Energy and consumption

George Monbiot has a surprising column this week, announcing that the Fukushima nuclear disaster has converted him to the cause of nuclear energy. His point is basically that the Fukushima reactor has been subjected to what in any meaningful sense of the term is a worst-case scenario, and so far the damage has been fairly small. I counter that there's still some ways to go and there are many, many problems with nuclear energy. But he makes a few great points towards the end about the unreality of some proposals for renewable energy. He points to Britain's pre-industrial energy sources:

The damming and weiring of British rivers for watermills was small-scale, renewable, picturesque and devastating. By blocking the rivers and silting up the spawning beds, they helped bring to an end the gigantic runs of migratory fish that were once among our great natural spectacles and which fed much of Britain – wiping out sturgeon, lampreys and shad, as well as most sea trout and salmon.Traction was intimately linked with starvation. The more land that was set aside for feeding draft animals for industry and transport, the less was available for feeding humans. It was the 17th-century equivalent of today's biofuels crisis. The same applied to heating fuel. As EA Wrigley points out in his book Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, the 11m tonnes of coal mined in England in 1800 produced as much energy as 11m acres of woodland (one third of the land surface) would have generated.
Before coal became widely available, wood was used not just for heating homes but also for industrial processes: if half the land surface of Britain had been covered with woodland, Wrigley shows, we could have made 1.25m tonnes of bar iron a year (a fraction of current consumption) and nothing else. Even with a much lower population than today's, manufactured goods in the land-based economy were the preserve of the elite. Deep green energy production – decentralised, based on the products of the land – is far more damaging to humanity than nuclear meltdown.

 There's a similar point to be made about organic and so-called sustainable agriculture: it scales extremely poorly. That's why the "green revolution" in the 1970s that revolutionized world food production came from the development of, er, more effective pesticides and herbicides.

I'm glad to see someone as hardcore Green as George Monbiot dealing with these issues, although I have to say I still disagree with him on nuclear power. But this gets back to the point I made before about the Green movement having a long way to go before it can be a viable alternative to Socialism for the Left.