Unplanning Journal

I've been reading the occasional posts on Unplanning Journal, a blog authored by a county planner in central California. The planner rightly points out that planners everywhere assume that energy supplies will grow without end. In fact, so deep is the faith in ever-growing energy supplies that planning documents either never mention or give just perfunctory mention to energy issues. The planner garnered considerable attention recently with his post of a summary of his conversation with an energy company executive espousing a bleak outlook for natural gas (READ: electricity) supplies in North America. (The planner's inquiry was part of his regular work of planning for countywide energy needs over the next couple of decades.)

Most revealing for me are his suggestions for relocating population away from major urban centers post peak oil, something he regards as an inevitability given how unsustainable cities such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas are. There is also his outline for an emergency response plan to energy shortages since he has come to believe that municipalities will not plan ahead given their deeply held belief that energy supplies will continue to grow indefinitely.

It is the tone of these suggestions that is most compelling. They are expressed in the neutral, rational manner you'd expect from a planner providing information on a plan for, say, a new highway. But, that very tone rattles the nerves since what is being contemplated is so enormous and disruptive. We need to recognize that the Unplanner is merely engaging in the kind of thinking every community will be forced to engage in if we all simply wait for the inevitable decline of energy supplies. Do we really want to temporize when oil prices are three and four times what they are today? And yet, it seems, given the inertia of planning departments everywhere, his suggestions might well become a template for how to react to the coming energy crisis--after its arrival.

Let's hope his message reaches his fellow planners before then.

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Fafblog explains Bush energy plan

Fafblog takes a poke at the Bush energy plan. Thanks to reader J. A. for pointing out this bit of energy humor.

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Hydrogen from bacteria?

Of course, we can get hydrogen from bacteria rather than more energy-intensive electrolysis or extraction from methane. But, these "breakthroughs" often turn out not to be what they are assumed. Note the comments at the bottom of this WorldChanging post explaining why the information provided is incomplete and why the process described may end up being quite costly indeed. Hydrogen as a fuel has a lot of advantages (and some very serious disadvantages), but getting it out of the environment at a reasonable energy cost remains a difficult hurdle.

(Via Peak Energy.)

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Cheap gas for cheap housing

This piece and its companion part two on Truthout provide a complex mapping of how our energy deficit (i.e., oil imports) have led to every other deficit and how those deficits have tilted the country rightward for 25 years. The basic pattern is as follows:

1. Energy deficit creates trade deficit.
2. Trade deficit creates investment deficit.
3. Investment deficit creates budget deficit.
4. Investment deficit and budget deficit creates wages and wealth deficit.
5. Wages and wealth deficits create pressure to use energy to generate housing wealth, which starts the cycle over again.

The vicious cycle keeps real wages flat and oil prices cheap, thus encouraging people to look for cheaper housing farther from the city using cheap gasoline to finance their trips to work and back and to everywhere else. It also tends to keep them focused on husbanding the remaining scraps of prosperity that they have, something which they do increasingly by taking on debt.

The grim forecast from the author is that oil depletion will make America move even further to the right. This seems to me not to be a firm bet. At some point the whole edifice comes tumbling down. Whoever is in office at the time gets blamed. Who will replace the fallen officeholders is the question. Will it be those with a progressive agenda seeking to rectify the ravaging of the middle class, the poor and the environment or will it be those who promise to restore the recent past when there is no hope of doing so?

(Via Mobjectivist.)

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Crop yields will crash with global warming

For a long time scientists believed that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere responsible for global warming would likely offset the damage done to crops by rising temperatures. As everyone knows, photosynthesis in plants converts carbon dioxide from the air into carbon compounds for the plants and oxygen which is released to the atmosphere. Extra carbon dioxide ought to do plants some good, scientist surmised.

Now, actual open field experiments which added carbon dioxide and the expected ozone levels from increased smog show dramatic reductions in yields. This is extremely bad news, especially for countries such as India and China.

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'Vote for me; I promise you less'

I recently did question and answer sessions after two local showings of the movie, "The End of Suburbia." Each time the question arose, "Why aren't our politicians talking about the issue of oil depletion?" My response has been that nobody in America gets elected by saying, "Vote for me; I promise you less." (A couple of brave congressmen from Maryland recently broached the subject of peak oil. Perhaps they don't care about whether they get re-elected.) The last person to make a serious go of this message was Jimmy Carter, and we all know what happened to him.

For some reason, the same political rules don't apply in Europe where the European parliament voted to require a 10 percent cut in energy use by 2015. No doubt much of this will be achieved through new efficiencies forced on industry and residences by the law. But, I believe some of it will have to be achieved through curtailment or, at least, the rearranging of how things are now done. That means less of something.

How can we import the magic elixir that allows Europeans to begin preparing for an energy transition before a crisis has hit? We need that elixir badly!

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Speak now (but don't forever hold your peace)

Kjell Aleklett, president of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, provides a compact summary of how oil depletion is turning more and more countries into net importers. Here's the key paragraph:

By 2010 the following countries have the potential to produce more oil than they have ever produced before; Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan and Bolivia. These countries will have to cover the decline in 59 countries and the increased demand from the rest of the world. Anyone that can provide information showing that this is possible must do it now.

Do we have any takers?

(Via PowerSwitch.)

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Stop the presses

"Vietnam, strategically situated on the south China Rim, will emerge as a key US trading partner and ally over the next ten years." That's one of several startling conclusions from "Crisis on the China Rim," (PDF-85 pages), a recently released report now available from Research Connect.

The subtitle, "An Economic, Crude Oil, and Military Analysis," gives you some idea of the reasons for the turn of events. It's all about energy, in particular, oil. The author of the report, Laguna Research Partners, also makes another startling prediction. Instead of merely coalescing around trading blocs, the world's nations will also coalesce around what Laguna calls "Energy Security Blocs."

Just as the Cold War of the 20th century had its opposing communist Eastern and democratic Western Blocs, we expect the intensifying race for energy security will prompt the formation of opposing "Energy Security Blocs. These Blocs will take time to emerge, but they are coalescing now. We anticipate that, eventually, one energy security bloc will be US-centric, while the other is likely to be China-centric.

The Laguna analyst also sheds light on the current posturing between China and Taiwan, showing the blinders that Western thinking can put on any attempt at analysis. He quotes from Sun Tzu's The Art of War: "The skillful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting." Then, he explains what it means in the context of China and Taiwan.

Viewed from a Western perspective, China's threats regarding Taiwan represent counter-productive saber rattling. From an Asian perspective, China is pursuing a Taiwan re-unification strategy of "breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting."

The report also makes note of how the recent pipeline deal between Iran, Pakistan and India "provides an excellent example of how the crisis on the China Rim is trumping deep historical distrusts and forging radical changes in world view among China Rim governments."

With respect to the Chinese economy, the report states, "As long as China keeps the value of the Yuan Renminbi pegged to the value of the US Dollar, we expect that China's economy will continue to surprise observers to the upside."

Any other surprises on the upside? You probably guessed it: oil. "[P]rice targets calling for $100 per barrel within the next three years will prove to be conservative," the report concludes.

The Laguna report is filled with statistics on military expenditures, GDP, border lengths, oil reserves--a myriad of fascinating detail that provides a solid statistical basis for some of the seemingly outlandish conclusions. There are more conclusions just like the ones I've cited for those with the patience to read through the entire report.

(Thanks to reader T. O. at Research Connect for putting me onto this report.)

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New Yorker climate article now online

The "The Climate of Man - 1", the first part of a three-part series on global warming, is now available online. I discussed it in my previous post, but it was not available online at that point. I strongly recommend the article.

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Fissures of (climate) history

Ridicule often comes to those who think that we are living at the beginning of a bold, new era of progress, pregnant with possibilities and opportunity or conversely, to those with a more pessimistic (or eschatological) turn of mind who believe we are living at the close of an age whose life and culture are about to be wiped out in a great cataclysm (the result of our own doing, of course). After all, it is argued, by definition almost everyone lives in the middle of any definable era. It's a boring and disappointing thought that undermines our self-importance and robs us of our personal sense of drama.

To restore that sense of drama, the latest New Yorker magazine (April 25) has the first of a series of three articles on climate change. In "The Climate of Man-1," we learn from a leading permafrost expert that Alaska's permafrost is warming up to near the freezing point, some of it only one degree away from melting. If it melts, it would be the first time in 120,000 years that it has done so.

It sounds like nothing more egregious than the freezer defrosting and leaving you with some liquid ice cream all over the bottom. But, according to our expert it would definitely mark a turning point in geological history. Huge amounts of organic material frozen in the permafrost would begin to decompose sending out the first installment of hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane, which would then make things warmer, which then melt more of the permafrost and so on. It's the feared runaway global warming scenario.

For those not convinced that we are on the edge of a new era (climatically speaking) there's this:

Antarctic ice cores show that carbon dioxide levels today are significantly higher than they have been at any other point in the last four hundred and twenty thousand years.

And, far from thinking about climate change as a slow process, we will likely not have to wait thousands of more years to see the result of our handiwork as this analogy that compares the climate system to a rowboat suggests:

You can tip and then you'll just go back. You can tip it and just go back. And, then you tip it and you get to the other stable state, which is upside down.

In the article you get a short history of global warming studies--they began more than 140 years ago--a tour of the main venues of research including Alaska, Greenland, and Iceland and a lot of very well-explained climate science.

When you get done, you will no longer think that we are living through the middle of anything except an era of extreme change.

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