James Woudhysen is a Visiting Professor of Forecasting and Innovation at London South Bank University, UK. He speaks worldwide about the sociology, politics and economics of technological innovation. The ideas he puts forward are counter-intuitive but pragmatic.
Instead of affordable energy abundance, we’re headed to higher prices and energy shortages. Are our climate targets to be blamed, or rather the political strategy to achieve them is at fault?
I think both are a problem. We seem to believe in modern society that you can aim an arrow at a target, and that’s the end of it. You say, “we want this to be achieved by such and such a time,” and then that’s politics nowadays. It’s very foolish. Mr. Stalin and Mr. Khrushchev in the old Soviet Union were always declaring targets, never making them, or they would make the quantity target with very poor goods. So I think the targets are a problem for net zero by 2050, and all the other targets for 2030, and 2040. But there’s something worse than that, which is that the EU’s whole approach is based on the so-called precautionary principle. The precautionary principle, drawn up by German lawyers, basically says that you mustn’t do anything if there’s any risk of anything happening at all. And so long as that remains in power in Europe, then the prospects for nuclear energy and energy, in general, are pretty poor because the simplest thing is to do what Frans Timmermans, the climate Pope, has said until he resigned, which is to save energy, not make energy. The best energy is the stuff that you don’t use. We heard this forty-fifty years ago from American greens. It’s a very conservative philosophy, but in a bad way conservative. It just says, don’t do anything. Turn the lights off. And that is no way to develop fast, reliable, cheap, good energy for the future.
What do you see as the long-term social and political consequences of Europe’s current climate strategy?
Deindustrialization? The end of the industry? Not the complete end, but it’s already happening in Germany, where large chemical companies like BASF have declared and moved to cut down on energy supplies. And the governments now pay in Britain, and elsewhere, pay energy users not to use it. This is the same philosophy I was already referring to. You would think energy was a bad thing. And therefore, if you do think it’s broadly a nasty thing that human beings do to the planet, you are not going to want industry. You are not going to want chemical plants. You’re not going to want more electricity. You want Europe to go to sleep. And that’s really where we’re headed.
Where does the rest of the world stand on nuclear research and deployment, and what is Europe’s geopolitical outlook in the energy race?
Well, the fact is that the EU’s political outlook–we’ve got the same in Britain, although we’ve left the EU–is we want everybody else to supply us energy in terms of materials and everything else, but not do it ourselves, except when it’s wind, and if we’re lucky, solar. So it’s a very irresponsible attitude. What it means is that politicians outsource energy supply to material suppliers, including Russia and not just in gas, but also in uranium, which is a foolish policy from the point of view of energy security, and is a kind of “hands-off” policy. We’ve got clean hands because we don’t work, you know, and it’s very sad. So the rest of the world, by contrast, especially the United States, also Canada, Britain, and a bit of Japan, is way ahead in the research on nuclear. In Europe, they spend much more on energy efficiency than on the energy source that has the highest power density that you can imagine. It’s much, much more powerful than renewables, more powerful than fossil fuels. If you look at research and development in the EU, about 800 million euros a year is spent by the EU on nuclear. That’s about 1.2 billion on renewables, and the overall figure is about 5 billion. So nuclear is the ugly sister. It’s the Cinderella, I should say, it’s not cool to do research there, not regarded as a major source of energy, something to be celebrated. It’s something that’s attacked by the Germans because they’ve always had this big anti-nuclear movement. So really, we’re slouching on our way to Bethlehem in the EU at the moment. South Korea has just opened four nuclear reactors in the United Arab Emirates. And it did it just in a few years, it was an importer of nuclear electricity thirty-forty years ago. Now, it exports. We don’t have that attitude in the EU.
