Why Isn’t Life Cycle Analysis More Popular for the Merit Order of Future Energies?

Protecting our environment, today and tomorrow, is high on political agendas. Each new summer is bringing its renewed, and seemingly more severe, lot of misery, with less and less people denying the influence of climate change in this bleak observation. Many solutions to address or at least mitigate, the impact of our civilization on our only planet, are known. Some have been around for some time, but it seems agreement when comparing their relative merits is not so easy to reach.

Tools exist to do just that, like Life Cycle Analysis (LCA). LCA is a powerful tool to describe and analyze through many criteria the complete value chains of any good, process or service, from cradle to grave, as the saying goes, so as to compare the relative merits of the solutions, at hand or future, from an environmental point of view. Economic, risk and social aspects are not in the LCA procedure and modeling, which only deal with environmental aspects, but are the object of companion normalized procedures, allowing to complete the analysis “in terms of the full life cycle”. A detailed, quite exhaustive, description of LCA can be found on Wikipedia to get familiar with this investigation tool.

Though recent, the 1970s, the LCA approach has been scientifically developed in the 1990s and normalized soon after by ISO (14040 and 14044 norms). The exhaustivity in the description of full and complex value chains, and the subsequent modeling thereof, is of course the major obstacle to validate beyond doubt LCA when the goal is to compare different solutions to a problem, mobility for instance, and help legislators to define global or local policies. Using a norm like ISO 14040 or 14044, which may require a lot of hypothesis and interpretation to get a proper picture, is thus the privilege of highly skilled scientific experts, which should, in principle, give comfort in the pertinence of the results. In other words, it should help whoever is asking the question to approach the truth and take the right decisions. The truth is a relative concept in the 21^st century. Science is now an object of mistrust.

In authoritarian regimes, the truth is whatever is the whim of the enlightened leader, which has been, for instance, the cause for major famines in communist countries in the 20^th century, hasn’t it? In democracy, the (absolute) truth, if ever it exists, is less important than the exchange of justifications between the parties debating about the subject, say an innovator, a regulator and civil society in its many representations, most of them quite a minor part of said society, but self-proclaimed and vocal. Interrogation and verification of the hypothesis, of the models, of the analysis, are key in this essential democratic debate, as is the use of scientific rationality, as imperfect as it may be, and can lead to the conclusion that the delivered truth is indicative, even temporary. In any case, as Hannah Arendt once said, there must be rules in the deliberation, which can be demanding. Honesty and trust in science are two essential rules.

On the subject of future mobility, as for many other topics, it seems the debate has drifted away from this high level of requirement, down to a dog fight between those who tend to over-simplify, to push their own magic solution, no mobility or electromobility for instance, and those who over-reason or overanalyze, by enforcing LCA for instance. Unfortunately, the former nearly always win in our lazy society, where post or alternative truth is privileged by mass media, mostly because it is easier to squeeze in a short sequence, for our limited attention, if not in 280 signs, for the bird-addicts.

To give an illustrative example, I recently heard a representative of a Brussels-based environmental NGO, with a strong input in the debate on the future of mobility, state, with no contradiction from the mostly virtual audience that using forestry wastes and residues to produce sustainable aviation fuel led to deforestation. This was an amazing oxymoron at first sight or hearing, but combined two highly controversial objects, flying and forest protection, thus obviously damning the former in the process, which was likely the intent. But, as William Faulkner wrote in The Sound and the Fury: “Battles are never won, the field only reveals to man his folly and despair”.

So, why do we get so easily bullied by this sort of nonsense, so common today in what we still call debates? Many reasons come to mind, to name a few:

• A sense of desperation (in Europe: the loss of the British Empire in the UK, the 1940 humiliating defeat in France, the belief that commerce is a substitute to diplomacy in Germany? All leading to a sort of sense of defeat, in other terms, why bother?).
• The loss of trust in science and progress.
• The negative impact of the neo-liberal globalization on the industry in the West, with its massive losses of well-paid, qualified, jobs in the middle-class.

The solace is that we also see a strong, much less mediatized, under-current of innovation in the “old” industry, in small and large companies alike, for bioenergy, biofuels, biomaterials, much welcome in a world where globalization is morphing, with re-shoring and national advantages coming back at the center of policies. Still, these innovators also have to fight to justify the value of their ideas, against the lazy zealots of magic solutions and dreamers of a post-industrial and global society, Matrix-style.

Association with the academic and scientific world to add thoroughly documented LCA to the technical and economic aspects of innovation may be a strong help to put forward, to legislators, first and foremost, as regulations are key to alternate and low-carbon energy solutions. We need a diversity of solutions for our future. Actually, California has been at the forefront of using LCA, in its Low Carbon Fuel Standard, and the last ten years have shown an impressive decrease in the carbon intensity of fuels in the Golden State, 10% no less, with 20% on sight for 2030.

Negative appreciations of the low-carbon fuels in use in California are few and apart, LCA surely helps. Yes, a diversity of low-carbon solutions is an absolute imperative for the future of transport, as no sensible person can now believe that the energy transition will happen all of a sudden, with one magic solution replacing more than two centuries of cheap fossil fuels. The energy transition, like democracy, is not instant coffee, it is the result of a process, long by nature, not of a conversion.

Philippe Marchand is a Bioenergy Steering Committee Member of the European Technology and Innovation Platform (ETIP).