The single most important principle for sustainability

No doubt you know someone who's told you about his or her great aunt who lived to be 98 and never went to a doctor. Or maybe it was a grandparent who led a vigorous existence and never went to a hospital, not once. We think of such people as being the hardiest of the species. But, there might be an additional explanation. Has it ever occurred to you that both people were that healthy and vigorous BECAUSE they never went to a doctor or a hospital?

One estimate puts deaths from medical errors at around 200,000 per year in the United States, a number which does not, of course, include those injured but not killed and saddled with disabilities--both obvious and subtle--that can affect health for a lifetime. Now, why am I telling you a medical story if my topic is principles for sustainability?

The short answer is that medicine has a term for its errors--which include outright mistakes by physicians, but also adverse reactions to drugs and other treatments. And, it attempts to count these errors which it calls iatrogenic, meaning caused by the doctor's treatment.

But, we have iatrogenic-like errors and problems caused by all sorts of modern inventions and procedures in a wide array of professions, trades, and industries--inventions and procedures which are thought to be improvements over the past. Think about how financial derivatives were supposed to be far superior instruments for mitigating and managing risk in the marketplace--until the 2008 market meltdown showed derivatives to have enormous hidden risks!

The late CBS television reporter and commentator Eric Sevaried was famous for saying, "The chief cause of problems is solutions." Perhaps we should say "presumed" solutions. The main problem with these presumed solutions is that typically, we have very little history with them, especially if they are the product of recent technological innovation. So, the risks associated with these supposed "solutions" are largely hidden from us.

The "solutions" we find in nature (and therefore in our bodies which are part of nature) are tested through the evolutionary process for a very long time. They may not be perfect solutions. But neither are many modern pseudo-solutions to our perceived problems. In fact, these pseudo-solutions often make matters worse--sometimes much worse--for reasons that cannot be detected until it is too late (and sometimes not at all if the risks are well hidden). The watchword in the medical profession used to be, "First, do no harm." Now, it's intervene so that the patient thinks you are doing something. And that, it seems, has become true in so many other professions as well. How can the fee be justified otherwise?

So here, finally, is the principle: "The non-natural needs to prove its benefits, not the natural."

I take this principle directly from a book I've mentioned previously, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. And, my discussion of it is largely based on his observations. This principle is the clearest expression of the precautionary principle I've ever seen, and it is even more stringent.

Now, those who shower our air, water, soil and bodies with newfangled chemicals (some of them called pharmaceuticals), tell us that it is our responsibility to provide evidence that these novel chemicals are harmful. In fact, logic dictates that those who introduce non-natural substances into the environment should be obliged to prove that those substances are safe. Nature's record is long, unassailable and open to inspection. The chemical industry has been with us for less than 200 years, and the modern chemical industry as we know it is a post-World War II phenomenon, an industry not exactly celebrated for its openness to public scrutiny.

So, here's a corollary to the principle above. A novel substance or action used to address a perceived problem for individuals or society should have far greater benefits than natural substances or than just doing nothing. Taleb suggests absolutely NO medical treatment for minor ailments such as headaches (the temporary kind), muscle spasms, and indigestion, for example. Nature suggests a change of diet, a change of routine, or even a change of jobs, strategies which have little risk associated with them compared to novel treatments.

When it comes to broader planetary issues, the introduction of massive amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and modern farming practices, is clearly non-natural. The true risks remained largely hidden even 100 years after Svante Arrhenius did the first calculations concerning global warming in 1896.

(Arrhenius vastly underestimated the pace of that warming, calculating that it would take 2,000 years to double carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The current time line puts this event in the middle of this century. But, he was surprisingly close to modern estimates of the likely temperature change, about 5 degrees C. Incidentally, he did all these calculations by hand!)

Modern farming practices--the so-called Green Revolution--lulled the world into believing that farming could sustainably be transformed into just another industrial activity with cookie cutter instructions. Grain yields and food supplies bounded upward until the mid-1980s, when per-capita grain yields began to fall. They haven't fallen dramatically. But, the fact that they have fallen tells us that there are limits to what industrial farming can do. We have more grain, but less grain per person than we used to.

It turns out that these limits might result from what we are doing to the soil through such farming. The solution so far has been to pour more chemicals onto the land. But that, too, is starting to lose its effectiveness as yields level off or even drop in areas where soil has been depleted of its natural fertility.

The real solution has been to look to nature and how it preserves and enhances soil fertility. Organic farmers have known this for a long time. The problem from the modern point of view with this approach is that it would likely require many more people to be involved in growing food. Organic farming typically requires more labor inputs than the machine-driven agriculture of monocrop grain farms.

All of this is not to say that NO improvements can be made over what is naturally occurring. More precisely, it is to say that the proposed improvements ought to be so compelling and so advantageous that any unanticipated downsides can be tolerated. A patient near death is unlikely to complain much about long-term side effects if the medicine saves him or her. One who has a headache but ends up with, say, a rare, life-threatening blood disorder from the treatment, will almost certainly conclude that the cure was not worth the (hidden) cost.

Expectant mothers who took thalidomide to relieve the distressing (but temporary) symptoms of morning sickness--only to have deformed children later-- were unknowingly taking large risks for small immediate gains. And, that seems to be the problem with much of what we label "progress." It's only progress until the unanticipated side effects kick in.

Okay, so let's think for a minute about the previously announced principle for sustainability: "The non-natural needs to prove its benefits, not the natural." Think about how deeply conservative that principle is. And, here I mean conservative in what has become an almost archaic sense of the word, that is, to conserve those practices and attitudes which have proven themselves truly sustainable over the ages.

What passes for conservative today is actually a radical political and economic agenda to strip the world of its resources as quickly as possible and turn them into wealth for a small elite. There is absolutely nothing conservative about this program.

But even those who style themselves liberal are typically only a few steps behind their pseudoconservative adversaries. Many of the world's progressives essentially believe that we should strip the world of its resources as well, only at a more measured rate while sharing the spoils more equitably. Both ways of thinking, however, have modern human society racing toward destruction. And, political liberals--who congratulate themselves for being open to the newest trends--may be even more susceptible to new technologies and methods that come with large hidden costs.

This piece is not a call to reverse history. That would be futile even if that's what I were proposing. Rather, it is a call to look with considerable skepticism on so-called "solutions" to the present crises that have no antecedent in nature or no long relevant tradition in society--and to place a special burden on technological solutions to show how they are far better than what nature suggests to us.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. The emerging sharing economy is based on the relevant and longstanding tradition of sharing with neighbors. It is not really a technological innovation so much as it is a social innovation--one, that is, well, not exactly new.

What's new is that the Internet makes sharing across vast distances with people you don't know possible--sharing extra rooms, cars, and office space, for example. The founders of the sharing economy didn't invent sharing; nor did they invent the Internet. They simply took an age-old tradition and used now existing technology to take advantage of huge unused capacity available worldwide in people's homes and driveways.

By my lights, this is an innovation that has big advantages over building more cars, more offices, and more hotels, by lowering overall consumption and freeing people from ownership of things which they only need occasionally.

In this I'm admitting that the Internet--a hog for electricity--might have net benefits when these kinds of insights are applied to it.

The criteria I've suggested for evaluating innovations are not scientific, nor could they be since they touch on values. But at least they offer a way to sift through the plethora of ideas for a sustainable world and ask whether these ideas themselves are sustainable and advantageous on their face.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He is a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Is "antifragile" better than "resilient"?

"Antifragile" is a word you can't find in the dictionary. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author and student of probability and risk, coined the word because, after looking at languages across the world, he could not find a word which describes the ability to improve with stress rather than merely resist it as the word "resilient" implies. Antifragile has now become the title of Taleb's latest book. Much of what I am about to say in based on this book.

An obvious example of something that improves with stress is the human body which gets stronger, more fit, and less prone to disease with exercise. Stress, but not too much stress--a cement truck running over you is too much stress--actually improves the performance of the body.

The same is true of the mind. Lying around watching television programs of the innocuous kind that don't challenge anything you believe is unlikely to make you more mentally acute. Difficult problems in life or in mathematics that require careful and prolonged problem-solving can sharpen the mind. Problems in life that cause a mental breakdown may not be good for you unless you come out of the breakdown a new person better prepared for the reality you must cope with--what Taleb informs us is called "post-traumatic growth" in the psychiatric profession.

The word "resilient" is easy to find in the dictionary. And, we should focus carefully on the second definition: "returning to the original form or position after being bent, compressed, or stretched." This seems like a good thing, and to a certain extent it is. Resilient systems, people and societies are good at maintaining their current operation or returning to their previous condition if disturbed.

Now, here's why antifragility rather than resilience might be a better goal for the sustainability movement. Resilience depends, in part, on knowing what kinds of stresses you will be subject to and building up defenses against those stresses. Antifragility does not require that you know what the stresses will be in advance since you expect to be strengthened by them. Again, too much stress will wipe out an antifragile system. But, it will also wipe out a resilient system. So, the added advantage of working toward a state of antifragility is twofold: You will not have to predict all the the stresses you will encounter to prepare for them; and, you will likely benefit from those stresses and so need not be afraid at their approach.

What does this mean in practice? Natural evolutionary strategies are antifragile. Nature tries many, many experiments--many species and subspecies and newly arising species--which increase the chances that some experiments will succeed. Survivability is increased by diversity among plants and animals because as conditions change, some versions will adapt better than others. Here, nature does not know in advance what conditions will prevail, but puts out enough diversity so that some plants and animals will likely survive. So, the antifragility of a system actually depends on some of the parts being fragile.

In business this model is most aptly illustrated by the venture capitalist (VC) who accepts that he or she cannot know in advance which ideas will succeed. So, the VC invests in a great number of fledgling companies knowing that most will fail, but that a few will succeed and flourish so much so that the reward will far outweigh the losses incurred in unsuccessful ventures. Mirroring the process, there are many VCs with varying approaches, philosophies and resources. Some go bust while others thrive. It's the diversity that is important to society.

This is how entrepreneurs perform an important service for the economy. The diversity of startups means many strategies and practices will be tested against the conditions prevailing in the economy and in society. Many will fail, but the few that survive can be a benefit to society.

Now, the specialist knows and does only one thing and can be a company or person. And, the specialist is typically made obsolete or severely impaired in income when conditions change drastically. I worked in the advertising industry just as the changeover from physical artwork to electronic artwork was taking place. Almost overnight designers could now simply type a few commands or perform a few mouse clicks to change the typography in their pieces. Previously, the industry had supported an entire infrastructure of typesetters. Within a short period, the typesetting business was gone.

It's not wrong for people to specialize. In the complex world we live in, most people must do so in order to find employment. And, those employed in typesetting have long since gone on to work at other things. But, we have built huge institutions upon which our society depends for its stability in banking, shipping and manufacturing that are exceedingly fragile. They do not stand up to outsized stresses.

We saw that in 2008 when the banking system, hit by contagion and fear, nearly collapsed which then nearly took out the worldwide logistics system. Sellers feared they might not be paid for goods they were shipping and halted deliveries because bank letters of credit (which were payment guarantees) were not trusted. Alternatively, many small failures in the banking system would have been much less consequential. But, a few large failures, because of the interlocking nature of worldwide finance, nearly brought the whole system down.

So, society can benefit from many small failures as they are the path to adaptation telling us what does not work. The successes, of course, give us information about what works, but not necessarily why those strategies worked.

Now, here is the crucial point about making society as a whole antifragile: THE WEAK MUST BE PROTECTED. If the weak are not protected, few people will take the risks necessary to find successful adaptations to the constantly changing social and natural conditions on planet Earth. Instead, most people will become risk averse, fearing that they will become weak and unprotected if they fail. Protecting the weak is entirely the opposite of what reactionary idealogues tells us to do to encourage highly innovative societies.

Another way the weak are protected is when failure does NOT carry with it any stigma. In this respect the United States has a culture that far outpaces most others on the planet. The United States is a place where starting over is not only acceptable, but encouraged, where failure is imagined as a possible gateway to future success--i.e., we believe people learn a lot from failure and recognize that many factors including just plain bad luck can be the cause.

So, the United States gets mixed marks--it does not protect the weak well, but does not stigmatize failure in most cases. Think about where your country rates on these two measures, and it will give you a rough idea if it has the necessary social conditions for antifragility.

Now, you might guess from the previous discussion that size is an important determinate in making a society antifragile. Here is where those advocating for what it often called "relocalization" have a point. Moving the logistics of everyday living from an interlocking worldwide affair to one that is regional or, in some cases, local will have the effect of creating many diverse logistical systems around the globe, each better adapted to the local or regional conditions, and none entirely dependent on a rigid, hyperefficient (and thus fragile) worldwide system that cannot withstand heavy stresses á la 2008.

The other characteristic of an antifragile system is that it will contain buffers, or to put it into logistical terms, it will have inventories--substantial inventories--in case shipments don't always get through in time. In our current system, we believe inventories are bad and try to eliminate them with dangerously fragile just-in-time delivery systems.

In the decentralized system, inventories are a source of strength. Just ask someone who has an ample inventory desperately needed by a region or town. That person will profit from such an inventory while his competitors shut down. And, the people who need the goods will be thankful to get them in a time of instability.

(I confess that the implications here are not entirely savory. The person having the inventory is antifragile in that he or she makes a killing financially when the system breaks down. But, at least the town or region is not left without essential goods and might decide to insure greater antifragility in the future by insisting on greater inventories which then give the whole town or region a competitive advantage. This also might be interpreted as resilience and certainly resilience and antifragility can and do coexist in any economy or society.)

The antifragile idea has so many other implications--for example, a bias toward city-states rather than nation-states--that I cannot catalogue them here. For that you should start with Taleb's Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder and see where your imagination takes you.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He is a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Will the real International Energy Agency please stand up?

It was as if the International Energy Agency were appearing on the old American television game show To Tell the Truth last week as it offered a third contradictory forecast in the space of a year.

You may recall that on To Tell the Truth the host would begin by reading a statement from a person with an unusual story or profession. Then, a celebrity panel would question three contestants who claimed to be that person. Afterwards, the panelists would vote on whom they believed was the real person. Finally, the host would say, "Will the real [name of person] please stand up?" (Some episodes are still available here on YouTube.)

The difference is that the contestants on To Tell the Truth would try to tell similar, plausible stories so as to stump the panel. In the non-game-show world of energy forecasting, the IEA--a consortium of 28 countries, all net oil importers except for Canada and Norway--plays all three contestants and does not even attempt to be consistent. So, it's possible that the agency is just a collective mental case with multiple personality disorder.

However, one has to allow for the fact that the IEA is not just one person or one voice. Still, if the agency were a single person, what it has released over the last year as official pronouncements would likely have a psychiatrist reaching for the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition).

Last November in its 2012 World Energy Outlook (WEO), the agency noted rising U.S. oil production and even predicted that the United States would become energy self-sufficient by 2035 (a doubtful call, in my view). It also noted that growing oil demand in the Asia has more than outweighed declines in European and U.S. consumption, keeping upward pressure on prices. It said that growth in Iraq's oil exports was not a sure thing. While the 2012 WEO is really a rather optimistic document on supply, it did not paint an especially rosy picture, indicating that obtaining the supplies of oil necessary to meet projected demand was not a foregone conclusion.

Then, only six months later came the agency's so-called Medium-Term Oil Market Report which read like an ad for the North American oil and gas industry. The agency touted a "supply shock" in oil from American tight oil fields unleashed by a new kind of hydraulic fracturing--a shock that would send "ripples throughout the world." Unlike six months earlier, worldwide supply was supposed to take flight on the wings of fracking.

This enthusiasm didn't last long. In its latest report, the just-issued 2013 World Energy Outlook, the agency sounded like a group of Gloomy Guses noting that "Brent crude oil has averaged $110 per barrel in real terms since 2011, a sustained period of high oil prices that is without parallel in oil market history."

The report goes on to say, "The capacity of technologies to unlock new types of resources, such as light tight oil (LTO) and ultra-deepwater fields, and to improve recovery rates in existing fields is pushing up estimates of the amount of oil that remains to be produced. But this does not mean that the world is on the cusp of a new era of oil abundance." The most recent forecast calls for rising oil prices in real terms through 2035. This is in part because the agency expects that "no country replicates the level of success with LTO" that we are seeing in the United States today.

What's really happening here? Is the IEA getting better at seeing the future? Not really. What's happening is that the IEA is being asked to do something which it cannot possibly do: accurately predict oil supplies 22 years into the future. So, given this impossible task, the agency responds by following current trends (and industry hype) and then extrapolating them.

Now that the IEA has had a chance to re-examine the industry's claims in light of more experience with tight oil development, it is backing off its previous assessment in its Medium-Term Oil Market Report from May. Fatih Birol, chief economist for the IEA, told the Financial Times that he would now characterize rising oil production in the United States as "a surge, rather than a revolution." He expects OPEC to become dominant once again in oil markets early in the next decade. The Financial Times characterized the report as predicting an oil supply crunch.

But, will the IEA have a change of heart once again? It might, depending on what it hears from industry sources and what it chooses to believe. But, the takeaway from the last year of IEA projections is not that the agency is suffering some sort of breakdown, but that it has been given an impossible task that in the volatile world of oil supplies has it casting about for a coherent story. In short, it is trying to tell the truth without knowing the truth for the simple reason that in this case the truth cannot be known. That has made it a poor contestant in its own real-life episode of To Tell the Truth stretched out over the past year.

It is a fool's errand to try to predict the future of world energy supplies. But, it is even more foolish to base our public policy, business and personal decisions on such predictions.

P. S. There is a minor acknowledgement that such forecasts are exercises in futility in a disclaimer at the end of the 2013 World Energy Outlook summary. The disclaimer reads: "The IEA makes no representation or warranty, express or implied, in respect of the publication’s contents (including its completeness or accuracy) and shall not be responsible for any use of, or reliance on, the publication." This is standard boilerplate, I know. But, it is not the kind of language that inspires confidence.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He is a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Dueling forecasts: Why our energy future is actually a risk management problem

Optimistic, but unwarranted, energy supply forecasts permeate the media (courtesy of the oil and gas industry) even as the occasional dire scenario gets coverage. But, it is well to remember that none of the people making forecasts can know the one thing they all desperately want to know: the future.

The most important thing you need to understand about forecasts--any forecast--is that their accuracy deteriorates rapidly, the further they go into the future. Surprisingly, almost no one who makes public energy supply forecasts acknowledges this; otherwise, we would see what statisticians call error bars--very large ones--in all these forecasts. In layman's terms, the further out a forecast goes, the wider the range of possible outcomes--so much so that for long-term forecasts the range of outcomes is far more important than the middle estimate.

But, this kind of waffling doesn't get headlines. Humans are evolutionarily disposed to listen to those who sound the most confident in their pronouncements, not those who are hesitant and full of equivocation. There is reason to believe that overconfidence is an evolutionary advantage, and that this explains its persistence in human society. In addition, research has shown that those projecting confidence engenders loyalty even if their forecasts are wrong more often than those who couch their predictions in the language of uncertainty. You can get some of the advantages of being right without actually being right. People like to feel that they are certain even though that feeling often turns out to be false.

So, the lay public is treated daily to an orgy of often contradictory soothsaying and tends to respond as follows: "Come back to me when you know for certain." But, that's just the problem. We can't know anything about the future for certain, and yet we must plan for it. So, how do we go about doing that?

One answer is simply to hope that the prognostications we favor will turn out to be true. It's a hazardous route and requires a good deal of luck. But, a better approach for serious and important matters is to employ risk management. It doesn't tend to generate headlines. But, it can help us better deal with the risks we face on every level.

No one knows whether his or her house will burn down in the next year. It's unlikely, but the damage to life, limb and finances could be very large if it happens. People don't generally go to a forecaster to ask whether their houses will burn down in the next year. Instead, they manage the risk by buying insurance.

So, it turns out that most of us actually do have an intimate acquaintance with risk management in our daily lives through the purchase of insurance. Why don't we take this approach when trying to manage society's large uncertainties such as our energy future?

The answer may lie in the fact that we do not have direct control over such a huge issue, and so we tend to delegate it to others that we regard as experts. Unfortunately, when it comes to energy, the loudest, most confident, and most well-funded voices are those paid for by the oil and gas industry. The practiced confidence of industry executives, captive Wall Street analysts and fake think tank academics has convinced the public that there is nothing to worry about. Just leave the future of energy in the hands of the oil and gas industry, and all will be well.

But, the realities of our energy situation suggest that we should have little confidence in such pronouncements, especially given their self-interested nature. The issue is NOT whether those pronouncements ultimately turn out to be correct, something we won't know until it's too late. The issue is whether the uncertainties we face in energy supply deserve at least the same kind of attention that we give to home and automobile insurance policies.

Here's what risk management in energy policy implies:

1. We must accept that we cannot know the future with any certainty and that the record of past forecasts demonstrate that we've been too optimistic about supplies for some time.
   
2. The risks to energy supply cannot be quantified because there are too many variables that determine the future availability of energy including underground geology, changes in technology, availability of trained personnel, investment and interest rates, energy prices, energy demand, government policy including land use restrictions, wars, social unrest, and environmental regulations including climate change policies. There is simply no way to put all of these into an equation and get a calculable range of supply outcomes.
   
3. We must therefore rely on an analysis of the types of risk we face and whether those risks warrant taking out some form of insurance against possible downsides.
   
4. The type of risk we face is asymmetrical risk. The downside risk of inadequate fossil fuel supplies needed to run our society could be catastrophic. On the other hand, the cost of transitioning quickly to renewable energy and drastically reducing our energy needs at the same time (which is the safest course) is low compared to the frighteningly high costs of a persistent and unexpected decline in fossil fuel availability.
   
5. The trouble with optimistic forecasts of fossil fuel availability is that we can't fix the situation easily if those forecasts turn out wrong to the downside and we have made absolutely no provision for this possibility, that is, we've done nothing to enable us to replace those fuels or to live with less and less of them over time. If we base our policies and actions on such forecasts, they must be right or we are in deep, deep trouble. We should strive instead to create a forecast-proof society.
   
6. Therefore, the most prudent course given the stakes is to begin a deliberate, but expedited program of deep energy reductions (through efficiency and conservation), dramatically ramp up the rate of renewable energy production and work furiously to solve the problem of electricity storage since most renewable energy comes in this form.

The complaint is that this will cost a lot of money. But, the oil and gas industry is spending close to $1 trillion a year to maintain a system which is known to have a limited life and the future output of which cannot confidently be predicted. The second complaint is that such a transition will create economic turmoil, throwing into doubt the future of the fossil fuel industry and creating a huge shift in the kinds of skills needed among workers. The real question is whether it would be wise to wait and see just how much chaos fossil fuel decline and climate change cause BEFORE making a commitment to a renewables-based, low-energy economy.

If the optimists are wrong (and they have been on oil since 2000) and if we follow their advice, how will we fix things when we are cascading off an energy cliff? Now is the time to act while there is enough stability to make the indisputably necessary transition. The only question then is timing. So, in the interest of managing risk we should err on the side of being too early (although in my own opinion we are actually already very late).

There is another problem embedded in the forecasting culture (other than the fact that it is dominated by the fossil fuel industry and its minions). Few making the bad calls suffer for them. They have no "skin in the game." ("Skin in the game" here means you participate in a commensurate downside if you are wrong.) Indeed, bad calls may even be rewarded. Oil companies are enjoying large profits even though they predicted low, steady oil prices and ample supply for decades to come at the beginning of the millennium. Far from suffering from their bad calls, they've been prospering. (That will ultimately come to an end as they experience more and more difficulty finding new oil to replace what they're taking out of the ground.)

In fact, the problem of having no skin in the game goes beyond the world of resources. Those who predicted an easy victory in Iraq got to pursue their dream of world domination without any danger to themselves. All the costs were borne by soldiers and civilians in harm's way and taxpayers who financed the fiasco.

What happened to U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz who assured Americans that they would be greeted as liberators in Iraq? He was subsequently appointed president of the World Bank. In 2006 ThinkProgress compiled a list of those in the Bush Administration who made optimistic statements and incorrect assessments about Iraq and the invasion. Subsequently, nearly all of those people were rewarded. None in the list ended up unemployable.

The same can be said for Ben Bernanke, U.S. Federal Reserve Board chairman, who opined in a 2007 speech, "[W]e believe the effect of the troubles in the subprime sector on the broader housing market will likely be limited, and we do not expect significant spillovers from the subprime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system."

He continues to be the chairman to this day and is even hailed as a hero for saving the world economy from a depression during the 2008 crash. There was not even a hint of irony in this pronouncement even though it was Bernanke's and Alan Greenspan's expansionary monetary policy (while Bernanke served on the Federal Reserve board) which helped to create the mortgage bubble that ended up bursting and severely damaging the world economy--and even though Bernanke assumed the subprime crisis would not affect the broad economy and guided monetary policy accordingly.

It's no wonder then that we get such bad public policy and such reckless financial and political behavior. You should not try to manage risk based on the pronouncements of those who have no skin in the game. They won't be careful. Just the opposite. They will often be reckless in pursuit of their own interests as long as someone else has to pay the bill when things go wrong. And, you can't manage risk based on the idea that you can know anything for certain about the future. If you knew things for certain, there wouldn't be any risk.

Too many people believe that public policy is made on the basis of certainty. Hence, my generic member of the public quoted above as saying, "Get back to me when you know for certain." The better course is to create systems that don't require forecasting, that are stable enough to withstand those events which we cannot predict and which might even grow more stable from such perturbations. But, that's a topic for another piece.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He is a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Does the Earth need saving?

Hardly a day goes by without someone writing or saying that we need to save the Earth. My geologist friends scoff at such language for semantic reasons. The coolish, rocky planet that we call Earth will be fine when humans are long gone, they say.

Yes, climate change and human depredations of the biosphere have already brought many species to extinction and will likely extinguish many more. And, the radioactive wastes we leave behind might very well get spread about the Earth in ways that are destructive to life. But give the Earth a few hundred million years, and all of this will be essentially forgotten, gone without a trace.

As for life, it is doubtful that the consequences of human actions, however extensive, could wipe out every trace of life on the globe. Some form of life is likely to survive anything we as a species ultimately throw at it and then begin the cycle of evolution all over again.

So, if the planet doesn't need saving, what does? Well, two things depending on your goals. Many people believe that humans are moving quickly toward premature extinction, and, as I mentioned above, that we are taking many species with us. So, if your goal is to maintain the continuity of the human species, you presumably have your work cut out for you--or maybe not depending on the result you'd like to see.

We humans are almost certainly in overshoot, a term from population biology that means we've exceeded the long-term carrying capacity of the Earth for humans given our current technology and consumption habits. So, here's the solution. Bring the per-capita consumption of humans down drastically or drastically reduce the number of humans consuming at our current rate. The first seems nearly impossible given our system of governance and technology and the fact that there are so many poor people who aspire to higher levels of consumption. The second seems impossible even though we have highly effective and cheap contraceptive technology that would over the course of the next century enable us to reduce our numbers down to one billion. (This assumes that average fertility is no more than one child per couple.)

There is a third solution. And, that is simply to let nature take its course and thin human numbers through plagues, food and resource shortages, climate-related catastrophes and the collapse of our complex global economic network that might ensue. Even with all of this, humans are extremely resilient, and enough of us would likely survive to create a new system of living based on the available resources under the new climate conditions on Earth.

It seems that human continuity is relatively assured no matter what. So, what we are really talking about saving is not the species, but the way of life we currently enjoy and the number of humans who currently enjoy it (using the term in its broadest sense since the world's vast sea of poor people must enjoy it without the material benefits of citizens in wealthy countries).

There is certainly an interest in protecting one's children and grandchildren who may face an increasingly perilous climate and shrinking resources including food. And, there is a broader concern that the world's poor will bear the brunt of these problems resulting in skyrocketing death rates.

But, some people have an even more wide-ranging concern for all the other creatures and plants which inhabit the Earth. In general, they form a web of life that provides us with services not accounted for by our money-driven economy, so-called ecoservices which according to the Encyclopedia of Earth do the following:

• Moderate weather extremes and their impacts
• Disperse seeds
• Mitigate drought and floods
• Protect people from harmful ultraviolet rays in sunlight
• Cycle and move nutrients
• Protect stream and river channels and coastal shores from erosion
• Detoxify and decompose wastes
• Control agricultural pests
• Maintain biodiversity
• Generate and preserve soils and renew their fertility
• Contribute to climate stability
• Purify the air and water
• Regulate disease carrying organisms
• Pollinate crops and natural vegetation

We could not survive without these ecoservices and would be bankrupted if we had to provide them completely artificially. Their scope and complexity are something on which our entire global society depends and gets essentially free of charge.

So, a concern for the well-being of all the other creatures and plants which inhabit the Earth is partly an act of self-interest in survival. Beyond this, there are aesthetic, cultural and moral reasons for preserving these other living things. For instance, it is sad to imagine a world without the beauty of the tiger. But we may someday inhabit such a world.

We inherited a rich diversity of edible plants, but have been narrowing the ones we continue to raise based on our ability to grow vast quantities with modern farm machinery and methods--and our ability to store, ship and market crops across long distances. A part of our cultural as well as our genetic heritage is being lost.

Then, there is the moral argument. Deep ecologists suggest that all life has intrinsic worth and that therefore to exploit and destroy other life except to satisfy basic needs is a moral failing. For deep ecologists, then, preserving life on Earth means much more than simply preserving human life.

So, next time someone tells you he or she wants to save the Earth, you might inquire, "Which part? And for what or whom?" It's a vital clarification. If you only wish to save the human species consuming at its current level, then humans will surely continue to impoverish the plant and animal kingdoms. And, we humans might ultimately see our numbers diminished considerably by forces beyond our control if we insist that consumption go up or stay the same, rather than go down.

However, if your goals are broader, those goals may require far-reaching changes in human society as it is currently configured. So, yes, go out and save the Earth. But, you would do well to understand which part you want to save and for what or whom you want to save it.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He is a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

The problem with (affordable) helium

If I had had space, I would have included a subtitle for this piece as follows: Things do not have to run out to become unavailable. So, now you have a general idea about the problem with helium, a problem to which I'll return shortly. But, first let me discuss the broader issue my subtitle enunciates.

How many times have you heard someone say that we have huge quantities of such and such a resource underground (or even in seawater), so there is nothing to worry about? It is hard to know where to start with this simplification because it comes from minds that are so egregiously uninformed.

There are dozens of reasons that things can become unavailable before they ever "run out." It is a favorite ploy among cornucopians (mostly economists) to accuse those warning of resource shortages of saying that some particular resource, say oil, is running out. But that is not what they are saying at all. Rather, the realists, as I call them, are simply pointing out that a number of factors are coming together than may raise the cost of obtaining such resources beyond the means of many to afford them.

The rich will pay whatever price is necessary for their food and energy. These are small percentages of their income even if food and energy costs double, triple or go up 10 times. But such is not the case for the vast majority of humans on the planet. At some price, food becomes unaffordable, gasoline becomes unaffordable, and even drinkable water become unaffordable.

What this tells us is that the smooth functioning of the global system depends not just on resources, but widely affordable resources and the products and services they make possible. Whatever the causes of an affordability problem are, millions and even billions could go without adequate food and fuel as a result. Many on the margins would become ill from inadequate nutrition, some might starve outright, and many could freeze for lack of warmth in cold climates.

Perhaps all this is too dramatic just yet. So let's take an example of something which has already become suddenly and unexpectedly less available: Helium.

Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe after hydrogen. But, on planet Earth it is exceedingly rare. The main source is decaying radioactive minerals in the Earth's crust which emit helium nuclei as part of their decay process. A small portion of this helium gets trapped in natural gas reservoirs. The rest makes its way into the atmosphere and then into outer space. Very few gas reservoirs are rich enough in this trapped helium to make it worthwhile to extract, process and get to market. Unless we find another affordable source of helium, this means that helium production will necessarily peak and decline when the helium-rich natural gas reservoirs that hold it peak and decline.

It wouldn't matter so much that helium is becoming hard to get if it were not for the fact that for many applications there is no substitute, none. Let me quote at length from a piece I did more than four years ago entitled "Let's party 'til the helium's gone":

Perhaps the most important uses of helium are in its liquid form. Helium is the gold standard for low-temperature processes and research. In its liquid state it can reach temperatures as low as -459 degrees F or almost absolute zero, the temperature at which all molecular motion would cease. (No one has ever succeeded at reaching absolute zero, and theoretically, it is thought to be impossible to achieve.)

Liquid helium simply has no equal. Currently, it is critical in magnetic resonance imaging, a non-invasive diagnostic procedure that allows physicians to obtain images of many tissues and organs, notably the brain, that are superior to those provided by X-rays. This is an application for which superconductivity is critical, and very low temperatures are essential for optimum results. In addition, superconductivity is an area of intense ongoing scientific research for ways to reduce electricity losses in the electrical grid and increase the efficiency of power storage and electric motors.

Perhaps the most visible use for helium beyond filling balloons is that in filling airships or blimps. More exotic uses include rocketry where helium is used to flush out fuel tanks and then prepare [that is, condense] liquid oxygen and hydrogen for those tanks. Helium is preferred for this work and for blimps because it is nonflammable and inert, that is, under ordinary circumstances it doesn't chemically combine with other elements.

These two properties also make it ideal as a shielding gas for certain types of critical welding. Preventing normal atmospheric gases from reaching a weld can enhance its strength and quality. The same properties make helium critical for producing silicon wafers, the basis of today's electronic world.

In addition, helium is used for heat transfer in gas-cooled nuclear reactors, and it is used to check for leaks in critical equipment because it flows more readily through such leaks. There are many more uses, both industrial and scientific, but you get the idea.

First, we are not running out of helium. What's happening is that the U.S. government, which for years dominated the helium business, has been gradually getting out.

All this was telegraphed a long time ago to industry. In 1996 the U.S. Congress passed a law mandating that the government get out of the helium business by 2015. That was supposed to give plenty of time for the private marketplace to pick up where government would leave off.

But, it hasn't turned out that way. Congress let the Federal Helium Program set prices too low in order to hasten the liquidation of its stockpile. Those low prices kept away potential new entrants into the helium business. And, now as the federal program ratchets up the price to address the problem, consumers of helium are yelling "ouch." And yet, at the same time there are few new players to replace the dwindling federal supply in the market.

It's not clear what price helium would have to rise to in order to incentivize private development. Since 1925 the U.S. government has essentially dominated the market, so there is no historical free market price to look at. One would have thought that with the impending government withdrawal from the market, some savvy entrepreneur would be stockpiling helium for the day when the price would skyrocket.

But such is not the case. For one thing, it takes an extensive infrastructure to capture helium from natural gas fields and thus a huge investment, one that few would undertake without reasonable assurances that prices would rise to cover the costs.

But perhaps even more important, U.S. sources are the world's most prolific. Nothing compares to them. And, this is not simply a question of incentivizing people to go out and look for economical deposits of helium. Helium currently is found only in commercial quantities in natural gas reservoirs and then only certain ones. All the richest sources, therefore, are already being produced.

The only course then is to raise the price of helium to a level where much leaner resources of helium could profitably be extracted from natural gas reservoirs, prices high enough to justify huge capital outlays. Keep in mind that separating helium from natural gas requires temperatures of -315 degrees F.

As prices rise to make these more-costly-to-get helium resources available, who will be priced out of the market? Right now, it turns out, people who want helium for party balloons are willing to pay the most. It's a small part of the market, but it shows that the distribution of helium in a higher cost world might not turn out to be what most of us would think is socially desirable. Many research labs might not be able to afford as much. Other critical uses in medicine and computer chip manufacture might be curtailed or result in considerably higher costs for medical diagnosis and electronic equipment.

All this is to demonstrate that a resource does not have to "run out" in order for it to become unavailable to large numbers of people. There are plenty of molecules of helium in the Earth. But the cost of getting them out for all who want to use them, even for critically important purposes, might be too high for many to bear.

The same analysis can be done for other finite resources, oil, coal, natural gas, rare earth minerals, lithium and many more. The cornucopians like to say that we will never run out of what we need. The market will provide the necessary incentives for getting more out of the Earth more efficiently or for finding substitutes. We will always have what we need when we need it at prices we can afford in the quantities we require.

But, there is no guarantee that this will happen in every instance that we want it to. As such the above assertion is simply an article of faith in the economics field, born of an era in which the rate of resource extraction was rising continuously and limits were nowhere in sight.

Now, limits do not mean that we have "run out." Instead, they mean that we cannot produce at a higher rate or that we cannot produce at a higher rate without significantly higher prices or that no viable substitute, competitive in price and sufficient in quantity, can be found.

The socially desirable outcomes we might want to see with regard to resource use do not have to be mandated. Market-based incentives--which must include high taxes on the resources we want people to use less of--can go a long way quickly to bring our choices in line with our long-term best interests.

It's either that or we can party 'til the remaining resources of helium and other critical substances are reduced to the point where we no longer have enough time to make a transition to a society that can adapt to their loss of affordability.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He is a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

The numbers don't add up to U.S. energy independence

Energy independence sounds good, and that's why politicians and oil company executives love to say the words. It's so easy to say, but oh so hard to actually accomplish, which is why the United States has been a consistent importer of oil since the late 1940s.

Recent overblown statements about U.S. energy independence from the oil industry, its paid consultants and the fake think-tank academics it funds simply aren't supported by the numbers. I have discussed this issue in two previous pieces, "The Oil Industry's Deceitful Promise of American Energy Independence" and "Oil and gas industry uses deceptive energy independence message to push U.S. exports".

Recently, friend and colleague Jeffrey Brown--who is best known for his Export Land Model which foretold of shrinking global oil exports--did some fairly simple math to show how difficult it will be for the United States just to maintain its current production, let alone produce all the oil and natural gas it consumes.

In a recent email Brown, who is a Dallas-based independent petroleum geologist managing a joint-venture exploration program, wrote the following:

The EIA's [U.S. Energy Information Administration's] estimate for the most recent four week average crude oil production rate (Crude + Condensate) [which is the definition of oil] was 7.6 mbpd (million barrels per day). Refinery runs were 15.8 mbpd, and net crude oil imports averaged 8.0 mbpd. The numbers for total liquids are, of course, different.

As several people have noted for some time, the primary problem with the tight[oil]/[natural gas] shale plays is the high decline rate.

At a (probably conservative) 10%/year decline rate for existing U.S. crude oil production, in order to simply maintain current U.S. crude oil production, the industry would have to put on line the productive equivalent of every current oil field in the U.S. over the next 10 years, or in round numbers we would need the productive equivalent of 10 new Bakken plays over 10 years, in order to maintain current crude oil production.

Citi Research [an arm of Citigroup] puts the decline rate for existing U.S. natural gas production at about 24%/year, which would require the industry to replace about 100% of current U.S. natural gas production in four years, just to maintain current production, or we would need the productive equivalent of 30 new Barnett Shale plays over 10 years, in order to maintain current natural gas production.

Companies are not finding one new Bakken play each year; nor are they finding three new Barnett Shale-sized plays each year. In fact, production of U.S. natural gas has been just about flat since the beginning of 2012. U.S. crude oil production continues to grow, outpacing most projections. But, the United States would have to more than double its output from here to supply all of the country's needs.

Keep in mind that U.S. energy independence has almost always been about oil. U.S. coal production has long satisfied U.S. consumption. And, U.S. natural gas imports from 1990 through 2010 averaged just 16.8 percent of total U.S. consumption. Almost all of that came from Canada, the country's northern neighbor and longtime ally.

That percentage came down in 2011 and 2012 to 14.2 percent and 12.5 percent, respectively. It's possible that U.S. production may yet grow just enough to bring that percentage down to zero. But, given the steep production decline rates for natural gas wells being drilled today, it's doubtful that production at a level high enough to avoid net imports could be maintained for very long.

That leaves us with oil. On average from 1990 through 2012, for domestic use the United States imported about 54 percent of its crude oil and petroleum products such as gasoline and diesel fuel (based on historical data gathered by the EIA). In 2012 the percentage had come down from that average to 48.3 percent.* It's progress, but the country is not even close to becoming energy independent. These percentages are based on crude oil and total petroleum products which include natural gas liquids that come from natural gas wells. It isn't clear how to back out these non-oil liquids in the statistics.

Still, the numbers give us a reasonable look at what the data actually say about the prospect of U.S. energy independence, which really means oil independence. The prospects are not good.

Brown points out that we've been down this road once before when the huge oil find around Prudhoe Bay in Alaska boosted U.S. oil production for a time in the 1980s. But Prudhoe Bay peaked in 1988 and has been on the decline ever since then. And, with it went total U.S. production until recently.

Given the potential for U.S. tight oil in deep shale deposits and a high oil price which makes it possible to incur the high costs of getting it out, U.S. production could grow for a time. But at some point the high production decline rates for tight oil wells (around 40 percent per year) will be too much of a barrier, and total U.S. crude oil production will begin to decline once again, Brown believes.

The cornucopian's argument is that the third time's the charm, that the industry can now do what they could not do from 1970 to 1977 [after the peak in U.S. oil production] and what they could not do from 1984 to 1991 [during the boom in Alaskan oil production], i.e., indefinitely maintain the rate of increase in production. And, of course, we are going to do this with the highest overall decline rates that we have ever seen.

Brown says you have to keep in mind that tight oil wells drilled today will in a few years be producing just a small fraction of what they are producing now. And, that means new wells will have to be drilled just to make up for this decline. Only then can production start to grow. As total U.S. production increases and the number of producing wells grows considerably, the number of new wells needed just to make up for the decline in the production of existing wells will grow along with it. At some point it will become impossible both to make up for declines in existing wells and to grow production.

Brown believes that the United States is unlikely ever again to exceed the 9.6 mbpd of crude oil production it achieved in 1970, the peak year. More likely is a continuation of an undulating decline with occasional upturns followed by fresh downturns.

What he finds ironic is that those who are saying that peak oil is dead are using the United States, an oil producer that saw its production peak more than 40 years ago, as the poster child for their arguments. Yes, the ride down the peak can feature a significant bounce here and there, just as--if you'll forgive the analogy--a dead cat hurled downward can appear to show some life as it bounces off the floor.

The oil age may not be dead yet, but Brown believes that the top is nearby--not just for the United States, but for the world. And, that means we are wasting precious time being lulled to sleep by the oil optimists when we should be preparing for a post-peak oil world.

_______________________________________________________________________________

*I arrive at this percentage by subtracting U.S. exports from total U.S. consumption which includes petroleum products refined for export. This gives me actual domestic consumption. I also subtract U.S. exports from U.S. imports to give me net imports. Then I divide net imports by domestic consumption to yield the percentage of that consumption which is dependent on imports.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He is a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Bad advice: Why the future won't be like the past

It's easy to get bad advice from successful people. Here's why: Successful people assume that the same circumstances that prevailed while they were achieving their success will generally prevail while you are pursuing yours. But, your circumstances will almost surely be different, probably in major ways.

The second mistake successful people make is that they underestimate the role of luck in their success. As it turns out, financial rewards--and that's what Americans almost always mean when they use the word "success"--are distributed more randomly than most people at the top or even the bottom of the economic pyramid would like to admit. Who gets wealthy, especially really wealthy, is largely a matter of luck.

If your measure is fame rather than wealth, the story is the same. It's hard to imagine that the world's 10th best concert violinist is far less talented than the world's best concert violinist. Most of the difference in fame (and income) is in all likelihood due to luck rather than skill.

Luck can come in many forms, but it mostly boils down to three things: chance meetings, lucky guesses (about investments or a promising business venture or an artistic product such as a book or a song); and birth. The family you are born into, of course, greatly influences the opportunities available to you. My father once said of another man who had inherited considerable wealth that he "chose his parents well." My father was, of course, making fun of the idea that our successes come primarily from brilliant choices.

I cover this terrain because we are currently inundated with unsupported claims that our energy future will be continuously more abundant in line with our historical experience of the last 200 years or so. And, I've written about the actual risks we face. Guessing right in the past about the supply of a finite resource, that is, fossil fuels, is no guarantee that the next optimistic projection will be correct. In fact, the finitude of fossil fuels suggests that the day will come when optimistic projections will be wrong, and we will be caught unawares with devastating results. (Oh wait! Didn't that already happen when at the beginning of the previous decade wildly optimistic projections of ample, cheap supplies of oil turned out to be wildly wrong?)

But for this piece I have two examples of our failure to understand the limits of our knowledge from the world of finance: an overheard dinner conversation in my adopted home of Portland and a recent sad story from an acquaintance who entrusted money to a well-reputed investment management organization. The second story definitively illustrates my point. The first only illustrates it in principle since those receiving the advice have clearly not acted on it yet. We'll return to these stories in detail later.

But first, we must keep in mind that in general terms, the future--that is, the future down through history--has not monotonously repeated the past. In fact, history is the story of what changed, and we have lots of history. This doesn't mean that things cannot seem stable for long stretches, sometimes spanning several lifetimes. This isn't the rule, however, but rather the exception. In fact, when this does happen, it turns out that both in society and in nature long periods of stability are frequently followed by catastrophic change. Think 2008 market crash and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

We are delving now into the what the great philosopher of skepticism, David Hume, referred to as the problem of induction which is often illustrated as follows: Seeing white swans on thousands of occasions does NOT prove that all swans are white. It suggests perhaps that the odds are high that the next one sighted will be white; but, even this could be mistaken because we can never see all instances of swans everywhere throughout the expanse of time backward AND forward--which is just another way of saying that our sample size is actually quite small, whatever we may believe. In the end, Europeans who landed in Australia did find what seemed impossible up to that point: a black swan.

Now, finding a black swan was astonishing, but not necessarily damaging on an individual or societal scale. But, if your life, livelihood or entire society absolutely depends on the future being more or less like the past (as you and others have lived it), then you would be a fool simply to let things ride without further investigation. It only takes one black swan to invalidate the supposition that all swans are white.

The great contemporary authority on risk, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, puts it best in his book entitled The Black Swan: "It does not matter how many times something succeeds, if failure is too great to bear." Just what does this gem of brevity mean. In practical terms it means that we must consider not only the PROBABILITY of a future event, but also its possible SEVERITY. The possibility of getting a hangnail in the next week ought not to concern us much. The possibility of losing an arm ought to rivet our attention, even if the risk seems small.

Let me return to the overheard dinner conversation. An older man was counseling his son or more likely his new son-in-law about the wisdom of buying real estate no matter how high the market. The young married couple was considering buying their first home. The man used as proof of his point that he invested in real estate as a young man and never looked back. He always made money on every home when he sold it, and was able to live in better and better homes along the way. The older man counseled his son-in-law and daughter that things always turn out all right in the end--to which I can only add "OR NOT."

It's easy to see that the sample size here is very, very small. And, the specifics of real estate are actually very important versus, say, the specifics of a commodity such as oil or gold. Location, location, location are the three considerations said to be most important in valuing real estate.

I'm not opposed to owning real estate and have owned some in the past. But I have always considered it a very expensive consumer item, not an investment. I don't doubt there are some who are sharp-eyed enough to make money on real estate consistently. But the rest of us, I believe, are better served by regarding residential real estate as a method of providing living quarters. The most recent housing bust should have made this abundantly clear (but apparently it did not do so for everyone).

The above example illustrates what such advice sounds like before it is acted upon. The second example illustrates the effects of breaks from past. An acquaintance enlisted a well-known investment management firm to invest all his money. The acquaintance explained that he was a very conservative investor and valued safety over return.

The investment firm put him 45 percent in stocks through broadly-based mutual funds and 45 percent in bonds, much of them of the government variety. The remaining 10 percent was in a money market.

Historically, this allocation looked "safe" and quite conservative. After all, the firm explained, when stocks go down, bonds go up. And, when bonds go down, stocks go up. But in aggregate this strategy was supposed to offer steady, modest growth over time.

Almost immediately the stock market and the bond market tanked simultaneously. It wasn't supposed to be that way. The losses were not massive, but they were sudden and contrary to what the management firm had foretold.

The acquaintance sold all his stocks and bonds and put the proceeds into a money market account. Whether this will prove wise in the long run is unknown. But, the reaction was not out of fear of loses so much as fear that the future will not look like the past--that the promised steady small gains over time would not materialize because markets were acting contrary to past patterns.

If we cannot necessarily rely on past patterns to guide us, what does the voice of experience have to offer? The answer should actually be unsurprising. Since none of us can know the future, our task ought to be to make ourselves more resilient come what may. The usual advice is to get a good education (but not so much that you become a rigid thinker); maintain your health enough to do your work and the other things you enjoy; cultivate many relationships to increase your chances of meeting your needs and of doing interesting things and thinking interesting thoughts; and finally, be willing to fail while experimenting to discover the best path to your goals. There is nothing startling about all this.

We like to think that we shape our destiny rather than destiny shaping us. It's not so much that our choices don't matter as that we cannot accurately forecast their results. If those choices redound to our benefit, then we style ourselves brilliantly perceptive. If they dog us with failures, we blame it on the stars.

I am reminded of Michael Grant's pithy summary of Stoic philosophy in his wonderful short history The World of Rome: "So pray not for blessings, but for the power to do without them." That's the true meaning of a robust life: Living well even when fortune does not favor us.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He is a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Fukushima and our inability to gauge risk

Perhaps the most important energy story on the planet right now is the precarious situation for fuel rods stored in a damaged building at the Fukushima nuclear power station in Japan, site of the worst nuclear power plant disaster in history.

It's a story that has actually been important for a while because an earthquake--in a place prone to earthquakes--or a severe storm or perhaps another tsunami has the potential to dislodge these rods, expose them to air and begin a reaction that might release a radioactive cloud that would reach around the globe. Figuring out how to get the rods out of harm's way, however, has proven exceedingly difficult. But shortly, the plant's owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company, is going to try, and any mistake in moving the rods could be very, very environmentally damaging and dangerous to human health.

However, there is another story beyond the immediate danger that tells us something about how we think about risk and why such thinking is wholly inadequate to the risks we face in energy. Up until the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Ukraine in 1986, nuclear advocates liked to say that no one had ever been killed by nuclear power. After Chernobyl that changed to very few people have ever been killed by nuclear power compared to the numbers killed, for example, in coal mining. And, of course, there is the damage done to human, animal and plant health by emissions from coal burning including respiratory disease, mercury contamination of fish and the degradation of forests due to acid rain. There is also climate change caused by emissions from burning not only coal, but other fossil fuels as well.

After Fukushima, even though nuclear advocates could still plausibly defend the same general claims about nuclear safety, they seldom do. Part of the reason is that we don't know the final toll of the Fukushima disaster because the disaster is still in progress and is likely to remain in progress for many years, if not decades. And, because there is so much more at the site to deal with, that time line holds even if the fuel rods are successfully extracted from the rubble of the building that currently houses them.

How could the world have misjudged the dangers associated with nuclear power, especially those from the light water reactors that so dominate the nuclear industry today? The simple answer is lack of experience. The nuclear power industry is only approaching 70 years old. That seems like a long time, but it isn't.

Nuclear power plants are one of the most complex systems ever devised by humans. Complex systems by their very nature have more failure points than simple systems. But this in and of itself is not the problem. Natural systems such as the ocean currents or a rainforest are exceedingly complex. But, they have been around for much longer and their processes have settled into much more predictable patterns. With nuclear power plants, we have little experience to go on in evaluating risks.

Man-made systems not only have much shorter histories to work from, but they can interact with natural systems in unpredictable ways. Recall what happened at the Fukushima nuclear plant: The tsunami was so high that it breached the plant's seawall, flooding emergency diesel generators located in basements, generators that were supposed to power pumps to cool the reactor core and fuel rods in the event of a power outage. Backup batteries for those pumps ran out of power within a day. And, that's when the trouble began that led to hydrogen explosions which damaged buildings--damage that ultimately compromised the fuel rod storage.

Let me quote from an earlier piece of mine, "Calculating calamity: Japan's nuclear accident and the 'antifragile' alternative":

Famed student of risk and probability and author of The Black Swan Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells us that in 2003 Japan's nuclear safety agency set as a goal that fatalities resulting from radiation exposure to civilians living near any nuclear installation in Japan should be no more than one every million years. Eight years after that goal was adopted, it looks like it will be exceeded and perhaps by quite a bit, especially now that radiation is showing up in food and water near the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi plant. (Keep in mind that "fatalities" refers not just to immediate deaths but also to excess cancer deaths due to radiation exposure which can take years and even decades to show up.)

Taleb writes that it is irresponsible to ask people to rely on the calculation of small probabilities for man-made systems since these probabilities are almost impossible to calculate with any accuracy. (To read his reasoning, see entry 142 on the notebook section of his website entitled "Time to understand a few facts about small probabilities [criminal stupidity of statistical science].") ....Calculations for man-made systems that result in incidents occurring every million years should be dismissed on their face as useless.

Furthermore, he notes, models used to calculate such risk tend to underestimate small probabilities. What's worse, the consequences are almost always wildly underestimated as well.

We could conclude that nuclear power is unsafe or, at least, risky enough that we don't want to build more potential Fukushimas, and leave it at that. But, we would be remiss in not noting that the rest of the world's energy system, based primarily on fossil fuels faces risks of unknown proportions as well.

There are the obvious risks of climate change associated with the burning of fossil fuels. The risks are rising, and the consequences could be nothing short of catastrophic.

With regard to supply, despite all the handwaving about ample supplies of fossil fuels, an oil price hovering in record territory for the last three years tell us that limits for this fuel cannot be far off. The rate of production has barely nudged upward, just 2.7 percent since 2005 despite record investment by the oil industry. This compares with a nearly 10 percent rise in the production rate in the previous eight years. It's a significant slowdown, made all the more significant because it comes in the face of supposedly miraculous new extractive technologies that were supposed to reverse the declining growth trend in world oil supplies.

Natural gas production in the United States--still (almost certainly wrongly) touted as the world's next natural gas superpower--has been just about flat since the beginning of 2012. Coal supplies seem ample, but coal quality is declining virtually everywhere, and estimates of minable coal have actually been dropping for decades.

We think we know the future of these fuels. But only a decade ago, the same people who are trumpeting fossil fuel abundance today were telling us how prices would stay low for decades and supply would keep on increasing at a steady pace. For example, long-term forecasts for oil production made in the year 2000 were far too optimistic. In fact, the optimists have been wrong every step of the way as oil's price has increased 10-fold since 1998.

Coal prices leapt upward in the last decade though they have come down from their peaks. World natural gas prices remain high, though a local glut in the United States has lowered prices there--but only to levels that remain 70 percent higher than the average price in the 1990s. Why should we accept optimistic pronouncements about supply now?

We shouldn't because the perennial optimists don't know the future, and neither does anyone else. And, that should tell us right there that we cannot gauge the risks to fossil fuel supplies with any degree of certainty. Projections and forecasts that go out decades are guesses and little more. They have no force as probabilistic predictions because the probabilities of such forecasts cannot be calculated. And yet, most are presented as fact rather than the fiction that they are.

The fact is, we don't know what we don't know. In our energy policy and planning across the world, we act as if we know future fossil fuel supplies precisely--just as we acted as if we knew the risks of nuclear power rather precisely--that is, close to zero.

All this suggests that we ought to have a bias toward energy supplies that cannot decline in the long run, namely renewables--and that cannot create environmental havoc with just one accident. Strangely, this is a surprisingly tough sell in a world that has already been sold on the idea that we have precise knowledge of our energy future--when, in reality, all we have are risks, many of which cannot be even be remotely quantified.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He is a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Geology beats technology: Shell shuts down oil shale pilot project

The belief that technology can always overcome natural limits just took a big hit this week when Royal Dutch Shell PLC decided to shut down its pilot oil shale project in western Colorado after 31 years of experimentation. The ostensible reason is that the company has opportunities elsewhere. Shell says it wants to shift resources away from the intransigent rock and move it to profitable opportunities.

That sounds logical. But, it might have sounded logical in any of the last 10 years as oil prices rose to historic heights while oil shale projects languished. Even today the average daily price of crude oil hovers near its historic highs set in 2011 and again in 2012.

The prize for anyone who profitably unlocks these deposits is huge, an estimated 800 billion barrels of recoverable resources. So why isn't oil shale yielding to the mighty combination of deep pockets, sophisticated technology and high prices?

A clue comes from one sentence in coverage in The Denver Post: "Full-scale production would probably have required building a dedicated power plant." In simple terms, it takes energy to get energy. Shell's process requires copious amounts of electricity to heat the rock in place through boreholes in order to release the waxy hydrocarbons embedded in it. In this pilot project, the subterranean rock was heated for three years before liquids were captured and brought to the surface for further processing.

(Oil shale is a promotional term. Oil shale is neither shale, nor does it contain oil. It is better characterized as organic marlstone. It contains kerogen, a waxy, long-chain hydrocarbon that must be extensively processed to make it into a synthetic form of crude oil. Oil shale is often confused with oil taken from deep shale formations such as the Bakken in North Dakota, oil properly called "tight oil.")

The ratio of energy outputs to inputs for oil shale is estimated to be about 2 to 1, according to a study by Cleveland Cutler who has long examined energy return on energy invested. Shell claimed a ratio of around 3 to 1 (though that claim no longer appears on the project site). That seems good until you realize that we are currently running the world on crude which has a ratio around 20 to 1.

Furthermore, the need for water to cool power plants associated with oil shale extraction and for processing the extracted liquids is considerable. And, water is increasingly difficult to secure in an area that has seen growing demand combined with more than a decade of drought.

Proponents of oil shale claimed in 1981 that it would be economical to process if oil were to reach $38 per barrel and stay there. The threshold price kept escalating along with the price of oil all the way up to $80 in a 2008 study by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

And, yet here we are. Brent Crude, the de facto world benchmark, hovers around $108 dollars. The average daily price for the past three years has remained above $100. In the face of these consistent record high prices, Shell is abandoning oil shale development. And, Shell isn't the only one. Another international major, Chevron Corp., pulled out of its project last year.

There are others who soldier on in the oil shale deposits, and they may eventually find ways to produce a synthetic crude from this rock at a profit. But 30 years of failure suggests that such a development remains far off. And, in a world that is trying to wean itself from fossil fuels because of climate change and the risks of depletion, time may run out.

The path of oil shale is reminiscent of atomic fusion research. Twenty-five years ago, fusion was supposed to be just 25 years in the future. Earlier in the same decade, oil shale was touted as the future of oil. Today, fusion remains the energy source of the future (just as oil shale does), and researchers at the world's main fusion research facility, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), say that fusion will perhaps be ready for commercial use by mid-century.

To be fair, the challenges for fusion researchers are daunting. For example, they must build and run a device that operates at interior temperatures of 150 million degrees centigrade--which is 10 times hotter than the core of the sun. And, they must do it safely and in a way that produces more energy than the device consumes.

But, because the challenges are so daunting, it may turn out that fusion will always remain the energy of the future. We already know how to fuse two atoms. And, we know how to process oil shale to produce synthetic oil.

But, we don't know how to do either of these things at an energy or financial profit sufficient enough to make them practical for widespread deployment. There is a strong possibility that we may not learn how to succeed with either in a time frame that matters to anyone living today.

That means we must get on with other technologies, energy projects and energy policies that have a more realistic possibility of addressing our energy needs and the climate change caused by our current energy regime.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He is a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.