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By Root 810 0

and is focusing its efforts on protecting and encouraging the local population of the rare honey buzzard by siting turbines away from its hunting areas and increasing the areas of suitable woodland habitat nearby.41 But the issue of scale will be very important for onshore wind in general: Optimistic projections from climate campaigners suggest upscaling wind parks by a hundred times or more in the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere. Unless some way is found to significantly reduce bird and bat kills, this level of wind generation could severely conflict with the biodiversity boundary.

It is not only wind that is at issue. In the U.K. the environmental movement is deeply divided over long-standing proposals to dam the Severn Estuary with a tidal barrage. Because it could potentially supply 5 percent of Britain’s electricity in a zero-carbon way, the idea was supported by the Sustainable Development Commission in 2007, headed by former Friends of the Earth director Jonathon Porritt. But the barrage proposal was vociferously opposed by Friends of the Earth, the National Trust, and the RSPB (Greenpeace remained on the fence) on the grounds of its wildlife impacts. Here, I would support Friends of the Earth and its allies. Habitat loss is the greatest threat to U.K. biodiversity. According to research published in 2010 by Oxford University ecologist Clive Hambler and colleagues, despite all its wildlife-protection laws, 1,000 endangered species still stand on the brink of extinction in the U.K., with an estimate of one species going extinct in England every fortnight.42 Mudflats and wetlands such as those that would be damaged or destroyed by the Severn Barrage are vital habitat for endangered waterfowl, as well as fish and many other rare species, and are among the most threatened habitats in the country.43 “To use climate change as an excuse to ignore so many ecologists would be eco-lunacy, especially since renewables are not the only option,” complained Hambler in a strongly worded letter to the Independent.44 Unlike Friends of the Earth and Jonathon Porritt, however, Hambler acknowledges that nuclear is a better option in this case. “Despite popular belief, nuclear power is highly acceptable from a conservation perspective,” he writes in a recent book.45

My argument is not in favor of nuclear and against renewables, however—both are necessary, in soaring quantities, if we are to meet the climate change planetary boundary. As Britain’s energy secretary Chris Huhne rightly put it when rejecting public funding for the Severn Barrage: “I’m fed up with the stand-off between advocates of renewables and of nuclear that means we have neither.”46 Both zero-carbon energy options, and various others, are essential to tackling climate change. Moreover, renewables can often be deployed in ways that minimize land-use and biodiversity impacts. Where building-mounted solar photovoltaics are cost-effective, no additional land—and therefore wildlife habitat—is used at all. Even the energy-hungry U.S. could probably supply all of its electricity use, according to one study, using solar PV on an area equivalent to 0.6 percent of the country—just a fraction of the existing developed and urban space.47

The objections to this are not environmental but economic: Solar PV is still extremely expensive, and only commercially competitive in places where fossil-fuel alternatives are costly or where subsidy schemes like feed-in tariffs support the nascent solar industry. While aggressive solar subsidy schemes in cloudy northern countries like Germany probably do not deliver value for money, in countries with high levels of sunlight solar power must eventually become the largest generator of electricity. As I argued in the climate chapter, North Africa should and probably will become a major supplier of desert solar-generated power to Europe, while Australia could easily become the world’s first major 100 percent solar country if the government in Canberra were prepared to show greater leadership than it has so far on climate-change mitigation. Feed-in tariffs,