Civilization, that is, the congregation of people in large settlements we call cities, is thought to owe its origins in part to the invention of agriculture. By growing surpluses of food crops farmers enabled the creation of an urban non-farming class who engaged in all manner of cultural, governmental, and commercial activities. These activities now preoccupy the vast majority of people in advanced economies.
From year to year the new settlements of ancient civilizations ensured their continuity through one very important measure: the storage of surplus food crops, especially grain. This enabled them to withstand a bad harvest or even two or three without facing collapse.
What a supreme irony then that the sine qua non of civilization--maintaining a store of essential materials--should in our time be considered a source of inefficiency and waste to be avoided at all costs. The long tradition of saving for a rainy day (or as we will see, in our case, a drought-stricken decade) has now been rejected in favor of the so-called just-in-time revolution. For those who didn't get the memo, just-in-time inventory management means that everything needed for the manufacture of any good is delivered to the factory just as it is needed or nearly so. Inventory levels are kept at minimal levels which frees up cash for other purposes.
Just-in-time methods have become synonymous with lean, well-managed international corporations. And, they are now the Achilles heel of a global trading system at risk on several fronts.
It is no accident that just-in-time methods came of age in the 1990s and were adopted by nearly every organization big enough to benefit from them. The relative tranquillity of the '90s made fears of any widespread disruption of supply lines fade from memory. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were no more superpower confrontations. The ambitions of Saddam Hussein to control a vast portion of the world's oil supply were contained. The sea-lanes were secured by the dominance of the U. S. fleet. Cheap energy meant cheap transportation which encouraged the expansion of trade. And, this allowed the wholesale removal of industries from places of high cost to places where labor and resources were the cheapest. In addition, the bear market in raw materials continued. This lulled purchasing managers into believing that needed materials would be cheaper tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. So, why keep anything but minimal inventories?
These conditions created fertile ground for just-in-time ideas in almost every corner of the globe and in almost every organization including government and nonprofits. And, under such conditions it was inarguably better to keep inventories lean. As a result spartan inventories soon became a necessity as company after company sought competitive advantage through this type of cost-cutting.
Whether just-in-time inventory is an idea for all time or was merely suited to a unique moment in history is now being tested. Commodity prices for many critical industrial commodities have now skyrocketed. At the end of 2001 copper could be had for about 65 cents a pound. Last week it closed at about $3.50 a pound. Nickel hovered near $2 a pound in 2001 and now sells for almost $13 a pound. Oil sold for about $20 a barrel in late 2001 and now sits above $70. And, the list goes on. (Memo to purchasing managers: Things are not getting cheaper anymore!)
The United States military now sits astride one of the greatest known reservoirs of oil in the world, Iraq. But that military appears impotent to increase oil production in the face of continuing chaos and an emerging civil war in the country. Iran and North Korea now ignore demands from the world's only putative superpower whose strength, financial and military, is being sapped every day by its engagement in Iraq.
U. S. friction with China over high Chinese trade surpluses, an undervalued currency, Taiwan, and China's increasingly close relations with Venezuela and Iran which were sought in order to secure precious oil and natural gas does not bode well for the future stability of the world and the free movement of goods.
The willingness of Russia to curtail gas supplies to the Ukraine and ultimately to Europe demonstrate the precariousness of energy supplies. In our own hemisphere, Hurricane Katrina laid bare the vulnerability of both the U.S. and world energy infrastructure to natural disasters. And, the recent pipeline problem at Alaska's Prudhoe Bay oil field showed our vulnerability to mere poor maintenance. The world now appears to have a razor thin cushion of excess oil production capacity.
Rising energy costs are starting to take their toll on the trucking industry, but despite rising fuel costs marine and rail shipments remain relatively affordable even if capacity is being strained.
All of this has been put down to temporary and cyclical factors such as the general bull market in commodities and increased demand from the growing economies of China and India. And, if that's true, then there is little cause for alarm except among those companies that can't obtain the supplies they need at prices that allow them to be competitive.
However, the drop in world grain stocks paints a more ominous picture. Those stocks have declined to about 57 days of supply. The last time grain stocks were this low was in 1972, just before grain prices doubled. And, as more and more grain is converted into fuel rather than food, the situation may worsen. High oil prices encourage such conversion.
Low grain stocks are also partly the result of declining harvests. And, declining harvests are partly due to drought in critical grain growing regions of the world: the U. S. western and Plains states, Canada, southern Africa and much of Europe. If global warming is the culprit, this problem is not going away.
Of more immediate concern is the way just-in-time ideas have filtered into the retail food system. Grocery stores are believed to have no more than a three-day supply of food. That means those who don't grow their own food (which is most of us) will find themselves going hungry within a week of an emergency that shuts down the just-in-time delivery system to stores. What could do that? Try an avian flu pandemic.
And, that brings us to the medical field which has long been applying the minimalist, just-in-time view to its operations. The corporate mentality driving both for-profit and non-profit hospitals has resulted in an attempt to keep capacity to a minimum in order to drive down costs. But, the effect has been to undermine surge capacity, that is, the capacity to treat large numbers of patients from a mass casualty event such as a terrorist attack or a flu pandemic. The issue also applies to vaccines, drugs and medical equipment that might be needed in an emergency.
As for energy supplies, one almost certain near-term crisis will come to North America when its natural gas production begins to decline. That crisis could arrive as early as this winter and it's one reason the U. S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is trying to encourage the creation of additional natural gas storage.
When it comes to oil, there is a recognition on the part of nearly every major importing nation that just-in-time inventories are not enough. The United States, the European Union and China all have plans for or already have in place large state-run petroleum inventories, normally referred to as strategic petroleum reserves.
Perhaps the ultimate expression of the just-in-time idea is Wal-Mart's so-called warehouse-on-wheels. Only in a cheap oil environment would the idea of motion be added to the idea of warehouse. Wal-Mart tries to keep much of its inventory on the road in trucks to maintain low costs and flexibility. This is the ultimate in just-in-time delivery. But, those who believe world peak oil production will soon be upon us with its skyrocketing oil prices think that Wal-Mart would quickly crumble under the resulting financial and logistical strain.
When any resource becomes scarce, the natural tendency of people is to hoard it. That has the effect of sending the price higher which makes people think they should hoard it all the more.
In the coming years we may be faced with such a dynamic in many markets. The most devastating and far-reaching effects could come in the energy markets. Will the just-in-time religion which swept the world in the 1990s survive such a dynamic? Will the new fashion be to plan ahead and make sure we have extra supplies of metals, fuel, medicine and food on hand to run our factories and our civilization when disruptions occur?
Such a novel idea, isn't it? Or maybe it's an idea that's as old as civilization itself.
Sunday, August 13, 2006
Saturday, August 05, 2006
Apocalypse always: Is the peak oil movement really just another apocalyptic cult?
Whenever the world's scientists release yet one more piece of evidence pointing to ecological catastrophe in climate or resource depletion, some of those who are historically minded like to say it has ever been thus. For instance, peak oil nemesis Daniel Yergin loves to repeat the idea that "[t]his is not he first time the world has 'run out of oil.' It's more like the fifth." When it comes to global warming, the few remaining skeptics are fond of saying that scientists were predicting a new ice age as recently as the 1970s. More recently, the author of an article in Harper's Magazine entitled "Imagine There's No Oil: Scenes from a Liberal Apocalypse," a piece otherwise sympathetic in its coverage of the peak oil movement, drew parallels between those concerned about an imminent peak in world oil production and apocalyptic cults of the past.
Even though the peak oil movement does share a common bond with those cults in its obsession with dates, perhaps the most compelling comparisons are between the dramatic end-of-the-world scenarios of past cults and the dramatic end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it scenarios of some peak oil adherents.
Still, at its core the peak oil movement is decidedly different from an apocalyptic cult. I am often asked if I believe in peak oil as if it were an article of faith rather than a question of evidence. I respond that I take the possibility seriously because the accumulated evidence demonstrates that oil wells, oil fields and oil-producing countries have and continue to peak and decline in their production. I add that there is no compelling evidence that world oil production will not do the same at some point.
In fact, undergirding the peak oil thesis now are both a large body of scientific evidence and a great number of experts, some of them drawn from the oil industry itself. The basis of this movement then cannot be fairly compared to such movements as the Millerites and the Shakers which at their core relied on revelation, not science. By contrast, accepting peak oil theory doesn't require personal revelation or mere belief, only an evaluation of the publicly available evidence. That's why even peak oil's supposed detractors such as Daniel Yergin can acknowledge that oil is finite and that someday its production will cease to rise and ultimately decline.
Perhaps the one thing which is holding back the peak oil idea from wider acceptance is that some of the data needed to create definitive scenarios for peak are simply not available. Much of the world's oil remains controlled by state oil companies that have no obligation to submit to an audit. The other problem is that oil is not easy to measure because it is underground and because its recovery is dependent on myriad factors that include technology, geology, geography and market prices. This contrasts with climate studies in which no government or corporation can hide the atmosphere or the oceans from eager researchers who want to do measurements. This difference may explain why concern about global warming has been embraced by nearly every informed person on the planet, while the concept of peak oil remains relatively obscure and often dismissed even by many in the environmental movement.
Another distinction between the usual run of apocalyptic cults and the peak oil movement is its diversity. It contains not just end-of-civilization doomsayers, but many who believe that a transition to a sustainable and prosperous society is eminently doable (albeit with considerable effort) and some who believe that the transition to alternative fuels will be brought about by the marketplace. And, while the above-mentioned Harper's article styles peak oil as a "liberal apocalypse," two of the peak oil movement's most prominent spokespersons are Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, a self-described "very conservative Republican," and energy investment banker Matthew Simmons, an advisor to the Bush presidential campaign in 2000.
The label "apocalyptic" is most often intended to be derisory. But even if it applies, those who use it this way may miss something very important about some apocalyptic movements. These movements sometimes spawn great creativity that has ongoing benefits for society at large. For example, even though the Shakers in America never numbered more than perhaps 6,000, their contributions to American society are astonishingly broad and enduring. Their art and architecture continue to inspire designers today. Their craftsmanship, particularly in furniture, commands high prices for original pieces and has led to many reproductions that are still being manufactured today. Inventions such as the flat broom, the circular saw, and the idea of printed packaging used in the sale of seeds are attributed to the Shakers. And, Shaker music lives on, perhaps most notably in the song "Simple Gifts," which has been adapted and arranged again and again.
Even if peak oil production turns out to be decades away, the contributions of the peak oil movement are already manifold. The people involved are forcing a re-evaluation not only of the idea of energy and its sources, but of the very way in which we live. They are creating dialogue on basic questions about what constitutes a good life--questions about excessive consumption, unhealthy lifestyles, and pathological social, political and economic arrangements born of fossil-fuel dependence. Above all, they are sounding the alarm about the unsustainability of our current way of life. And, they are offering concrete solutions to move us toward sustainability in a wide range of areas that are inextricably linked to energy including food production, water resources and climate.
Can those who mock the peak oil movement as apocalyptic honestly say that it's too early to start moving toward sustainability? Do they really think we will be better off if we wait and risk being too late?
Even though the peak oil movement does share a common bond with those cults in its obsession with dates, perhaps the most compelling comparisons are between the dramatic end-of-the-world scenarios of past cults and the dramatic end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it scenarios of some peak oil adherents.
Still, at its core the peak oil movement is decidedly different from an apocalyptic cult. I am often asked if I believe in peak oil as if it were an article of faith rather than a question of evidence. I respond that I take the possibility seriously because the accumulated evidence demonstrates that oil wells, oil fields and oil-producing countries have and continue to peak and decline in their production. I add that there is no compelling evidence that world oil production will not do the same at some point.
In fact, undergirding the peak oil thesis now are both a large body of scientific evidence and a great number of experts, some of them drawn from the oil industry itself. The basis of this movement then cannot be fairly compared to such movements as the Millerites and the Shakers which at their core relied on revelation, not science. By contrast, accepting peak oil theory doesn't require personal revelation or mere belief, only an evaluation of the publicly available evidence. That's why even peak oil's supposed detractors such as Daniel Yergin can acknowledge that oil is finite and that someday its production will cease to rise and ultimately decline.
Perhaps the one thing which is holding back the peak oil idea from wider acceptance is that some of the data needed to create definitive scenarios for peak are simply not available. Much of the world's oil remains controlled by state oil companies that have no obligation to submit to an audit. The other problem is that oil is not easy to measure because it is underground and because its recovery is dependent on myriad factors that include technology, geology, geography and market prices. This contrasts with climate studies in which no government or corporation can hide the atmosphere or the oceans from eager researchers who want to do measurements. This difference may explain why concern about global warming has been embraced by nearly every informed person on the planet, while the concept of peak oil remains relatively obscure and often dismissed even by many in the environmental movement.
Another distinction between the usual run of apocalyptic cults and the peak oil movement is its diversity. It contains not just end-of-civilization doomsayers, but many who believe that a transition to a sustainable and prosperous society is eminently doable (albeit with considerable effort) and some who believe that the transition to alternative fuels will be brought about by the marketplace. And, while the above-mentioned Harper's article styles peak oil as a "liberal apocalypse," two of the peak oil movement's most prominent spokespersons are Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, a self-described "very conservative Republican," and energy investment banker Matthew Simmons, an advisor to the Bush presidential campaign in 2000.
The label "apocalyptic" is most often intended to be derisory. But even if it applies, those who use it this way may miss something very important about some apocalyptic movements. These movements sometimes spawn great creativity that has ongoing benefits for society at large. For example, even though the Shakers in America never numbered more than perhaps 6,000, their contributions to American society are astonishingly broad and enduring. Their art and architecture continue to inspire designers today. Their craftsmanship, particularly in furniture, commands high prices for original pieces and has led to many reproductions that are still being manufactured today. Inventions such as the flat broom, the circular saw, and the idea of printed packaging used in the sale of seeds are attributed to the Shakers. And, Shaker music lives on, perhaps most notably in the song "Simple Gifts," which has been adapted and arranged again and again.
Even if peak oil production turns out to be decades away, the contributions of the peak oil movement are already manifold. The people involved are forcing a re-evaluation not only of the idea of energy and its sources, but of the very way in which we live. They are creating dialogue on basic questions about what constitutes a good life--questions about excessive consumption, unhealthy lifestyles, and pathological social, political and economic arrangements born of fossil-fuel dependence. Above all, they are sounding the alarm about the unsustainability of our current way of life. And, they are offering concrete solutions to move us toward sustainability in a wide range of areas that are inextricably linked to energy including food production, water resources and climate.
Can those who mock the peak oil movement as apocalyptic honestly say that it's too early to start moving toward sustainability? Do they really think we will be better off if we wait and risk being too late?
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
The Coming "War" with Canada
As I returned recently from a vacation in Canada, I took a detour along the Canadian side of the St. Clair River which divides Ontario from Michigan as it flows from Lake Huron into Lake St. Clair. The sunny, placid scene of sailboats, swimmers and the occasional motorboat or barge bore no witness to the fact that this was a border between two countries. As I passed two vast oil refineries I was reminded that I was indeed in Canada, a country so rich in oil and natural gas that the docks next to these refineries were likely used to ship refined products to the United States which is now in perpetual need of them.
From such a vantage point it is hard to imagine that this apparently benign unconcern for where the United States ends and Canada begins might suddenly be transformed into a pitched battle of words and deeds. And yet, that is almost certainly where these two old friends are headed.
Behind this looming turnabout is one very troubling development: Natural gas production in North America has leveled off. Only warm winter weather has so far delivered the continent from a severe crisis. The glib confidence with which Wall Street analysts touted the buildup in gas storage earlier this year betrays their ignorance about how tenuous those supplies really are. Underground gas storage currently stands at 2.8 trillion cubic feet (tcf) and could reach well over 3 tcf if the current hot weather abates and reduces demand for gas used to produce electricity. But those figures amount to a very small buffer when compared to the approximately 26.5 tcf consumed each year across North America. In fact, it is so small that the U. S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is taking steps to encourage an expansion of gas storage in order to reduce the volatility in prices.
But you can't store what you don't produce. Even though gas drilling rig counts in the United States have steadily advanced from an average of under 500 in 1999 to 1,376 in June, production remains flat. This has led to high volatility in prices. Since February 2002 prices have risen from a low of a little over $2 per thousand cubic feet (mcf) to nearly $15 per mcf last October. Prices have since come down considerably. Even so they are unlikely to stay there if a hurricane again knocks out gas production infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico or a truly cold winter descends on North America.
But there is something else even more foreboding about the leveling off of gas production according to Douglas Reynolds, a resource economist at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks who has studied the North American gas situation closely. Reynolds predicts that North American production will begin to fall precipitously sometime after the beginning of 2007. And, unlike the gradual downslope that the declining production numbers for a depleting oil well or an entire oil-producing nation trace on a graph, Reynolds expects the falloff in North American gas production to resemble a cliff. When gas wells begin to decline, they decline swiftly and often with little warning.
Which brings us back to the coming "war" with Canada. There will be no quick fixes for natural gas shortages in North America. None. Eventually, natural gas from Alaska and the MacKenzie Delta in the Northwest Territories will arrive by pipeline. But that could easily be 10 years from now. Imports in the form of liquid natural gas (LNG) could offer some relief, but the timelines for building the necessary special purpose ports and ships could be equally long.
So, what happens in the meantime should Reynolds' prediction turn out to be true? The answer will be puzzling to many Canadians. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) obliges Canada to share its oil and gas in the same proportion as it has in the previous 36 months prior to any restrictions placed on output. The specific reference is Article 605. In other words, the United States is supposed to get its share no matter what. In 2005 the U. S. imported almost 3.7 tcf of natural gas from Canada which produced about 6.5 tcf in the same year. That's more than half Canada's production.
(Perhaps even more galling to the Canadian public will be the fact that the other party to NAFTA, Mexico, retained control over its own hydrocarbon resources in the very same chapter of the agreement in which Canadian negotiators gave away Canada's energy sovereignty.)
But what if the Canadian government faced a situation in which its own citizens were freezing in their homes for lack of heat? Would it simply let natural gas flow south because of a trade agreement? And, what if it became apparent that the situation wasn't temporary, but rather a long-term problem?
Any party to NAFTA can withdraw from the agreement with six months' written notice. But the urgency of a mid-winter natural gas crisis wouldn't allow for such an orderly retreat. So, if, say, a weak Canadian minority government such as the one currently in power in Ottawa were faced with the wrath of freezing Canadian voters or a nasty row with the United States, which would it choose?
In the past when it suited the United States, the U. S. government simply ignored rulings made by the body that adjudicates trade disputes under NAFTA. Specifically, a long-running dispute over the export of softwood lumber to the United States from Canada had both parties hot under the collar. (Read here and here.) The dispute has since been settled. If this rather minor dispute had both parties this agitated for this long, how much more will they be agitated by a natural gas crisis.
I seriously doubt that the Canadian government would ever risk an actual military confrontation with the United States over energy, a confrontation that it could not win. But, what would it do short of that? And what would the United States do short of military action when its own people are threatened with freezing?
We can all hope for lovely cooperation. But if the past is any indication, I fear we Americans could be in for what is about as close to a war as we will ever get with Canada.
You might expect that under the circumstances Canada and the United States would be invoking emergency conservation measures for natural gas. But instead both governments fiddle while the continent's remaining and perilously tight natural gas supplies continue to burn. They thereby risk that one day in the not-too-distant future their relationship may turn as icy as the St. Clair River during the depths of a frigid winter.
From such a vantage point it is hard to imagine that this apparently benign unconcern for where the United States ends and Canada begins might suddenly be transformed into a pitched battle of words and deeds. And yet, that is almost certainly where these two old friends are headed.
Behind this looming turnabout is one very troubling development: Natural gas production in North America has leveled off. Only warm winter weather has so far delivered the continent from a severe crisis. The glib confidence with which Wall Street analysts touted the buildup in gas storage earlier this year betrays their ignorance about how tenuous those supplies really are. Underground gas storage currently stands at 2.8 trillion cubic feet (tcf) and could reach well over 3 tcf if the current hot weather abates and reduces demand for gas used to produce electricity. But those figures amount to a very small buffer when compared to the approximately 26.5 tcf consumed each year across North America. In fact, it is so small that the U. S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is taking steps to encourage an expansion of gas storage in order to reduce the volatility in prices.
But you can't store what you don't produce. Even though gas drilling rig counts in the United States have steadily advanced from an average of under 500 in 1999 to 1,376 in June, production remains flat. This has led to high volatility in prices. Since February 2002 prices have risen from a low of a little over $2 per thousand cubic feet (mcf) to nearly $15 per mcf last October. Prices have since come down considerably. Even so they are unlikely to stay there if a hurricane again knocks out gas production infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico or a truly cold winter descends on North America.
But there is something else even more foreboding about the leveling off of gas production according to Douglas Reynolds, a resource economist at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks who has studied the North American gas situation closely. Reynolds predicts that North American production will begin to fall precipitously sometime after the beginning of 2007. And, unlike the gradual downslope that the declining production numbers for a depleting oil well or an entire oil-producing nation trace on a graph, Reynolds expects the falloff in North American gas production to resemble a cliff. When gas wells begin to decline, they decline swiftly and often with little warning.
Which brings us back to the coming "war" with Canada. There will be no quick fixes for natural gas shortages in North America. None. Eventually, natural gas from Alaska and the MacKenzie Delta in the Northwest Territories will arrive by pipeline. But that could easily be 10 years from now. Imports in the form of liquid natural gas (LNG) could offer some relief, but the timelines for building the necessary special purpose ports and ships could be equally long.
So, what happens in the meantime should Reynolds' prediction turn out to be true? The answer will be puzzling to many Canadians. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) obliges Canada to share its oil and gas in the same proportion as it has in the previous 36 months prior to any restrictions placed on output. The specific reference is Article 605. In other words, the United States is supposed to get its share no matter what. In 2005 the U. S. imported almost 3.7 tcf of natural gas from Canada which produced about 6.5 tcf in the same year. That's more than half Canada's production.
(Perhaps even more galling to the Canadian public will be the fact that the other party to NAFTA, Mexico, retained control over its own hydrocarbon resources in the very same chapter of the agreement in which Canadian negotiators gave away Canada's energy sovereignty.)
But what if the Canadian government faced a situation in which its own citizens were freezing in their homes for lack of heat? Would it simply let natural gas flow south because of a trade agreement? And, what if it became apparent that the situation wasn't temporary, but rather a long-term problem?
Any party to NAFTA can withdraw from the agreement with six months' written notice. But the urgency of a mid-winter natural gas crisis wouldn't allow for such an orderly retreat. So, if, say, a weak Canadian minority government such as the one currently in power in Ottawa were faced with the wrath of freezing Canadian voters or a nasty row with the United States, which would it choose?
In the past when it suited the United States, the U. S. government simply ignored rulings made by the body that adjudicates trade disputes under NAFTA. Specifically, a long-running dispute over the export of softwood lumber to the United States from Canada had both parties hot under the collar. (Read here and here.) The dispute has since been settled. If this rather minor dispute had both parties this agitated for this long, how much more will they be agitated by a natural gas crisis.
I seriously doubt that the Canadian government would ever risk an actual military confrontation with the United States over energy, a confrontation that it could not win. But, what would it do short of that? And what would the United States do short of military action when its own people are threatened with freezing?
We can all hope for lovely cooperation. But if the past is any indication, I fear we Americans could be in for what is about as close to a war as we will ever get with Canada.
You might expect that under the circumstances Canada and the United States would be invoking emergency conservation measures for natural gas. But instead both governments fiddle while the continent's remaining and perilously tight natural gas supplies continue to burn. They thereby risk that one day in the not-too-distant future their relationship may turn as icy as the St. Clair River during the depths of a frigid winter.
Sunday, July 23, 2006
Why It's Hard to Debate a Cornucopian
It's much easier to tell people what they want to hear than to tell them what they need to hear. This is the first and most important advantage a cornucopian thinker has when arguing before any audience. No one really wants to hear that the future may be filled with turbulent change and personal insecurity.
Perhaps more difficult to overcome is the argument that the future will be like the recent past--meaning the last couple of fossil-fueled centuries--only better. By definition there can be no proof of such an assertion. But the human tendency to extrapolate the recent past (meaning my lifetime of experiences) into the future is almost universal. When the ecological truthteller offers a different scenario, the burden of explanation is on him or her to show why the future will be different; the cornucopian is not required to mount a case other than to say something vague such as, "Everything has worked out fine so far, even though the pessimists predicted catastrophe."
This is nothing more than the problem of induction which is unfathomable to many people unless it is explained very simply. One writer relates a story told by Bertrand Russell that attempts to do just that:
Perhaps more difficult to overcome is the argument that the future will be like the recent past--meaning the last couple of fossil-fueled centuries--only better. By definition there can be no proof of such an assertion. But the human tendency to extrapolate the recent past (meaning my lifetime of experiences) into the future is almost universal. When the ecological truthteller offers a different scenario, the burden of explanation is on him or her to show why the future will be different; the cornucopian is not required to mount a case other than to say something vague such as, "Everything has worked out fine so far, even though the pessimists predicted catastrophe."
This is nothing more than the problem of induction which is unfathomable to many people unless it is explained very simply. One writer relates a story told by Bertrand Russell that attempts to do just that:
I prefer another tale told by Bertrand Russell, which concerns a certain farmer and his turkey. From the point of view of the reflective turkey, the farmer will always greet him in the morning with a bucket of grain. Why? Because, by simple inductive reasoning, it follows that the more often this happens, the more secure [the turkey] is in the belief that it will happen again until, one morning, the farmer appears with an axe. Now from the farmer's better informed point of view, he knows that the more often the turkey gets the grain, the less likely it is that he will survive another day. Similarly, life underwriters adopt the farmer's point of view.
We mistake frequency of an event for proof that it will continue in the future.
Cornucopians also like to talk about how much better off nearly everyone in the world is now than in the recent past. Again, because most people have difficulty understanding the problem of induction, this claim is hard to battle. But the clever debater will show that the cornucopian is focused only on human welfare in the very short term. The eco-services that humans rely on for clean water, food production, and stable climate are actually on different and deteriorating trajectories. If the very basis for our material well-being is declining dangerously, then society's feeling of well-being will someday reverse. The big question is when.
Since the ecological truthteller must now come up with a date to satisfy the audience's curiosity, he or she will offer one from the literature on global warming or water depletion or some other predicted ecological crisis. If the date is nearby, the truthteller will be subject to short-term falsification (and, in addition, to the feeling among the audience that something so horrible couldn't happen so soon and that the speaker is merely engaging in fearmongering). If he or she chooses a distant date, the audience may not see the importance of doing anything. Keep in mind that dates 20 years or more in the future seem distant to most people, and they are inclined to believe that the intervening time will be sufficient to think up and implement solutions for a known problem.
Above all, cornucopians love to argue that even if many environmental problems exist, we will think up ways to solve them because we always have. They will cite clean air and clean water as successes. This is the problem of induction with a twist. It is not just faith that current trends can be endlessly extrapolated into the future, but faith that problems which could derail those felicitous trends and for which there are currently no solutions will be miraculously solved. It is as if the turkey in Bertrand Russell's story knows that the axe has fallen with regularity on other turkeys, but somehow believes that the axe "problem" will be solved before his number is up.
To offer a definite date in the future for anything (except maybe recognized holidays) is a fib. The cornucopian will easily trip up anyone claiming to be an ecological truthteller and turn him or her into a ecological liar. The calendar is already littered with disaster predictions that have not (yet) come true.
But the tables can be turned on the cornucopian who likes to speak in certainties just as much as the ecological truthteller inadvisably does. We live more or less in a probabilistic universe about which our knowledge is highly imperfect. In our daily lives, however, we unconsciously know this. We take out insurance against risks which may never strike us, but the consequences of which could be catastrophic. We buy fire insurance on our homes, for example, even though home fires large enough to justify an insurance claim are very rare. Yet, we do it because we know that home fires have been known to wipe out people financially.
The cornucopian has no more knowledge about the future than anyone else. And yet, even as he or she conveniently ignores negative trends, the cornucopian also tells us not to bother with insurance in the form of mitigating global warming or creating a sustainable society.
The ecological truthteller now has the opportunity to fight the arrogant certitude of the cornucopian with a dose of risk assessment as follows: "Given that the consequences of global warming and resource depletion could be severe--so severe that they could bring down our modern civilization--and even if you believe that the chances of such severe consequences are small, wouldn't it be worth it to take out some insurance just in case? And, if you believe we should do nothing, why are you paying to insure your home against catastrophic but very rare occurrences such as fires? As for the date of the onset of any demonstrable crisis that we will feel personally, well, we are all like Bertrand Russell's turkey. We simply don't know when it will happen. But, unlike the turkey, we've been warned."
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Welcome to "Braided" Time
On a recent visit to Minnesota a friend of mine introduced me to the idea of "braided" time. The average American segregates such activities as work, shopping, dining out, exercise, and socializing. And, because of the way we have organized our towns and cities, this means an average of six car trips per day per household in addition to any commute to work, according to Jane Holtz Kay, author of Asphalt Nation.
But, on this day in this small town tucked along the Mississippi River, I accompanied my friend and his family as we engaged in all these activities at the same time without ever getting into a car. From his house, we walked to the center of town to get breakfast at a local eatery dedicated to providing fare from local food sources. Once there he and his family met and talked with people they knew. After that we popped over to the farmers' market, where he met yet more people and arranged meetings related to his work as a college professor. Then, there was the pleasant socializing with the vendors at the market, many of whom raise or make their own products. We were never in a hurry and yet we got much done, all as part of a family outing.
As we walked back to his home, he pointed to a delivery car in which the driver went all of two blocks to make her delivery. "She needed to save time so she can go to the gym and get some exercise later," he quipped.
While it's true that people who live in the center of large, walkable cities experience "braided" time quite frequently, those of us who live in smaller, but sprawled out towns and cities find ourselves reaching for the car keys to "save time." The question is, "Save time for what?" Why do we consider the time we spend in transit as wasted time? Why can't the time we spend getting somewhere be turned to some good use?
As we walked those streets along the Mississippi River, I didn't get the sense that time was contracting or being wasted. In fact, I felt time expanding as the things we needed to do that day got done naturally without any special sense of urgency and without any need to "save time."
In his book Fooled By Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb divides the world into maximizers and satisficers (people who try to blend satisfying with maximizing). We think that the fossil-fueled world which allows us to annihilate space is helping us to maximize our lives by giving us concentrated doses of exercise and entertainment and socializing in different places all connected by automobile travel. In the end, however, we spend oodles of time in the car and in traffic.
With "braided" time my friend and I managed to get many tasks done at once--all to our satisfaction--but perhaps not with the intensity of a racquetball game. Which sounds better to you?
But, on this day in this small town tucked along the Mississippi River, I accompanied my friend and his family as we engaged in all these activities at the same time without ever getting into a car. From his house, we walked to the center of town to get breakfast at a local eatery dedicated to providing fare from local food sources. Once there he and his family met and talked with people they knew. After that we popped over to the farmers' market, where he met yet more people and arranged meetings related to his work as a college professor. Then, there was the pleasant socializing with the vendors at the market, many of whom raise or make their own products. We were never in a hurry and yet we got much done, all as part of a family outing.
As we walked back to his home, he pointed to a delivery car in which the driver went all of two blocks to make her delivery. "She needed to save time so she can go to the gym and get some exercise later," he quipped.
While it's true that people who live in the center of large, walkable cities experience "braided" time quite frequently, those of us who live in smaller, but sprawled out towns and cities find ourselves reaching for the car keys to "save time." The question is, "Save time for what?" Why do we consider the time we spend in transit as wasted time? Why can't the time we spend getting somewhere be turned to some good use?
As we walked those streets along the Mississippi River, I didn't get the sense that time was contracting or being wasted. In fact, I felt time expanding as the things we needed to do that day got done naturally without any special sense of urgency and without any need to "save time."
In his book Fooled By Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb divides the world into maximizers and satisficers (people who try to blend satisfying with maximizing). We think that the fossil-fueled world which allows us to annihilate space is helping us to maximize our lives by giving us concentrated doses of exercise and entertainment and socializing in different places all connected by automobile travel. In the end, however, we spend oodles of time in the car and in traffic.
With "braided" time my friend and I managed to get many tasks done at once--all to our satisfaction--but perhaps not with the intensity of a racquetball game. Which sounds better to you?
Monday, July 03, 2006
Why I Love Coal (In Its Proper Place)
Many people have accused me of hating coal. But nothing could be further from the truth.
I recognize that without coal the greatest achievements of human history in art, architecture, and literature would never have occurred. Without coal the world would never have been investigated and explained to us by science. Without coal the ascent of man (and woman) would not have been possible.
I love coal in all its forms: lignite, sub-bituminous, bituminous and anthracite. I especially love anthracite because it represents the purest form of coal containing the most carbon per unit of volume. Coal has quietly, magnanimously given of itself so that all of us air-breathing creatures could have life. It has labored without complaint under layer after layer of sediment which progressively increased the pressure and heat that formed it.
And, as more and more coal formed, the air was cleared of its excess carbon dioxide; the world cooled and cooled moving toward a more beneficent climate, one that ultimately provided a suitable environment for the aspirations of homo sapiens. As a byproduct of this process, the air also filled with oxygen, a substance that enjoys an even greater reputation and inspires an even greater love among the human race than coal.
For millions of years--no, hundreds of millions of years--coal has asked nothing more than to be left alone. And, until recently coal had its way, that is, until seacoal fell from the seams extruding out of Britain's ocean cliffs and caught the attention of the native population. Since then we have scratched at it, clawed at it, picked at it, dynamited it, scooped it up in giant shovels--which in the way of the cannibal were first powered by the very coal they attacked--and gathered coal into great mounds awaiting transport across the world.
Torn from its true home, coal began an unwanted journey from its resting place in the earth to kilns and furnaces and boilers in every corner of the globe. Fire now continuously dissolves coal, returning its essence to the heavens. First, the amounts were small and inconsequential. Now, they are like rushing torrents. Wherever coal is found, coal cars rattle day after day and night after night without ceasing. Smokestacks which signal the coal cars' destinations belch endlessly with visible haze and invisible gases.
The spectacle must be distressing to the coal I love: the gradual wasting away of its bulk, the irretrievable transformation of its body from a solid into a gas. Driven from its home, coal exacts a revenge in the only way it can on the creatures whom it helped to foster. It raises the world's temperature--not by the heat of combustion, but by coal's now gaseous carbon which traps heat in the worldwide blanket we call the atmosphere.
I can't help but wonder if people only loved coal as I do--that is, enough to leave it alone as it so clearly wants us to do--how different the world would be, how different our future would look.
(Go see "An Inconvenient Truth" as it opens across the country and learn to love coal the way I do.)
I recognize that without coal the greatest achievements of human history in art, architecture, and literature would never have occurred. Without coal the world would never have been investigated and explained to us by science. Without coal the ascent of man (and woman) would not have been possible.
I love coal in all its forms: lignite, sub-bituminous, bituminous and anthracite. I especially love anthracite because it represents the purest form of coal containing the most carbon per unit of volume. Coal has quietly, magnanimously given of itself so that all of us air-breathing creatures could have life. It has labored without complaint under layer after layer of sediment which progressively increased the pressure and heat that formed it.
And, as more and more coal formed, the air was cleared of its excess carbon dioxide; the world cooled and cooled moving toward a more beneficent climate, one that ultimately provided a suitable environment for the aspirations of homo sapiens. As a byproduct of this process, the air also filled with oxygen, a substance that enjoys an even greater reputation and inspires an even greater love among the human race than coal.
For millions of years--no, hundreds of millions of years--coal has asked nothing more than to be left alone. And, until recently coal had its way, that is, until seacoal fell from the seams extruding out of Britain's ocean cliffs and caught the attention of the native population. Since then we have scratched at it, clawed at it, picked at it, dynamited it, scooped it up in giant shovels--which in the way of the cannibal were first powered by the very coal they attacked--and gathered coal into great mounds awaiting transport across the world.
Torn from its true home, coal began an unwanted journey from its resting place in the earth to kilns and furnaces and boilers in every corner of the globe. Fire now continuously dissolves coal, returning its essence to the heavens. First, the amounts were small and inconsequential. Now, they are like rushing torrents. Wherever coal is found, coal cars rattle day after day and night after night without ceasing. Smokestacks which signal the coal cars' destinations belch endlessly with visible haze and invisible gases.
The spectacle must be distressing to the coal I love: the gradual wasting away of its bulk, the irretrievable transformation of its body from a solid into a gas. Driven from its home, coal exacts a revenge in the only way it can on the creatures whom it helped to foster. It raises the world's temperature--not by the heat of combustion, but by coal's now gaseous carbon which traps heat in the worldwide blanket we call the atmosphere.
I can't help but wonder if people only loved coal as I do--that is, enough to leave it alone as it so clearly wants us to do--how different the world would be, how different our future would look.
(Go see "An Inconvenient Truth" as it opens across the country and learn to love coal the way I do.)
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Russia's plight: A cautionary tale about the need to relocalize
Recent mention in the media of more than a decade of population decline in Russia elicited little more than a yawn from the somnolent public. The usual explanations link that decline to events in Russia which seem specific to that country: a high rate of alcoholism, a poor public health system, widespread denial about a raging AIDS epidemic, and economic hard times. No doubt there are many things uniquely Russian about the sad state of Russian society. But is Russia's decline really only about Russia? Can we safely ignore the bad news and assume nothing like it can happen to us?
Perhaps if Joseph Tainter, author of The Collapse of Complex Societies, had published his book today instead of in 1988, he might not have had to reach back so far in history for an example of a complex society in collapse. (For a brief summary of Tainter's ideas, read his 1996 article entitled, Complexity, Problem Solving and Sustainable Societies.) And, if William Catton, author of Overshoot, had published his book this year instead of in 1980, he might have had to look no further than post-Soviet Russia for an example of how a reduction in the scope of trade relations can create an ecological crisis of sorts, one that led to a long economic depression in Russia which at its depth cut the country's GDP in half. (This was far worse than what the United States experienced in The Great Depression of the 1930s.)
Let's take Tainter first. Whatever one believes were the causes of the breakup of the Soviet Union, the complex economic and political arrangements of the Soviet block were becoming increasingly untenable given shifting realities. One of Tainter's contentions is that when a complex system doesn't meet the needs of the people it governs, they may seek to break off from that system, i.e., govern themselves under conditions of lower complexity. It is certainly true that changing technology, particularly communications technology; the globalization it spawned; and the military and diplomatic pressure applied to the Soviet system worked to confound its inflexible, hierarchical pattern of governance and economic organization. Those arrangements weren't delivering to people what they could now see others getting in terms of material goods, services and freedom of movement. Not even the Red Army could stop the cascade of events that finally fractured the Soviet empire.
In his book Overshoot Catton explains how a vast reduction in the scope of international trade was, in part, responsible for the severity of The Great Depression. Many goods and services that were formerly obtained through trade either had to be made within each country or region or simply done without. Since much of the world's productive capacity had become specialized by country and region, in the short term, people suffered a triple calamity. First, they found that things they needed that had formerly been imported from other countries weren't widely available. Second, they found that the things which they themselves produced were in considerably less demand since foreign markets had essentially been closed. Third, many whose work depended on exports found themselves out of jobs. This, of course, made it difficult for those people to buy whatever essentials were still affordable in the depression-plagued economy. And, that rippled through the rest of the domestic economy.
The inciting event for The Great Depression was financial: the worldwide stock market crash of 1929. The inciting events for the breakup of the Soviet Union were a mix of economic, social, political and military developments that resulted in a major reduction in scope. But, what might the inciting event be for a worldwide reduction in the scope of trade? Those who believe we are nearing a peak in world oil production have an answer: very high oil prices.
Because petroleum-based liquid fuels power the vast majority of the world's land, sea and air transportation fleet, it should be fairly obvious that skyrocketing fuel prices could destroy the current world trading system. That system is based on cheap fuel. Without it, many things which are routinely shipped across the oceans or by airfreight today would cease to move. Inexpensive plastic household goods, bottled water, flowers and fresh produce come to mind. At first, anything with low value per unit of weight or volume would be in jeopardy. As the crisis deepened, perhaps only luxury goods would be worth transporting long distances. We would, in a manner of speaking, be thrown back to the days of Marco Polo. Yes, we would have more technological resources and still many more times the power, but we would lack the incentive to use it--at least, in the way we have become accustomed to using it.
A sudden reduction in scope might very well manifest itself as an economic depression. But, this time the underlying cause would not be financial, but rather the declining availability of a key resource. The results would be far-reaching. All of the new governments formed in the wake of the Soviet breakup including the Russian government found themselves disoriented and unprepared. Long settled trade, political and social arrangements were suddenly ripped away with nothing immediately available to replace them. The results have been nothing short of catastrophic for the average citizen.
In Russia, for example, male life expectancy plummeted from 64 to 57 years. It has recovered a bit and now hovers around 59. But, that number may soon be a memory as the AIDS epidemic overwhelms the dysfunctional public health system. Death rates from AIDS and other causes are skyrocketing. The blow to important public services, especially health services, has been so severe that demographers say that if death rates remain at this level and birth rates continue their current low trajectory of about 1.2 per woman (far below the 2.1 replacement rate), Russian population could fall 22 percent by 2050. Already, population has fallen by about 3 percent from a peak of more than 148 million in the early 1990s to about 143 million today.
Such is the power of a sudden reduction in scope that it not only undermines the economic well-being of those affected, but also ultimately the ability of their government and community institutions to cope with things most of us in wealthy industrialized nations take for granted.
There are, in addition, all manner of foreign policy implications--most of them, in this case, quite bad--when one empire crumbles while another lives on. But, what kind of mess would we find ourselves in should a sudden reduction in scope visit the entire globe, one precipitated by extremely high oil prices?
This is why those concerned about peak oil have been calling for the relocalization of economic life; this is why they have been saying that we have no time to lose. We need only look to Russia to see what they mean.
Perhaps if Joseph Tainter, author of The Collapse of Complex Societies, had published his book today instead of in 1988, he might not have had to reach back so far in history for an example of a complex society in collapse. (For a brief summary of Tainter's ideas, read his 1996 article entitled, Complexity, Problem Solving and Sustainable Societies.) And, if William Catton, author of Overshoot, had published his book this year instead of in 1980, he might have had to look no further than post-Soviet Russia for an example of how a reduction in the scope of trade relations can create an ecological crisis of sorts, one that led to a long economic depression in Russia which at its depth cut the country's GDP in half. (This was far worse than what the United States experienced in The Great Depression of the 1930s.)
Let's take Tainter first. Whatever one believes were the causes of the breakup of the Soviet Union, the complex economic and political arrangements of the Soviet block were becoming increasingly untenable given shifting realities. One of Tainter's contentions is that when a complex system doesn't meet the needs of the people it governs, they may seek to break off from that system, i.e., govern themselves under conditions of lower complexity. It is certainly true that changing technology, particularly communications technology; the globalization it spawned; and the military and diplomatic pressure applied to the Soviet system worked to confound its inflexible, hierarchical pattern of governance and economic organization. Those arrangements weren't delivering to people what they could now see others getting in terms of material goods, services and freedom of movement. Not even the Red Army could stop the cascade of events that finally fractured the Soviet empire.
In his book Overshoot Catton explains how a vast reduction in the scope of international trade was, in part, responsible for the severity of The Great Depression. Many goods and services that were formerly obtained through trade either had to be made within each country or region or simply done without. Since much of the world's productive capacity had become specialized by country and region, in the short term, people suffered a triple calamity. First, they found that things they needed that had formerly been imported from other countries weren't widely available. Second, they found that the things which they themselves produced were in considerably less demand since foreign markets had essentially been closed. Third, many whose work depended on exports found themselves out of jobs. This, of course, made it difficult for those people to buy whatever essentials were still affordable in the depression-plagued economy. And, that rippled through the rest of the domestic economy.
The inciting event for The Great Depression was financial: the worldwide stock market crash of 1929. The inciting events for the breakup of the Soviet Union were a mix of economic, social, political and military developments that resulted in a major reduction in scope. But, what might the inciting event be for a worldwide reduction in the scope of trade? Those who believe we are nearing a peak in world oil production have an answer: very high oil prices.
Because petroleum-based liquid fuels power the vast majority of the world's land, sea and air transportation fleet, it should be fairly obvious that skyrocketing fuel prices could destroy the current world trading system. That system is based on cheap fuel. Without it, many things which are routinely shipped across the oceans or by airfreight today would cease to move. Inexpensive plastic household goods, bottled water, flowers and fresh produce come to mind. At first, anything with low value per unit of weight or volume would be in jeopardy. As the crisis deepened, perhaps only luxury goods would be worth transporting long distances. We would, in a manner of speaking, be thrown back to the days of Marco Polo. Yes, we would have more technological resources and still many more times the power, but we would lack the incentive to use it--at least, in the way we have become accustomed to using it.
A sudden reduction in scope might very well manifest itself as an economic depression. But, this time the underlying cause would not be financial, but rather the declining availability of a key resource. The results would be far-reaching. All of the new governments formed in the wake of the Soviet breakup including the Russian government found themselves disoriented and unprepared. Long settled trade, political and social arrangements were suddenly ripped away with nothing immediately available to replace them. The results have been nothing short of catastrophic for the average citizen.
In Russia, for example, male life expectancy plummeted from 64 to 57 years. It has recovered a bit and now hovers around 59. But, that number may soon be a memory as the AIDS epidemic overwhelms the dysfunctional public health system. Death rates from AIDS and other causes are skyrocketing. The blow to important public services, especially health services, has been so severe that demographers say that if death rates remain at this level and birth rates continue their current low trajectory of about 1.2 per woman (far below the 2.1 replacement rate), Russian population could fall 22 percent by 2050. Already, population has fallen by about 3 percent from a peak of more than 148 million in the early 1990s to about 143 million today.
Such is the power of a sudden reduction in scope that it not only undermines the economic well-being of those affected, but also ultimately the ability of their government and community institutions to cope with things most of us in wealthy industrialized nations take for granted.
There are, in addition, all manner of foreign policy implications--most of them, in this case, quite bad--when one empire crumbles while another lives on. But, what kind of mess would we find ourselves in should a sudden reduction in scope visit the entire globe, one precipitated by extremely high oil prices?
This is why those concerned about peak oil have been calling for the relocalization of economic life; this is why they have been saying that we have no time to lose. We need only look to Russia to see what they mean.
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Nonrenewable renewables: The hidden life of biofuels
The farm fields are again sprouting with their recently planted corn and soybeans, and those verdant fields, once reserved for growing food, are increasingly devoted to what people are now calling renewable fuels. Those fuels, ethanol from corn and biodiesel from soybean oil, are touted as the path to energy independence and clean air and as an answer to global warming. How innocuous and wholesome these fuels must seem: They come from things we eat; the smell of biodiesel is no more offensive than that of french fry oil; ethanol is nothing more than the same alcohol we find in all alcoholic drinks; and the carbon dioxide which both fuels release into the atmosphere gets reabsorbed by the following year's planting.
That, anyway, is the extent of the story one might get from recent coverage of the biofuels boom. But are these fuels really the renewable wonders they seem? That may hinge on what people mean by renewable. If they mean that for a limited time the crops from which liquid biofuels are made can be repeatedly grown, harvested and processed to make biofuels, then they are perhaps in a very narrow sense correct. If what they mean by renewable is sustainable, then they are just plain wrong. Biofuels produced the way we are producing them today are not even close to sustainable. In truth, the current production methods for biofuels are more like mining operations than farming operations. That calls into question whether such fuels can deliver the benefits which are now being so incessantly trumpeted in the news media.
To understand why this is so, we have to go beyond the fleeting glimpses of farm fields that we get from our cars--glimpses that for many of us form the sum total of our knowledge of farming. If one were to stand across from a field of corn or soybeans for an entire season, one would, in most cases, witness the following: plowing done with a tractor, planting using large mechanical planters, the spraying of herbicides and pesticides, the application of fertilizers, irrigation (in some cases), and harvesting done by large machinery. In fact, one would see that all of the heavy field work is done by petroleum-powered machines.
This style of industrial farming involves huge petroleum and natural gas inputs to fuel the machinery; to make and apply the herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers; and to irrigate and harvest the crops. Many people don't know that oil is the basis for most herbicides and pesticides and that natural gas is the basis for most of the world's nitrogen fertilizers. (Nitrogen fertilizers are used heavily on corn, but not on soybeans which produce their own nitrogen.) Both oil and natural gas are finite resources; their use to help grow crops for fuel can in no way be called sustainable. In effect, we are mining finite hydrocarbons to grow crops for biofuels.
In addition, industrial farming causes soil erosion on a horrific scale. A recent study shows that soil in the United States is eroding at a rate that is 10 times faster than the rate at which it is being replenished. The numbers are worse in places such as India and China where the erosion rates are 30 to 40 times faster than the rate of replenishment. And, while many areas of the United States get ample rainfall, others require irrigation to be productive. That leads to another problem: overpumping. David Pimentel, one of the world's leading researchers on biofuels, pointed out in a recent study that "[i]n some Western U. S. irrigated corn acreage, for instance, in some regions of Arizona, groundwater is being pumped 10 times faster than the natural recharge of aquifers." This can hardly be termed a sustainable practice.
But, even where there is plenty of water to pump, irrigation can cause salt to build up in the soil rendering it useless for crops. In all, close to 50 million acres of farmland worldwide are lost to soil erosion and salinity each year. In effect, we are mining the soil and the acquifers of the world to produce crops.
But, we have yet to discuss the processing of crops for liquid biofuels. Here, the news is no better. First, of course, there is the diesel or gasoline burned to transport crops from the fields and grain elevators to the production facilities. More fuel is burned to transport the finished fuels from the production facilities to the service stations. The production facilities themselves run on a combination of electricity, natural gas and/or coal. In fact, the high price of natural gas has led ethanol producers to build new plants that will use coal for energy and heat. Electricity isn't exactly clean, either. It has to come from a generating plant that almost always uses either coal, natural gas or uranium to produce it. What this means is that the reputation that ethanol and biodiesel have for being "clean fuels" is rapidly being tarnished. The extensive use of fossil fuel energy to produce liquid biofuels can in no way be construed as renewable. Again, we are simply mining finite resources to run the production facilities.
The obvious question for newcomers to the biofuels debate is why biofuels themselves aren't used to run the production plants. The answer is troublingly simple: Under present methods of agriculture and processing, liquid biofuels are energy losers. Their production uses more energy in the form of fossil fuels than the finished biofuels contain. In fact, the entire biofuel regime is not only unsustainable, but a huge boondoggle which only exists because of large government subsidies. Absent those subsidies, no one would make liquid biofuels in commercial quantities.
Perhaps, you say, technology will improve, and we will eventually get more energy from biofuels than we expend to make them. No one can predict the future. But it is worth keeping in mind that the energy profit ratio--the amount of energy we get back from petroleum, natural gas and coal for each unit we expend extracting, processing and transporting them--ranges from 10 to 1 to 20 to 1. Biofuels are currently below 1 to 1 in their return. In other words, they are energy negative. Even if their energy profit ratio were to improve to say, 2 to 1 or 3 to 1, we would still find ourselves living in a very low-energy world if we had to rely on biofuels alone.
But, it is doubtful that, even in this best-case scenario, biofuels would do very much to help us. First, there isn't enough arable land to make much of a dent in the liquid fuels market. Perhaps even more important, food and fuel are already beginning to compete with one another and that has serious implications for most of the world's population which is poor. Some 3.7 billion people are currently considered malnourished. The last thing they need is higher food prices.
So, next time you pass by those fields of corn and soy, think of what you don't see; think of the hidden life of biofuels. Don't get bamboozled by the cynical public relations ploys of the biofuels producers; their only goal, after all, is to get you to support their lucrative subsidies. And, don't get taken in either by the wishful thinking of well-intentioned biofuels advocates; unfortunately, some may lead you to believe that life in the future will look pretty much like life in the recent past if we commit to biofuels.
Liquid biofuels are not renewable under any reasonable definition that also means sustainable. And, far from helping us kick our fossil fuel habit, the production of biofuels is only making our addiction worse.
(This article was based in part on papers published by David Pimentel and Tad Patzek. If you would like copies of those papers, email Kurt Cobb at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.)
That, anyway, is the extent of the story one might get from recent coverage of the biofuels boom. But are these fuels really the renewable wonders they seem? That may hinge on what people mean by renewable. If they mean that for a limited time the crops from which liquid biofuels are made can be repeatedly grown, harvested and processed to make biofuels, then they are perhaps in a very narrow sense correct. If what they mean by renewable is sustainable, then they are just plain wrong. Biofuels produced the way we are producing them today are not even close to sustainable. In truth, the current production methods for biofuels are more like mining operations than farming operations. That calls into question whether such fuels can deliver the benefits which are now being so incessantly trumpeted in the news media.
To understand why this is so, we have to go beyond the fleeting glimpses of farm fields that we get from our cars--glimpses that for many of us form the sum total of our knowledge of farming. If one were to stand across from a field of corn or soybeans for an entire season, one would, in most cases, witness the following: plowing done with a tractor, planting using large mechanical planters, the spraying of herbicides and pesticides, the application of fertilizers, irrigation (in some cases), and harvesting done by large machinery. In fact, one would see that all of the heavy field work is done by petroleum-powered machines.
This style of industrial farming involves huge petroleum and natural gas inputs to fuel the machinery; to make and apply the herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers; and to irrigate and harvest the crops. Many people don't know that oil is the basis for most herbicides and pesticides and that natural gas is the basis for most of the world's nitrogen fertilizers. (Nitrogen fertilizers are used heavily on corn, but not on soybeans which produce their own nitrogen.) Both oil and natural gas are finite resources; their use to help grow crops for fuel can in no way be called sustainable. In effect, we are mining finite hydrocarbons to grow crops for biofuels.
In addition, industrial farming causes soil erosion on a horrific scale. A recent study shows that soil in the United States is eroding at a rate that is 10 times faster than the rate at which it is being replenished. The numbers are worse in places such as India and China where the erosion rates are 30 to 40 times faster than the rate of replenishment. And, while many areas of the United States get ample rainfall, others require irrigation to be productive. That leads to another problem: overpumping. David Pimentel, one of the world's leading researchers on biofuels, pointed out in a recent study that "[i]n some Western U. S. irrigated corn acreage, for instance, in some regions of Arizona, groundwater is being pumped 10 times faster than the natural recharge of aquifers." This can hardly be termed a sustainable practice.
But, even where there is plenty of water to pump, irrigation can cause salt to build up in the soil rendering it useless for crops. In all, close to 50 million acres of farmland worldwide are lost to soil erosion and salinity each year. In effect, we are mining the soil and the acquifers of the world to produce crops.
But, we have yet to discuss the processing of crops for liquid biofuels. Here, the news is no better. First, of course, there is the diesel or gasoline burned to transport crops from the fields and grain elevators to the production facilities. More fuel is burned to transport the finished fuels from the production facilities to the service stations. The production facilities themselves run on a combination of electricity, natural gas and/or coal. In fact, the high price of natural gas has led ethanol producers to build new plants that will use coal for energy and heat. Electricity isn't exactly clean, either. It has to come from a generating plant that almost always uses either coal, natural gas or uranium to produce it. What this means is that the reputation that ethanol and biodiesel have for being "clean fuels" is rapidly being tarnished. The extensive use of fossil fuel energy to produce liquid biofuels can in no way be construed as renewable. Again, we are simply mining finite resources to run the production facilities.
The obvious question for newcomers to the biofuels debate is why biofuels themselves aren't used to run the production plants. The answer is troublingly simple: Under present methods of agriculture and processing, liquid biofuels are energy losers. Their production uses more energy in the form of fossil fuels than the finished biofuels contain. In fact, the entire biofuel regime is not only unsustainable, but a huge boondoggle which only exists because of large government subsidies. Absent those subsidies, no one would make liquid biofuels in commercial quantities.
Perhaps, you say, technology will improve, and we will eventually get more energy from biofuels than we expend to make them. No one can predict the future. But it is worth keeping in mind that the energy profit ratio--the amount of energy we get back from petroleum, natural gas and coal for each unit we expend extracting, processing and transporting them--ranges from 10 to 1 to 20 to 1. Biofuels are currently below 1 to 1 in their return. In other words, they are energy negative. Even if their energy profit ratio were to improve to say, 2 to 1 or 3 to 1, we would still find ourselves living in a very low-energy world if we had to rely on biofuels alone.
But, it is doubtful that, even in this best-case scenario, biofuels would do very much to help us. First, there isn't enough arable land to make much of a dent in the liquid fuels market. Perhaps even more important, food and fuel are already beginning to compete with one another and that has serious implications for most of the world's population which is poor. Some 3.7 billion people are currently considered malnourished. The last thing they need is higher food prices.
So, next time you pass by those fields of corn and soy, think of what you don't see; think of the hidden life of biofuels. Don't get bamboozled by the cynical public relations ploys of the biofuels producers; their only goal, after all, is to get you to support their lucrative subsidies. And, don't get taken in either by the wishful thinking of well-intentioned biofuels advocates; unfortunately, some may lead you to believe that life in the future will look pretty much like life in the recent past if we commit to biofuels.
Liquid biofuels are not renewable under any reasonable definition that also means sustainable. And, far from helping us kick our fossil fuel habit, the production of biofuels is only making our addiction worse.
(This article was based in part on papers published by David Pimentel and Tad Patzek. If you would like copies of those papers, email Kurt Cobb at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.)
Sunday, May 28, 2006
The Newest Guest at Your Dinner Table: Your Car
Some 250,000 people are being added to the world's population every day. Of the more than 6 billion people now on earth, 3.7 billion suffer from some form of malnutrition. For these reasons and others now does not seem like a good time to embark on a program to turn a significant portion of the world's food crops into fuel for automobiles. So says David Pimentel (pronounced: pim-men-TELL), the Cornell University agriculturalist whom many regard as the world's leading authority on the energy content of biofuels and their effects on food and agriculture as a whole.
The growing drive for energy "independence" coupled with heavy subsidies has led to a scramble to build biodiesel and ethanol plants across the United States. "I wish that ethanol and biodiesel would save us," Pimentel said at a conference entitled "Peak Oil and the Environment" held in Washington, D. C. recently. Unfortunately, green plants collect relatively little solar energy, he explained. Less that 0.1 percent of the sunlight that falls on plants gets converted into usable energy. That compares with about a 20 percent conversion of sunlight to energy by photovoltaic cells.
This means that biodiesel and ethanol production facilities end up being voracious though hidden guests at the world's dinner tables. Humans get 99 percent of their food from the land and only 1 percent from the oceans, according to Pimentel. (This is in part due to the collapse of the world's fisheries brought on by new forms of industrial fish harvesting and by high demand for seafood.) The more that we demand from the land in the way of fuel, the less that will be left over to eat, and the catch from the oceans is unlikely to make up for this loss.
Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of the recent book Plan B, spoke at the same conference. He said that as long as oil remains above $60 per barrel, it will be profitable to produce fuel from crops. "The price for oil is becoming the floor for agricultural crops," he explained. "We're setting up a competition between service stations and supermarkets. The prices of agricultural commodities will be determined by their fuel value." (my emphasis)
If oil prices remain high or even rise, they would continue to put upward pressure on grain prices. This could lead to political instability in countries such as Indonesia and Mexico which rely heavily on grain imports, Brown said.
But if, for the sake of argument, we didn't concern ourselves with the effects of biofuels on food supplies, just how far could plant-based fuels go toward solving our looming liquid fuels problem? The U. S. Department of Energy now reports that currently less than 1 percent of all vehicle fuel consumed in the United States is plant-derived. According to Pimentel, even if we devoted all the corn raised in the country to making ethanol, we would be able to supply only about 7 percent of the country's needs. Any claims that biofuels will make us energy independent just don't hold up.
Even if biofuels could be produced in more substantial amounts, there is reason to believe they would not help us address energy shortages in the future. According to Pimentel's work it takes 25,000 kilocalories of energy to produce one gallon of corn ethanol which contains 19,400 kilocalories of energy. That's a loss of more than 22 percent (dividing the loss of 5,600 kilocalories by the 25,000 kilocalories of inputs). Other studies which claim to show an energy gain for ethanol leave out many inputs such as the energy used to create farm and processing machinery, the energy used to irrigate and the costs of the environmental impacts, he said.
(Pimentel's critics argue that his methods underestimate the energy return on ethanol. He encourages them to submit their findings to refereed scientific journals where all of his research articles on the subject have appeared. So far none have done so.)
Many other biofuels perform even worse. Pimentel and his co-author Tad Patzek determined that it takes 45 percent more energy in the form of fossil fuels to turn switchgrass into liquid fuel than that liquid fuel returns in energy. The results for wood biomass, soybeans and sunflowers were 57 percent, 27 percent and 118 percent, respectively. In short, we are currently subsidizing the production of biofuels with fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas which provide the heat and electricity to process those biofuels.
So, given all of this, what is driving the biofuels market? The simple answer is money, said Pimentel. For instance, U. S. government subsidies mean that companies producing corn ethanol receive payments totaling $7 per bushel of corn processed. The corn farmers alas receive less than a 2-cent per bushel subsidy related to ethanol production.
Pimentel offers a simple test for whether ethanol producers really believe their own hype. If ethanol offers such a magnificent energy gain, then why don't ethanol plants run on ethanol instead of coal and natural gas? Not surprisingly, this question has so far been met with dumbfounded silence.
The growing drive for energy "independence" coupled with heavy subsidies has led to a scramble to build biodiesel and ethanol plants across the United States. "I wish that ethanol and biodiesel would save us," Pimentel said at a conference entitled "Peak Oil and the Environment" held in Washington, D. C. recently. Unfortunately, green plants collect relatively little solar energy, he explained. Less that 0.1 percent of the sunlight that falls on plants gets converted into usable energy. That compares with about a 20 percent conversion of sunlight to energy by photovoltaic cells.
This means that biodiesel and ethanol production facilities end up being voracious though hidden guests at the world's dinner tables. Humans get 99 percent of their food from the land and only 1 percent from the oceans, according to Pimentel. (This is in part due to the collapse of the world's fisheries brought on by new forms of industrial fish harvesting and by high demand for seafood.) The more that we demand from the land in the way of fuel, the less that will be left over to eat, and the catch from the oceans is unlikely to make up for this loss.
Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of the recent book Plan B, spoke at the same conference. He said that as long as oil remains above $60 per barrel, it will be profitable to produce fuel from crops. "The price for oil is becoming the floor for agricultural crops," he explained. "We're setting up a competition between service stations and supermarkets. The prices of agricultural commodities will be determined by their fuel value." (my emphasis)
If oil prices remain high or even rise, they would continue to put upward pressure on grain prices. This could lead to political instability in countries such as Indonesia and Mexico which rely heavily on grain imports, Brown said.
But if, for the sake of argument, we didn't concern ourselves with the effects of biofuels on food supplies, just how far could plant-based fuels go toward solving our looming liquid fuels problem? The U. S. Department of Energy now reports that currently less than 1 percent of all vehicle fuel consumed in the United States is plant-derived. According to Pimentel, even if we devoted all the corn raised in the country to making ethanol, we would be able to supply only about 7 percent of the country's needs. Any claims that biofuels will make us energy independent just don't hold up.
Even if biofuels could be produced in more substantial amounts, there is reason to believe they would not help us address energy shortages in the future. According to Pimentel's work it takes 25,000 kilocalories of energy to produce one gallon of corn ethanol which contains 19,400 kilocalories of energy. That's a loss of more than 22 percent (dividing the loss of 5,600 kilocalories by the 25,000 kilocalories of inputs). Other studies which claim to show an energy gain for ethanol leave out many inputs such as the energy used to create farm and processing machinery, the energy used to irrigate and the costs of the environmental impacts, he said.
(Pimentel's critics argue that his methods underestimate the energy return on ethanol. He encourages them to submit their findings to refereed scientific journals where all of his research articles on the subject have appeared. So far none have done so.)
Many other biofuels perform even worse. Pimentel and his co-author Tad Patzek determined that it takes 45 percent more energy in the form of fossil fuels to turn switchgrass into liquid fuel than that liquid fuel returns in energy. The results for wood biomass, soybeans and sunflowers were 57 percent, 27 percent and 118 percent, respectively. In short, we are currently subsidizing the production of biofuels with fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas which provide the heat and electricity to process those biofuels.
So, given all of this, what is driving the biofuels market? The simple answer is money, said Pimentel. For instance, U. S. government subsidies mean that companies producing corn ethanol receive payments totaling $7 per bushel of corn processed. The corn farmers alas receive less than a 2-cent per bushel subsidy related to ethanol production.
Pimentel offers a simple test for whether ethanol producers really believe their own hype. If ethanol offers such a magnificent energy gain, then why don't ethanol plants run on ethanol instead of coal and natural gas? Not surprisingly, this question has so far been met with dumbfounded silence.
Monday, May 22, 2006
What Clive Crook Doesn't Know About Energy Will Hurt Him (And Us Too!)
The incurious mind often doesn't know what it doesn't know and so, not surprisingly, doesn't think to ask questions. Such is the case with Clive Crook in his recent piece in The Atlantic Monthly (subscription required, but even if you can't read it, I will outline his main points). While misleading articles about oil and energy are so numerous in the media these days that responding to them all would be an impossible task, it is occasionally worthwhile to critique a typical specimen so as to remain in practice.
In a nutshell, Crook appears to be channeling Daniel Yergin who contends that the main obstacles to an energy-secure future are political, not technical or geological. But Crook should have been more careful to conceal his ignorance of the world's energy landscape. He tells us the following:
In a nutshell, Crook appears to be channeling Daniel Yergin who contends that the main obstacles to an energy-secure future are political, not technical or geological. But Crook should have been more careful to conceal his ignorance of the world's energy landscape. He tells us the following:
Even if prices somewhat lower than those already seen this year were sustained, an array of existing but not yet widely applied technologies would make it economically feasible to extract oil from tar sands or shale, or to convert coal to liquid fuel.
If Crook doesn't know that for many years it has been economically feasible to obtain oil from the tar sands in Alberta and that it is being done currently to the tune of 1 million barrels a day, what else doesn't he know? Apparently, he doesn't know that coal is already being turned into liquid fuel on a large scale in South Africa, either. And, though he tells us in amazement that the economy has not been slowed appreciably by $70 a barrel oil, he doesn't seem to know that this price is about $25 to $30 below the inflation-adjusted high that oil reached in 1980.
Crook also tells us that the American economy is far more efficient in its use of oil and energy in general than it was in 1970. The absolute amount of oil that we use is greater, he admits, but the amount we use per unit of GDP is considerably less. This makes it easier to absorb price increases without hurting economic growth. True, but it never occurs to him to ask how our economy would fare if the amount of oil available actually declined. Then, I think we would find out that we are not less dependent on oil, but, in fact, more dependent on oil since we now balance much more GDP on a given unit of oil. Could our economy grow after even the partial withdrawal of oil supplies? Here we must consider Liebig's Law of the Minimum: an organism's growth is limited by the amount of the least available essential nutrient. In the case of the world economy, that nutrient would be oil.
Crook launches three other obvious canards: 1) that the move toward a service economy is making us less energy dependent, 2) that reserve estimates for oil prove that we have enough oil for decades to come and 3) that some vague group of people is saying that we are running out of oil.
Let's take the claim about the service economy. First, those who work in the service economy depend on mining, agriculture and manufacturing to make what they need to live and work. Those basic sectors of the economy must use more and more resources including energy to make it possible for more people to work in the so-called service sector. But the service sector isn't necessarily all that energy lean. Ask someone who has had to pay the utility bills for a university or a large hotel lately. In fact, some service businesses and institutions are from an energy standpoint nothing but sprawling energy sinks as our large state universities have been finding out recently. Growth in the economy means growth in energy use no matter how that growth occurs. Yes, we've become more efficient. But, nature doesn't care that we are using finite fossil fuels more parsimoniously; it only cares about the absolute drawdown which is getting bigger by the day.
Crook also claims that oil reserve estimates show that we have nothing to worry about for several decades. Here he once again displays his ignorance. He says nothing about the controversy surrounding reserve gains in the late 1980s in nearly all OPEC countries. OPEC was contemplating adjusting production quotas to be commensurate with reserves. Suddenly, OPEC members within the space of a couple years were reporting gains of 50% to 100% in their reserves with no discernible exploration to account for it. The Middle East, where most of OPEC's oil is located, contains 60 percent of the world's remaining reserves. Not mentioning the sudden appearance of these phantom reserves and the recent sudden vanishing of some of the same reserves is no small oversight.
The second error he makes is confining his discussion to reserves. It doesn't matter how big your reserves are if the rate at which you can get oil out of the ground is small. The reserves in the Alberta tar sands are quoted at 180 billion barrels, bigger than that of every OPEC country except Saudi Arabia. But, the tar sands are unlikely to give us much more than 3 million barrels a day by 2025. This sounds like a lot, but it is a mere trickle compared to projected world demand of about 120 million barrels a day.
Another problem with the tar sands and other nonconventional oil sources is that their energy return is poor. Right now, we are running the world economy on oil that gives us about 20 units of energy to use in the non-energy economy for each unit we spend in the energy industry to get it. For tar sands, the ratio is only 1.5 to 1. Efficiencies will surely accrue over time, but it seems quite doubtful that tar sands will approach anything like the 20 to 1 ratio for conventional oil. And, we need to keep in mind that the easiest-to-recover oil from the tar sands is being taken first. The harder-to-get oil, and thus more energy-intensive, will come later. It will be a race between technology and declining grades; but will it be a race up to 20 to 1 returns? I doubt it.
Crook mentions oil shale and indicates that there is ready technology to make it a useful energy source. To date no company has been able to get oil out of oil shale at a profit. Even more important, oil shale remains net energy negative. That means we are getting less than one unit of energy for each unit we put in. In short, it's not an energy source using existing technology, and unless somebody figures out a technique for extracting and processing it which doesn't involve using lots of water, it probably never will be a source of energy. That's because most of the world's oil shale is located on the Colorado plateau where water is already in short supply.
The final canard is a staple among oil optimists: They say the-sky-is-falling pessimists claim that we're running out of oil. This, of course, is an utter straw man. Even the pessimists say that we won't run out of oil anytime soon. What they claim is that we are approaching a peak in the rate of production worldwide. Oil production in every field and in every oil country now in decline has followed the same pattern: a sharp rise in the rate of production, followed by a peak, followed by a decline. No one has convincingly shown why this should not be true for the world. And, in a global economy that is utterly dependent for its growth on ever-expanding supplies of cheap oil, a decline in the rate of production would have profound consequences. If that decline is nearby, we will find that we are simply not ready for it. If it is delayed for many years, we have chance to get ready. But, we will not be ready in time if we stick with the current the-market-will-save-us policies which are in force now.
To his credit Crook notes that global warming also needs to be addressed simultaneously with energy issues. But, he again seems to betray his ignorance by saying that the Kyoto Protocol will "impose immediate, drastic changes at ruinous cost." What he doesn't know or doesn't tell you is that leading climate scientists believe we will have to cut our greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 70 percent over the next 40 years to save us from disastrous warming. Kyoto only requires reductions of about 5.2 percent below 1990 emissions for industrialized countries only (though these reductions would have meant up to 23 percent for the United States if had it signed the protocol). Unfortunately, total emissions may actually rise because of plans for many new coal-fired power plants in countries not covered by or not ratifying the protocol such as China, India and the United States. If the limits Kyoto calls for are "drastic," then they are clearly not drastic enough.
Crook proposes energy diversification, a carbon tax and subsidies for "oil-saving technologies," all sensible steps. But when it comes to understanding the true nature of our energy predicament, he needs to go back and ask more questions--a lot more questions.
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