DAVID MACKAY
David Mackay was a Cambridge professor and adviser to the Dept for Energy and Climate Change. Sadly, he died in April 2016.
His principal thesis was that we need to get away from fossil fuels for a number of reasons, including
- Possible climate effects
- Pollution
- Use of a diminishing resource
- Security of energy supply
In his book, he deliberately stayed away from ranking these reasons, but simply examined how it could be done, and the consequences.
This was a very clever book, acclaimed by the science community, policy makers, NGOs and other academics. It is in three parts
- A brief summary that can be read in about an hour. It argues that what needs to be achieved is a at a country sized scale, and so are the solutions.
- A long section which sets out the options, using numbers that can be grasped and understood. He avoided the use of trillions, billions. miilions, and even avoided thousands. All was reduced to simple ratios. He explains the consequences of changing the energy mix between nuclear, solar/wind/wave, fossil fuels.
- The third section explains, with references, any assertions made in the second part.
I particularly liked this quote from the introductory pages
“….This heated debate is fundamentally about numbers. How much energy could each source deliver, at what economic and social cost, and with what risks? But actual numbers are rarely mentioned. In public debates, people just say “Nuclear is a money pit” or “We have a huge amount of wave and wind.” The trouble with this sort of language is that it’s not sufficient to know that something is huge: we need to know how the one “huge” compares with another “huge,” namely our huge energy consumption. To make this comparison, we need numbers, not adjectives. Where numbers are used, their meaning is often obfuscated by enormousness. Numbers are chosen to impress, to score points in arguments, rather than to inform. “Los Angeles residents drive 142 million miles – the distance from Earth to Mars – every single day.” “Each year, 27 million acres of tropical rainforest are destroyed.” “14 billion pounds of trash are dumped into the sea every year.” “British people throw away 2.6 billion slices of bread per year.” “The waste paper buried each year in the UK could fill 103448 double-decker buses.” If all the ineffective ideas for solving the energy crisis were laid end to end, they would reach to the moon and back…. I digress.
“The result of this lack of meaningful numbers and facts? We are inundated with a flood of crazy innumerate codswallop. The BBC doles out advice on how we can do our bit to save the planet – for example “switch off your mobile phone charger when it’s not in use;” if anyone objects that mobile phone chargers are not actually our number one form of energy consumption, the mantra “every little helps” is wheeled out. Every little helps? A more realistic mantra is: if everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little.”
So, you can read the report at any level of detail you wish. It is still freely available, and the link can be found on the previous page (press ‘back’ and reselect Climate}