Power densities are a measure of the land required for both energy sources and energy users. The current infrastructure matches the small footprint of energy sources against the large footprint of energy users. With the drive toward renewable energy sources, this relationship is about to be reversed with consequences few people understand.....Read more
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
How many windmills does it take to power the world?
My latest column on Scitizen entitled "How Many Windmills Does It Take to Power the World?" has now been posted. Here is the teaser:
Sunday, February 24, 2008
The cult of continuity
History would be a very boring read indeed if nothing changed. Imagine reading about the Roman Empire if it had survived intact and more less untouched from Augustus onward. All that might be said is that the Pax Romana has been good for business and that any one day in the life of the empire has pretty much looked like any other for the past 2,000 years.
But, of course, that is not how human history has unfolded. It is chock full of wars, the rise and fall of empires and of whole civilizations, ravaging plagues, breathtaking discoveries, vast migrations, world-changing inventions and cultural evolution. So, it is a puzzle why so much emphasis is now put on the supposed inevitable continuity of modern industrial life. The argument goes that humans are so very clever that they have brilliantly overcome every resource and ecological constraint on their way to becoming the dominant species. And, now with our powerful new technologies we are poised to dominate the globe forever while adding to it the conquest of outer space. Perhaps every empire including the empire of modern man thinks along similar lines.
But a cursory study of history should lead us to conclude no such thing. Humans have squandered opportunities, let their ambition lead them to destruction, run out of natural resources, and despoiled the landscape beyond repair again and again. Human societies do not always triumph. They tend to rise and fall as if they had a natural life cycle.
This may seem all too obvious once you think about it. And yet, at present our modern society seems captive to a cult of continuity even as it touts the great change wrought by technology and predicts great changes ahead from that technology. It never occurs to those caught up in the cult of continuity that great change almost always means great peril! There is barely any mention of the possible vulnerabilities or even fatal side effects resulting from such technology. The Luddites are laughed at today as is Thomas Malthus who predicted starvation for the masses since food supplies were not supposed to keep up with population growth. These men saw peril where their compatriots only saw progress.
But history is all about discontinuity. Who would even bother to write the dull history of the untouched Roman Empire imagined above? In fact, reality has spawned myriad volumes of history over the past 20 centuries reflecting in part the great volume of discontinuity experienced by human societies.
Perhaps because much of the discontinuity of our time is far away from modern eyes we are missing the peril part of change. The depletion of the world's fisheries continues apace while few know that catches peaked in the late 1980s. The silent rape of the soil proceeds with barely a notice that billions of tons of topsoil slip away each year due to erosion. The world's vast water treatment facilities should tell us something is happening to the world's potable water; but such plants are rarely in the center of cities where everyone could see them and contemplate their meaning. Vast tracts of forest both in the tropics and in places such as Canada are being felled for fiber. But how many actually see it happening? And, if they did, would they understand its significance?
Those of us in wealthy countries often see only the "progress" end of such change. There are more and more goods available each year at generally lower prices. The trend has been going on for so long it hardly seems possible that it could slow down, much less come to a halt.
Here is why the cult of continuity must really be classified as a cult. The word "cult" in its simplest sense means a system of religious worship. In many cults nothing is more important than the acceptance of certain beliefs without the requirement of evidence. And, because cult members require no evidence (in the scientific meaning of the word) to confirm their beliefs, these members are remarkably immune to evidence that might also challenge their beliefs.
So there you have it. Anyone who has tried to argue a devout friend out of his or her religion knows that appeals to reason rarely succeed. So why should we be so surprised when those who are convinced that human progress always runs in the same direction as time cannot be persuaded by evidence to the contrary?
All of this has implications for how one argues the case for the unsustainability of modern civilization. It is true that people of faith, even devout faith, can lose that faith under extreme distress. The extreme distress is already here for many in poorer countries; and, it is bound to spread elsewhere over time without prompt action to change our course.
Therein lies the conundrum. How can one shake the faith of those devout acolytes of the cult of continuity before the hardships of their own day-to-day existence force them to adapt? Failure to shake that faith means we will be left with only palliatives after the crisis arrives.
But, of course, that is not how human history has unfolded. It is chock full of wars, the rise and fall of empires and of whole civilizations, ravaging plagues, breathtaking discoveries, vast migrations, world-changing inventions and cultural evolution. So, it is a puzzle why so much emphasis is now put on the supposed inevitable continuity of modern industrial life. The argument goes that humans are so very clever that they have brilliantly overcome every resource and ecological constraint on their way to becoming the dominant species. And, now with our powerful new technologies we are poised to dominate the globe forever while adding to it the conquest of outer space. Perhaps every empire including the empire of modern man thinks along similar lines.
But a cursory study of history should lead us to conclude no such thing. Humans have squandered opportunities, let their ambition lead them to destruction, run out of natural resources, and despoiled the landscape beyond repair again and again. Human societies do not always triumph. They tend to rise and fall as if they had a natural life cycle.
This may seem all too obvious once you think about it. And yet, at present our modern society seems captive to a cult of continuity even as it touts the great change wrought by technology and predicts great changes ahead from that technology. It never occurs to those caught up in the cult of continuity that great change almost always means great peril! There is barely any mention of the possible vulnerabilities or even fatal side effects resulting from such technology. The Luddites are laughed at today as is Thomas Malthus who predicted starvation for the masses since food supplies were not supposed to keep up with population growth. These men saw peril where their compatriots only saw progress.
But history is all about discontinuity. Who would even bother to write the dull history of the untouched Roman Empire imagined above? In fact, reality has spawned myriad volumes of history over the past 20 centuries reflecting in part the great volume of discontinuity experienced by human societies.
Perhaps because much of the discontinuity of our time is far away from modern eyes we are missing the peril part of change. The depletion of the world's fisheries continues apace while few know that catches peaked in the late 1980s. The silent rape of the soil proceeds with barely a notice that billions of tons of topsoil slip away each year due to erosion. The world's vast water treatment facilities should tell us something is happening to the world's potable water; but such plants are rarely in the center of cities where everyone could see them and contemplate their meaning. Vast tracts of forest both in the tropics and in places such as Canada are being felled for fiber. But how many actually see it happening? And, if they did, would they understand its significance?
Those of us in wealthy countries often see only the "progress" end of such change. There are more and more goods available each year at generally lower prices. The trend has been going on for so long it hardly seems possible that it could slow down, much less come to a halt.
Here is why the cult of continuity must really be classified as a cult. The word "cult" in its simplest sense means a system of religious worship. In many cults nothing is more important than the acceptance of certain beliefs without the requirement of evidence. And, because cult members require no evidence (in the scientific meaning of the word) to confirm their beliefs, these members are remarkably immune to evidence that might also challenge their beliefs.
So there you have it. Anyone who has tried to argue a devout friend out of his or her religion knows that appeals to reason rarely succeed. So why should we be so surprised when those who are convinced that human progress always runs in the same direction as time cannot be persuaded by evidence to the contrary?
All of this has implications for how one argues the case for the unsustainability of modern civilization. It is true that people of faith, even devout faith, can lose that faith under extreme distress. The extreme distress is already here for many in poorer countries; and, it is bound to spread elsewhere over time without prompt action to change our course.
Therein lies the conundrum. How can one shake the faith of those devout acolytes of the cult of continuity before the hardships of their own day-to-day existence force them to adapt? Failure to shake that faith means we will be left with only palliatives after the crisis arrives.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
The lure of the city
The history of the 19th and 20th centuries could fairly be characterized as the history of urbanization. Today, every culture is rife with stories of the trek from the countryside to the city in search of work, education, sophistication, power and money. To stay behind was to be condemned to a life of parochialism and poverty. Will the history of the 21st century be more of the same?
It's starting out that way. Every year countless millions continue to stream into the metastasizing boundaries of Shanghai, Bangkok, Jakarta, Dhaka, Calcutta, Lahore, Cairo, Lagos, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Rio De Janeiro, Caracas, and Mexico City. Countless millions more are crowding into the ever sprawling urbanized areas surrounding so-called world-class cities such as Tokyo, Singapore, London, Paris, Rome, Toronto, New York, Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston and myriad other vibrant modern cities across the globe. The attraction of the city for the young has never been so strong. This migration has become like a howling wind that will blow back anyone who tries to walk in the opposite direction.
Yet the forces which have made all of this migration possible seem like they are coming to an end. The fabulous advances in food production of the last century are slowing. We are having a harder time keeping up with population growth. This is partly the result of a self-reinforcing loop in which more urban growth means more land for housing and infrastructure and the consequent destruction of fertile farmland needed to feed this growing population. The result of this and other factors has been that per capita grain yields which peaked in 1984 have actually declined. Yes, there is overall more food available; but the key figure--as anyone who has gone hungry can tell you--is food per person. Naturally, people eat things other than cereal grains. But for most of the world, cereal grains are the central source of food calories; some 80 percent of all calories eaten are in the form of grain products and the products of livestock fed on grains.
We face a litany of other problems as well: the overuse of underground and surface waters, the collapse of fisheries, climate change, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, toxic pollution, and the depletion of strategic minerals. In addition, the growth in world oil production appears to be stalling out. Yet, against this backdrop, waves of humanity keep washing into the world's cities.
It is like the momentum of the tides which take water further up onto the beach even as the gravitational force which brought that water there is waning. People continue to come into the cities despite all the challenges of doing so because the whole system--even as it frays at the edges--practically forces them to.
Those who are concerned about sustainability talk about making cities more sustainable. But that is an oxymoron. Cities have never been sustainable. They have always needed more from the land than the land under them could give. But the issue is more nuanced than that. On the one hand, living more densely in an energy-constrained world makes sense. It reduces travel for all purposes, economic and social. And, in the past people did live in walkable villages and towns. Some still do. But today, at least in North America, only those living in large cities can really do without a car.
On the other hand, the explosive expansion of urban areas is primarily driven by economic growth and rising population. These two trends will be called into question in the energy-constrained world that is emerging in the 21st century. Without cheap energy it will be difficult to keep food production and economic growth on its current upward path. And, even if the two continue to rise, they may not do so at a rate that satisfies the world's hunger for both food and energy.
But try encouraging people to stay put in their rural landscapes when the hope of a better life is all in the city. Part of the reason is that the rural landscape is being systematically decimated by city residents through soil degradation (due to industrial farming); voracious mineral extraction and its often toxic side effects; and the felling of forests for fiber and to clear land for more agriculture. Add to this the persistent underfunding of public infrastructure and services in rural areas.
The ideal among serious thinkers about sustainability is a more decentralized living arrangement than we currently have--and one that is much lighter on the land and the entire ecosphere, of course. But the continuing crush of people moving toward the world's cities may not stop anytime soon even in the face of declining energy supplies. In part that's because the alternative, the countryside, has been so damaged in many places that it offers no alternative at all for the teeming millions in the cities.
What this means is that we will be obliged to figure out how to make our cities, even our megacities, somehow work even as the challenges of climate change and resource depletion begin to hit us full force. At this date that seems an impossible task. Perhaps in the long run we will be able to make living in the countryside and its villages and towns attractive to most people again. For now we will have to do what we can to respond to the growing number whom the lure of the city is bringing within its borders every day.
It's starting out that way. Every year countless millions continue to stream into the metastasizing boundaries of Shanghai, Bangkok, Jakarta, Dhaka, Calcutta, Lahore, Cairo, Lagos, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Rio De Janeiro, Caracas, and Mexico City. Countless millions more are crowding into the ever sprawling urbanized areas surrounding so-called world-class cities such as Tokyo, Singapore, London, Paris, Rome, Toronto, New York, Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston and myriad other vibrant modern cities across the globe. The attraction of the city for the young has never been so strong. This migration has become like a howling wind that will blow back anyone who tries to walk in the opposite direction.
Yet the forces which have made all of this migration possible seem like they are coming to an end. The fabulous advances in food production of the last century are slowing. We are having a harder time keeping up with population growth. This is partly the result of a self-reinforcing loop in which more urban growth means more land for housing and infrastructure and the consequent destruction of fertile farmland needed to feed this growing population. The result of this and other factors has been that per capita grain yields which peaked in 1984 have actually declined. Yes, there is overall more food available; but the key figure--as anyone who has gone hungry can tell you--is food per person. Naturally, people eat things other than cereal grains. But for most of the world, cereal grains are the central source of food calories; some 80 percent of all calories eaten are in the form of grain products and the products of livestock fed on grains.
We face a litany of other problems as well: the overuse of underground and surface waters, the collapse of fisheries, climate change, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, toxic pollution, and the depletion of strategic minerals. In addition, the growth in world oil production appears to be stalling out. Yet, against this backdrop, waves of humanity keep washing into the world's cities.
It is like the momentum of the tides which take water further up onto the beach even as the gravitational force which brought that water there is waning. People continue to come into the cities despite all the challenges of doing so because the whole system--even as it frays at the edges--practically forces them to.
Those who are concerned about sustainability talk about making cities more sustainable. But that is an oxymoron. Cities have never been sustainable. They have always needed more from the land than the land under them could give. But the issue is more nuanced than that. On the one hand, living more densely in an energy-constrained world makes sense. It reduces travel for all purposes, economic and social. And, in the past people did live in walkable villages and towns. Some still do. But today, at least in North America, only those living in large cities can really do without a car.
On the other hand, the explosive expansion of urban areas is primarily driven by economic growth and rising population. These two trends will be called into question in the energy-constrained world that is emerging in the 21st century. Without cheap energy it will be difficult to keep food production and economic growth on its current upward path. And, even if the two continue to rise, they may not do so at a rate that satisfies the world's hunger for both food and energy.
But try encouraging people to stay put in their rural landscapes when the hope of a better life is all in the city. Part of the reason is that the rural landscape is being systematically decimated by city residents through soil degradation (due to industrial farming); voracious mineral extraction and its often toxic side effects; and the felling of forests for fiber and to clear land for more agriculture. Add to this the persistent underfunding of public infrastructure and services in rural areas.
The ideal among serious thinkers about sustainability is a more decentralized living arrangement than we currently have--and one that is much lighter on the land and the entire ecosphere, of course. But the continuing crush of people moving toward the world's cities may not stop anytime soon even in the face of declining energy supplies. In part that's because the alternative, the countryside, has been so damaged in many places that it offers no alternative at all for the teeming millions in the cities.
What this means is that we will be obliged to figure out how to make our cities, even our megacities, somehow work even as the challenges of climate change and resource depletion begin to hit us full force. At this date that seems an impossible task. Perhaps in the long run we will be able to make living in the countryside and its villages and towns attractive to most people again. For now we will have to do what we can to respond to the growing number whom the lure of the city is bringing within its borders every day.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Dave Cohen's suburban savanna
People have been moving to the suburbs for decades to escape the supposed afflictions of the city: noise, crime, lack of privacy, air pollution, poor schools, high taxes, traffic congestion and a host of other maladies. In suburbia many of them found relief, that is, until enough people moved out with them and created urban problems all over again. This caused some to move even further out to what are now called the outer ring suburbs.
Though gasoline prices are rising, traffic congestion is increasing, commutes are lengthening, and the supposed advantages of suburban life are diminishing, suburbia continues to attract new adherents even as it maintains its powerful hold on those already living there. Can it be that there is something more basic going on than simply a dislike of the city?
Dave Cohen thinks so. Known for his work on The Oil Drum and now for the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas-USA, Cohen believes there is an instinctual basis for our love of suburbia, one that may be hard to break through even as the cheap oil which has made suburbia possible disappears. He plans to do more research and to write about the topic in the future. But, when he mentioned it to me, I couldn't resist asking him a few questions and reporting on his preliminary findings.
We are creatures adapted to moving around, Cohen explains. The anatomically modern humans who appeared 1.7 million years ago on the plains of East Africa were designed for hunting and gathering. In short, they were designed for movement for the purposes of acquiring food and avoiding predators. And, move these early humans did, throughout Africa and much of Asia. They didn't have the technology to live in cold climates or they might have wandered further north as well.
Mobility is a trait so basic to humans "that nobody notices that it's there," he says. "It's totally automatic." Of course, there have been many modes of mobility throughout history, but nothing that could take the average person so far, so fast as the automobile. And, because of modern manufacturing techniques, such as the assembly line, those automobiles became affordable to the masses.
Our instinctive penchant for mobility, according to Cohen, meant that "everybody would drive and everybody did if they could afford it." Long before the arrival of the car, agriculture brought millennia of confinement to small villages, constricted rural landscapes, and urban centers. Then, suddenly, the car made it possible for the great mass of people once again to roam the landscape. As they did, they set about creating what Cohen calls the industrial suburban savanna. So instinctually attractive was this new savanna that "they built it out so the entire culture is structured around the automobile," he said. Only instinct would seem to explain why people would "transform an entire landscape to accommodate personal transportation [such as the car]."
Because this phenomenon is worldwide and not just seen in North America or Europe, Cohen thinks it demands an explanation. "A deep biologically rooted instinct got triggered by the advent of the car," he contends. While he recognizes that there is no way to "prove" his theory and that it therefore falls into the scientific definition of a "just-so story," he thinks the theory is a good point of departure for talking about the love affair the world has had and continues to have with suburbs.
One disadvantage to the automobile version of mobility is that it cuts way down on communication. It's hard to talk with a person in another automobile at 70 miles per hour no matter how close they are to you. At first, we tried to make up for this loss of voices with radios. We have recently tried to make up for it with cellphones. "What you get is the perfectly mindless combination of people driving around and talking on their cellphones," he says. In this case by "mindless" he means "instinctual."
Driving goes beyond simply foraging for food and other necessities. It is now mandatory if one wants to have a social life. We drive to visit people we know and travel sometimes to encounter ones we don't. It is this instinct for sociability that may be one of the keys to challenging the hold that suburbia has on the minds and instincts of so many. For example, many couples who have finished raising their children, so-called empty nesters, are now returning to the city for the enhanced sociability that it offers.
Cohen writes frequently about energy issues and especially about peak oil. He thinks that if the reluctance of people to leave the energy-intensive life of suburbia is instinctually rooted, we will not be able to get them to change their habits or their deployment in the landscape through merely rational appeals. Of course, the survival instinct may come into play if peak oil creates conditions which are desperate enough in suburbia.
But, in the meantime, perhaps the best way to encourage people to settle in more compact communities is to make those communities more richly social. Then, we would be pitting one instinct against another. And, that seems more like a fair fight.
Though gasoline prices are rising, traffic congestion is increasing, commutes are lengthening, and the supposed advantages of suburban life are diminishing, suburbia continues to attract new adherents even as it maintains its powerful hold on those already living there. Can it be that there is something more basic going on than simply a dislike of the city?
Dave Cohen thinks so. Known for his work on The Oil Drum and now for the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas-USA, Cohen believes there is an instinctual basis for our love of suburbia, one that may be hard to break through even as the cheap oil which has made suburbia possible disappears. He plans to do more research and to write about the topic in the future. But, when he mentioned it to me, I couldn't resist asking him a few questions and reporting on his preliminary findings.
We are creatures adapted to moving around, Cohen explains. The anatomically modern humans who appeared 1.7 million years ago on the plains of East Africa were designed for hunting and gathering. In short, they were designed for movement for the purposes of acquiring food and avoiding predators. And, move these early humans did, throughout Africa and much of Asia. They didn't have the technology to live in cold climates or they might have wandered further north as well.
Mobility is a trait so basic to humans "that nobody notices that it's there," he says. "It's totally automatic." Of course, there have been many modes of mobility throughout history, but nothing that could take the average person so far, so fast as the automobile. And, because of modern manufacturing techniques, such as the assembly line, those automobiles became affordable to the masses.
Our instinctive penchant for mobility, according to Cohen, meant that "everybody would drive and everybody did if they could afford it." Long before the arrival of the car, agriculture brought millennia of confinement to small villages, constricted rural landscapes, and urban centers. Then, suddenly, the car made it possible for the great mass of people once again to roam the landscape. As they did, they set about creating what Cohen calls the industrial suburban savanna. So instinctually attractive was this new savanna that "they built it out so the entire culture is structured around the automobile," he said. Only instinct would seem to explain why people would "transform an entire landscape to accommodate personal transportation [such as the car]."
Because this phenomenon is worldwide and not just seen in North America or Europe, Cohen thinks it demands an explanation. "A deep biologically rooted instinct got triggered by the advent of the car," he contends. While he recognizes that there is no way to "prove" his theory and that it therefore falls into the scientific definition of a "just-so story," he thinks the theory is a good point of departure for talking about the love affair the world has had and continues to have with suburbs.
One disadvantage to the automobile version of mobility is that it cuts way down on communication. It's hard to talk with a person in another automobile at 70 miles per hour no matter how close they are to you. At first, we tried to make up for this loss of voices with radios. We have recently tried to make up for it with cellphones. "What you get is the perfectly mindless combination of people driving around and talking on their cellphones," he says. In this case by "mindless" he means "instinctual."
Driving goes beyond simply foraging for food and other necessities. It is now mandatory if one wants to have a social life. We drive to visit people we know and travel sometimes to encounter ones we don't. It is this instinct for sociability that may be one of the keys to challenging the hold that suburbia has on the minds and instincts of so many. For example, many couples who have finished raising their children, so-called empty nesters, are now returning to the city for the enhanced sociability that it offers.
Cohen writes frequently about energy issues and especially about peak oil. He thinks that if the reluctance of people to leave the energy-intensive life of suburbia is instinctually rooted, we will not be able to get them to change their habits or their deployment in the landscape through merely rational appeals. Of course, the survival instinct may come into play if peak oil creates conditions which are desperate enough in suburbia.
But, in the meantime, perhaps the best way to encourage people to settle in more compact communities is to make those communities more richly social. Then, we would be pitting one instinct against another. And, that seems more like a fair fight.
Monday, February 04, 2008
Do high commodity prices speak for themselves?
Stunning new highs in some world commodity prices have catastrophists of all types tapping out SOS in their sleep. There was, of course, the rise of oil which started 2007 at $50 a barrel and rose above $100 on the first trading day of this year, an all-time high. Wheat which began 2007 at around $5 a bushel reached $10, another all-time high, before retreating slightly. Soybeans which started last year around $6.50 a bushel ended the year above $12 and went on to set an all-time high last month just above $13. And, gold, that quintessential barometer of fear, rose from about $640 an ounce to above $900 recently, shattering its old highs.
Not every commodity rose or rose by as much. But the general trend has many of those concerned about peak oil, biofuels, and the effects of climate change saying, "I told you so." There is certainly a lot to be worried about. And, there is a good case to be made that long-term policy choices concerning energy, biofuels and climate change are now colliding with the physical facts on Earth and leading to a vicious cycle of interlocking problems that can't be solve by doing more of the same.
Still, it is the peculiar mission of markets to make fools ultimately of all who predict them and all who interpret them. The soothsayers on Wall Street and the vast majority of commodity forecasters were caught by surprise by the moves mentioned above. Markets are social phenomena and as such, they represent the constantly changing opinions and activities of thousands and sometimes millions of participants--activities and opinions which can never be fully observed or assessed. That is why it is in the nature of markets to surprise. If everyone could have known early last year that the oil market would reach $100 by the first trading day of this year, they would immediately have bid it up to that price. But, price movements in markets are about things which are not known or which lie in the future and therefore cannot be known.
This is why it is dangerous to affix any particular meaning to any particular price, whether high or low. The reasons for the price of any commodity are as multifarious as the people whose activities influence them. Too often we think that news makes markets. But, in reality, most of the time it is markets that make news. Those who get paid to write about markets are expected to come up with some reason each day for the latest price movements of Citigroup, Hewlett Packard, junk bonds, gold or wheat. But how can these writers possibly know the reasons?
In addition, there is the cardinal rule of neoclassical economics: High prices bring on more supply or substitutes or both. The watchword among right-minded economists (that is, cornucopian ones) is that this too shall pass. And, that's where the argument starts. Those who've been preaching that there would come a day when high prices wouldn't pass--a day when resources really would be running out because adequate new supply can't be found or grown at any price and because ready substitutes are not available--those people are now saying that that day is here.
The problem is that these two sides are talking about different things. The economists are talking about markets and the professional worriers are talking about resources. It is possible for something to be relatively cheap, but still not be accessible to everyone who wants it. Ask those who lived through the Great Depression. But the coming difficulties, "the long emergency," as James Howard Kunstler styles it, will be one of shortage not glut. For the market fundamentalist, however, there is no such thing as a shortage; there is only price. Price is what balances supply and demand even if some poor souls will simply have to go without. (There is a shortage of yachts for all who would like them, the market fundamentalist might say, but not for all who can afford them.)
It is all too likely then that the skyrocketing prices predicted for oil, for example, of $300, $500 or even $1,000 a barrel will never materialize. Yes, many people will do without oil, or a least without as much oil as they would like. And, that means that the price of oil will not go up forever. That's because many oil consumers will simply drop out of the bidding with each successive price hike. And, ultimately the dropouts will halt the upward pressure on oil prices perhaps at levels far lower than $300. The economists have a polite term for this. They call it "demand destruction." What they don't want you to think about is that sometimes, perhaps this time, a lot of people will be demolished in the process.
The same process, unfortunately, may be unfolding for cereal grains and perhaps other critical commodities about which we currently do not worry. But no commodity will be a one-way street. There will be swings enough for the market players to stay engaged. And, when prices do come down, these players and their affiliated economists will point to the drop as proof positive that the market is working just fine--which if one is concerned only with markets and not with people will turn out to be true.
There is another consideration for both sides of the debate. In truth, most commodity prices appear to be below their inflation-adjusted highs even if you use the U. S. government's admittedly stingy methods for calculating inflation. The government's current method calculates wheat's all-time inflation-adjusted high as $28.25 a bushel in February 1974 ($6.35 in 1974 dollars). And, if you use the price of $3 a bushel in 1974 dollars--a level which wheat maintained almost all the time from the beginning of 1973 through 1975--the inflation-adjusted price today would still be $13.52. But the government intentionally underestimates the inflation rate to keep pension and social security cost-of-living adjustments down. To get around this John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics (subscription required) designed a calculator based on the old, pre-adjustment government methods for calculating inflation. That calculator puts the wheat price spike at $75.94 in today's dollars and the $3 a bushel floor at $36.34.
Calculations for all four commodities mentioned above are summarized in the table below:
1U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
2Shadow Government Statistics
Not every commodity rose or rose by as much. But the general trend has many of those concerned about peak oil, biofuels, and the effects of climate change saying, "I told you so." There is certainly a lot to be worried about. And, there is a good case to be made that long-term policy choices concerning energy, biofuels and climate change are now colliding with the physical facts on Earth and leading to a vicious cycle of interlocking problems that can't be solve by doing more of the same.
Still, it is the peculiar mission of markets to make fools ultimately of all who predict them and all who interpret them. The soothsayers on Wall Street and the vast majority of commodity forecasters were caught by surprise by the moves mentioned above. Markets are social phenomena and as such, they represent the constantly changing opinions and activities of thousands and sometimes millions of participants--activities and opinions which can never be fully observed or assessed. That is why it is in the nature of markets to surprise. If everyone could have known early last year that the oil market would reach $100 by the first trading day of this year, they would immediately have bid it up to that price. But, price movements in markets are about things which are not known or which lie in the future and therefore cannot be known.
This is why it is dangerous to affix any particular meaning to any particular price, whether high or low. The reasons for the price of any commodity are as multifarious as the people whose activities influence them. Too often we think that news makes markets. But, in reality, most of the time it is markets that make news. Those who get paid to write about markets are expected to come up with some reason each day for the latest price movements of Citigroup, Hewlett Packard, junk bonds, gold or wheat. But how can these writers possibly know the reasons?
In addition, there is the cardinal rule of neoclassical economics: High prices bring on more supply or substitutes or both. The watchword among right-minded economists (that is, cornucopian ones) is that this too shall pass. And, that's where the argument starts. Those who've been preaching that there would come a day when high prices wouldn't pass--a day when resources really would be running out because adequate new supply can't be found or grown at any price and because ready substitutes are not available--those people are now saying that that day is here.
The problem is that these two sides are talking about different things. The economists are talking about markets and the professional worriers are talking about resources. It is possible for something to be relatively cheap, but still not be accessible to everyone who wants it. Ask those who lived through the Great Depression. But the coming difficulties, "the long emergency," as James Howard Kunstler styles it, will be one of shortage not glut. For the market fundamentalist, however, there is no such thing as a shortage; there is only price. Price is what balances supply and demand even if some poor souls will simply have to go without. (There is a shortage of yachts for all who would like them, the market fundamentalist might say, but not for all who can afford them.)
It is all too likely then that the skyrocketing prices predicted for oil, for example, of $300, $500 or even $1,000 a barrel will never materialize. Yes, many people will do without oil, or a least without as much oil as they would like. And, that means that the price of oil will not go up forever. That's because many oil consumers will simply drop out of the bidding with each successive price hike. And, ultimately the dropouts will halt the upward pressure on oil prices perhaps at levels far lower than $300. The economists have a polite term for this. They call it "demand destruction." What they don't want you to think about is that sometimes, perhaps this time, a lot of people will be demolished in the process.
The same process, unfortunately, may be unfolding for cereal grains and perhaps other critical commodities about which we currently do not worry. But no commodity will be a one-way street. There will be swings enough for the market players to stay engaged. And, when prices do come down, these players and their affiliated economists will point to the drop as proof positive that the market is working just fine--which if one is concerned only with markets and not with people will turn out to be true.
There is another consideration for both sides of the debate. In truth, most commodity prices appear to be below their inflation-adjusted highs even if you use the U. S. government's admittedly stingy methods for calculating inflation. The government's current method calculates wheat's all-time inflation-adjusted high as $28.25 a bushel in February 1974 ($6.35 in 1974 dollars). And, if you use the price of $3 a bushel in 1974 dollars--a level which wheat maintained almost all the time from the beginning of 1973 through 1975--the inflation-adjusted price today would still be $13.52. But the government intentionally underestimates the inflation rate to keep pension and social security cost-of-living adjustments down. To get around this John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics (subscription required) designed a calculator based on the old, pre-adjustment government methods for calculating inflation. That calculator puts the wheat price spike at $75.94 in today's dollars and the $3 a bushel floor at $36.34.
Calculations for all four commodities mentioned above are summarized in the table below:
Are Commodity Prices Really That High?
(in U. S. Dollars)
| Commodity | Date or Range | Price Type | Price | BLS1 Inflation Adj | SGS2 Inflation Adj | Current Price (2/1/08) |
| Gold (oz.) | Jan. 1980 | Spike | $850 | $2,295 | $6,165 | $908.70 |
| Gold (oz.) | 1979-1981 | Average | $450 | $1,380 | $3,720 | $908.70 |
| Oil (bbl.) | Dec. 1979 | Spike | $38 | $104 | $280 | $88.96 |
| Oil (bbl.) | 1979-1981 | Arbitrary Floor | $24 | $66 | $177 | $88.96 |
| Soybeans (bu.) | Jun. 1973 | Spike | $12.90 | $61.29 | $164.75 | $12.87 |
| Soybeans (bu.) | 1973-1975 | Approx. Floor | $5.00 | $24.65 | $66.26 | $12.87 |
| Wheat (bu.) | Feb. 1974 | Spike | $6.35 | $28.25 | $75.94 | $9.43 |
| Wheat (bu.) | 1973-1975 | Approx. Floor | $3.00 | $13.52 | $36.34 | $9.43 |
1U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
2Shadow Government Statistics
What all of this suggests is that the catastrophists may, in fact, be a little bit early and that the cornucopian economists may be too optimistic, at least about the near term. While history doesn't ever exactly repeat itself--Mark Twain liked to say that it rhymes--commodity prices look like they have considerable room to run. And, that's even if they never make it to the practically airless heights suggested by figures emitted from the inflation calculator at Shadow Government Statistics.
But perhaps the most important indicator is not how high these commodities will get, but how low they will go once they fall back from whatever new highs they achieve. The real price of commodities has been going down for more than a century. This is because the race between technology and resource exhaustion has been been won decisively by technology. Whether that will continue is now in question.
One indicator will be to see not what new highs are achieved in various commodities in the coming years, but whether a new floor is established that is significantly above previous historical real prices. In other words, higher lows will be more indicative of our situation than higher highs which are usually a very temporary phenomenon.
Exceedingly high prices for commodities, especially for oil, could conceivably tip our fragile economy into a recession or even a depression. That would temporarily lower demand for commodities and thus lower prices. Many commodities would then appear to be in surplus as fewer and fewer companies or people would have the means to buy them. We could again experience what some of our parents and grandparents experienced in the last depression: great want amid seeming plenty.
But if the high prices that cause this (as yet hypothetical) depression are due to the fact that resource depletion is stealing the march on technology, we may not know this for some time. Higher real lows in commodity prices, however, may give us one clue.
The impetus under such extreme circumstances will be to try to boost consumption. And, with so much slack in the economy, it may work. But if we have come to the crossover point where depletion is outrunning technology, we may find any recovery short-lived.
All of this amounts to speculation, a sort of thought experiment in an attempt to answer the question which is the title of this piece. My answer to that question is as follows: Commodity prices do not speak for themselves. Their meaning is not self-evident, and therefore many voices take on the task of speaking for them. Of course, I may suffer the fate of so many others who have tried to forecast or explain the markets. But, if my thought experiment proves broadly correct in its outlines, we may be on the front edge of an economic and social storm that will destroy the conceits of market economics and cast us into a dark and difficult struggle to find a new way of thinking about our economic and social lives.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Cornucopians and their magical thinking
We are all subject to bouts of magical thinking. The classic and most widespread form of this is to confuse correlation with causation. One can see it in daily life: Objects such as rabbits' feet, special stones, and certain "lucky" pieces of clothing are presumed to be the cause of whatever good fortune comes to the holder or wearer. One can see it in commentary on financial markets: Presidential election years in the United States are bullish for the stock market as if for some arcane and indecipherable reason, presidential elections cause the stock market to go up. Another form is the belief that the mind can affect the physical world. If we wish for something hard enough (as opposed to taking concrete steps to achieve it), it will happen.
And, so it is with the cornucopian thinker. He (or she) explains that most accepted measures of human well-being have been rising since 1800. But so has population. Ergo, population increases simply cannot result in human misery in the future. The correlation--a rise in living standards while population increased--means that rising populations cause beneficial things to happen to most human beings. (Never mind that fossil fuel usage was increasing exponentially during most of this period. And, never mind that the cornucopian only considers human well-being, especially the ability of humans to extract their needs from nature in the short run. Never is the long-term health of the ecosphere on which all humans depend seriously considered.)
Another bedrock of cornucopian magical thinking is that substitutes will always be available for any resource that becomes scarce. As you will see below, our ability to think is supposed to allow us always to find substitutes. A favorite example is the use of fiber optic cable in place of copper as copper ores have declined in quality. Even now the high price of oil is creating increased demand for coal and renewal energy sources. Substitution has and does occur, but it is hard to see what substitutes there might be for potable water or a climate suitable for human habitation. Perhaps we will desalinate the oceans and geoengineer the climate. But, that would take huge amounts of energy and, when it comes to climate, we would need a precise knowledge about the climate effects of any proposed geoengineering fix so as not to create the wrong kind of climate.
As for energy, even the world's foremost cornucopian thinker, Julian Simon, admitted that energy is the "master resource" upon which the extraction and refining of all other resources depend. For Simon it is the sum total of all the efforts of an increasing population which will bring us solutions to any energy shortages. "Resources come out of people's minds more than out of the ground or air," Simon said in a now-famous Wired magazine interview. He went on to say that "[m]inds matter economically as much as or more than hands or mouths. Human beings create more than they use, on average. It had to be so, or we would be an extinct species."
Now this is not exactly the belief that if you think about something it will happen, but it comes awfully close. It is the passivity that such ideas engender that move this kind of thinking over the line into magical thinking. We are led to believe that all of our environmental and resource problems can be left to technical experts who will surely solve them without much disruption to our lives. What Simon is implying is that if we think hard enough, human ingenuity will always find a way to overcome supposed limits on the human species. (Notice also that he says above that people "create" rather than extract resources which one should put down to just plain confusion about how the natural world works.) And, just so people would get his point, he stated the following in another article:
And, so it is with the cornucopian thinker. He (or she) explains that most accepted measures of human well-being have been rising since 1800. But so has population. Ergo, population increases simply cannot result in human misery in the future. The correlation--a rise in living standards while population increased--means that rising populations cause beneficial things to happen to most human beings. (Never mind that fossil fuel usage was increasing exponentially during most of this period. And, never mind that the cornucopian only considers human well-being, especially the ability of humans to extract their needs from nature in the short run. Never is the long-term health of the ecosphere on which all humans depend seriously considered.)
Another bedrock of cornucopian magical thinking is that substitutes will always be available for any resource that becomes scarce. As you will see below, our ability to think is supposed to allow us always to find substitutes. A favorite example is the use of fiber optic cable in place of copper as copper ores have declined in quality. Even now the high price of oil is creating increased demand for coal and renewal energy sources. Substitution has and does occur, but it is hard to see what substitutes there might be for potable water or a climate suitable for human habitation. Perhaps we will desalinate the oceans and geoengineer the climate. But, that would take huge amounts of energy and, when it comes to climate, we would need a precise knowledge about the climate effects of any proposed geoengineering fix so as not to create the wrong kind of climate.
As for energy, even the world's foremost cornucopian thinker, Julian Simon, admitted that energy is the "master resource" upon which the extraction and refining of all other resources depend. For Simon it is the sum total of all the efforts of an increasing population which will bring us solutions to any energy shortages. "Resources come out of people's minds more than out of the ground or air," Simon said in a now-famous Wired magazine interview. He went on to say that "[m]inds matter economically as much as or more than hands or mouths. Human beings create more than they use, on average. It had to be so, or we would be an extinct species."
Now this is not exactly the belief that if you think about something it will happen, but it comes awfully close. It is the passivity that such ideas engender that move this kind of thinking over the line into magical thinking. We are led to believe that all of our environmental and resource problems can be left to technical experts who will surely solve them without much disruption to our lives. What Simon is implying is that if we think hard enough, human ingenuity will always find a way to overcome supposed limits on the human species. (Notice also that he says above that people "create" rather than extract resources which one should put down to just plain confusion about how the natural world works.) And, just so people would get his point, he stated the following in another article:
We have in our hands now--actually, in our libraries--the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years. Most amazing is that most of this specific body of knowledge was developed within just the past two centuries or so, though it rests, of course, on basic knowledge that had accumulated for millennia.
Not only are people capable of great ingenuity when faced with great challenges, but they have already imagined and written down all the solutions to all the challenges to basic survival that we will face as a species for the next 7 billion years. Now, that might be properly classed as wishful thinking, perhaps the greatest piece of wishful thinking of all time. (Again one wonders about the oversight that in the past two centuries fossil fuel consumption has had a lot to do with giving people the time and power to discover and elaborate the basic knowledge to which Simon alludes--even if it now appears that that knowledge will not solve all of our future problems.)
Perhaps just as important as being able to spot cornucopian magical thinking is understanding the motive behind it. Simon elucidated his agenda and that of many other cornucopians in the following sentences from the article just cited above:
The extent to which the political-social-economic system provides personal freedom from government coercion is a crucial element in the economics of resources and population. Skilled persons require an appropriate social and economic framework that provides incentives for working hard and taking risks, enabling their talents to flower and come to fruition. The key elements of such a framework are economic liberty, respect for property, and fair and sensible rules of the market that are enforced equally for all.
What Simon--who was a professor of business administration, not a scientist--most feared was that concerns about the environment and about human population growth would lead to government intervention in the economy and society. That would undermine the free-market capitalism which he so stridently believed is the best form of social organization. (It is no accident that the piece quoted above was written for the free-market, libertarian-minded Cato Institute.)
But perhaps even more basic than this is Simon's admission in the preface to his book, The Ultimate Resource, that he once believed that population and resource problems were worrisome and urgent. His research into the matter, however, reversed his views. And, this research had an important side effect. It helped to lift him out of long depression (which he claims had nothing to do with his previous views on population and resources), a depression that never again returned. He wrote:
And I believe that if others fully recognize the extraordinarily positive trends that have continued until now, and that can reasonably be expected to continue into the future, it may brighten their outlooks, too.
That is the one thing about which Julian Simon is dead on. Magical thinking like his can often lift our spirits and make us think anything is possible, that is, until reality intrudes and leads to painful and sometimes catastrophic results.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
How the coming home heating crisis could threaten the grid
Canadians think about heat a lot more than most people do for obvious reasons. And, since so many Canadians rely on natural gas to heat their homes, assuring adequate supplies of the stuff is understandably critical to them. This fact was highlighted on a recent trip to Canada where I met with members of Post Carbon Toronto who detailed their concerns about natural gas supplies in North America, concerns which the Canadian government, their fellow Canadians and the largest importer of Canadian natural gas, the United States, seem only too happy to ignore.
The crux of the matter is that North American natural gas production has been stuck on a plateau fluctuating between 26 and 27 trillion cubic feet of production annually since 1998. But, it's not for lack of trying. From a low in early 1999 of 397 active gas drilling rigs in Canada and the United States combined, the count has vaulted to 1,753 active gas rigs for the week just ended. And, the high rig count is not just a recent phenomenon. Combined gas rig counts first reached 1,000 in the year 2000 and fluctuated between about 700 and 1,300 from then until mid-2005. At that point they broke through the 1,300 level and never looked back. The simple fact is that natural gas in North America is getting harder to find; and when we do find it, it is coming in smaller quantities that flow at slower rates than in the past. That's why we are having to drill so many wells just to run in place.
All of this might not seem so desperate were it not all but certain that at some point natural gas production will start to fall, perhaps precipitously so. Oil fields over their lifetime generally exhibit gradually rising and falling production which looks like a bell curve on a graph. However, gas fields quickly reach a plateau in production (usually determined by what a pipeline can carry), remain on the plateau for a time, and then fall off very quickly once the decline starts. The plateau pattern is followed by what can only be described as a cliff.
(Even before gas production begins to fall, North America's limited natural gas storage capacity could result in a winter heating crisis. Natural gas is now extensively used to generate electricity for which demand peaks during the air conditioning season. Therefore, it is conceivable that a hot summer followed by an unusually cold winter could bring storage down to dangerously low levels. Another peril is a strong hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico that does extensive damage to the natural gas infrastructure there.)
Resource economist Douglas Reynolds, a specialist on North American natural gas, has told me that once the natural gas decline begins, he expects a 5 percent per year drop-off in total production. Reynolds believes such a drop could begin as soon as this year. While imports of liquid natural gas (LNG) could ease the situation, the U. S. currently has only five such ports, and Canada does not anticipate opening any until 2011.
The members of Post Carbon Toronto have little faith that LNG will come fast enough and in quantities large enough to make much of a difference. (For why, see my piece entitled "If we build it, will they come?") And, planned pipelines from Alaska and northern Canada will not arrive anytime soon. So, the question, of course, is this: What will people who rely on natural gas for home heating--and that includes a huge number of people in the United States--do when the crisis hits?
One Post Carbon Toronto member feels certain that they will turn to electricity in a big way to heat their homes. The main problem will not be that natural gas is unavailable since home heating will get first priority (even if it means businesses and public buildings must be shut down). The main problem will be the skyrocketing price of natural gas. In a scramble to find affordable heat, people will turn to the grid via electric space heaters. Those who can will turn to wood. But in large cities such as Toronto (and Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland, for that matter) it will not be practical to do this because most homes do not have wood stoves and because supplies of firewood will be limited. And, although kerosene heaters will certainly be available, kerosene is a petroleum derivative and therefore may not ultimately be any cheaper to heat with than natural gas. Beyond this many apartment and high-rise dwellers will find that building rules or local ordinances prohibit the use of kerosene heaters in their units. All of this points to electricity as a backstop for cash-strapped Canadians and Americans faced with a natural gas shortage in winter.
So, this raises a second question: Will there be enough electricity for all those who want it? The short answer from Toronto is "no." Based on my admittedly rough calculations for the United States, the answer may be "no" here as well. If Americans who heat with natural gas substituted electricity for a mere quarter of their home heating, they would add about 6 percent to total electrical demand. Doesn't sound like much, does it? However, that 6 percent would not be added continuously throughout the year, but concentrated in the coldest months. That could cause a pronounced spike in demand, especially during deep freezes. Add to this the fact that about 20 percent of U. S. electricity is generated from natural gas-fired power plants that will be competing with homeowners for the same dwindling supplies of natural gas.
Right now the American electrical grid has about a 16 percent excess capacity margin. With all the additional demand coming during the winter and with supplies for natural-gas power plants in jeopardy as well, it seems plausible that my rather modest scenario could result in problems for the electrical grid. Keep in mind that this example involves replacing only a modest portion of home heating for homes warmed by natural gas. It takes into account neither the actions of those who own businesses or commercial buildings, nor the actions of homeowners who have gas appliances other than furnaces such as stoves and clothes dryers.
The likely response of the electric utilities, according to my informed Torontonian, will be to raise rates drastically to curtail electric use. Unless they can get some people to turn off their electric heaters, the utilities will risk major power outages and possibly damage to the grid. While rate rises in the middle of winter levied on a desperately cold population will probably not go down well with the public or their elected officials, it may be the only way in the short run to curtail demand and protect the grid.
Given that neither the U. S. nor the Canadian government seems to understand the seriousness of the natural gas predicament in North America, it is no surprise that they haven't thought through the implications for electrical demand once a crisis hits. While the probability of running low on natural gas by itself ought to scare the two governments into instituting emergency conservation programs, the possibility that the electricity might go out in mid-winter at the same time ought to positively terrify them.
Unfortunately, given the current inaction on both sides of the border, this horror movie may soon be coming to a town near you--or possibly even to your own town.
The crux of the matter is that North American natural gas production has been stuck on a plateau fluctuating between 26 and 27 trillion cubic feet of production annually since 1998. But, it's not for lack of trying. From a low in early 1999 of 397 active gas drilling rigs in Canada and the United States combined, the count has vaulted to 1,753 active gas rigs for the week just ended. And, the high rig count is not just a recent phenomenon. Combined gas rig counts first reached 1,000 in the year 2000 and fluctuated between about 700 and 1,300 from then until mid-2005. At that point they broke through the 1,300 level and never looked back. The simple fact is that natural gas in North America is getting harder to find; and when we do find it, it is coming in smaller quantities that flow at slower rates than in the past. That's why we are having to drill so many wells just to run in place.
All of this might not seem so desperate were it not all but certain that at some point natural gas production will start to fall, perhaps precipitously so. Oil fields over their lifetime generally exhibit gradually rising and falling production which looks like a bell curve on a graph. However, gas fields quickly reach a plateau in production (usually determined by what a pipeline can carry), remain on the plateau for a time, and then fall off very quickly once the decline starts. The plateau pattern is followed by what can only be described as a cliff.
(Even before gas production begins to fall, North America's limited natural gas storage capacity could result in a winter heating crisis. Natural gas is now extensively used to generate electricity for which demand peaks during the air conditioning season. Therefore, it is conceivable that a hot summer followed by an unusually cold winter could bring storage down to dangerously low levels. Another peril is a strong hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico that does extensive damage to the natural gas infrastructure there.)
Resource economist Douglas Reynolds, a specialist on North American natural gas, has told me that once the natural gas decline begins, he expects a 5 percent per year drop-off in total production. Reynolds believes such a drop could begin as soon as this year. While imports of liquid natural gas (LNG) could ease the situation, the U. S. currently has only five such ports, and Canada does not anticipate opening any until 2011.
The members of Post Carbon Toronto have little faith that LNG will come fast enough and in quantities large enough to make much of a difference. (For why, see my piece entitled "If we build it, will they come?") And, planned pipelines from Alaska and northern Canada will not arrive anytime soon. So, the question, of course, is this: What will people who rely on natural gas for home heating--and that includes a huge number of people in the United States--do when the crisis hits?
One Post Carbon Toronto member feels certain that they will turn to electricity in a big way to heat their homes. The main problem will not be that natural gas is unavailable since home heating will get first priority (even if it means businesses and public buildings must be shut down). The main problem will be the skyrocketing price of natural gas. In a scramble to find affordable heat, people will turn to the grid via electric space heaters. Those who can will turn to wood. But in large cities such as Toronto (and Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland, for that matter) it will not be practical to do this because most homes do not have wood stoves and because supplies of firewood will be limited. And, although kerosene heaters will certainly be available, kerosene is a petroleum derivative and therefore may not ultimately be any cheaper to heat with than natural gas. Beyond this many apartment and high-rise dwellers will find that building rules or local ordinances prohibit the use of kerosene heaters in their units. All of this points to electricity as a backstop for cash-strapped Canadians and Americans faced with a natural gas shortage in winter.
So, this raises a second question: Will there be enough electricity for all those who want it? The short answer from Toronto is "no." Based on my admittedly rough calculations for the United States, the answer may be "no" here as well. If Americans who heat with natural gas substituted electricity for a mere quarter of their home heating, they would add about 6 percent to total electrical demand. Doesn't sound like much, does it? However, that 6 percent would not be added continuously throughout the year, but concentrated in the coldest months. That could cause a pronounced spike in demand, especially during deep freezes. Add to this the fact that about 20 percent of U. S. electricity is generated from natural gas-fired power plants that will be competing with homeowners for the same dwindling supplies of natural gas.
Right now the American electrical grid has about a 16 percent excess capacity margin. With all the additional demand coming during the winter and with supplies for natural-gas power plants in jeopardy as well, it seems plausible that my rather modest scenario could result in problems for the electrical grid. Keep in mind that this example involves replacing only a modest portion of home heating for homes warmed by natural gas. It takes into account neither the actions of those who own businesses or commercial buildings, nor the actions of homeowners who have gas appliances other than furnaces such as stoves and clothes dryers.
The likely response of the electric utilities, according to my informed Torontonian, will be to raise rates drastically to curtail electric use. Unless they can get some people to turn off their electric heaters, the utilities will risk major power outages and possibly damage to the grid. While rate rises in the middle of winter levied on a desperately cold population will probably not go down well with the public or their elected officials, it may be the only way in the short run to curtail demand and protect the grid.
Given that neither the U. S. nor the Canadian government seems to understand the seriousness of the natural gas predicament in North America, it is no surprise that they haven't thought through the implications for electrical demand once a crisis hits. While the probability of running low on natural gas by itself ought to scare the two governments into instituting emergency conservation programs, the possibility that the electricity might go out in mid-winter at the same time ought to positively terrify them.
Unfortunately, given the current inaction on both sides of the border, this horror movie may soon be coming to a town near you--or possibly even to your own town.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
The coal question revisited
My latest column on Scitizen entitled "The Coal Question Revisited" has now been posted. Here is the teaser:
Many people believe the world has enough coal to last hundreds of years. Recent assessments now suggest that coal production could actually start to decline as early as 2025. Read more...
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Manufactured nightmares
There is nothing that says, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," quite like a trip to China with Edward Burtynsky, an internationally known Canadian photographer. In a recent film he takes us there for a tour of the detritus of industrial civilization--the mines; the junk heaps; the blackened, desolated landscapes. When the occasional person crops up, that person is the victim of a vast industrial combine that seems to have no head and no tail. If one were angry at it, one wouldn't know exactly where to strike. Certainly, not at these poor people.
Burtynsky's visit to China and a side trip to Bangladesh are the subject of a documentary entitled Manufactured Landscapes. I literally had nightmares after seeing it. Not that it sets out to be a horror film. Burtynsky's calm, measured voice starts out telling us that for much of his career he has been trying to catalogue the effects of industrial society, effects that result in what he calls "manufactured landscapes." For most of the film Burtynsky just lets the action and the pictures speak for themselves as we quietly survey scene after disturbing scene. As we watch, we observe him displaying all the sophistication of a first-rate fine art photographer in his meticulous attention to composition, lighting and color. The results are his disconcerting photos that seem as if they could be exhibits in a civil trial, albeit one that takes place in the world's finest art galleries. And, that is the horror of it all. Burtynsky creates beautifully done photography that silently draws the eye to it and into it, and thereby draws one deep into the horror of the subject matter itself.
Burtynsky says he refrains from politicizing his work. He is not holding a referendum on whether industrial society on balance is good or bad. It would be too easy for people just to vote yes or no, he explains. Rather, he wants viewers to look at things they rarely see--the extractive and industrial processes that make our modern lives possible and the waste--the piles and piles and piles of waste--that result. He wants viewers to look at these things deeply, carefully, quietly, with a patient gaze.
Along on the trip are director Jennifer Baichwal and her film crew who do more than simply record Burtynsky's actions and photos. They do some observing for themselves, showing us a motion-picture version of Burtynsky's manufactured landscapes. Inside Chinese factories we are treated to repetitive manual assembly operations that make one's wrists hurt just from watching. We see young, barefoot Bangladeshi men bailing crude oil out of a half-open, beached oil tanker which is being disassembled for scrap. We get brief interviews with young Chinese factory workers who brag about their prowess, their productivity and the reputation of their employers, all without conveying the slightest awareness that their bodies (particularly their wrists) are being used up to keep costs to a minimum.
Beyond the cumulative environmental and workplace horrors of China's economic juggernaut, viewers feel themselves dwarfed by the scale of operations they witness. They are treated by turns to a seemingly endless factory assembly building; a massive shipyard; a high-rise apartment next to the squat, densely packed residences of old Shanghai; and finally to the construction site of the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest. The scale is vast. But that in itself is not so troubling. It is the momentum that these places convey.
China is a society with huge built-in momentum that is everywhere on display in this film. To politically and sociologically aware eyes it does not seem possible that anything could deflect Chinese society from its current course, save a brick wall--perhaps in the form of peak oil or massive drought or plague. It is to this thought that I think I owe my nightmares. For one wishes neither for China's current course to continue, nor for the arrival of those things which seem potent enough to stop it.
It is hard enough to imagine North America and Europe coming to their senses and embarking on a crash program for creating a sustainable society. After seeing Manufactured Landscapes, it is all but impossible to imagine China embarking on such a course. With a population of 1.3 billion of which tens of millions stream each year from the countryside into the cities; a hypercaffeinated growth rate of 10 percent which is necessary to create jobs for all those urban arrivals; and greenhouse gas emissions now surpassing those of the United States would it be unfair to say that as goes China, so goes the world? That is the stuff from which nightmares are manufactured.
Burtynsky's visit to China and a side trip to Bangladesh are the subject of a documentary entitled Manufactured Landscapes. I literally had nightmares after seeing it. Not that it sets out to be a horror film. Burtynsky's calm, measured voice starts out telling us that for much of his career he has been trying to catalogue the effects of industrial society, effects that result in what he calls "manufactured landscapes." For most of the film Burtynsky just lets the action and the pictures speak for themselves as we quietly survey scene after disturbing scene. As we watch, we observe him displaying all the sophistication of a first-rate fine art photographer in his meticulous attention to composition, lighting and color. The results are his disconcerting photos that seem as if they could be exhibits in a civil trial, albeit one that takes place in the world's finest art galleries. And, that is the horror of it all. Burtynsky creates beautifully done photography that silently draws the eye to it and into it, and thereby draws one deep into the horror of the subject matter itself.
Burtynsky says he refrains from politicizing his work. He is not holding a referendum on whether industrial society on balance is good or bad. It would be too easy for people just to vote yes or no, he explains. Rather, he wants viewers to look at things they rarely see--the extractive and industrial processes that make our modern lives possible and the waste--the piles and piles and piles of waste--that result. He wants viewers to look at these things deeply, carefully, quietly, with a patient gaze.
Along on the trip are director Jennifer Baichwal and her film crew who do more than simply record Burtynsky's actions and photos. They do some observing for themselves, showing us a motion-picture version of Burtynsky's manufactured landscapes. Inside Chinese factories we are treated to repetitive manual assembly operations that make one's wrists hurt just from watching. We see young, barefoot Bangladeshi men bailing crude oil out of a half-open, beached oil tanker which is being disassembled for scrap. We get brief interviews with young Chinese factory workers who brag about their prowess, their productivity and the reputation of their employers, all without conveying the slightest awareness that their bodies (particularly their wrists) are being used up to keep costs to a minimum.
Beyond the cumulative environmental and workplace horrors of China's economic juggernaut, viewers feel themselves dwarfed by the scale of operations they witness. They are treated by turns to a seemingly endless factory assembly building; a massive shipyard; a high-rise apartment next to the squat, densely packed residences of old Shanghai; and finally to the construction site of the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest. The scale is vast. But that in itself is not so troubling. It is the momentum that these places convey.
China is a society with huge built-in momentum that is everywhere on display in this film. To politically and sociologically aware eyes it does not seem possible that anything could deflect Chinese society from its current course, save a brick wall--perhaps in the form of peak oil or massive drought or plague. It is to this thought that I think I owe my nightmares. For one wishes neither for China's current course to continue, nor for the arrival of those things which seem potent enough to stop it.
It is hard enough to imagine North America and Europe coming to their senses and embarking on a crash program for creating a sustainable society. After seeing Manufactured Landscapes, it is all but impossible to imagine China embarking on such a course. With a population of 1.3 billion of which tens of millions stream each year from the countryside into the cities; a hypercaffeinated growth rate of 10 percent which is necessary to create jobs for all those urban arrivals; and greenhouse gas emissions now surpassing those of the United States would it be unfair to say that as goes China, so goes the world? That is the stuff from which nightmares are manufactured.
Saturday, January 05, 2008
The services we seek
It is now almost de rigueur for any self-respecting peak oil activist engaged in a conversation about energy to announce that the automobile era will soon be over; that cheap air travel and cheap food will soon be a thing of the past; and that life as we know it will generally disappear.
If anybody--most probably someone already in the know--is still listening at that point, the conversation may continue. But just as often those who are out of the peak oil loop will ask to talk about something else, as if the peak oil activist has made some thoughtless remark about one of his listeners lacking an arm. Perhaps a different approach would yield better results.
Economists tell us that it is not goods which people seek, but the services which goods provide. We would have scant use for cars if they didn't provide transportation. Air-conditioners would be of little import if they didn't produce cool homes and offices. Processed foods would be of no interest if they did not satisfy our hunger and our need for pleasurable tastes. Unfortunately, most people, especially those in North America, equate their cars with transportation. They may also equate air-conditioners with a cool environment in summer. And, they may unconsciously think of grocery store shelves as the point of origin for their food. To simply tell them that all of this is coming to an end because it is unsustainable seems to imply that every service they depend on for mobility, comfort and nutrition will abruptly disappear. People either won't believe it or they'll say that the situation as described seems hopeless.
But neither the need for these services nor the means to provide them will disappear. Rather the mode in which they are offered and the cleverness and amount of effort needed to get them will change. The challenge then is to get people to think not about such notions as electric cars, but rather about how to get the mobility they want, say, through public transportation, passenger rail, cycling and even walking. They need to be led to contemplate how they can keep their homes and offices and themselves cool in ways other than turning on their air-conditioners. They need to be encouraged to think about alternatives to getting the food they need such as farmers' markets, local farms, and home or community gardens. In short, they need to participate in the response. All of this seems plainly obvious. The point then is this: It is only half a discussion to talk about the things we'll have to give up after peak oil and not about the ways in which we'll obtain the services those things represent.
It is precisely this "thing" orientation which has to date prevented us from thinking clearly about organizing our lives and our societies. Instead of building beautiful, densely populated, pedestrian-friendly cities, we have sprawled out into the countryside because cheap energy and inexpensive private automobiles made it possible. The result has been that the distance between the services we need everyday has gotten much greater--because it could. We think we've gained mobility and saved time. All we've really done is swap the cheap, easy, low-energy mobility of walking, cycling and public transportation, for the privatized, high-energy, high-maintenance mobility of the car. This thing called the car which was supposed to liberate us ends up only isolating us and degrading our social and physical health as well as the health of the planet.
Admittedly, it is difficult to convince people that a different way of doing something will provide satisfactory results. But as long as the emphasis remains on an energy transition that for example, simply replaces one kind of car with another, the real work of adjusting to a low-energy society will be unfinished. Rather, we need a thorough-going inventory and analysis of the services we seek and new ways to obtain them with a lot less energy.
Much of that thinking is already being done, and many experiments are underway. The task is to introduce the "services" way of thinking into peak oil discourse so that 1) we are not inadvertantly promoting the idea that gadgets and products that are "greener" are always the best route to adaptation and 2) people can have confidence that there are, in fact, ways--perhaps many good ways--to get the everyday services we seek.
If anybody--most probably someone already in the know--is still listening at that point, the conversation may continue. But just as often those who are out of the peak oil loop will ask to talk about something else, as if the peak oil activist has made some thoughtless remark about one of his listeners lacking an arm. Perhaps a different approach would yield better results.
Economists tell us that it is not goods which people seek, but the services which goods provide. We would have scant use for cars if they didn't provide transportation. Air-conditioners would be of little import if they didn't produce cool homes and offices. Processed foods would be of no interest if they did not satisfy our hunger and our need for pleasurable tastes. Unfortunately, most people, especially those in North America, equate their cars with transportation. They may also equate air-conditioners with a cool environment in summer. And, they may unconsciously think of grocery store shelves as the point of origin for their food. To simply tell them that all of this is coming to an end because it is unsustainable seems to imply that every service they depend on for mobility, comfort and nutrition will abruptly disappear. People either won't believe it or they'll say that the situation as described seems hopeless.
But neither the need for these services nor the means to provide them will disappear. Rather the mode in which they are offered and the cleverness and amount of effort needed to get them will change. The challenge then is to get people to think not about such notions as electric cars, but rather about how to get the mobility they want, say, through public transportation, passenger rail, cycling and even walking. They need to be led to contemplate how they can keep their homes and offices and themselves cool in ways other than turning on their air-conditioners. They need to be encouraged to think about alternatives to getting the food they need such as farmers' markets, local farms, and home or community gardens. In short, they need to participate in the response. All of this seems plainly obvious. The point then is this: It is only half a discussion to talk about the things we'll have to give up after peak oil and not about the ways in which we'll obtain the services those things represent.
It is precisely this "thing" orientation which has to date prevented us from thinking clearly about organizing our lives and our societies. Instead of building beautiful, densely populated, pedestrian-friendly cities, we have sprawled out into the countryside because cheap energy and inexpensive private automobiles made it possible. The result has been that the distance between the services we need everyday has gotten much greater--because it could. We think we've gained mobility and saved time. All we've really done is swap the cheap, easy, low-energy mobility of walking, cycling and public transportation, for the privatized, high-energy, high-maintenance mobility of the car. This thing called the car which was supposed to liberate us ends up only isolating us and degrading our social and physical health as well as the health of the planet.
Admittedly, it is difficult to convince people that a different way of doing something will provide satisfactory results. But as long as the emphasis remains on an energy transition that for example, simply replaces one kind of car with another, the real work of adjusting to a low-energy society will be unfinished. Rather, we need a thorough-going inventory and analysis of the services we seek and new ways to obtain them with a lot less energy.
Much of that thinking is already being done, and many experiments are underway. The task is to introduce the "services" way of thinking into peak oil discourse so that 1) we are not inadvertantly promoting the idea that gadgets and products that are "greener" are always the best route to adaptation and 2) people can have confidence that there are, in fact, ways--perhaps many good ways--to get the everyday services we seek.
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