Power market liberalisation: a trip down History l...

An (energy) tale of one city: Twistringen

Magical, mystical hemp

Posted on January 31, 2021January 31, 2021 By nicoftrs

hemp | Description & Uses | Britannica — [1]

Today’s guest of honour is”Cannabis sativa”, more casually called hemp. And this is probably one of the few plants which would rather get rid of its fancy latin appellation, as nice as it may sound. Indeed, hemp belongs to the same species as its groovy relative, marijuana. What sets the two appart is the amount of THC in the plant (please, don’t ask me to spell it out), which is the stuff that’s gets you ganjafaced. Hemp is the variety of the plant which has too little THC to get you high, while anything above 0.3% THC is classified as marijuana. Now what does this all have to do with the usual eco-warrior dialogue which your newsfeed is used to?

Well, it turns out hemp has a whole range of properties which have made it one of the favourite hypes in the sustainability community. While its use for medical purposes is the easiest leap made from the usual conversation topics around its cousin, hemp actually has much more interesting properties as a construction material, bioplastic, paper, textile, food supplement… the list goes on. The web is full of enthusiastic preachers of its thermal insulation and humidity regulating properties in homes, its purification virtues for polluted soils, its impressive performances as a carbon sink, its high recyclability… This multifaceted use also means that the plant can be used in almost its entirety, with barely any waste.

The best part is: it actually can grow fairly easily in a wide range of areas, with low water requirements, no pesticides nor mechanical plowing, to yield fully grown plants about 2m high in around 140 days. During a conversation with my grandmother, who’s from Britanny, in north-Western France (same shitty weather as their “Great” cousins, with a similar propensity for a drink or three), I learned that the region used to be covered in hemp fields not that long ago. Britanny being a natural sailing area, hemp was a critical material until the mi-1800s to produce sails and ropes for the wind-powered ships. In fact, during World War II the US government produced the movie “Hemp for Victory” to encourage farmers to produce more hemp, considered an essential ressource to supply the army with rope, clothes and cordage.

The epic 1942 “Hemp for Victory” movie, patriotic yet surprisingly informative

Truth be told, modern-day hemp aficionados really didn’t reinvent the wheel. Hemp has been around from the very beginning of our sedentary lifestyles, with hemp textiles found in Mesopotamia dating back to 8000 B.C., and the Chinese already cultivating the crop as far back as 6000 years ago to produce textiles. Throughout most of sedentary mankind’s history, hemp has been a mainstream industry present in pretty much every aspect of our lives. America’s Founding Fathers were growing the stuff themselves, and most of their paper they used was made out of it. Whether the United States’ Declaration of Independence were actually written on hemp paper is still open for debate. If only the Founding Fathers knew how their cherished paper would be treated only a few decades later… Indeed, the hemp industry will face a dramatic turn of events at the turn of the 20th century. While the industry had already lost a bit of steam with the rise of …well, hehe, sailless steamships, patents mechanising the fiber extraction process started to appear, solving one of the key challenges of the until-then highly labour intensive industry. But its fate had already been sealed. With the growing lobbies of petroleum-based synthetic products and the timber-based paper industry, the new competition brought about by hemp “Power Breaker” defibering machines was not welcome by everyone. Conveniently bringing back hemp’s cursed cousin MJ out of the cupboard, hemp opponents in the US urged the authorities towards a “hempeachment” (sorry, that was terrible) by first imposing heavy taxes and then banning the stuff altogether. Or so the story has it. Let’s get back to it later, shall we?

As I researched a bit more on the topic, my curiosity kept growing. The stuff seemed to be able to grow everywhere, to produce everything, all of this with an unbeatable environmental footprint. But as I reached this point on YouTube after a few too many redirects, where the line between conspirationism and science becomes obscure, I decided to pull my scientific rigour together, and put all these years of public money spent on education to good use.

So off to Scopus we go. For anyone mentally sane enough to not have sold their soul to academia, Scopus is basically a search engine for academic papers. Without the confirmation bias which Google is so kind to give you.

Of course you can quickly come into very complex and niche analyses, which is a pretty humbling experience. I, for one, was quickly reminded why I didn’t become a material scientist as I was scanning through papers churning out terms which sounded more like insults than diagnostics, one example being “composites following a Fickian behaviour”. But overall, the academic world seemed equally interested in the diverse properties of hemp, as is shown below from the 10 053 results which the search engine spat at me, corresponding to worldwide research outputs from 1828 (!) to 2021:

Scopus results for “hemp”

(references [1],[2],[3],[4] have been used to make this article sound a bit more legit)

While mentioned, the medicinal properties of hemp, which often make people confuse it with it’s cousin marijuana, only constitute a small fraction of the research. A lot of efforts focus instead on its properties as a construction and manufacturing material. It seems to behave particularly well as a composite, with the fibres providing some supporting structure for any material it is mixed with. Composites are often appreciated in engineering, as they allow to combine the benefits of two materials while compensating their drawbacks. Cool beanz, but that often makes them a real mess to recycle at end-of-life. One could imagine that bio-composites out of hemp have some advantages in that regard.

In general, hemp seems to have favourable properties for housing construction, materials, furniture and automative parts. Even its nutritional values seemed to be all-round great. Hemp seeds contain around 25% proteins (GAINZ GAINZ GAINZ), omega-6 and -3 (whatever these do), and all the other stuff you hear about in those fitness-diet craze magazines. Basically, whenever the diet trend changes from high unsaturated fats intake to vitamin-rich cures in a Kondratieff-worthy cyclic manner, you won’t need to change anything to your meals: hemp’s got you covered no matter what.

But an inner voice was still nagging me: if hemp truely is this miracle product everyone flauts about, how come its use is not more ubiquitous in our everyday lives? Why are we so desperatly clinging on to its petrochemical substitutes? Is it just a regulation issue, or are there also more fundamental obstacles like … maximum harvest yield? …cost? Before delving into innumerous and brilliantly thought-through business plans, I always like to do a few back-of-the envelope calculations.

Canadian governmental sources estimate hemp fibre yields to be around 3.6 tons per acre (compared to 0.4 tons per acre for cotton in the US), which is equivalent to 8.9 tonnes per hectare in civilised units (1 hectare being about 1.5 football fields). French hemp selling at around 200$ per ton and knowing that Britanny was covered by 100 000 hectares of hemp back in the golden days (mid 19th century, when the country wasn’t yet overrun by pigs farms), that would give a business of around 175 million dollars in Britanny alone. Not a negligible sum, if you ask me, especially if you then add the 0.4 tons per acre of seeds you can feed to the woke millenials at extortionate prices (well, those quarantine savings have to go somewhere, right?).

On the other side of the fence, as I mentioned, the web is teeming with entrepreneurs full of ideas, motivated to get hemp back in business and save the world. So really, where’s the hook? And here I can only make a few stabs in the dark, but my guess is that building up a whole supply chain up from scratch is not an easy business, and will require a lot of coordination and state support. As we’ve seen, the fibre breaking process also seems a pretty messy business, with some heavy-duty machinery required. “Heavy machinery, you said? Music to my ears” says the German engineer at this point, letting out a burst of repressed patriotism just at the thought of it. Jokes aside, reviving such local industries will ironically require strong collaboration. And not least amongst us, the consumers, as we decide to support such initiatives (like this one, or this one, or even that one), whether financially or simply as ambassadors of their efforts.

Now promised, I’m done playing the Robin Hood of sustainable investment, but I hope this all raised your interest in a topic which I’m only just discovering myself, but really hope to hear about more in the future. On that note, time to get out of here, we finally got some snow around my place, and that snowman is not gonna get built on its own!

Listen to the science! … But which one?

Posted on July 4, 2020July 5, 2020 By nicoftrs

While listening to scientists has been pretty trendy in the last few months (what a revolutionising idea!), the outcry “Listen to the science!” had already been going on for months before, spearheaded by the one and only Greta Thunberg. Except that at that time it was concerning climate change, environmental pollution, threatening of biodiversity, resource depletion – the list of anxiogenic phenomena goes on.

Since then, a lot of parallels have been drawn between how the COVID-19 crisis is being handled and how we have been dealing with the environmental issue so far. And when we see the dramatic societal changes that have happened within just a few days, driven by necessity, the pretty unanimous verdict regarding our progress on sustainability seems to be: we can do better. Much better.

But then how come we don’t? It’s not like sustainability issues (sorry, I keep using this word to refer to the list of catastrophes mentioned in the first paragraph, for a lack of other all-ecompassing word – other suggestions always welcome) are constantly being mentioned in newspapers and public debates. Only 80% of the time. It’s fair to say that compared to only ten years ago, discussions have made incredible progress regarding sustainability. But the problem is just that. They mostly seem to remain fruitless discussions, with a tendency to drift off into arguments, incoherent shouting, and ruined dinner partys (only slightly exagerating here).

While all future scenario studies indicate the urgency of steeper and steeper emission reductions to meet sooner and sooner carbon neutrality deadlines, the share of fossil fuels in the world’s total energy consumption has stubbornly remained the same for the past 30 years: 80% (1).

But at the same time, there seems to be a endless list of promising solutions coming out of the lab. Renewable energies have managed the incredible feat of becoming cheaper than most other sources of electricity generation sources over the past few years (2), electric vehicle batteries are making incredible progress, smart meters can significantly improve the energy consumption within households… So how come the scientific community cannot come together to give governing authorities, industries and the general public a clear road plan to follow? Their colleagues over at the health department seemed to do a pretty good job repeating day-in, day-out: #washyourhands, #spreadthecurve, #staythefuckhome. Even if in hindsight some of the COVID-19 measures proved more effective than others, we reached these conclusions by first implementing them. It’s about time we do this leap of faith on the environmental side as well.

The biggest barrier within the academic community to implement this for sustainability is disappointingly simple: it seems impossible to reach a consensus on the road to follow. While an overwhelming majority agrees on the cause (took them long enough to do so), there are as many different solutions as there are research centres.

Part of this is due to the nature of the problem: for climate change, while the problem is a global phenomenon, the solutions have to be adapted to the local conditions. Inevitably, a researcher from Ghana will come to different conclusions than the one in Norway on how to best produce renewable energy.

But another issue, which is the main point I wanted to get to (geez, finally!), is the way in which academics communicate their findings. What makes academic work trustworthy is not the brilliance of the researcher, nor the university he is affiliated to or the amount of money which has been dumped into the project. Instead, it relies on the fundamental concept of peer-reviewing: before any work is published, it must be reviewed by an external group of experts in the field to judge whether the work is of enough interest, of high enough quality and whether the applied methodology is rigorous enough. Of course, academics being humans, this process is not always impartial. However, it is the best we’ve got at the moment to avoid the “fake news” phenomenon infiltrating itself into academic circles. But this process, which is essential, often takes months before the final verdict falls. And so inevitably, the pace of “official” knowledge dissemination is relatively slow, despite all the work put in.

PHD Comics on Twitter: "The Academic Review Process. http://t.co ...

And once you’re through the holy gates of peer-reviewed articles, you still have to make it into the big wide world. While an academic’s work will not give THE answer to a question, it will give AN answer. A commonly used metric to assess whether this answer is worth listening to is the number of times an article / piece of work was cited. Indeed, any work in academia lies on the shoulders of others, and therefore you cite them in your own work. This is also why peer-reviewing is so important: if one brick in the pyramid is flawed, the whole structure crumbles.

So in a sense, academics have invented social media and have been giving each other “likes” long before Facebook was a thing :p. Except that you can’t just post whatever and whenever you want based on your mood. And this is why, in my opinion, the academic dialogue cannot keep up with the fast-paced news and medias nowadays. That 10-page bit of work paid with tears and sweat after 10 months of hard work will just get drowned in the constant stream of daily tweets. While I think it would be good for everyone to tweet a bit less and read a bit more, it is also up to the academics to adapt to their times and also get more involved in the public debate, communicating about their work in a more approachable way and include the general public more. This is not a call to transform publication journals into newfeeds, but an encouragement for academics to also disseminate their knowledge outside academic circles. If given the chance to understand it, many people might have their own word to say on the relevance of a particular work. The problem is, at the moment the public is only informed of this work through third-party sources or buzzfeeded summaries, which can dangerously deform initial results.

But this is where we hit another uncomfortable point for researchers (who already seem uncomfortable enough in the society they are asked to evolve in – just a bit of self-derision here 😉 ). For a scientist, a result is meaningless without its associated error. As you inevitably take certain assumptions to build up your experiments or models (I’m excluding the theoretical mathematician weirdos here), the results you get from your simulations, calculations and analyses will only be approximations to reality. And therefore it is fundamental to underline this uncertainty or deviation. In general, this leaves scientists to have very rational arguments, always counterweighting their results with the assumptions they’ve made.

Yet this cautious behaviour is again fundamentally at odds with the assertive tone of the self-proclaimed experts of the Internet. People nowadays want to hear facts (whether right or wrong), and elect people who “promise” to fulfill great electoral agendas. The rise in extremism seems to be more the death of moderated dialogue, leaving scientific (or rather, academic, let’s not forget the importance of the Humanities in the debate) dialogue very difficult. Yet when it comes to looking into the future, there’s no “fake” or “true” news: there’s just hypotheses, assumptions and a good dosis of uncertainties. In that case, consensus through informed dialogue is the only way forward (while also remembering to literally pick up the shovel once in a while).

In the end, what I’m trying to say, is that if we all agreed a bit more that there are a lot of things we don’t know, and won’t know until we try them out, then maybe this could help us make a step further and get going with implementing real solutions against climate change. But this requires more communication efforts from everyone, not least from the academic community’s side.

Why learning languages shouldn’t just be for privileged millenials taking a gap year

Posted on May 12, 2020May 16, 2020 By nicoftrs

…and why this has something to do with sustainability, like pretty much everything else.

The signs of isolationism have clearly been looming over our heads for quite some time now, with one demagogue goon getting elected after the other, competing for whoever will make the most empty promises to protect us from a globalised world gotten “out of control”.

And if a few months ago the undeterred europhile optimists could still flaunt the benefits of passport-free holidays on the Costa del Sol as a major symbol of European unity, the uncoordinated response of the European countries to the current COVID-19 crisis clearly has put the state of the “Union” under the spotlight, and it’s not a pretty sight.

But who am I to criticise, all of us are facing unprecedented circumstances and there certainly isn’t a routine protocol to follow; our dear leaders are just trying to save whatever there is to save, with varying degrees of success. But now comes the key part for our economies, societies, and therefore our sustainability policies for the years to come: the recovery. In this context, increasing pressure is put on the governments to use this opportunity to realign their agendas with their sustainability goals, to the image of the Green New Deal in the US or the European Green Deal promoted by the president of the European Comission, Ursula von der Leyen.

However, a change in tone within the “green” movement can also start to become noticeable. While the sustainability movement has always been a hot topic within younger generations with a more “global” perspective (energetically waving their “No planet B” slogans in the face of their “Not in my backyward” opponents), the increasing urge for concrete actions has underlined the importance of local solutions to this global problem of climate change and ecosystem destruction.

Eating local and in-season produce, supporting local shops, shortening supply chains, favouring local holidays instead of long-haul flights are all solutions which are gaining momentum in the public opinion. And the catastrophic consequences of a world pandemic on these globalised supply chains have only reinforced convictions that our current system is not resilient enough.

Certainly, this is a step in the right direction. But let’s make sure that these self-centred solutions don’t coincide too much with the isolationist agendas of you-know-who I mentioned as an introduction.

Yes, part of the problems to climate change must be solved on a local scale, but this does not mean we should lose interest in what our neighbours are doing, or even people on the other side of the world which we might never meet. Simply because part of the solution will still require intense international collaboration. Whether the uranium for a nuclear reactor, the lithium in a car battery or the rare metals in the smart phone controlling your smart home, these materials are rarely found where they are used. And so the uranium from Australia, the lithium from Bolivia or the rare metals from China need to be shipped to the places of manufacture. Then comes the question of who builds the transportation ships, who provides the raw materials these ships are made out of, who provides lunch for the dockyard workers building the ships… And before you know it, you’ve gone around the world (refer to this little cartoon to get a better picture with the life of a pencil). And so even if we achieve to be self-sustaining at 95%, the remaining 5% where we rely on someone else imply a need for collaboration by everyone.

One could answer that we should simply abandon these superfluous materialistic neocapitalistic solutions and live happily from “bare necessities”, but that would require to give up a lot of the elements we’ve learned to call “civilisation” over the centuries. Growing your own produce, knitting your own clothes, chopping your own wood, carving your own tools certainly must give a great feeling of independence and fulfillment, but one must also question why leaving some of this behind was considered progress a few centuries ago. Would we still be able to produce the machines, the pharmaceuticals, and the skilled labour supporting our healthcare system, which we currently learn to appreciate so much, if everyone went back to such a low-tech society? (note that low-tech here is used slightly differently to the more common definition by Philippe Bihouix, which focuses more on sober and responsible use of tech).

If we want to tackle the climate change now (would be a good idea, wouldn’t it?), then we have to use the best tools we have available now. And these are deeply interconnected on a global scale. If collaboration is inevitable, this requires to make a step towards others, to understand how their history, geography, demography, you name it, have shaped how they think and how they see the world. Because if you think that Google Translate will help you build closer relationships with other countries, you can keep trying. So what better way to understand a certain point of view than through learning a particular language?

Now let me first explain what I mean by learning a language: yes, the first few steps might involve painfully swiping through pet names on Duolinguo, ploughing through dry grammar rules and getting frustrated at rule exceptions which occur so often that they seem to be the norm. This exercise in itself can seem pretty pointless in terms of cultural understanding of the other. But going back to this toddler stage is first of all very humbling, and makes you question expressions, concepts and ideas you took for granted. How come “organic” products are called “bio” in French or German and “økologisk” in Danish? If anything, this shows us that the organic industry has something to do with nature, being a mix of organic, biological and ecological processes, but overall still remains a pretty unclear concept, despite the suffocatingly strict regulations applied to it by the EU. It doesn’t use any pesticides or fertilisers indeed, but remains heavily mechanised and favours large-scale monocultures, which haven’t proven to be the most friendly to biodiversity either. Has the concept just been lost in translation or is it just incoherent from the start?

But let’s get to the really interesting part of learning a language: as you progress, you start reading more texts written by natives and you pride yourself in reading snippets of articles here and there. It starts with being able to pronounce Bundesliga football results correctly (good luck with Mönchengladbach vs. Hoffenheim), but slowly you realise you can also follow more elaborate articles. And before you know it, you have access to a whole new world of information, which hasn’t been translated in your native language. Not only do you find new sources of information, but you are also confronted to new point of views.

This is where the “usefulness” of a language should not only be measured by the number of people who speak it. Does learning Danish, a language roughly spoken by 5 million people, make any sense compared to Mandarin, spoken by 1.4 billion (assuming you don’t live in either of these countries)? Well yes: if I work in the field of renewable energy, where Denmark clearly is a leading country, and I truely want to understand the public debates which have led to these successful sustainability policies, then I’ve got to immerse myself into their newspaperes, tv shows and podcasts…in Danish.

And as you immerse yourself into these cultures, you learn to recognise some patterns (without generalising too much of course, each society definitely has its own set of values ): while not all Northern Europeans are pragmatics, the North European empiricism clearly seems to influence society deeply. The German “Energiewende” can certainly be criticised on some points, yet the country has managed to establish some of the leading companies in renewable energies through it. Meanwhile, their French neighbours in quest of the Absolute Truth, entrenched in their pro-nuclear vs. pro-renewables arguments, are still waiting for the first commercial offshore wind farm to be installed off their coast. Yet the ideas brought up during these French debates are definitely worth being spread further than the borders of the camembert hexagone. Jean-Marc Jancovici, Philippe Bihouix, Arthur Keller: all names which have a large French audience while sadly remaining largely unknow to other countries, despite ideas which could be applicable to them as well.

The more you confront yourself to these other cultures, the better you get to understand what defines your own society as well. And the perception of others on your own culture can often be quite eye-opening (even when speaking the same language): for Californians we met, my British friends and I were all obviously simply Europeans, without any afterthought. Sure enough, these college-educated folks could place London, Paris and Berlin on a map and tell me about major philosophical movements from each of these cities, but after all, these were all places with century-old buildings (well, those that weren’t bombed), where students would never think of casually walking around wearing university stash, and where it wasn’t taboo to find alcohol being served on campus (rest assured, there’s more to Europe than that). And so strangly enough, it’s confronting yourself to people on the other side of the planet that makes you realise what shapes your society and what you can do to change it.

To bring it back to languages and international collaboration for the sustainability movement, this need to understand the point of view of others is essential, now more than ever. What before seemed a simple differentiation between developing and developed countries has evolved into a puzzle of developed countries, but each according to their own definition and priorities. And before we turn on each other, arguing which definition of developed is more valid than the other, we need to understand what drives the development motivations of each culture, each country, each people. And in my humble opinion, learning languages can be a beautiful gateway to achieve this, giving at the same time an equal opportunity for everyone to discover new cultures around the world.

Indeed, with the beauty of Internet, a lot of this internationalisation can be done comfortably sat at home, relieving both your wallet and the atmosphere from another 8-hour flight. And when the time comes, you will be able to make a lot more out of your trip, ordering that “zumo de naranja sin hielo por favor” feeling like a real local. Because let’s face it, travelling is something magical we shouldn’t start frowning upon for environmental reasons. We just need to learn to appreciate it for its true value, and not just book a trip because that’s what people should do on holidays.

The limits of renewable energy

Posted on April 6, 2020April 7, 2020 By nicoftrs

This talk was held on Facebook Live on the 30th of March 2020 under the quite straightforward title: “Sustainability talks: The limits of renewable energy”. It was originally meant to be a live talk hosted by the Repair Café in Odense, but the Coronavirus lockdown decided to challenge our creativity and technological literacy, forcing us to host the event online instead.

All in all, apart from the fact that I got to interact (if only by Facebook comments) with other human beings after three weeks of self-isolation, I was really impressed by the interest and engagement of the public, which I would like to thank again. But enough said, get the video started to listen to what I had to waffle about. Below the video you’ll find the questions asked during the talk and the answers to those I didn’t have the time to address in the talk itself.

(Hint: you can start at 02:15 to skip the painful setup process)

Posted by Nicolas Fatras on Monday, March 30, 2020

Q&A

Note that you could probably have a whole presentation in itself on each of these questions, so I’ve tried to be brief but to the point. Be aware that I’m also only answering to the best of my knowledge (while trying to be more or less coherent and rational of course :P).

Can you talk about this change in consumption?

This is THE big question which every government or policy maker would like to have answered, so all I can do is give suggestions and personal experiences. And honestly, I think this is the best answer we can give: if consumption is driven by individuals, then there’s no general solution, which is the nightmare of centralised governments. That’s also in my opinion why the power industry, which until recently mainly had big centralised players, was the first one to get decarbonised. Transports on the other hand are lagging behind because they depend so much on individual commuter’s specific driving patterns, and are therefore so hard to centrally control.

That being said, what I mean by “a change in consumption” is that if consumption is governed by what renewables can supply to us, we will inevitably be limited in our choices. For example, if planes were forced to fly on biofuels instead of fossil fuels, even with a mature biomass industry there would be no way to physically sustain our current rate of flights. Flights would become a lot less frequent and therefore more expensive. People will shout that this goes against principles of democratisation of travelling. But isn’t it rather that we’ve lost all sense of the value of travelling? (I invite you to check out the “Nirvana through Corona” post on this blog for more reflections on the topic).

I for one am a massive fan of triathlon, and at this time of the year (early spring), it is typical for teams (especially from the colder parts of Europe) to go on a week-long training camp in Mallorca, admittedly more for the scenic bike routes than the tan lines (well, well…) . But this is only possible because RyanAir and co allow to get there and back for less than a food shop at the supermarket. If flights were a lot less accessible, I think most teams in Denmark would find that a week of cross-country ski training in Sweden instead would be just as fun, just as cardio-intensive, (if you’re lucky) just as sunny and most of all a whole lot more eco-friendly.

Do you have any orders of magnitude wrt CO2 emissions throughout the whole life-cycle?

I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t have numbers on top of my head, but the table on page 1335 of this IPCC annex gives a very useful inter-technology comparison in gCO2eq/kWh taking into account the whole lifecyle (but it seems to be without recycling, interestingly enough!). As always with life cycle analyses, the hard question is always where to draw the line on what emissions to count or not. Emissions also depend on where, how, by whom the technology is deployed, but in general according to this annex:

Wind (~11 gCO2eq/kWh) and solar (~ 48 gCO2eq/kWh) can have a fairly clean conscience compared to the classic dirty ol’ coal (~820 gCO2eq/kWh) and even combined cycle gas (~ 490 gCO2eq/kWh) industries.

Do we make progress on the issue of stocking renewable energy ?

The problem with storage is that it involves transformation of energy from one form to another, and therefore inevitable losses (hydrogen production being the most flagrant example). As satisfying our demand entirely from renewables is already going to be a close call, we have to make sure to use most of it when it is produced. This calls for more “flexible” consumption, and demand adapting to supply, instead of the other way around. Examples are “smart” homes that plan consumption, planned electric vehicle charging, etc…
But of course, we will still need some storage, and I would summarise the existing solutions like that:

-Hydro power pumping remains the most common solution at large scale, but is restricted to countries which have the adequate geology. A cool project is the link being built between Scotland and Norway to store the excess Scottish wind power behind Norwegian dams
-thermal “storage” is however also a very interesting solution. Unlike electricity, which is immediate, heat takes a certain time to dissipate. The Danish use CHP (Combined Heat and Power) stations to cope with the high share of wind (>40%!!!) in their grid: when wind blows, these power plants (which run on biomass, waste, or whatever you want) reduce their electricity consumption and just produce heat, which is redistributed to the households through district heating. When there is less wind, these CHP plants use more of the heat to produce electricity, and less is redistributed to the households. In a sense, the heat production acts as “buffer” for the variable electricity production. Long-term thermal storage in specific materials (stones) is also being experimented and is worth following closely
-batteries grab most of the media’s attention nowadays, and are making incredible progress in terms of efficiency, lifetime, material usage, but I think they will remain specific to certain applications (eg. private electric vehicles), as large scale storage is not feasible
-a lot of talks are also happening with regards to hydrogen, but as I said, producing the fuel and reconverting it back to electricity in the car would leave you with a ~ 36% overall conversion efficiency, which only really makes sense in very specific applications where you have no other choice.

So I think there still isn’t and won’t be any clear winner in the future, but I believe we can solve the intermittency problem at least on the time scale of up to a few weeks of storage. The real problem is the seasonal variability over the year, and the only solution I see for this is to adapt our lifestyle to each season (our move to the equator!).

Is a “rebound effect” likely? Where people will consume more because it is seen to be “cleaner”?

Answered (partly) in the video at 43:58.

Regarding the rebound effect due to the “cleaner” ressource, I don’t really see it as a major problem. On the contrary, I feel the rebound effect at the moment is happening because people don’t really think about where their energy is coming from. I mean…electricity is generated by electric plugs, right?

Regarding the transportation of raw materials, is it possible to keep all the processes (mining, transport…) in Europe, to avoid imports from other continents? (especially metals, panels, concrete)

To answer that, I’ll boil down these materials into their main components:

-the steel used in the wind turbine towers and the structural frames of solar panels is highly recyclable. If Europe manages to reduce its consumption as would be needed to match the supply by renewables, a lot of the steel used in obsolete infrastructure could be reused for the further development of renewables. Attention should be paid to the quality (strength, stiffness) of the recycled steel, as it depends on the ratio of raw iron to added additives (coke being the main one, which is essentially processed coal, hum hum)

-Silicon-based PV panels, which are currently the most common ones out there, are based on silicon, produced out of sand. Sand wasn’t particularly perceived as a rare element until now, however its ubiquitous use in our society has driven it to become a more and more precious resource. Which shows the extent to which our current consumption models put stress on the most basic of nature’s resources.

-Concrete is simply a mixture of aggregates (see comment on sand for silicon), water and cement. Cement in itself is made out of limestone, chalk or clay, heated up and grinded at very high temperatures. While these basic materials are quite common, it is the very high temperatures at which they are processed which are a problem, as they are very energy and therefore emission-intensive. Cement is therefore more of an energy than a ressource problem.

The stock issues we see on a shorter term concern rare earth elements such as a the ones presented, which are really absent from Europe, but with a bit of luck innovative technology and design can find alternatives to those.

Again, I’m not a materials expert, so there might be some much more clever ways to go about this nowadays. But I think in general it is interesting to look at Europe’s reusable resources rather than its raw resources.

Thoughts on carbon taxing?

I think carbon taxing is definitely necessary to get things changing and has to be considerably increased compared to current levels, however the big question is how to implement it while staying socially fair. When you see the Yellow Vest mouvement in France which originally emerged from an increase in fuel prices, you realise some people really can’t afford to pay more on heavily fossil fuel-dependent goods. Taxes and restrictive regulations are in my opinion best suited to regulate and optimise the functioning of existing systems. However, alternative systems also have to emerge on the side, which are a lot less dependent on fossil fuels (short food circuits, local employment and tourism…) and which are based on incentives rather than fines.

But again, this is a topic up for debate and still extensively researched, so I’ll keep my eyes out for answers as well.

Hi Nicolas, you mentioned about how society is better at being more environmentally friendly when laws/regulations are put in place – what practical laws would you recommend governments put in place to help reduce consumption and enhance everybody’s individual environmental responsibility?

I am having a particularly hard time answering in a concise way to this question, as this is very close to my PhD topic and I have a tooooooooon to say. I’ll try to make it short.
First of all, more and more people (especially younger generations who’ve only known democracy) point towards the advantages of “green” authoritarianism to meet sustainability targets. Sure enough, the strict measures of Coronavirus quarantines have helped significantly reduce emissions over the past few weeks, but I don’t think restricting our liberties to that point is something we should strive for.
As you correctly put, regulations should instead help/encourage consumption reduction, and in our current society this usually goes through economic incentives / disincentives:
-planes nowadays still fly without taxation on kerosene, which allows them to offer these ridiculously low prices. How can short distance European flights be cheaper than the same distance by train !? There definitely needs to be higher investments in our rail system, for one. Only then will individuals be able to make the right environmentally friendly transportation choices
-consumers should also be made a lot more aware of the daily energy they are consuming: this could be indicated on products you buy along with the price tag. Installing meters in households also allows consumers to see that toasting bread or using a hair drier uses an incredible amount of energy compared to other household applications and makes them think about the impact of their daily actions.

But the main issue for governments is that individuals, unlike industries, are not only economically driven and have more irrational, diverse and unpredictable behaviour. And this is why applying regulations directly to individuals is hard, and this is also why most regulations focus typically on industries with centralised activities.
By pushing for more renewables, we’re in a situation where it is not governmental regulations which restrict our choices, but the rigid laws of physics, and therefore we have to adapt our lifestyles no matter what.

Some points from what I know:
– In France, many installation projects are stopped for security reasons by the air force, as they might prevent low altitude flights
– Energy transportation remains a huge deal which does not have any good answer for now
– Many people living close to such windfarms complain about the noise produced. I do not know if it’s true, but what could be the improvements in the near future ?

I’ll answer to points 1 and 3, because point 2 will just increase the size of this post by a tenfold. Regarding wind farms near airfields, they are indeed a problem as according to regulation they represent an obstacle along planes’ take-off and landing paths. Additionally, they create turbulent wakes up to several hundreds of meters above the rotors, especially for large wind farm arrays. However, current regulations are considered too strict and in Germany debates are under process to reduce the exclusion zone.

Regarding noise, I’m afraid this is a legacy from the very first prototypes in the 70s-80s which has been transformed into a popular belief the industry has struggled to get rid of. Indeed, the much smaller turbines back then had a much higher rpm (rounds per minute), which made the swishing sound of the blades quite loud. Since then, larger turbines have lowered their rpm, improved the aerodynamics of the blade tips to reduce vortex shedding, and improved the gear mechanism in the nacelle to make it more smooth. It turns out that wind turbine noise measurements have to filter out noises from nearby road traffic or wind in the trees to identify the impact of turbines. And frankly, whenever I walk under turbines I can barely hear them myself, although I’m not quite deaf yet.

Another issue to take into account is the “shadow flicker effect”, where the shadows from the rotating blades can be a nuisance for nearby residents, especially when the sun is low. However, most wind farm planning software nowadays take this into account, and make sure our farmers can go to sleep undisturbed, to the soft sound of nearby passing cars on the country roads.

Do you have an estimate on how much run time years you have to deduct for recycling from the overall energy producing years?

Quite frankly, no. It definitely will depend on your recycling method. For wind turbines, if you mechanically grind the components to use them as new building materials (concrete aggregate from foundations, blades parts for cement production or structural elements), this will not use much energy and could even be counted as emissions for their next use instead of the turbine’s. Blade thermal treatment will use a lot more.

The high heats required to recycle solar panels will also require energy-intensive methods. Note also that a temperature of 500C requires high-grade heat, so you cannot just use recycled industrial waste heat, which is an additional challenge.

But I will definitely keep my eyes out for more specific numbers!

Can the blades be “refurbished” and reused?

Answer in the video at 41:15.

Is consumption reduction on a global scale realistic with increasing population and without keeping the majority of the world population in poverty? What makes us believe that the transition towards a sustainable future will be easier in these countries and free of dominance (in terms of market)?

Answered in the video at 45:44.

How does the short lifetime imply fast learning curve?

Answered in the video at 50:10.

What do you think about nuclear energy, What about fission vs fusion?

Answered in the video at 51:45.

Last but not least, an interesting conversation from the chat:

Lea: Europe do not have any rare eath material ores...

Nicolas: Very good point Lea, and I think that’s why we need to rethink the design of our technologies to not only make them more efficient, but also give us more energy independence. It would be a shame to get rid of the shackels of fossil-fuel geopolitics to get the same problem with renewables.

Lea: That is true.. I used RERs only as example of how Europe can not be resource independent at the moment 🙂 maybe it is the future in urban mining..

Christophe: Now wind turbines, especially onshore, can be built without rare metals, and a lot of research is done to avoid rare metals in future generation of wind turbines and solar pv

Apart from the many questions, it was fantastic to see people from so many different backgrounds get thinking about the topic. And I think it is exactly this cross-disciplinary collaboration which is needed in the sustainability field at the moment. So thank you everyone for keeping the discussion going, and I have to say you’ve motivated me to try this again another time, for better or worse, so you see you hopefully soon 😉

Nirvana through Corona

Posted on March 17, 2020April 5, 2020 By nicoftrs

You can thank the quarantine imposed by our ever-so-friendly COVID-19 for me getting back to you on a Monday night. As I was washing my pots and pans, grumbling about all those cancelled holiday plans in the upcoming months while enjoying the lock-down here in Denmark, I thought it was about time to throw my thoughts to the web again and get a break from the Corona news-feed overdose.

Whether you wanted to or not, it’s been impossible to stay away from discussions, breaking news, country mortality rankings giving off a sense of Corona-Olympics, and a myriad of memes which thankfully are there to provide a bit of comic relief (my personal favourite definitely remains this one).

But a striking video was also the response of quarantined Italians playing accordion on their balconies, seemingly having a good time and bringing some joy to the ‘hood. One might put it on the Italians’ warm-hearted temperament, but it has been experienced time and again that in times of hardship, community ties become stronger and people support each other (well, from a safe distance in this case, of course). But what does this all have to do with sustainable living? Spending your life trapped on a balcony doesn’t seem like a particularly long-term goal to strive for.

Well, one could be very cynical and suppose that this pandemic is a nice little drill for what could await us. By that I don’t mean a post-apocalyptic scenario worthy of the “Walking Dead”, but simply a severe limitation on the endless travelling, consuming and past-time possibilities we have at our fingertips (literally).

These limitations could come for different reasons:

-we actually decided to do something about those Climate Agreements we happily signed a few years back, thinking at the time that the objectives would magically be reached once we signed them on a piece of paper, not realising how much effort it would actually involve.

And no, these efforts do not just come from governments magically waiving their wands or scientists inventing a new energy-making machine. It’s gonna require some pretty strong will-power from us mere mortals on the consumption side too, and that involves a bit more than saying no to a plastic straw in the bar on your Ibiza holidays.

-the rate of crop-destroying droughts and floods, pandemics (whether concerning the sapiens squad, other animals or plants) and other natural reactions of Mother Nature for being bullied by us over so many decades could put a severe long-lasting stress on our agriculture and raw materials supply chain, causing our whole economy to collapse. Yes, to my eyes this is the biggest threat of climate change and should be communicated a bit more loudly than the sea-level rise by a few centimeters every decade, which to most people seems like a minor price to pay to keep on consuming mindlessly.

-we run out of petrol, the fuel on which 96% of our transportation system relies. But let’s be honest, this is something that’s been prophesied since my father was my age, and it might already be too late by the time this ACTUALLY happens. We keep finding ways to access new reserves (i.e. commercially recoverable oil) whenever proven reserves are starting to look a bit scarce. A real problem (or blessing, depending on how you look at it) is that more and more technology and effort, and hence energy, has to be used to recover this source of … energy. And so inevitably there will come a point where we will have to spend more energy extracting oil than we can get out of it, which by definition makes it economically unviable. In fact, this point is approaching much faster than we realise. This is simplified in the picture below, which shows the ROI (ratio of energy delivered to energy required to extract it) for oil in the world over the past decades.

Source: http://images.feasta.org/2017/01/Systemic-Change-Rev-7.pdf

You can see that our good ol’ Boomers in 1960 (or in fact their parents, aka Grandpa and Grandma), had a lot easier time getting access to all that oil than we had in 2010. Can’t really blame them for it, they already had been through enough hardships in their lives at that point. Anyway, it definitely didn’t get easier throughout the years, and it’s not predicted to improve in the years to come. So there comes a point where we will have to give up squeezing out that precious liquid, just as you eventually give up trying to get to those last bits of pumpkin-spice frappucino Grande latte stuck between ice cubes in your Starbucks cup using your (sustainably sourced) straw.

The point of these scenarios (which are not mutually exclusive by the way) is that we will most likely have to reduce our consumption drastically in the near future anyhow, whether planned or forced. Sorry to disappoint on that one: as an engineer I have a lot of faith in technology, but when the numbers don’t add up to satisfy our energy needs (and stay tuned for a thrilling post on that theme in a bit), we’re gonna have to adapt our need to the numbers.

But what about just making our machines more efficient, for the same amount of travelling? Well, first of all, this is what the fuel efficiency curve for jet aircrafts (such as the Boeing 737) looks like:

Source: https://www.greenaironline.com/news.php?viewStory=684

The seat-km and ton-km metrics indicate the fuel efficiency is measured for a given distance travelled and weight/number of passengers carried. While showing an impressive progress, the curve’s decrease has definitely been slowing down over the past decades. Now I’m not a jet expert, but this seems to hint towards the fact that we’re getting closer and closer to the physical limits of that technology. And you might continue to spend millions in research to keep that curve going down by another few percent, but to cut our emissions by 70- 80% anytime soon, we’re gonna have to find another way.

Second problem is the infamous rebound effect: you make something more efficient just to have people consume more of it. Car engines have kept getting more efficient, yes, but this has been offset by cars getting heavier to be more spacious, safer, “smarter”, etc. Build another motorway lane to relieve traffic jams, and you’ll find out you’ve just created more traffic as more people have an incentive to drive to work. Insulate houses better? People will heat almost as much, but walk around in a T-shirt instead of that embarrassing wool jumper knitted by Mom last Christmas (OK I might be dramatizing, not everyone is Ron Weasley).

But you got it: while the first point on efficiency is simply ruled by the laws of physics, the second is definitely a behavioural issue. The problem is, this behaviour is so deeply engrained in our society that only shocks such as the Coronavirus crisis seem to be able to momentarily stop our constant thirst for more.

So maybe instead of impatiently waiting for the situation to come back to normal after the Coronavirus pandemic and catch-up on all that lost time in quarantine, let’s take the time to really think about what is really missed and what is not so bad about this slowed-down life-pace.

Just a hint: if they’re still around, have a chat with your grandparents. Even if they are the most sensitive to this new pandemic, I don’t think they are the most worried about it. I’m pretty sure they’ve seen worse in their lifetime, and most of all they are used to not having everything they want immediately, anywhere, at any time. Ever wonder how your granddad could vividly remember his summer holidays of ’57? Well, back then travelling was still something special and exciting, and you would take the time to enjoy it. Enjoying things for the time they take and appreciating the value of simple daily routines is something we forgot along the way, and is probably a reflex we should try to get back if we want to start putting a break to ever-accelerating consumption behaviours.

And hey, I’m definitely in the same boat as everyone: my family lives a 2 hrs flight away (instead of an excruciatingly painful 26 hrs coach journey – yes living on islands doesn’t help), so why not go for a weekend, especially for such cheap prices? Well, I guess it’s time to accept that the world really isn’t as small as people say (and that’s a great thing!), and that moving to a place also means embracing the new environment you’re in. If you make the choice to move, you gotta own it. And you’ll see that whenever you do end up going back to visit your family or friends, it makes those trips ever-so more enjoyable and memorable. This is true for travelling, but also for the restaurants, the cinemas, the shopping malls, etc., which you could go to, but don’t necessarily have to.

On interconnectors, and my love for Europe

Posted on February 5, 2020April 5, 2020 By nicoftrs

In these times of Brexit (don’t worry, read on, I won’t get into politics), marked by a mixture of mourning, incomprehension, anger and, I guess if we follow the logic of democracy, celebrations for some, I would like to talk about a subject that particularly lies at heart to me because it is … intrinsically European.

To put it simply, interconnectors are big cables allowing two separate electricity networks to exchange electricity production across their border. While you won’t see them as you go about in your everyday life, they are one of the most tangible elements of what unites countries together, more than the Erasmus programs, the passport-free holidays and the toll-free trade rights, which are usually what comes to most people’s mind when talking about Europe (don’t get me wrong, you do find interconnectors elsewhere, but I’ll focus on European examples for now).

Nowadays, most electricity networks in European countries are liberalised, so that the basic laws of supply and demand apply. However, unlike other markets, this balancing has to be done instantaneously, otherwise the lights go out pretty quickly. And as a grid operator, you certainly don’t want that happening during the screening of the Champions League final penalty shoot-outs, unless you like to put your life at stake.

This need for redundancy is why electric networks were built out on a larger scale in the first place, so that a power plant failure at one point could be replaced by power plants operating somewhere else. The higher the amount of connections between the points of a grid, the stabler it is. This makes electric grids the largest physically connected machines on Earth, as a power plant’s behaviour in Scotland for example will depend on another one in Cornwall (I mean, come on, the island I’m referring to remains at least physically big, relatively speaking…).

While in mainland Europe transmission operators agreed to build out a synchronous grid which facilitated cross-border power exchanges, areas which were physically more isolated such as Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia and the Baltics had to develop their own transmission system.

So traditionally, the main purpose of such grid network developments was avoiding getting knocked out by frustrated hooligans. However, in the 60s, France and the UK decided to put their false rivalry aside as they saw the opportunity for a market emerging, despite the moat separating them. Indeed, as each country has different energy policies and therefore production dynamics (mainly nuclear for France and coal/gas for the UK at that time), but also different consumption patterns (good ol’ 2h lunch break for the Froggies whereas kettles get boiling in unison at football half-times on ze Rosbif side), the market balance is reached at difference prices on either side of the Channel at different times of the day. By exchanging power from one market to another, interconnectors thereby allow to sell off electricity higher on one side while buying it cheaper on the other side. Easy way to make money while helping the neighbour in need!

And so after a first interconnector of 0.16GW was operational for 20 years, it was replaced by a second cross-Channel interconnector of 2GW in 1986, which is still operational nowadays. As a reference, the average evening consumption in the UK is around 40GW, so that at any point, 5% of the consumption can be supplied from abroad.

The clear benefits shown by the cross-Channel interconnector encouraged a series of others to be built and planned, as can be seen below.

These undersea cables are quite an engineering feat in itself. Many of you might have heard of AC and DC current (if this only sounds like a rock-band to you, maybe check out the Tesla vs. Edison Epic Rap Battle of the Century for enlightment), but don’t really know which is used when. Put very, very crudely, AC is considered easier to produce and transmit, while DC is better to use in household applications.

When it comes to electricity networks, transmissions losses are indeed a big topic. A certain percentage of electricity gets lost as heat (Joule effect) during transportation, and the longer the distance the higher the loss. Until recently, AC was the preferred way of transporting electricity over long distances. However, clever bits of engineering have allowed over the last couple of decades to develop HVDC (High Voltage DC), which turns out to be more efficient than AC over even longer distances. Additionally, it allows to connect two asynchronous networks (basically when two networks wiggle out of phase), which is exactly what is needed when connecting those poor islands gone astray from the mainland! If I completely lost you in the last few lines, just take home as the next pub-quiz trivia knowledge that modern interconnectors are HVDC links, and that it’s pretty cool.

Aaaaaaaanyway, these cables connecting all these bits of land with each other have acquired even more interest over the last few years with the increase of variable and not-so-easily predictable renewables in our grid. What to do with all that wind when no one needs it at 02:00 AM? Or how to still heat up my dinner at night when the solar panels on my roof are pretty useless?

Well, again, the natural wind and sun ressources are different throughout the day and in different regions across Europe. By connecting all these renewable sources together in a mega-grid, it smoothens out the individual variability and allows to provide renewable energy for everyone more continuously. So after all, those dreams of isolated communities relying on their own solar panels to grow their quinoa in greenhouses (I’m not sure how you grow quinoa to be honest) might be a bit counterproductive, and we would be much better off sharing all that renewable energy.

Secondly, some specific geographical differences between countries can be exploited. The most striking and exciting example is the North Sea Link currently being built between the UK and Norway. In the UK, especially in the Northern parts, the grid often experiences times of wind power overproduction which no one needs. Norway on the other hand generates 98% of its electricity through hydroelectric dams thanks to its mountainous topography and high amounts of rainfall (at least some people can be thankful for their shitty weather!). Hydroelectric dams have the very interesting property that their turbines can be run backwards at times, essentially working as pumps to store the water high up. With the North Sea Link, the overproduced wind power from Scotland can then be used to pump the water up the reservoirs in Norway, to then be used later on in the hydroelectric dams the other way around when there is a shortage of production in the UK. Essentially, these hydrodams work as massive energy storage solutions, which are to date the cheapest and largest energy storage option available.

This example out of many shows the benefits which can be extracted from collaboration between different countries through interconnectors. And while some people might moan about the oppressive bureaucratic nature of the EU, I hope examples such as these will remind them that it’s not all bad and that differences within Europe is what makes the strength of this place. I’ll stop here before this gets too emotional, but thank you for reading this far and see you soon for another topic I’ll probably have randomly chosen the night before!

Is there an optimal city size for sustainability?

Posted on December 8, 2019April 5, 2020 By nicoftrs

When reading news articles or magazines on the future of urbanisation, a common picture that usually pops up is the rendered 3D CAD drawing of kids playing on large green spaces, while carbon-neutral dwellings out of sustainable materials are integrated in the landscape. Add a few vertical wind turbines, PV-covered rooftops, a bike here, a hydrogen or EV-charging station there, and the picture is complete. Already quite a change from “the Jetsons” TV-series future imagined only a few decades back, and something which seems a lot more sustainable.

According to the UN almost 70% of the world’s population is predicted to live in cities by 2050. At the same time, more and more studies show that the net CO2 emissions of urban dwellers tend to be lower than their rural counterparts. According to LiveScience, New Yorkers tend to emit 30% less than the national average, mainly due to their smaller dwellings and shorter transportation distances.

So obviously, shouldn’t more and more people live in cities and let only farmers (those having to care for our sustenance) live in the countryside?

Well, apart from killing the “charm of rural culture”, you might also find some concrete arguments against this idea. First, one only needs to spend some time in the London, Paris or any 10 million + city tube/metro to realise how long it takes to get anywhere and do anything. Assuming you don’t live bang in the middle of the city, just count the number of hours in a week you spend underground. I’m not even talking about rush hour, where you have the privilege of spending this time between sweaty armpits and luggage of tourists who clearly had no clue what they signed up for. And this is still probably the smartest way of travelling if one considers the alternative: being stuck in a bus behind the unloading delivery van, or even worse in your own car which you still have to find a parking spot for. And pay for the car. And the fuel. And the maintenance. Oh, and did I mention the insurance? Bottom line is, apart from the absurdity of using 1.5 tons of metal to transport 80kg of human, cars make no sense in cities from a cost and time perspective. And electric vehicles won’t solve that.

At this point, the sportier spirits among us will jump in and say that I forgot to add the most ecofriendly solution of all: cycling. And don’t get me wrong, my ideal world would be filled with people cycling to work, with bike lanes drawn out on every road and warm showers waiting for you at work to change yourself in your work clothes (alright, no need to get cocky you Danish and Dutch, everyone needs their own time to get there). But tell a guy from New Jersey to hop on his bike on a cold and rainy day to get to work in Manhattan: I mean, you got to have a bit of pity for him, he’s having a hard enough time getting laughed at by Ted and his friends for living on the wrong side of the Hudson! Anyway, it just seems that no matter which transportation is chosen, cities above a certain size require too much transportation time, money and therefore … energy! Well, you might answer that sparsely populated rural areas have the same problem, if not worse. Well, let me get to my second point.

I would like to focus on the supply (in food, material, goods…) of a city of such a huge scale. Let’s go back a few centuries. In the Middle Ages, towns and cities were created and thriving when the agricultural lands around them managed to generate enough surplus to not only feed the farmers but the people living in these cities. As Jancovici explains, the agricultural perimeter around each city was defined by the distance one could cover by foot in a couple of days to deliver the harvest, produce or meat before it turned bad. Obviously, this kept the size of cities in check for quite some while.

With the advent of mechanisation in the 19th century, the yield per acre increased and therefore more people could move to the cities. But as transportation also mechanised itself, the “agricultural perimeter” around each city could be vastly extended as well, allowing in turn for more people in the city to be fed. All this growth was generated thanks to fossil fuels, first coal then oil. As fossil fuels still represented 96% of the energy consumed in transportation in 2012, cities are basically fed on fossil fuels, and a share of the emissions accredited to rural populations in fact only serves to feed the urban one.

Solutions to this are either to decarbonise the transportation system or to eat more locally. The first option still has a few hurdles to overcome which we can talk about in more detail another time (lower energy content of biofuels, material consumption and weight of EV batteries, life cycle of hydrogen production), while the second one implies to reduce this agricultural perimeter. If the same amount of people live within a reduced yield area, on which organic production would require more surface per kg of food produced than “industrialised” agriculture, we quickly encounter a problem (we’ll skip the topic on permaculture for now, but for me it also fits into the redistribution of population to rural areas).

Finally, let’s consider these higher emissions in the rural sector. Indeed, driving 50km in one of those pick-up trucks to get to the closest doctor or simply find a hardware store doesn’t seem very economical. But if the density of mid-sized towns offering these services was better spread out throughout the territory through a megalopolis exodus, the distances having to be covered by country folks would in turn decrease, sparing fuel, time and money, and making the countryside in turn a more pleasant place to live, which generates a positive feedback loop.

So what I am trying to get at is that we should stop to push for further urbanisation just because it seems to reduce per capita emissions, and look at the wider consequences of it. People living in a community can help, protect and entertain each other, but above a certain size these original benefits are lost (if you see a Londoner smiling at you in the tube, just check your fly isn’t open before taking it for a sign of friendliness). I think we should start to think more about integrating the countryside in our sustainability plans and encourage the creation of smaller local communities, which is something which paradoxically has to be encouraged on a national scale. And it might not only have environmental benefits, but also help to overcome political cleavages which seem to have widened uncontrollably over the past few years…

Another sustainability blog !?

Posted on December 5, 2019April 5, 2020 By nicoftrs

Yes… but in this one you will not learn how to make your homemade ethical eco-friendly soap, nor will you get tips on the best thrift shops to find in town or how to reduce the carbon footprint of your next Christmas shopping spree. As I, a 23-year-old dude, am struggling myself to get to grips with the basic expectations of adulthood, how can you expect me on top of that to have an exemplary attitude with regards to the environment and my consumption choices?

That is exactly the question I’ve heard from many friends and my surroundings. We keep being told that we as individuals can have a real impact on the sustainability of society as a whole. But when we look around us, there are so many places to start and the scales involved are so impressive that we cannot help but feel a sense of hopelessness, and give up before we even started.

To quote our dear Aristotle, this might be because “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. And according to many, this “whole”, “this system” is “broken” (good old Bernie isn’t the only out there). We have been building up this system as a mutually agreed concept since whenever we decided to plow the first acres of land (big up to Yuval Noah Harari for summing this up neatly in “Homo Sapiens”). Whether what resulted from this system is mainly good or bad is for each and everyone to decide. But if we agree that it has to be changed in order to meet our targets set at these never ending Climate Conferences, then we are going to have to change the story behind this constructed myth. Easier said than done, and apparently going against thousands of years of human cognitive evolution.

And so this blog is an invitation to discuss about such broad topics, which at first seem out of our reach, in a humble and casual way. And once people have appropriated themselves this common story, instead of leaving it to completely overwhelmed politicians, then the real systemic changes will be able to happen more naturally.

On that note, welcome to the Green Chatterblogs, where discussions on sustainability will rival in drama the next episode of “the Bachelor”, “Les Anges de la téléréalité”, or “Bauer sucht Frau” 😉 Now grab your cup of oat milk, get a few locally sourced fruit snacks (sorry, I said I wouldn’t go into patronizing eco-warrior proselytism, but couldn’t help it), and get commenting!

Why I decided to throw my thoughts to the Web

Posted on December 5, 2019April 5, 2020 By nicoftrs

…apart from narcissistic reasons.

Here I am, typical millenial having recently joined the workforce and turning to the Internet to solve issues I can’t deal with in the big, scary, real world. Blogging is something I have long considered as an openly narcissistic version of writing a personal diary, or just an opportunity to reinvent yourself freely while in reality being the poor guy bullied at school, uni or work. Anyway, not something a dude in his mid-twenties would be proud of openly sharing with his friends.

Although part of me still thinks this is true, my experiences during my engineering degree also showed me the benefits of confronting your ideas with others (C-O-M-M-U-N-I-C-A-T-I-O-N skills, much wow!). Scientists (sorry purists if I count us poor engineers in that lot) and academics in general have to develop their concepts based on proofs, facts and references. While we can be bloody happy they do this, it also tends to make them less outspoken and clear-cut on their ideas, as they learn to appreciate the meaning of standard deviations, probabilities, errors and uncertainties. Easy to say that they have no chance to be listened to on a TV debate or a Facebook joust against the loud pathos-filled claims of far-right (or -left) demagogues.

This is the point one my professors was making as well: we need more scientists involved in policy. People who understand numbers, but most of all who understand the uncertainty and errors behind these numbers. And this requires scientists to get engaged in debates, develop their rhetorical skills and get out of their bubbles where large consensus reigns. Getting likes from LinkedIn contacts is easy; getting your message across to someone from a totally different background is something else.

This problem of opinion entrenchment is something that has affected me as well, as I realised that my diverse social media networks were agreeing on most topics, and that the dialogue that was so desperately needed was not happening.

And so this blog is for me the opportunity to try out another platform to reach out and discuss. I therefore will focus on making my posts as accessible as possible, and cover varying topics related to sustainability (you will quickly see that pretty much everything is) to get discussions going, using a simple blog format worthy of the dawn of Internet in the 90s, when the vision of the WWW was still that of uniting people to strive for common goals together. A bit of naive optimise never hurts 😉

Another challenge this blog is aiming to address is to change the perceptions on sustainability (whatever this word means, anyway). The never-ending debates on the topic seem to be either apocalyptic, utopist or simply dried-up from churning out the same concepts over and over again. Either way, nothing you can talk about too long around the Christmas turkey before plates shatter, old conflicts surge up or smartphones pop up from beneath the table to end the conversation in a painful statement of disinterest.

And whenever someone has been interesting himself for the topic a bit, a sheer sense of overwhelm is the standard reaction leading to the I-give-up step before efforts haven’t even started.

I therefore think that despite the urgency of the situation in front of us, it is high time we desacralise the sustainability topic and make it fun (again!). Make people realise that it affects everyone, everywhere, all the time, and that general policy questions shouldn’t just be discussed amongst public authorities in educated circles. I’m not talking about indoctrinating everyone into the “every little counts” movement, which is merely a (dangerous) way of salving our conscience: if everyone reduces their emissions by 1%, total emisions will be reduced by … 1% ( provided double-counting is avoided, the whole IS the sum of its parts in this case). No, what I would like is people to be more interested in a variety of subjects, even those that don’t affect them directly.

Indeed, if change is to also come from the consumption side, then the overall population must be educated on the global picture as well. With sustainability, the era of task specialisation is over. This call for multidisciplinary is not necessarily a call for further academic education or intellectual hegemony, but an invitation to be interested in many topics, be open-minded and ready to see problems from different perspectives. On a side note, these are also prerequisites for a healthy democracy, but we’ll get to that point later on I’m sure.

In the meantime, I am looking forward to meeting, interacting and debating with as many people as possible to open up my and your perspectives on the greatest and most exciting challenge of our time.