Copper, nappies, and the environment

Renewable energy is not an end in itself. Replacing fossil fuels with renewables also entails environmental damage. Copper, for example: 

Problem is, that the generation and transmission of low carbon electricity requires more copper per megawatt than conventional fossil fuel power plants. Offshore wind farms, for example, take around 11 tonnes of copper per megawatt to build—that is over 5 times as much as gas-fired power plants. Onshore wind and solar are also more copper-intensive, at around 1.7 and 1.4 times, respectively....Even if we could extract every ounce of copper in the ground in the coming decades, we could only replace 22% of our ageing fossil fuel energy system with an all electric one, then would be left wondering what to do with the remaining 78%…Trying to switch to “renewables” or building AI data centers so late in the game is thus not only technically infeasible but ill-advised, accelerating resource depletion even further and bringing about collapse even faster. Running on empty: Copper, 'The Honest Sorcerer, 7 December 2025

The inescapable fact is that whether we aim to increase energy consumption using fossil fuels or renewables means the continuing destruction of our environment. With renewables, we might see a small reduction in greenhouse gases emitted over a period of decades but, as the article excerpted above says, 'Copper mining is an extremely dirty, water intensive and polluting business. No wonder local communities are doing everything they can to avoid another mine being built next to their village....' Such trade-offs are implicit in most of our power generation choices and consumption choices. What is the policymaker to do? Current policy is heavily influenced by the short-term goals of politicians, and corporations and their lobbyists. In today's media, climate change is the most prominent environmental problem we face - and it is a huge problem. How do we weight small reductions in emissions of the gases that (probably) aggravate it, against the devastation wrought by, in this example, more copper mining and processing? 

We can't do so objectively. But what I suggest is that, instead of targeting the supposed means towards environmental goals, we come to some agreement about what those goals should be, and aim to achieve them. Thus Environmental Policy Bonds; an application of the Social Policy Bond idea to the environment, under which we'd agree on broad, long-term targets encompassing all aspects of the environment, contract out the achievement of these targets to investors bidding for the bonds, and reward investors as these targets are achieved. 

Targets must be broad, so that we do not achieve one environmental goal at the expense of another. So, for example, we target air pollution, rather than, say, nitrous oxide pollution; loss of biodiversity, rather than polar bears or pandas. 

The bonds imply humility, in the sense that they acknowledge that we don't know what future knowledge of scientific relationships will tell us. Take the seemingly simple question of disposable versus cloth nappies, which embodies in microcosm the difficulty of making policy about bigger concerns: there are always angles that we cannot foresee. Some years ago, a reader of the New Scientist wrote about nappies: 

.... I wonder whether the research comparing [cloth] to disposables took into account the fact that babies using cloth nappies tend to be toilet-trained day and night at a much earlier age – there is little more uncomfortable than a wet cloth nappy. A difference of six months to a year would lead to a child using 1100 to 2200 extra disposable diapers or nappies – a lot of extra landfill. Cleo Mussi, Letter to the editor of 'New Scientist', 12 December 2021

No government regulation, which uses science that is inherently fossilised, can account for the complexity of changing scientific relationships and our expanding knowledge thereof. An Environmental Policy Bond regime would supply market incentives to investors in the bonds to keep up their research and investigations and pursue only the most promising approaches to solving the targeted problem. The bonds would reward the sustained achievement of our goals, so that bond investors would be constantly researching and implementing only the most promising of the possible approaches to solving our problems, in ways that no government body can. 

For more about Social Policy Bonds see here. There are links there to papers on Environmental Policy Bonds and Climate Stability Bonds.