that in England, some morning in late February or the start of March, one will step out and feel the wind cold, harsh even, but not so raw as it was; and the sky will be a sort of washed blue with bright white clouds scudding across it, bisected by branches that are still bare but somehow not as barren as before. One knows then that it is early Spring. Then some weeks later that the buds arrive, the hawthorn breaks out and the trees are suddenly a very vivid green that you won’t see later in the summer, when they are duller, jaded.

We’re in that vivid time now; the sky’s a deep blue, not the livid grey-white of August, and the fields are coming alive – I can see them quite well beyond the perimeter fence, stretching across the Lincolnshire Wolds with their gentle folds and hedgerows. The blossoms are everywhere. I woke quite late today – we landed at four last night, and then there was debriefing and breakfast – when I got up I opened the window of my quarters and the world outside looked exactly like early June. Then just now the chaps were bombing up and some clot miss-set a circuit and let a 4,000-pound cookie drop from a bomb bay onto the tarmac. It didn’t go off, or we wouldn’t be here. I could hear the maniacal laughter of the crew and I thought, the world is in flames from Singapore to the Channel coast, and we have just been near-blown to eternity; yet the seasons feel exactly as they should, and there is something we cannot destroy, and that comforts me.

Ned lowered the page. “I read today that the Woodland Trust have detected changes in the seasons. Nothing has brought the reality of climate change home to me quite as that has done.” Two or three members began to rise, but he shook his head. “No, I shall not give way. Madam Deputy Speaker, I realise that my great-uncle could not now be comforted by the immutability of the seasons, as he wrote that he was in that dark time – a week or so before his death on active service. That is a reality almost beyond my grasp. Am I to deny that reality today because if I do not, a few thousand votes may go to fools?

“Madam Deputy Speaker, I have been a member of my Party for fifty years and a member of this House for thirty. But tonight I must defy the whip. I cannot vote against the Government motion and, for all its flaws, I commend it to the House.”

A wave of noise broke over him; cries of “Oh! Oh!” and “For shame!” and “Bravo!”. He did not hear them; he left the chamber and crossed the lobby, only dimly aware of the two or three lobby correspondents striding to keep up with him. They fell back, but one of them called out: “Is your career over?” And another called: “What season is it now, Ned!”

He stopped and thought for a moment. “I think,” he said, “that it’s early spring.”

More flash fiction from Mike:

A Man for All Seasons Net zero. The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip

A History Lesson Why do we study it?

The Creatives Meeting a tech bro

Homecoming A sort of love story

Solitude A Cold War memory

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography

Hiraeth A yearning…

Strange Places A spirit in the sky 

A Sideways Journey Things might have been different

Displaced Encounter on E94th Street

Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

Straight from the sun

Renewable energy will drive a new industrial revolution. That revolution is inevitable, elegant, and already here 

Just after the latest round of climate change talks (in Bonn this time) had sort-of stalled, I took a walk to New York’s North Cove Marina.

The southern tip of Manhattan narrows to a point at its southern end and juts out into the broad expanse of New York Harbour. The Marina is on the lower West Side, far enough down for the famous landmark of Ellis Island to be clearly visible. Just beyond is the Statue of Liberty; it was a mid-June Monday and the statue was bathed in the bluish haze of a warm humid late afternoon at the end of spring. A few lazy sailboats drifted in front of it. Further away, the high, bright-orange superstructure of a Staten Island ferry passed in front of the Verrazano Narrows bridge, itself a tiny latticework on the horizon, spanning the channel between Staten Island and Brooklyn, and guarding New York’s gateway to the sea.  Closer to the shore, the Circle Line sightseeing boat passed by, as did the odd ferry across the Hudson, carrying commuters home to New Jersey a mile or so away across the river.

The Planet Solar in New York (pic: M. Robbins)

The Marina itself is tucked into the steel-and-glass canyons of modern Manhattan; over it looms the new Freedom Tower that has sprung from the ruins of September 11 2001. That afternoon the MS Tûranor PlanetSolar had backed into her berth in the Marina after a long trip across the Atlantic to Florida and thence up the coast. The name Tûranor is taken from J.R.R. Tolkien;  it is Elvish for Power of the Sun. They are not joking. PlanetSolar is powered by an enormous solar array of about 5,600 square feet (519 sq m). Walking into the marina from the south, the 89-ton boat was instantly recognisable; she is actually a catamaran, with a totally flat superstructure bar a small blister for the bridge – the rest of her topside is solar cells. The brainchild of Swiss eco-entrepeneur Raphael Domjan, in 2010-2012 she became the first solar boat to circumnavigate the globe. On this occasion, she had not come so far – across the Atlantic from La Ciotat on France’s Mediterranean coast.  The trip had been accomplished solely on solar power; although she carries a back-up engine to recharge the batteries, she hadn’t needed it.

PlanetSolar had not come to New York just to prove a point. On board was a team from the University of Geneva, led by Martin Beniston, Professor of Climate Change at the University and also director of its newly-established Institute of Environmental Sciences. On the night the PlanetSolar arrived in Manhattan, the Swiss Consulate arranged a cheerful informal reception on board, and I found Professor Beniston unwinding with some excellent Swiss wines and cheeses.   Although Swiss, Professor Beniston was born in the UK and did his first degree at the University of East Anglia, where I did my own PhD  on climate change. The project, he explained, was to carry out research in the Gulf Stream into the mechanics of CO₂ fluxes between the ocean and the atmosphere, and especially into the role of phytoplankton.  “Because it’s a pollution-free boat, it will be ideal for the collection and analysis of samples,” he told me. “They won’t be contaminated.”  

Later I climbed up to the bridge to greet the captain of the PlanetSolar,  Gérard d’Aboville.  The vessel had had a hard time docking that afternoon in the confined space of the marina, and he could have been in a foul mood, but he wasn’t, or if he was, he hid it well. But then, not much bothers a man who has rowed singlehandedly across both the Atlantic and the Pacific, sat in the European Parliament and done much else besides. (He also once competed in the Paris-Dakar with his four brothers, each one riding a Kawasaki 250; so maybe the whole family is slightly mad.) Then I stood with my companion in the hatch and admired the solar array, which glowed carmine and orange as the sun sank slowly towards the New Jersey shore, lighting the pink and grey clouds and setting the Hudson on fire.

II

The Solar Impulse is Swiss as well. It was designed in collaboration with the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, which is also doing pioneering work on solar cells. It is not the world’s first solar plane; experimental designs have been flown of over 30 years. What is new about Solar Impulse is that it is the first manned aircraft that can store enough power when in the air in daylight to fly through the night. In theory, Solar Impulse it has an unlimited range. In practice it hasn’t; the pilot is the limiting factor, as the cockpit is extremely small and besides, the plane is not designed to fly through bad weather. Nonetheless it has remained aloft for over 24 hours at a stretch.

On July 6 2013 it arrived in New York after a transcontinental flight in the hands of its two Swiss pilots, André Borschberg, an entrepreneur and former fighter pilot, and distinguished balloonist Bertrand Piccard (the two men are co-leaders of the project, as well as alternating pilots). Its arrival was fraught. A stretch of fabric pulled away from the port wing, a fact unknown to pilot Borschberg until he was told by the crew of a following helicopter. Borschberg later described cheerfully how, on hearing of the tear in the wing, he had thought he might have to bail out into the Atlantic below and found himself thinking that that would at least be a new experience. A week after the plane’s arrival, and again courtesy of the Swiss Consulate, I filed into Hangar 19 at New York’s JFK airport to see the plane.

The Solar Impulse in Hangar 19 (pic: M.Robbins)

Hangar 19 has apparently played host to Concorde, Air Force One and the plane that brought the Pope to the USA; but it can have had few stranger and more wonderful visitors than it did on that July day. The roof of the hangar was in shadow, as was the foreground; the plane itself was 60 or 70 feet away and bathed in an eerie light. It is both tiny and vast. It is controlled from a small forward pod that contains the pilot, his oxygen (the plane flies above 30,000ft when required) and all immediate essentials; together, according to Piccard, these weigh about 500lb. The fuselage itself is longer – over 70ft (about 22 m) – but very slender; the wingspan, at around 208ft (about 63 m), is equal to that of an Airbus A340, and there was little clearance from the wingtips to Hangar 19’s edges. There are four motors, each in a nacelle that also contains the batteries. Two of the engines are mounted quite close inboard, but the outer ones are far out at the point where the wing bends upwards. This, and the predatory downward sweep of the cockpit, remind one of an enormous pterodactyl.

Both pilots were on hand to answer questions. Piccard was in ebullient mood. In addition to his own achievements, he is a grandson of Auguste Piccard, a Swiss scientist who worked in Brussels and was Hergé’s model for Professor Calculus (Professor Tournesol in French) in the Tintin books. More to the point, he was, like his grandson, a pioneer high-altitude balloonist; and was also the inventor of the bathyscape, which in 1961 dived to the bottom of the Mariana Trench with his son, Bertrand’s father, aboard. The family thus has the distinction of having held the records for both the highest ascent and the deepest descent.

Borschberg (left) and Piccard  (pic: M. Robbins)

Asked about Solar Impulse’s gliding characteristics and how they compared with a conventional aircraft, Bertrand Piccard  said they were exceptional; if anything went wrong, the air traffic controller would have time to “drive home, have a cup of tea and come back” to deal with the emergency. This perhaps makes light of the hazards of the enterprise. The plane cruises at just 30-60 MPH, meaning it must stay well out of the way of busy air routes. Moreover it weighs just 3,500 lb (1,600 kg), about the same as a car (in fact, that is pretty much the kerb weight of one typical European saloon, the Alfa Romeo 159). At the same time it has a huge, very light wing area, and Borschberg and Piccard admitted that the aircraft is difficult to land in crosswinds. Given that at least one full-size airliner has been destroyed by wind shear, both men must have had real courage and skill to fly this strange aeroplane across a continent. In fact, they intend to fly around the world in, they hope, 2015; the aircraft in which they plan to do this, the Solar Impulse 2, is already undergoing testing. 

III
The solar plane and the solar boat should make the Swiss proud. That day both Bertrand Piccard and the Swiss Consul-General in New York, François Barras, stressed the Swiss track record in innovation. (The country has earned the largest number of patents per capita of any on earth.) But are they practical technology? Piccard told the audience he didn’t foresee passengers flying the Atlantic in a solar plane, while Gérard d’Aboville has said that the Planet Solar, remarkable as it is, does not represent the future of boats. In a sense, they are surely right. The Solar Impulse has the wingspan of a jumbo jet but barely has room for its pilot and cruises at 40 MPH. The Planet Solar makes an average of 5-6 knots and the “works” leave little space for cargo.

In another sense, however, Planet Solar and Solar Impulse represents a future that is inevitable, elegant, and – to some extent – already here.

As a child, I had a number of Ladybirds, picture books for children that were then much loved. One was The Story of the Motor Car. This showed the progress of the car from the earliest experiments with steam. One colour plate that I have not forgotten is one of an 18th-century Frenchman with an infernal three-wheel machine with an enormous boiler overhanging its front. It is tipping over, and the Frenchman in question is flying through the air, his tricorn hat parted from his wig, his frock coat askew; a tongue of flame emerges from the boiler. Soldiers, on foot and on horseback, look on with evident concern.

The flying Frenchman was a military engineer, Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, and the fiery trike was one of two attempts he made to build a steam-powered fardier (a fardier being a heavy horse-drawn cart for pulling field guns). Cugnot’s  fardier à vapeur is said to have been implicated in the world’s first road accident, destroying a wall of the Paris Arsenal.  This may be apocryphal; some sources say it never happened. Still, Cugnot’s fardiers à vapeur (he built two, in 1769 and 1770) were unstable and proceeded at only 2 mph; moreover they could manage only 10 minutes or so of motion before steam had to be raised again. Eventually the army lost patience and pensioned Cugnot off, along with the fardiers à vapeur. However, the 1770 machine survived. It can be seen in the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, though not, one assumes, in action; if I were the museum, I wouldn’t mess with that thing.

Gérard d’Aboville: rowed the Pacific (pic: M. Robbins)

Meanwhile Nicéphore Niépce (who later invented photography) and his brother Claude were taking a different route. In 1807 they built a device called the Pyréolophore, which they mounted on a boat and tested on the River Saône. The device, which initially ran on moss spores but later on pulverised coal, bore little relation to a modern engine; rather, it sucked in water and blew it out in order to convert the pressure created by combustion into forward motion. Nonetheless it was an internal combustion engine, converting its fuel into motion directly rather than via steam, and the French Institute National de Science saw the point. In the Niépces’s machine, it declared, “no portion of heat is dispersed in advance; the moving force is an instantaneous result, and all the fuel effect is used to produce the dilatation that causes the moving force."

This must have been how François Isaac de Rivaz saw things, too. De Rivaz was born in Paris but was Swiss, of a family from the Valais, where he settled at quite a young age. After working with steam engines for some years in the Army, he built an internal combustion engine, and in the same year, 1807, he mounted it on a cart to create, in effect, the world’s first car. There is some argument as to whether this, rather than the Niépces’s Pyréolophore, was the first internal combustion engine. However that may be, de Rivaz’s machine had one strikingly modern feature: the force of the explosion was converted into movement by rotary motion through a piston. True, this was blown upwards by the explosion, and turned a ratchet as it fell back down – not a system used much at Ford or Toyota. Moreover the idea would take a long time to catch on. Nonetheless, the process of converting stored energy into rotary movement had been simplified, so that less was lost during the process. In effect, de Rivaz had built the world’s first internal combustion piston engine.

So why have we not moved forward since? 

IV
Not long ago Škoda launched a new version of its popular Octavia model. I was very impressed with an early version that I hired some years ago, so I took a look. The car is available with an arsenal of equipment, including satnav, a digital radio, driver fatigue warning, dual-zone climate control and a box on the dash with a wireless connection for your mobile phone. Electronic stability control is standard, and one can specify a collision warning and even a system to apply the brakes if a collision seems likely. All in all, the car disposes of far more computing power than did the Apollo lunar module. Yet at its heart (and that of almost all cars) is a reciprocating engine not much different in principle from de Rivaz’s, and certainly not from that of the Benz Motorwagen of 1885.

This will not do. Consider the number of moving surfaces in such a unit.  Each piston begins its cycle by sucking in fuel on a downward (intake) stroke, compressing it on the upward (compression) stroke, being driven down by combustion on the next stroke and then expelling the waste gases on its next upward travel (the exhaust stroke). With four such pistons, there are one hell of a lot of moving surfaces, especially given that not all the cylinders will be on the combustion stroke, and providing power, at any one time. Moreover, besides the major moving parts – the cylinders, the connecting rods from them to the crankshaft and the crankshaft itself – there are a mass of others; belts or chains from the crankshaft will drive the shafts that open and close the valves at the top of the cylinders, and will also turn the water pump that cools the engine and will drive the alternator that provides electrical power. Thus the cylinders that are firing at any one time moves a large surface area that constantly changes direction, meaning that it must also accelerate and decelerate a great deal of mass as the pistons pass the tops and bottoms of their stroke.

In short, the modern car engine is an archaic, demented Heath Robinson device that flies in the face of physics, the sort of nightmare of moving parts an incompetent child might make with a Meccano set. Why do we still tolerate it in our digital world? Science fiction fans may remember a short story by John Wyndham, Chocky, in which the eponymous hero is an alien that communicates with a child; when the child explains that his father’s new car has gears, Chocky cannot hide his contempt.

There have been attempts to produce an internal combustion engine that is simpler and more effective. The most successful has perhaps been the Wankel engine, in which the piston did not go up and down but instead rotated, doing so concentrically so as to compress fuel and expel waste gases. Pioneered by NSU (now part of the Volkswagen group) in the 1960s, it powered the 1967 NSU Ro 80, a car of such elegance and modernity that it would not look out of place today. (Although Car Magazine described it as having “large, hard seats for large, soft Germans”.) But high fuel consumption killed it off, and the last car to use the Wankel engine (a Mazda) ceased production in 2012.

But another answer has been staring us in the face for over 100 years.  In 1899 the Belgian engineer Camille Jenatzy broke the world land speed record and also exceeded 100KPH for the first time, using a torpedo-shaped vehicle called the Jamais Contente. It too still exists and is on display at the Château de Compiègne not far from Paris, but I wouldn’t mess with the Jamais Contente either; it is rather tall, and the driver sat on top of it, making it look dangerously top-heavy.  Jenatzy will not have been scared. He went on to a distinguished motor-racing career at a time when the sport was horrifically dangerous. He told friends that he would die in a Mercedes, and oddly enough he did; to amuse guests on a hunting trip, he hid behind a bush and imitated a wild boar, whereupon his friends shot him. He died in the ambulance.

Camille Jenatzy and his wife celebrate

What intrigues about the Jamais Contente, however, is that it was electric. There is nothing new about electric cars at all. In the early days of motoring they were common, especially for town use. The relative lack of moving parts reduces friction, while the simplicity of their action mean that changes in velocity do not mean changes in multiple piston speeds. The Jamais Contente did not even have a transmission as we would understand it.  The limiting factor, so far, has been battery technology and inadequate range. Jenatzy himself seems to have abandoned the technology for that reason.

That is changing. Tesla Motors claims that its Model S will manage 300 miles at 55MPH. The range of an electric vehicle is highly variable depending on temperature and usage, but the US Environmental Protection Agency apparently does accept that the Model S car will do 208-265 miles, depending on battery pack. The Morris Minor I drove in my youth had a range of only about 260 miles. True, that was an era when there were many more fuel stations; but building charging stations for electric cars should be a simpler matter. In fact a recent article on the website of the Rocky Mountain Institute (Is the End of EV Range Anxiety in Sight?, June 20 2013) suggests a number of possibilities, including increases in the number of charging stations, mobile emergency chargers and a 500-mile vehicle through developments in lithium-air batteries.

V
Two thoughts about the story above. First, Cugnot’s fardier à vapeur didn’t cut it at the time. Had you told even Cugnot himself that, at its apogee, steam would move the world’s largest artificial objects, the 1930s liners Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, each weighing over 80,000 tons, at over 30MPH for days on end, he would have found it hard to envisage. The fardier à vapeur and the Jamais Contente were the future; they weren’t the present. A proof of concept rarely is.

The second thought is that steam never was the shortest route from A to B. Why use combustion of fuel to heat a separate substance to induce motion, when you can do so directly from the fuel itself? As the Institute National de Science realised, that was what the Niépce brothers had done. Meanwhile de Rivaz used the piston to convert that process into rotary motion.  But that was 200 years ago. It’s time to move on again. It’s the same process that led the replacement of the piston aero-engine by the turbine and then the jet, a profound simplification; and to the clean shapes of modern aircraft in place of the string-and-fabric birdcages that followed the Wright Brothers. In the late 1960s a motoring magazine persuaded the 80-year-old W.O. Bentley to give his thoughts on modern technology. It took him to Fairford to see the British prototype of Concorde, then under construction. “Now we’re back to the dug-out canoe,” he snorted. But perhaps that was the point. Good technology is ultimately a process of understanding how to use one’s environment, rather than confront it. To confront is a process of complication, of evasion; progress is simplification, cutting the distance between the source of energy and the outcome for which it is needed.

But there is a flaw in this argument. Electric cars are not fuel-less vehicles like the Planet Solar. They do not generate their own electricity. There have been experiments with solar vehicles, but they have yet to pass the proof-of-concept stage.  Far from converting fuel directly into motion, electric vehicles must take their charge from power stations that may generate it from fossil fuel. If the power were generated from renewables, of course, this objection would be overcome. 

VI
We are much nearer this than we think. I am writing this a week after the inauguration of the London Array, the world’s largest offshore wind farm, and a day after the UK approved an even bigger one off Lincolnshire (it’s to be called Triton Knoll). Renewables are growing, despite a recent hiccough in investment. Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2013, by the United Nations Environment Programme and the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, reports that in 2012 investment in renewables – by which they mean mainly, though not entirely, wind and solar – was 12% down on 2011. However, it was still the second-highest ever. Investment in developing countries was actually up.  Moreover, while part of the overall decline arose from policy uncertainty, it also reflected a drop in the cost of photovoltaics (PV) for solar power. “The... cost of generating a MWh [megawatt hour] of electricity from PV was around one third lower last year than the 2011 average,” states the report. “This took small-scale residential PV power, in particular, much closer to competitiveness.”

This prompts the attractive thought that a householder will soon generate all their electricity needs, including, maybe, those of the car. In fact, there are already dedicated solar charging stations for vehicles, although effective ones are still probably not economic for most homeowners. But household use of renewables, mainly solar panels, is spreading rapidly, along with solar and wind capacity designed to feed into the grid. The renewables website CleanTechnica recently claimed that three Landkreise, or districts, in Germany, Nordfriesland, Prignitz and Dithmarschen, were producing 260%, 261% and 281% respectively of their regional power mix from renewables – meaning, presumably, that they could provide 100% of their energy needs from them, and export the rest.

True, these are not large areas. They have a population of 80,000-165,000, and two of these states are on the North Sea coast of Schleswig-Holstein, giving them an unfair advantage in terms of wind power.  Moreover high subsidies for feed-in tariffs, by which householders or owners of wind turbines can sell what they generate back through the grid, have made electricity expensive for many German consumers, and there is also an increasing backlash against the environmental drawbacks of wind-turbine construction. Nonetheless Germany has done well with renewables, and CleanTechnica claims that a 100% renewables energy system is possible within a few decades. As the UNEP/Frankfurt School study implies, the right policy environment is needed for this. (California, for example, allows feed-in tariffs – but it doesn’t allow householders to install more capacity than they need, so that they can generate and sell a surplus.) However, according to a Deutsche Bank report quoted by Australian journalist Giles Parkinson on his excellent site, Renew Economy, the 2014 global solar market could jump to 45GW, after rising to 38-40GW in 2013.

This is all quite logical. Just as de Rivaz’s engines bought the power source right into the piston chamber, so renewable energy sources – especially solar – bring the sun’s energy direct to where it is needed. By contrast, the use of oil and gas requires the sun to shine on a plant, the plant to grow, the plant to die, the dead plant material to become buried, and for it to work its way deeper underground until it is crushed by the weight of the earth above. It is then necessary to wait 500 million-odd years before it is ready to burn. At that point, it must be brought back to the surface and transported to where it is needed, sometimes with pollution and loss of life. Examples include the BP explosion in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, and – less discussed, but possibly worse – the environmental damage done for many years in the Niger Delta. This is not new. I am old enough to remember the disastrous 1967 oil spill after the shipwreck of the 120,000-ton oil tanker Torrey Canyon on the Seven Stones off south-west England. Many will also remember the 167 deaths in the explosion of the Piper Alpha gas platform in 1988. Just this week, it is reported that at least 35 people have died in a dreadful accident involving an oil train at Lac-Mégantic in Quebec. As for nuclear energy, it is scarcely a simpler process, and requires huge infrastructure projects with a limited working life. Moreover, while it has a better safety record, the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima have reminded us that it is potentially even more dangerous. Why on earth not just harvest the wind and the sun?

This may seem glib. It is not so simple, of course. Fossil fuels let us use the energy produced through photosynthesis at a far higher rate than it is produced. (But is that a good idea? We have unbalanced the global carbon cycle in the process.) And as the Germans are finding, for renewables you need to fix the grid first. Yet there is an inescapable logic to the direct use of energy, and as the Planet Solar and the Solar Impulse have shown, one day we may be able to use it more directly still.

That is why a move to renewables is inevitable. They will not come about through the international climate negotiations. I am not opposed to those, but I am sceptical. Visit the web page of the Solar Impulse and you will see the headline “Around the world in a solar airplane”. Visit the website of the secretariat of the UN climate-change treaty, the UNFCCC, and you will see a reference to “The thirty-eighth sessions of the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI 38) and the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA 38), as well as the second part of the second session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP 2-2).” Enough said. 

VII 
Neither will the move to renewables have anything to do with of some nice fuzzy feeling about being in harmony with nature. Technological progress, as I have argued, is a cold, hard  process of going from A to B first via L, M, N and P, then via D, E and F and finally by the direct route.

But I cannot forget what Piccard said about the Solar Impulse and its ability to glide. Many years ago, as a young man in England, I wanted to fly gliders. Every weekend I drove the 70-odd miles from my home in inner London to an abandoned bomber airfield, where I would spend the day pushing gliders on and off the runway. There was a lot of waiting around. The runway was vast; it had once sent 30-ton bombers to the Ruhr; the control tower still stood, with ragged pieces of paper pinned to a mouldy noticeboard, long unreadable. Like all such places, the airfield was haunted one moment and prosaic the next as the light changed and the wind dropped.

At the end of the day, if I was lucky, I would be strapped into the cockpit of a wooden 1950s dual-control glider and launched a thousand feet into the air behind a decrepit 12-cylinder Jaguar car, rescued from the scrapheap at Milton, a few miles away.  If I was really lucky the instructor would catch a thermal, and kick the rudder hard, searching for an elusive pocket of warm air that would carry us upward so that we would be suspended for a minute or two between the low, hazy grey-and-white clouds and the soft green Oxfordshire countryside below. One day I was standing on the grass with nothing special to do when an ancient glider passed a hundred feet or so above my head, and seemed to drift through the air so slowly that it was almost stationary. As it came close I heard a thrumming, singing sound from its rigging, really quite loud, an enormous Aeolian harp.

As we left Hangar 19 at JFK last weekend, I turned for a last look at the strange aircraft behind me, and just for a moment I did think of a world where there would be no polluted Niger delta, no terrible Piper Alpha or Lac-Mégantic, no Fukushima; just solar boats that move quietly through clean water and, far above, a magic aeroplane that stays aloft forever, soaring and wheeling with kestrels and kites.

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Follow the links for more information about the Planet Solar and the Solar Impulse
To stay up-to-date on renewables, follow  Giles Parkinson and Zachary Shahan’s informative sites RenewEconomy and CleanTechnica
 Thanks to Sandrine, Neil and Andy
The author warmly acknowledges the hospitality of the Consulate General of Switzerland in New York Follow their Facebook page here

Hudson, sunset, and solar array (pic: M. Robbins)

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