Why renewables can’t save the planet | Michael Shellenberger | TEDxDanubia

Thank you very much

When I was a boy, My parents sometimes

would take me camping in California.

We would camp in the beaches,

in the forests, in the deserts.

some people think that deserts are

empty of life.

But my parents taught me to see

the wild life all around us,

The hawks, the eagles, the tortoises.

One time when we were staying up at camp,

We found a baby scorpion with its sting around,

And I remember thinking how cool it was

that something could be both so cute

and also so dangerous.

After college, I moved to California,

And I started working on a number of

environmental campaigns.

I got involved in hoping to save

the state's last ancient redwood forest.

And blocking a proposed radioactive waste

repository set for the desert.

And surely after I turned 30,

I decided that I wanted to dedicate

a significant amount of life to solving

climate change.

I was worried that global warming would

end up destroying many of the natural

environments that people had worked

so hard to protect.

I thought the technical solution were

pretty straight forward,

solar panels on every roof,

electric cars in the drive way,

that the main obstacles were political.

And so I hoped to organize a coalition

of the countries biggest labor unions

and biggest environmental groups.

Our proposal was for a 300 billion dollar

in renewables.

And the idea was not only we would prevent

climate change but, we would also create

millions of new jobs in a very fast

growing high tech sector.

Our efforts really paid off in 2007,

when then presidential candidate

Barack Obama embraced our vision.

And between 2009 and 2015,

the US invested a 150 billion dollars

in renewables and other kinds of clean tac.

But right away, we started to encounter

some problems.

So first of all, the electricity from

solar roof tops in some costs about twice

as much as the electricity from solar farms.

And both solar farms and wind farms

require a cover of pretty significant

amount of land with

solar panels and wind turbines,

And also building very big transmission lines

to bring all that electricity from the

country side into the city.

Both of those things were often very

strongly resisted by local communities,

as well as by conservation biologists who

were concerned about the impacts on

wild birds species and other animals.

Now, there was a lot of other people

working on technical solutions at the time

One of the big challenges of course is

just the intermediacy of solar and wind.

They only generate electricity about

10 - 30 % of the time during most of the year

But, Some of the solutions that were

being proposed were to convert hydroelectric

dams into gigantic batteries.

The idea was that when the sun was shining

and the wind was blowing, you would pump

the water uphill, stored for later and

then when you needed electricity you run

it over the turbines.