The Energy Imperative

Hermann Scheer (1944-2010) was a social Democrat member of the German Bundestag, president of Eurosolar and general chairman of the World Council for Renewable Energy. He came and spoke with great eloquence and passion at our conference on the sun in 1999, and I have been following his work ever since until his untimely death in 2010. This was his last book, finished just before he died. Early in the book he quotes from Wilhelm Ostwald, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1909 and wrote a book in 1912 called The Energy Imperative in which he said that the unexpected legacy of fossil fuels leads us to losing sight temporarily of the principles of a durable economy and into living from one day to the next. For him, and durable economy has to be based exclusively 'on the regular influx of energy from the sun's radiation. This is a prescient remark. Scheer's vision and analysis is towards 100% renewable energy system; one often hears that only a certain percentage can be provided by renewables, but Scheer vigorously challenges this assumption and shows how this transition can be achieved, even in the teeth of opposition from the current energy establishment. Conflict is inevitable and governments would have to get behind this agenda and stop subsidising traditional energies and hoping that nuclear power might come to the rescue. Scheer is completely uncompromising in his view here, linking nuclear power with the possession of nuclear weapons and calling for the abolition of both. The extremely clever scientists involved in this sphere and in the arms industry could then refocus on renewables instead of devising ever more fiendish ways of eliminating their enemies. Unlike the information revolution, this is difficult to drive from below with technologies on an industrial scale, but decentralisation and localism can be used as a point of departure. Ultimately, he argues that the shift to renewables is an ethical choice and that it synthesises the interests of the individual with the common good and ensures a marriage of ecological and material values as we can create an economy that does not entail further ecological damage. Scheer combines vision with realism so that readers can grasp the possibility and its implementation.