This article first appeared in our COP29 special issue of My Green Pod Magazine. Click here to subscribe to our digital edition and get each issue delivered straight to your inbox
Look at the tailpipe of a car on a cold day. Observe the plumes above the power station. View the gases fly from the flue of your boiler.
More than that, visit the oil fields. Take a trip to the tar sands. Watch as waste and wood are shipped in fossil-fuelled vehicles and then incinerated.
All around us is visible evidence that mankind has an addiction to burning stuff – for warmth, electricity and transport.
Countless studies show that millions die prematurely from air pollution; we are poisoning ourselves as well as the planet.
This would all be too bleak if there weren’t solutions, but there is an array of cleaner, greener technologies at our fingertips.
Below are the technologies we need in the fight for our futures. What has the combustion industry done to accelerate these cleaner technologies, to combat climate breakdown and clean the air?
Chiefly, it has been using its industrial might to pump out fear, uncertainty and doubt – straight from the tobacco’s industry playbook.
Harnessing solar energy is such an obvious solution, it’s incredible that anyone could argue against this technology.
Almost entirely recyclable, the emissions from manufacturing are negligibly low when compared with combustion technologies.
Having topped out at an efficiency of ~25%, new work here in the UK, using perovskite instead of silicon, could even increase that efficiency to ~30%.
Every commercial and residential building should have solar on it. It has been calculated that a solar area the size of 500,000 square kilometres would be enough to provide all the world’s power.
From the perspective of physics, the sun of course is also the reason we have wind, and we’re getting better at harnessing that power.
Even if you believe that the majestic turbine is a blight on our landscape, you will be reassured to know that it can be built out at sea – and yes, turbines too are highly recyclable, with lifetime emissions much lower than combustion technologies.
In the UK we are blessed with wind, especially on our coastline; it provides valuable power and the opportunity to revitalise coastal communities.
Over the last 12 years British wind power has effectively pushed coal power off the grid.
Energy storage is enjoying a golden era. Big batteries – also known as BESS (battery energy storage systems) – are enabling us to store grid-, solar- and wind-generated electricity and to keep it for use at optimal times.
While battery manufacture is a relatively intense process, we will need far fewer materials than we do to stoke combustion technologies.
Again these batteries are almost entirely recyclable, and have a much, much longer life than other technologies in the first place.
No technology is without its drawbacks, but hydroelectric power is an incredible resource.
Not every country can make hydro work at scale, but in countries like Canada, China and Norway its contribution is significant.
Almost all British Columbia’s power comes from its dams.
Well known as the biggest elephant in the room, heat – and its contribution to building emissions – has been a harder problem to solve.
But many solutions now exist, including air source heat pumps – proven out in the colder climes of Scandinavia – ground source heat pumps, infrared heating, zero-emission ‘boilers’, smart thermal storage, district heating and large-scale heat derived from rivers.
All heat can – and, we believe, will – be electrified around the western world by 2050. Retrofitting insulation would reduce heat demand, too.
Electric vehicles (EVs) have been caught in the crossfire of the culture wars, but they’re significantly better than the vehicles we have been using up to this point.
There is almost no ground transportation option that cannot go electric – and yes, the incrementally growing grid can cope with the incrementally growing demand for electricity.
While an electric car is more carbon intensive to manufacture, that initial debt is paid off after as little as 15,000 miles of driving – even if powered off the dirtiest grid electricity.
EVs (significantly) outlast their combustion counterparts, and when they come to the end of their ‘motive’ lives, they can be repurposed as ‘stationary’ energy storage in buildings before being almost entirely recycled.
In the UK, we have added renewable capacity, and electrification, at pace over the last 12 years, and yet we now use less energy than ever before.
How? Smarter use of energy, certainly, but the biggest single contributor to this statistic was the large-scale switch to low-energy lightbulbs, which was achieved by regulation.
We are wasteful, and there are many more ways in which we can reduce our energy requirements.
If nuclear is a contentious inclusion on this list, let me explain. Nuclear is one of the lowest carbon emitting generation options we have, and while we are building out the renewable generation and storage options outlined above, we should safely maintain our existing nuclear fleets in order to balance and buttress the grid.
Ultimately, will we have nuclear power in its current form? We believe there will be much less nuclear power than there is today; declining economies of scale are likely to see nuclear become more and more prohibitively expensive, and to date small modular reactors have seemed more like a mirage than a reality.
Finally, we need a word on the fossil-fuelled ‘con job’ that is carbon capture and storage (CCS).
This technology belongs in the bin, along with other major state-sponsored missteps such as burning wood for power (biomass), burning rubbish for power (waste to energy) and burning diesel in cars.
The fact that the new British government is, at a time of restrained fiscal headroom, investing over £22bn into this technology should be cause for serious concern.
Why? Well, the efficacy of CCS at scale is largely unproven, and in simple terms the best way to get milk out of a cup of tea is to not put it in in the first place.
In short, #stopburningstuff is a simple mantra that humanity should heed.
So, how can you help? When able, consign the combustion technologies you rely on to the bin, and spread the word about the better technologies available to us right now.
Fully Charged’s Dan Caesar unpicks the myths around electric vehicle batteries.
France-style EV leasing scheme ‘could lift 500,000 people out of poverty’.
Green drivers go free with the UK’s first vehicle-to-grid tariff, from Octopus.
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