Toda la actualidad sobre el Cénit (o Pico o Techo) del petróleo y cuestiones relacionadas, en una sola página

CrisisEnergetica.org

Destacado: Filtrado un informe de la defensa alemana sobre los peligros del cenit del petróleo

Cierre de Garoña : ¿a la francesa o a la española ?

Nueva explosión de una plataforma petrolífera en el golfo de México

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El petróleo cotiza a la baja y pone en peligro la barrera de los ... - Cotizalia.com

IntereconomíaEl petróleo cotiza a la baja y pone en peligro la barrera de los ...Cotizalia.comEl petróleo West Texas Intermediate (WTI) cotiza hoy a la baja después dos días de ascensos consecutivos en los que su precio ha aumentado un 4,31%, ...El crudo de Texas sube el 1,5% y cierra a 75,02 dólares el barrilABC.esPrecio Actual del Petroleo. Noticias Inversiones Importantes ...Pysn Pueblo y Sociedad NoticiasEL CRUDO CAE MAS DE UN DOLAR EN NUEVA YORKTerra ArgentinaCNNExpansión.com -Prensa Latina -NOSISlos 150 artículos informativos »

El Brent baja en Londres un 0,34 por ciento, hasta los 76,67 dólares - EFE

Prensa LibreEl Brent baja en Londres un 0,34 por ciento, hasta los 76,67 dólaresEFEEl petróleo del mar del Norte, de referencia en Europa, para entrega en octubre acabó la jornada en el Intercontinental Exchange Futures (ICE) en 76,67 ...Caída del petróleo en NY y Londres, el mercado se inquieta por la ...Terra ColombiaPETROLEO-Barril cae ante persistencia de temores sobre economíaInvertiaPETROLEO-Barril trepa 3 pct, optimismo crecimiento EEUU y ChinaReutersMileniolos 192 artículos informativos »

PETROLEO-Barril cae por débil dato económico EEUU y tormenta - Invertia

latercera.comPETROLEO-Barril cae por débil dato económico EEUU y tormentaInvertiaNUEVA YORK, sep 3 (Reuters) - El petróleo caía el viernes, luego de que débiles datos económicos en Estados Unidos y menores preocupaciones por una tormenta ...El petróleo cae pese a cifras mejor de lo previstas de empleo en EEUUTerra ColombiaBarril venezolano de petróleo cierra en 66.77 dólaresPrensa LatinaEl crudo de Texas baja el 0,55% y cierra a 74,6 dólares el barrilABC.esCNNExpansión.com -ElMundo.com.ve -ÚltimasNoticias.com.velos 58 artículos informativos »

Véspera de Nada

O goberno británico, preocupado, analiza o problema do ‘peak-oil’ en segredo

Hoxe aparecía a nova retrasmitida por diversos activistas do peak-oil no Twitter: o xornal The Guardian informaba das reunións que diversos ministerios británicos (incluído o de Defensa!) estaban a ter para analizar esta cuestión e as súas preocupacións por non estar preparando o país axeitadamente. En xuño o que fora máximo asesor científico do goberno [...]

Novamente o Teito do petróleo no xornal El País

Hoxe coñecía por medio da resposta de Pedro Prieto no web de AEREN, dunha nova mención do Teito do petróleo no xornal El País. Se ben a reportaxe anterior de Gloria Rodríguez-Pina abordaba con seriedade e obxectividade os movementos que se están a producir a nivel cidadán para afrontar este gravísima situación, o artigo de [...]

Hoxe, 21 de agosto, a Humanidade entra en déficit ecolóxico

A día de hoxe temos gastado todos os recursos que produce anualmente o planeta, e xa que logo viviremos ata fin de ano xerando un déficit que pagaremos no futuro, ou roubándolles aos nosos fillos, que é outra maneira de velo. Este é o déficit ineludible que condicionará no futuro inmediato á nosa especie, moito [...]

The Oil Crash

Correspondencia con los lectores: Crisis, población y populismo

Queridos lectores,Hay una cuestión que planea desde hace cierto tiempo por el blog, y es el papel de la población en el dimensionamiento de nuestra crisis energética. La idea subyacente es que plantea Juan en su comentario al último post: "Los límites de las renovables: capital": El otro día estaba hablando con un conocido sobre la crisis energética, el cenit del petroleo y temas relacionados... Entonces mi amigo, en plan broma, soltó este comentario (disculpas si es algo molesto):"Oye, pues si no se puede producir mas energía entonces que se reduzca el consumo, para ello que expulsen a todos los inmigrantes y de esta forma se ahorrara electricidad y recursos al haber menor consumo... ¡Y encima al consumir menos energía aumentaría el porcentaje de energías renovables!" Resumiendo: Reducir población del país para reducir el consumo de recursos.Me gustaría preguntarte tu opinión sobre la reducción de población en un país para ahorrar energía y recursos. ¿Es una vía factible?Ha sido, y continua siendo, el deseo de este autor no centrarse en el tema de la población por diversos motivos. El primero, porque mi cualificación técnica para hablar con cierta solidez del tema es nula; sociólogos, economistas y otros especialistas llevan estudiando el problema de la población en general, y específicamente en su conexión con el consumo, desde hace décadas y corresponde a ellos el hacer un balance ponderado de la situación. Eso no evita, por supuesto, que yo tenga mi propia opinión sobre el tema, y es esta opinión la que una y otra vez se me está solicitando, como si mi opinión personal fuese relevante. No puede serlo, no tiene más valor lo que sobre este tema diga que la de cualquiera, porque no tengo más datos que cualquiera otro ni he analizado con detalle esa cuestión. Sin embargo, de cara a zanjar de una vez por todas esta solicitud, voy a expresar en lo que sigue mi opinión sometida a la siguiente salvedad: es la opinión de un ciudadano de a pie, de alguien que no es experto, y como tal no debe tomarse como una opinión técnica y sólidamente fundada; y si ya en las cuestiones técnicas que yo domino o conozco bien me reservo el derecho de adaptar mi opinión a los nuevos hechos que vaya conociendo, en el tema del que hoy hablaré con mayor motivo ejerceré este derecho porque con mayor facilidad conoceré en el futuro nuevos hechos, tan poco es lo que sobre el tema sé. También, intentaré que ésta sea la última vez que me pronuncie sobre el tema y en lo sucesivo remitiré a los nuevos lectores del blog que me cuestiones a este post. Un tema caro y recurrente en Hank es que la mayor población se da en países donde el consumo de energía per cápita es de los más bajos del mundo. De aquí mi amigo parece colegir que un colapso societario es improbable (éste es nuestro deseo, qué duda cabe) ya que, por un lado, es posible vivir con menos (en eso todos estamos de acuerdo) y por otro no hay relación entre energía abundante y población. Lamentablemente, en ese último punto no puedo estar de acuerdo. Una de las razones de la superpoblación es muchos países es la llegada de medicamentos baratos a esos países, medicamentos cuya producción y distribución en masa propició la energía barata sobre todo del petróleo. Hace años visité la fábrica de Antibióticos en León, mi ciudad natal en España, la cual era prácticamente la única gran industria que había en esa ciudad (130.000 habitantes). Con grandes cubetas donde cultivaban los hongos (y un relevante consumo energético, que duda cabe, para entre otras cosas mantener caliente el caldo de cultivo) esta fábrica llegó, en su mejor hora, a cubrir la mayoría del mercado de antibióticos de Europa (al menos en algunas especialidades, como la penicilina, si no recuerdo mal). Después la compró Mario Conde y comenzaron las desgracias, pero ése es ya otro tema... El caso es que la fabricación a escala de algo tan banal como lo es hoy en día un antibiótico, fabricado en abundancia y distribuido a grandes distancias gracias al aporte energético de los combustibles fósiles, permite combatir eficazmente numerosas infecciones que de otro modo serían mortales. Sólo con eso y con una mejora de la alimentación propiciada por la Revolución Verde se crea una explosión demográfica y una recaída en la trampa maltusiana. ¿Se puede desligar este aumento explosivo de la población del subsidio energético de los combustibles fósiles? Parece poco probable. Además, en muchos países del África Central y Meridional, el gran aumento de la población ha servido para hacer viable la explotación de recursos minerales recónditos, típicamente en minas, para extraer minerales fundamentales para la expansión de la sociedad industrial occidental (para los que ignoran que llevan en su bolsillo, buscar la palabra "coltan" en Internet puede hacerle comprender que todos tenemos una parte de responsabilidad en el genocidio de África Central -Ruanda, Uganda, Congo- de hace una década). En el caso de materias energéticas de bajo EROEI (o TRE, en español), los esclavos energéticos de Occidente son substituidos por esclavos físicos y bien reales, y de esa manera las cuentas acaban saliendo. Lo siento, es duro de tragar, pero es la puñetera verdad. La conclusión final que a mí se me antoja, en mi completamente subjetiva opinión, es que 1) el subsidio energético de los combustibles fósiles ha favorecido la superpoblación y 2) esta superpoblación es útil para mantener nuestros excedentes energéticos en Occidente. Un último apunte: se calcula que durante las últimas inundaciones unos 20 millones de paquistaníes están en riesgo vital debido a la falta de alimentos, las infecciones y las epidemias (típicamente propagadas por agua no potabilizada). La comunidad internacional ha enviado numerosa ayuda para tratar de mitigar este problema, y como en particular alimentos y medicinas son baratos en nuestro esquema energético, es posible que con el relativamente magro aporte económico se pueda reducir considerablemente el riesgo de muerte para esos 20 millones de almas. Ahora imagínense que en una situación de carestía energética mundial no les pudiéramos proporcionar esa ayuda. Resultado: posiblemente 20 millones de muertos (en un país de 180 millones es el 11% de su población). Ahora sumen mentalmente las mayores catástrofes que recuerden de solamente el último año: inundaciones en China, el terremoto de Haití, los sucesivos huracanes,... Sin un gran aporte energético cada vez que un gran desastres azotase una parte del mundo causaría allá una gran mortalidad, y al cabo de unos poco años veríamos rápidamente reducida la superpoblación. De la peor manera posible, eso sí.Volviendo a la cuestión que plantea el amigo de Juan, hay varios errores de concepto, a mi parecer, en esa observación. Si descontamos el consumo de los coches privados, el consumo energético de los hogares es, en todos los países occidentales, menor del 10%. La parte del león del consumo energético se la lleva la actividad industrial, incluyendo el consumo del transporte de mercancías. Se puede pensar que en última instancia la producción industrial y su consumo son un gasto energético de los ciudadanos, y es verdad, pero un gran parte de él es discrecional (no tengo más remedio que comprar comida y ropa, pero puedo pasarme sin el iPad) y por tanto no se distribuye homogéneamente sobre toda la población: aquellos con rentas más altas consumen más que los de rentas más bajas (al fin y al cabo, la energía es un proxy o comodín del dinero). Encima, parte de la producción se exporta a otros países, y parte de la energía que consumimos se gasta en importar de otros países. Lo cierto y verdad es que dentro del consumo energético de un país hay una componente extensiva con la población (es decir, que crece linealmente con la población - a doble población, doble consumo) y una componente no extensiva, aunque no independiente. La prueba más simple de este hecho es que mientras España ha duplicado de 1993 a 2008 su consumo energético (es decir, un incremento del 100%, según datos del prof. Josep Puig de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, aunque no los tengo de primera mano) no ha duplicado su población en ese mismo período (pasó de unos 40 millones a 44 millones, un 10%). Lo cual sugiere que la componente intensiva en población del gasto energético español representa alrededor del 10% en la estructura actual (este porcentaje no sería constante, y en una sociedad más colapsada y menos industrial el porcentaje correspondiente a la población iría subiendo). Por tanto, expulsar a los inmigrantes -unos 4 millones en España- produciría un ahorro quizá del 10% de la energía consumida, lo cual es poco. Pero es que además esos inmigrantes son mayoritariamente mano de obra barata, con lo que su expulsión agravaría probablemente la crisis. He de añadir que se está constatando un retorno espontáneo a sus países de origen de inmigrantes que no encuentran trabajo, así que la parte ociosa de la población inmigrada ya se va ella solita; expulsar a los que quedan, que seguramente trabajan en tareas que los españoles no quieren hacer, y menos por el sueldo que se les da, sólo puede profundizar nuestra crisis económica. España tiene el funesto precedente histórico de la expulsión de los moriscos y la crisis económica que le siguió, no seamos tan necios esta vez. Por acabar con esta cuestión, decir además que el consumo energético de estos inmigrantes no es gratis; ellos pagan, al igual que nosotros, por la energía que consumen, y con su consumo estimulan la economía nacional. Por todos estos motivos, y por otros de naturaleza moral, esta expulsión que propone tu amigo es una barbaridad, además de un despropósito.Es curioso qué pronto hemos olvidado los ufanos españoles de hoy en día que sólo una generación nos separa de aquellos españolitos que se iban a Europa o a las Américas (que yo en mi familia también tengo), y qué rápidamente hemos adoptado actitudes xenófobas o supremacistas. El supremacismo español es, encima, absolutamente idiota, pues si hay un país en Europa donde la mezcla racial a lo largo de los siglos haya sido intensa es España. Sólo por la parte de los pueblos que invadieron España de una u otra manera, los españoles son descendientes de árabes, judíos, germanos, suevos, alanos, vándalos, fenicios, griegos, romanos, celtas, íberos y de todas las razas que sepamos que se dieron cita en esta península. Mi nombre es de origen griego y significa "digno de estima", mi primer apellido significa "roca de Dios" en hebreo, mi segundo apellido es de origen germánico y significa "hijo de Martín", tengo una bisabuela francesa y mi mujer tiene antepasados alemanes que huyeron a España en los turbulentos años de la Revolución Francesa. Esa mezcla continúa hoy en día con la llegada de gente de otros pueblos que buscan aquí una vida mejor; no es nada nuevo ni nada malo per se. Sin embargo, en una situación de dificultad es muy fácil dejarse llevar por el miedo irreflexivo contra el extraño, el diferente, el que no pertenece a nuestra comunidad, el que no es uno de los nuestros. Esos miedos son hábilmente explotados por los grupos que hacen demagogia populista y acaban asentándose en la población, incluso aquella que defiende los intereses de los inmigrantes pero que dice, por ejemplo, que hay más delincuentes entre los inmigrantes que entre los naturales del país. La verdad es que lo lógico sería que la proporción de delincuencia fuera mayor en este colectivo, pues está constituido por más hombres y en edades medias, que es el colectivo donde siempre se practica más la delincuencia; encima, mayoritariamente pertenecen a estratos sociales más bajos, donde la delincuencia también es mayor, fruto de las mayores carencias. Sin embargo, recuerdo haber leído hace ya unos años un artículo publicado en una irreverente web que llevaba como nombre Sonotone, en el que el autor analizaba los datos objetivos de la incidencia de la delincuencia y se veía que la incidencia absoluta de población delincuente entre los inmigrantes es varias veces menor que entre la población nativa española. Lo cual también es lógico, porque la mayoría de la gente viene para trabajar para ayudar a su familia en su país, y lo último que quiere son problemas. Sin embargo, las noticias se fijarán en ese clan de carteristas rumanos (¡qué malos que son los rumanos!) porque los miles de honrados trabajadores rumanos que se dejan la piel en la construcción o haciendo de camareros, haciendo su trabajo día a día y sin ruido no son noticia y por tanto no se ven. Pero el discurso xenófobo no se detiene ahí, y se acusa a los inmigrantes de saturar los servicios médicos, como si no tuvieran derecho a usarlos, como si no los pagaran ellos también, como si no contribuyeran a la riqueza del país. Un bienpensante llegará a una consulta en la que esperan cuarenta personas, de entre los cuales estadísticamente tendrá que haber 4 que serán inmigrantes (o 8 si vive en una gran ciudad, o 20 si vive en según que barrio de esa gran ciudad) y se fijará en lo que para él aporta más información, aquello que es diferente, y se sacará la impresión de que sólo usan el servicio inmigrantes, ignorando la mayoría nativa que no le llamó la atención "porque son gente normal". También se acusa, y se acusará más cuando la crisis se agrave, a los inmigrantes de arrebatar el trabajo a los locales, cuando los salarios que se les ofrece y la dureza del trabajo que desempeñan, como hemos dicho, son inaceptables para los locales. La próxima vez, lector, que oiga una de estas arengas, piense en los datos objetivos y mire si el hecho que le perturba es estadísticamente significativo o sólo la proporción esperable, y aún en realidad por debajo de ella. La escasez de recursos que trae consigo el Peak Oil implica un riesgo de intentar dar respuestas simplonas a problemas complejos; en la presentación suelo enfatizar esto y el riesgo de que los medios de comunicación fijen la agenda, espoleando más este debate, "que está en la calle", como dicen, como si no fuera creado por esos mismo medios. Porque si no sabemos repartir la carestía no tendremos posibilidades de gestionar el descenso, de crear las comunidades que nos serán tan vitales. Sólo un ejemplo para acabar, que siempre me comenta Quim: En la comarca del Maresme de Barcelona, tradicional huerto de donde se nutría la capital, el saber de los campesinos locales, o payeses, se ha perdido entre la población local, y sólo se ha preservado en los africanos que trabajan de sol a sol partiéndose allí el espinazo. Si echamos a esos "negros de mierda", ¿quién nos dará de comer? Ya expulsamos a los moriscos, no cometamos ese error dos veces. Salu2, AMT

Los límites de las renovables: capital

Queridos lectores,Antes de comenzar con esta segunda parte del análisis sobre la posible implantación de un sistema energético basado en energías renovables (ver primera parte aquí) querría dejar claras un par de cosas. En primer lugar, que por supuesto yo soy partidario de las energías renovables; básicamente porque en unas pocas décadas será lo único que tendremos. Es nuestra tabla de salvación hacia un futuro en el que no tendremos ya la subvención energética de los combustibles fósiles. Dicho esto, debo añadir que eso no impide que uno tenga que ser realista sobre qué es lo que implican y, sobre todo, qué es lo que se puede hacer y qué es lo que no se puede hacer. Las renovables serán la energía de nuestro futuro si las sabemos gestionar adecuadamente, pero si pretendemos convertirlas en un sucedáneo de los combustibles fósiles pagaremos cara nuestra osadía y nos estrellaremos, y al cabo no tendremos ni las unas ni las otras.Hoy pretendo discutir sobre la economía de las fuentes renovables, y más particularmente sobre la posibilidad de financiación de las mismas. No entraré a considerar su implementabilidad, esto es, si existen suficientes lugares para producir toda la energía que se pretende (eso será tema de un post futuro). Es un tema escurridizo para mí: no tengo datos precisos sobre los costes ni, más importante aún, una buena manera de modelizar cómo evolucionarán estos costes en una situación de peak oil, y mis conocimientos sobre el mundillo financiero son escasos. Sin embargo, sí que puedo intentar dar una estimación de los órdenes de magnitud de la empresa, actividad ésta a la que los físicos nos dedicamos continuamente, y que nos permite ver rápidamente, a primer golpe de vista, si algo puede ser factible o no. Es un test forzosamente grosero, pero nos permite descartar de un plumazo las propuestas descabelladas. Así, bien puedo no conocer con precisión el coste de un aerogenerador, pero sí estar seguro de que como mucho es 10 veces mayor o 10 veces menor. Tal horquilla de valores es demasiado grosera para poder emprender un plan financiero para una empresa eólica, pero sí que me permite saber, por ejemplo, que si los costes estimados por mí para implantar un sistema español de energía eólica que cubra nuestras necesidades actuales son 1.000 veces superiores al capital del que dispondríamos durante los próximos 20 años, entonces no podremos acometer el proyecto a esa escala, ni en el supuesto en que el coste unitario de cada aerogenerador fuese al final 10 veces más pequeño del que yo tomé.Se debe destacar, empero, que en esta contabilidad de costes hay, como he indicado, numerosas fuentes de incertidumbre, con lo que todo el análisis que sigue se ha de tomar con cierta precaución, a falta de un trabajo más preciso y analítico. Una de las incertidumbres mayores es sobre cuál será la evolución del coste monetario de la implantación de los aerogeneradores, sistemas de producción solares, hidroeléctricos, marinos o geotérmicos. Todos los sistemas de generación renovables reciben a día de hoy un enorme subsidio de las fuentes no renovables, ya que para fabricar por ejemplo un aerogenerador se usará cemento producido en cementeras que usan hornos de gas, acero fundido en altos hornos que usan gas y carbón, el hierro del cual provendrá de minas explotadas usando ingentes cantidades de gasoil o será reciclado en acerías usando gas o petróleo, cosa que también le pasa al cobre de las turbinas, etc. Además de estos insumos energéticos no renovables empleados en la fabricación, existen otros asociados con los equipos de instalación, mantenimiento y reparación. Ciertamente, si las fuentes propuestas tienen realmente Tasas de Retorno Energético (TRE, ya discutidas en el post sobre la curva de energía neta) sensiblemente superiores a 1 eso quiere decir que al final de su vida útil estas fuentes habrán producido más energía que la que se consumió en su fabricación y mantenimiento y por tanto son verdaderamente fuentes de energía; sin embargo, de cara a calcular los costes no nos debemos dejar engañar por los valores actuales de todas las operaciones de construcción y mantenimiento. Nuestro dinero es sólo un token, un símbolo, es una divisa fiduciaria; su valor se fija convencionalmente y depende de la capacidad de la economía de crecer. En una situación en la que la energía que continuamente nos aportan el petróleo, el gas, el carbón y el uranio sea cada vez menor, indudablemente los precios de la energía en general subirán, y esos costes están embebidos en los costes unitarios de los aerogeneradores, los paneles solares, las presas de marea o ríos, y las instalaciones geotérmicas. Por tanto, los costes de construcción y mantenimiento de todas esas fuentes alternativas irán creciendo con el tiempo, y aunque el mismo aumento del coste de la energía puede mantener y aún hacer crecer su rentabilidad económica, el coste del capital a invertir en primer lugar sin duda tiende a crecer. En el lado contrario, siempre se puede argumentar que los avances tecnológicos tienden a hacer disminuir los costes, y aunque ya hace muchos años que se estudian y mejoran estas fuentes y que por las mismas razones de estrangulamiento de capital que se describirán hoy aquí probablemente no podremos financiar la investigación en mayores mejoras, no se puede negar que por aquí aún hay recorrido para disminuir costes. Por tanto, faltando un modelo más o menos sensato de la evolución de los costes todo lo que aquí se discute se ha de tomar con cierta prevención.Comienzo este análisis con una recomendación a los lectores: que se lean el artículo de Pedro Prieto "Crítica al artículo de Mark Z. Jacobson y Mark A. Delucchi sobre energía sostenible", publicado en investigación y ciencia". Este artículo, publicado en la web de Crisis Energética, hace una revisión crítica de un ensayo tecno-optimista de un futuro energético basado en un colosal despliegue de sistemas de captación de energía renovable publicado originalmente en Scientific American en Noviembre de 2009 (tengo un PDF del original, quien quiera me lo puede pedir por correo privado), y traducido y publicado en Investigación y Ciencia en Enero de 2010. Cuando no mencione explícitamente la fuente los datos que utilizaré después provendrán de este artículo de Pedro Prieto; creo además que leer este artículo puede aclarar muchas ideas sobre lo que en realidad son los sistemas de captación de energía renovable.Por comodidad y hacer más directas las comparaciones, utilizaré la potencia media consumida en vez de la energía total consumida. La primera es una ficción que consiste en calcular cuál debería ser la potencia de un sistema de generación de energía que produjese a potencia constante la misma energía que se acaba consumiendo en España durante un año. Esencialmente, divido los julios de energía consumidos en España al año entre los segundos que tiene un año (31.536.000) para obtener los vatios de ese sistema equivalente, cantidad que me resulta más fácil comparar con las potencias medias de una fuente cualquiera. Cuando necesite hablar de la energía consumida, la expresaré en términos de la potencia media (en Gigavatios) multiplicada por año (potencia por tiempo es energía); no es una unidad usual de energía, pero me es cómoda aquí. Me centro en el caso de España, que es el que conozco un poco mejor, aunque muchas de las conclusiones que obtendré se podrían generalizar sin problemas a otros países.La primera cosa que necesitamos estimar es cuál es la potencia media utilizada en España, lo cual implica calcular cuál es la energía total consumida en España al año, tomando como referencia el año 2008, antes de que la crisis se hiciera más virulenta y el consumo energético cayera considerablemente (casi un 15% en dos años, en el caso del petróleo). Esta cifra ya es imprecisa de por sí, dado que los diferentes combustibles fósiles (carbón, petróleo y gas) tienen usos diferentes, desde producir calor directamente (lo más eficiente en principio con un aprovechamiento cercano al 100%), hasta la producción de electricidad con una caldera de vapor (35% en centrales convencionales y más del 50% en las de ciclo combinado), pasando por el motor de gasolina (que aprovecha tan sólo entre el 20 y el 25% de la energía contenida en la gasolina) y el de diésel (un 30%, y en condiciones óptimas hasta un 54%); además, todas estas materias tienen también usos no energéticos (plásticos, fertilizantes, pesticidas, pinturas, etc). Por tanto, convertir el consumo de todas estas materias en la energía que finalmente se aprovecha de ellas es un poco impreciso, y según la metodología que se proponga la cifra final será una u otra. Se debe decir, además, que en nuestro ejercicio de ficción vamos a utilizar la electricidad que nos darán nuestros sistemas de captación de energía renovable para mover nuestra civilización, y aunque el rendimiento de los motores eléctricos es mucho más alto (hasta el 85%) que el de los motores de combustión interna se ha de descontar las pérdidas por transmisión de la electricidad a través de nuestra red eléctrica de gran escala (en torno al 20%), y en el caso de los usos térmicos de la energía eléctrica, la eficacia de la conversión (no tengo el dato aquí). Hechas todas estas salvedades, tomando los datos de la Corporación de Reservas Estratégicas de Productos Petrolíferos de España y utilizando las Megatoneladas equivalentes de petróleo del petróleo, gas y carbón consumidos durante el año 2008 en España, aplicándoles un factor de conversión, para calcular la potencia media asociada, y añadiendo a ésto la energía eléctrica de origen nuclear y renovable nos sale que la potencia media de TODA la energía consumida en España (eléctrica y no eléctrica) es de unos 200 Gigavatios (en vatios sería un dos seguido de 11 ceros), con un generoso margen de incertidumbre, aunque este número es bastante razonable ya que da que cada español (44 millones) consumiría unos 4,5 Kw, en línea con el consumo típico de un europeo (unos 6 Kw). De esos 200 Gigavatios, aproximadamente 32 Gigavatios corresponden a la potencia media eléctrica, y de estos últimos unos 8 Gigavatios corresponden a energías renovables (hidroeléctrica, eólica, solares y otros). Por tanto, las energías renovables representan alrededor de un modesto 4% de la generación de energía total y a los efectos de esta discusión son despreciables. Quiero destacar, en todo caso, que no deja de ser significativo que después de unos cuantos años ya, más de una década, haciendo un discurso en pro de las energías renovables y siendo España una potencia mundial en este campo la penetración final de las mismas en el mix energético total español (no sólo el eléctrico) sea tan pequeña.Los 200 Gw que acabamos de obtener son gigavatios de potencia media, pero es importante distinguir la potencia media de la potencia instalada. Yo puedo tener un aerogenerador cuya potencia instalada sea de 3 Mw, lo cual quiere decir que en su régimen óptimo (viento constante y suficientemente fuerte, pero no demasiado) puede darme hasta 3 Mw de potencia; sin embargo, una parte del tiempo trabajará por debajo de este régimen óptimo (porque el viento sopla con menos intensidad) o simplemente no proporcionará ninguna energía durante determinados intervalos de tiempo (por estar los vientos en calma o ser demasiado fuertes). Análogamente con las otras fuentes de energía, no se puede esperar conseguir extraer de ellas una máxima potencia (su potencia instalada) de manera continua. Para garantizar que de media tendremos 200 Gw deberemos instalar bastantes más; para un factor de carga (esencialmente, tanto por ciento de energía suministrada durante un año sobre el máximo potencial) de un 20% que estima Pedro Prieto para la energía solar y eólica, esto significa que necesitaríamos instalar un teravatio (1 Tw) de potencia, es decir, en vatios sería un 1 seguido de 12 ceros.¿Cuanto costaría cambiar nuestros 200 Gw·año de energía consumida en España de su porcentaje actual de 96% no renovable a un 100% renovable? Tendríamos que instalar, como ya hemos dicho, 1 Tw de fuentes renovables para conseguir tal cosa. Además, nos tendríamos que conformar con no aumentar nuestro consumo energético, con las consecuencias previsibles para una economía capitalista, pero como esto es sólo un ejercicio vamos a aceptarlo. Como menciona Pedro Prieto en su artículo. de acuerdo a las previsiones de la Agencia Internacional de la Energía (AIE) en su último World Energy Outlook, durante los próximos 20 años se deberían instalar en el mundo 3,32 Tw de potencia nueva, lo cual costará la nada desdeñable cifra de 13,7 billones dólares (aclaración: uso billones españoles, o sea que 1 billón de dólares un 1 seguido de 12 ceros de dólares. Usaré la notación científica T$ para expresar un billón de dólares, por comodidad). Eso sale a 4,12 $ (unos 3,4€) el vatio instalado; de este coste un 52% va a la construcción de la planta generadora en sí, un 15% para conectar adecuadamente la central a la red y un 33% para adecuar la red a esta nueva capacidad de producción de energía. Por tanto, el teravatio que necesitamos instalar en España para abandonar los combustibles fósiles nos saldría por 4,12 T$ o 3,4 T€. Es una cantidad colosal: casi tres veces y media el PIB de España, lo cual quiere decir que si pudiéramos convertir toda la capacidad productiva española en capacidad constructora de centrales renovables necesitaríamos tres años y medio para conseguir este hito (y no comer, ni vestirnos ni trasladar mercancías ni hacer ninguna otra actividad entre tanto). Para que se hagan una idea de la monstruosidad de la cifra, la compararé con otra dos muy significativas. Primero, la deuda que tienen las inmobiliarias, los promotores y las cooperativas con los bancos españoles: asciende a 0,445 T€, y después de más de dos años de crisis no han conseguido saldarla y pone en peligro la estabilidad del sistema bancario español. Segundo, los Presupuestos Generales del Estado español: ascendían en 2007 a 0,475 T€, casi la misma cifra. El coste estimado de la transición a una España sólo renovable es unas 7 veces y media mayor que estas cantidades. Y eso asumiendo perfecta disponibilidad de todos los materiales y energía necesarios para hacer la obra, y precios constantes. El esfuerzo económico en la práctica debería ser significativamente mayor, porque además no se está contabilizando el coste de aumentar la capacidad productiva de España al nivel requerido (formar y pagar más personal, comprar más maquinaria, etc) ni los costes de oportunidad que se incurrirían con este despliegue ni el retroceso económico de otras áreas asociado a este despliegue, por no hablar de los costes de cambiar todos los motores para que al final puedan funcionar con electricidad, el incremento de costes de mantenimiento de tan gigantesco parque de plantas renovables etc. Una parte importante de todos estos otros sobrecostes aludidos depende por supuesto de la escala temporal sobre la que se quiera hacer esta sustitución, así que seguidamente abordaremos esta cuestión.Muy bien, ya sabemos que el coste estimado (y seguramente bastante subestimado) de la transición española a un sistema energético plenamente renovable es de unos 3,4 T€. ¿Cuánto tiempo se necesita para desplegar ese parque? Imaginaré tres escenarios posibles: cruzada energética, BAU, y trayectoria reciente.En el primer escenario, cruzada energética, imaginamos que embarcamos a España en una cruzada por cambiar su modelo energético y somos capaces de destinar un 10% del PIB integramente a la transición, asumiendo que el coste de la misma es solamente esos 3,4 T€. Sería un esfuerzo titánico, comparable a una guerra, como ya discutiremos después. En ese escenario cada año gastaríamos unos 0,1 T€ en la instalación de nuevas plantas de energía renovable que equivaldrían a unos 300 Gw. Tardaríamos 34 años en completar esa transición, tal es la enormidad de las cifras implicadas; casi tres décadas y media.El segundo escenario es inferir cuál será el ritmo español de despliegue analizando el escenario BAU (Bussiness as Usual) del último WEO de la AIE. La AIE calcula que el mundo en su totalidad instalará 3,4 Tw de energía (no toda ella renovable) de aquí a 2030, eso quiere decir que a España, si produce aproximadamente el 2% del PIB mundial, le correspondería, grosso modo, el 2% de este despliegue. Eso significa 68 Gw en 20 años, y 294 años para alcanzar el sueño renovable.El tercer escenario consistiría en extrapolar la trayectoria reciente de España. En la actualidad España tiene 21,6 Gw de potencia instalada eólica y solar. Asumamos que este potencia instalada se ha desplegado en su totalidad en los últimos 10 años, y que seguiremos a ese mismo ritmo durante los próximos años. En este caso tardaríamos 463 años en completar el despliegue.De cara a discutir los tres escenarios propuestos, aquellos lectores que todavía conservan la fe en la economía de mercado podrían alegar que el coste marginal de hacer la transición disminuye con el tiempo, ya que al crecer el PIB se puede ir destinando una mayor cantidad de recursos financieros y así acelerar esta empresa. Lamentablemente, y como tantas veces ha establecido la propia AIE, el crecimiento económico viene siempre acompañado del crecimiento del consumo energético, con lo que si la economía crece la necesidad energética también y en el mejor de los casos podríamos aspirar a mantener los plazos aquí marcados. Por otro lado, justamente en virtud de esa conexión causal entre crecimiento económico y crecimiento del consumo energético, la inevitable disminución del consumo energético forzada por la llegada del cénit de todas las materias energéticas y la Gran Escasez hará que el PIB se contraiga y cueste más financiar este despliegue, a no ser que nos conformemos con adaptarnos a un consumo energético cada vez menor y revisemos a la baja progresivamente nuestros planes de expansión renovable. Por último, se debe hacer notar que según el análisis de Glen Sweetnam que ya hemos citado en este blog la producción de petróleo decaería en un 4% a partir de 2012; para 2056, año en que pretendemos que podría acabar la instalación del nuevo parque renovable en el escenario más optimista la producción bruta de petróleo sería sólo un 16% de la que es ahora, y la energía neta aportada sería prácticamente nula. Es evidente que mucho antes que eso se produciría una grave disrupción en la sociedad, toda vez que las otras fuentes de energía no renovable posiblemente llegarían a su cénit en fechas cercanas (carbón en 2011, gas y uranio en 2015) y la falta del subsidio del petróleo necesario para su explotación aceleraría el declive energético de estas otras tres fuentes no renovables, así que probablemente para 2056 tampoco aportarían energía neta. ¿Dónde está el punto de transición? Por dar un horizonte de tiempo convencional podríamos fijarlo en el momento en que el petróleo decaiga a un 50% de su producción máxima, que seguramente corresponderá a una energía neta de menos del 25% actual. A un 4% anual de declive desde 2012 este momento sería el año 2029. Quizá en este contexto es más fácil de entender la frase de Chris Martenson: "Los próximos 20 años serán muy diferentes de los pasados 20 años".El escenario "Cruzada energética", que es el único que puede llevarnos a instalar algo parecido a lo que podríamos necesitar, no se va a dar a menos que no se produzca una intervención total de la economía, cosa que no veo posible sin un golpe de estado o un movimiento de semejante profundidad (estado de emergencia económico, medidas extremas de salvación, gobierno de concentración nacional o algo parecido); en todo caso, tal movimiento pondría la economía patas arriba, forzaría a la nacionalización de fábricas y recursos y tendría consecuencias inimaginables y posiblemente indeseables (aunque su alternativa también). Por el momento no parece que vaya ser el caso; la tendencia observada es a continuar el negocio habitual mientras que la cosa no reviente. El problema es que el sistema actual no permite una mayor expansión del parque renovable. El sistema eléctrico español se regula mediante unas tarifas que hacen que el precio de toda la energía consumida durante cada período corto de tiempo se fija en función del precio de la fuente más cara que se haya necesitado para suministrar la potencia necesitada. La primera de las energías que entra es la de origen nuclear, porque las centrales nucleares no se pueden regular ni parar, y entra a coste de 0 euros el kilovatio. Después entran las renovables cuya producción no se puede moderar, lo cual incluye eólica y solar (y excluye la hidroeléctrica, ya que en ésta última sí que podemos controlar el caudal de energía que entra en el sistema), y que tienen un precio muy barato. Después entran las hidroeléctricas y térmicas de todo tipo, que proporcionan la energía que haga falta, comenzando por las más baratas. El último kilovatio que se haya usado, que será siempre el más caro de los que hayan entrado con este sistema, será el que fije el precio que se paga por toda la producción de ese período. El problema que se está presentando en la actualidad es que con cierta frecuencia, sobre todo por la noche, la energía nuclear y la eólica son suficientes, o casi, para cubrir toda la demanda, y el precio del kilovatio final es demasiado bajo para los intereses de las eléctricas, las cuales protestan habitualmente por la situación, generalmente quejándose de que el coste de las renovables es superior al declarado. Este artículo de El País que acabo de enlazar es un buen ejemplo de lo que se mueve en el sector. En primer lugar, no se entiende muy bien por qué el Sr. Vilaseca dice que el coste de las renovables es entre 2 y 12 veces más caro que el de las convencionales; ¿el coste para quién? Porque si es para el consumidor (que estaría pagando un sobrecoste vía impuestos por las subvenciones) ése es un problema de política nacional, de una decisión estratégica en la que las eléctricas no tendrían por qué entrar. Pero evidentemente entran ya que esta electricidad subvencionada ataca la base de su negocio, y yo me sospecho que en esta cifra que da el sector están incluyendo también el coste que tiene para estas empresas no poder colocar sus kilovatios más caros (y que incluirá probablemente tanto los costes operativos de mantener las térmicas a punto para cubrir la demanda cuando sea necesario, y por tanto son costes reales, con los de oportunidad, de naturaleza más especulativa). Y en segundo lugar, porque por todo ello las eléctricas protestan porque el objetivo del Gobierno eleve el 20% de energía total renovable que marca la UE para 2020 a un 22,7%. En suma, que en un caso completamente hipotético de que no aumentase el consumo energético y se pudiera financiar y hubiese materiales y emplazamientos, el plan de ruta de la UE, de mantenerse, significa elevar en un 16% la penetración renovable (del 4% actual al 20%) en 10 años, lo cual implica 60 años más para sustituir todas las energías por renovables; y las eléctricas se quejan porque el Gobierno pretende hacerlo más rápido, un 18,7% cada década y tardar así 51 años. Plazos ambos excesivamente lentos en todo caso, e irrealizables por el enorme esfuerzo de capital que implican (si en los últimos 10 años se habría instalado un 2% de eólica y solar, es impensable que en los próximos 10 se instale nada cercano al 16%).Por otro lado, todas esas declaraciones son brindis al sol, en tanto que se mantenga un sistema económico no intervenido, simplemente por la falta de estímulo a la inversión. Cuando un inversor decide invertir su dinero en su negocio mira fundamentalmente dos variables: el plazo de amortización (cuánto tiempo tardará en recuperar la inversión inicial) y la rentabilidad final que le dará (la ganancia total respecto a lo invertido durante la vida útil de la inversión). Hoy en día, exacerbado por estos años de turbulencias económicas, los inversores buscan preferentemente inversiones que se amorticen en uno o dos años y que tengan rentabilidades tan altas como sea posible, preferiblemente por encima del 3 o 5%. Esto está haciendo que cueste invertir en la propia industria de extracción petrolera, donde pasan entre cinco y diez años hasta que sale el primer barril de petróleo, y eso después de haber perforado un par de agujeros secos en promedio; y de nuevo esto hace poca atractiva la inversión en renovables, incluso con las subvenciones, porque encima mina el negocio ya existente de centrales térmicas. Para las compañías eléctricas, las renovables ya están en su máximo de expansión por el momento, ya que la producción de energía eléctrica cubre sobradamente la demanda en España, y así ha de ser, porque no se ha producido un despegue paralelo de motores eléctricos que puedan ir consumiendo esa nueva electricidad y reemplazando los antiguos de gasolina y diésel. Por tanto, tenemos todos los incentivos para no hacer nada más, durante un tiempo crítico en el que el agravamiento de la crisis destruirá más capital y hará cada vez más difícil invertir en esta infraestructura, y por este camino ni de broma se verá en España cubrir nunca la demanda actual ni siquiera en el 20% que en Bruselas sueñan para 2020.Termino este post tan largo. Hemos visto como no es ni remotamente posible producir un 100% de nuestro consumo energético actual por medios renovables. Insistir en esta vía, además, llevará probablemente a la tentación de una actuación intervencionista por parte del Estado, eventualmente desembocando en una dictadura o régimen autoritario, y con el riesgo de un cierto expansionismo militar (esto me recuerda el proyecto Desertec: como me decía Quim el otro día: ¿por quéiban a aceptar los habitantes del norte de África que les hagamos una gigantesca instalación de placas solares para suministrar energía a Europa? Quizá manu militari, he ahí el riesgo). Siendo realistas, y viendo las dificultades de materiales y de capital que ya hemos visto (y las de emplazamiento que ya veremos), creo que es más sensato pensar en intentar producir entre un 6 y un 10% de la energía que consumimos actualmente por medios renovables, y eso será todo. Tendremos que acostumbrarnos a vivir con mucho menos de lo que vivimos ahora. Que en realidad no es para tanto, como ya discutiremos otro día, cuando veamos cuál es la cantidad mínima de energía necesaria para mantener una sociedad funcional y con prestaciones avanzadas como la nuestra (sanidad, educación,...). Pero, eso sí, tendremos que acabar con el despilfarro actual.Salu2,AMT

Los límites de las energías renovables: materiales

Queridos lectores,Como ya hemos visto, no hay grandes esperanzas en lo que respecta a la producción de los combustibles no renovables (petróleo, gas, carbón y uranio). Debemos por tanto comenzar el análisis de las alternativas renovables, y considerar sus límites. Ese análisis me llevará diversos posts que se irán sucediendo de manera intermitente, algunos genéricos para los dos tipos principales, solar y eólica (como éste) y otros específicos. Con el tiempo espero abordar otras fuentes minoritarias (geotérmica, mareomotriz, olamotriz, ...) y la mayoritaria (hidráulica), que la damos tanto por supuesta que con frecuencia la olvidamos. La cuestión fundamental es conocer sus límites para ver cuál es mayor potencial que estas fuentes, que son las que condicionarán nuestro futuro, pueden llegar a tener, habida cuenta también del tiempo necesario para su despliegue. El tema del post de hoy son las limitaciones en los materiales que se usan para su construcción.Hace unos días leía el siguiente artículo de Jack Lifton: "La revolución verde en China". Jack Lifton es un analista de tierras o metales raros, del cual ya hemos hablado en un par de ocasiones en este blog (ver "El coche eléctrico, un grave error", sobre las limitaciones en la producción de litio, y "La guerra de las tierras raras", sobre la lucha cada vez menos soterrada entre los diversos países para asegurar su acceso a materiales estratégicos). En su artículo analiza los planes de expansión del parque de energías renovables de China y cómo intersecta esto con las recientes restricciones a la exportación de tierras raras que China ha impuesto a escala global (lo puede hacer, controla el 95% de la producción mundial).Resulta que el Imperio del Medio tiene la intención de desplegar antes del año 2020 unos 330 GW de potencia eléctrica generada eólicamente (imagino por lógica que estamos hablando de potencia instalada). El Sr. Lifton hace unos números rápidamente y llega a la conclusión de qué impacto tendrá eso sobre los tres metales raros más usados en la fabricación de turbinas eólicas de más eficiencia: tres años de suministro actual de neodimio, cinco de terbio y entre dos y tres de disprosio. Estos metales se usan para hacer los imanes permanentes que hacen que esas turbinas alcancen los 3 y hasta los 5 MW de potencia. Por cierto que también se usan en los imanes permanentes de los motores eléctricos (por el mismo motivo, la eficiencia), así que si China pretende acompañar semejante despliegue energético con uno automovilístico de varias decenas, quizá centenares, de millones de vehículos eléctricos, la conclusión es clara: no va a haber neodimio, terbio ni disprosio más que para China durante los próximos 10 años. Eso va a suponer un golpe severo para la industria de aerogeneradores occidental; se podrán seguir haciendo aerogeneradores, sí, pero su potencia será radicalmente inferior, volveremos a los diseños de hasta 1 MW de potencia. Por añadidura, este movimiento será el tiro de gracia para el coche eléctrico en Occidente, porque la ya limitada capacidad de los diseños actuales no resistirá una degradación de potencia impuesta por el uso de materiales menos eficientes. Por otro lado, dado la rareza de estos metales y la falta de estudios, no sabemos dónde se encuentra su cénit de producción, ni cuál es el límite de capacidad de extraerlos (ya comentamos que generalmente se aíslan de la ganga de otro mineral más abundante, sin el cual no se justifica su extracción). Es posible que después del despliegue chino (y si hay un país que tiene capacidad de acometer con tesón, como un solo hombre, cualquier tarea, ése es China) no queden prácticamente filones explotables en el planeta (China no sólo controla su producción doméstica, sino una buena parte de la producción del resto del mundo, en buena medida por la falta de comprensión occidental de la economía de los materiales raros, también comentada en el post de las tierras raras).El artículo de Jack Lifton no lo comenta, pero es bien conocido que las placas fotovoltaicas de mayor rendimiento también usan tierras raras, como el telurio. Es de esperar que el movimiento de China no sólo afecta a los aerogeneradores, sino a todas las energías renovables y a las de origen solar en particular. Es por los mismos argumentos previsible que habrá un estrangulamiento de materiales en los próximos años también para las placas solares de todo tipo. Para terminarlo de agravar, la falta de comprensión de la mentalidad de los chinos hace creer a los líderes occidentales que China retiene la materia prima para ganar más dinero comercializando el producto con mayor valor añadido. No es así. China quiere todo para sí, porque sabe que sin energía no hay producción.Todo esto nos lleva a que, cuando hagamos planes de futuro sobre el despliegue a gran escala de las energías renovables, debamos pararnos a pensar de dónde van a salir los materiales, y si quizá no deberíamos considerar instalar generadores de menor potencia pero con materiales más accesibles (si es que se puede considerar que el cobre es accesible), o como mínimo reciclables. No porque queramos, sino porque no nos quedará más remedio. Lo que sucede es que si hacemos eso, las cuentas de balance energético, que ya no salían, se nos arruinan por completo.Por hoy eso es todo. En otro momento analizaremos otro importante cuello de botella para el despliegue renovable a gran escala: el capital.Salu2,AMT

Oil Crash Observatory

Los límites de las energías renovables: materiales

Queridos lectores, Como ya hemos visto, no hay grandes esperanzas en lo que respecta a la producción de los combustibles no renovables (petróleo, gas, carbón y uranio). Debemos por tanto comenzar el análisis de las alternativas renovables, y considerar sus límites. Ese análisis me llevará diversos posts que se irán sucediendo de manera intermitente, algunos genéricos [...]

Más allá del Peak Oil: El rápido declive de la energía neta

Queridos lectores, El gráfico que encabeza este post está extraído del comentario de un lector al post invitado de Artur Sixto, “A Peak Oil Ideogram“. Este lector señalaba acertadamente que más que centrarse en la curva de producción de petróleo o de toda la energía de origen fósil producida convenía centrarse en la curva de la [...]

Preocupación en el gobierno UK

Esta noticia es de este domingo. Se relaciona precisamente con la noticia que impulsó el nacimiento de este blog. Traduzco la noticia al completo: Comunicaciones secretas del gobierno revelan alarma por el Peak Oil.Terry Macalister y Lionel BadelThe Observer, Domingo 22 de Agosto de 2010Detrás de las negaciones respecto al problema del Peak Oil, aumenta [...]

Canarias ante la crisis

El fin del petróleo barato reduce la velocidad del transporte marítimo internacional de mercancías

 ”Los barcos de contenedores están tardando tanto en cruzar el océano como los antiguos veleros del Siglo XIX” El diario británico “Guardian” informa de la disminución de velocidad de los grandes buques contenedores, como estrategia para ahorrar combustible: “Modern cargo ships slow to the speed of the sailing clippers“. Traducimos algunos párrafos de este artículo, que refleja la importancia de los costes de combustible en la “logística” del transporte mundial, y las repercusiones de un encarecimiento del combustible en el comercio mundial y la “globalización”: “Los buques portacontenedores están tardando más en cruzar los océanos que el legendario “Cutty Sark“, uno de los veleros “clipper” que surcaba la ruta del Té durante el Siglo XIX. El motivo se encuentra en el descenso de la velocidad de los mismos para reducir el consumo de combustible. “Una combinación de recesión y creciente preocupación en la industria naval sobre las emisiones que generan cambio climático han estimulado a los propietarios de los buques a adoptar una estrategia de “ralentización de la marcha” (”Slow steaming” en inglés) desde hace dos años, para ahorrar combustible. Esta decisión hizo bajar la velocidad desde los 25 a los 20 knots, aunque varias compañías adoptaron una “super ralentización de la marcha” a 12 knots (1 Knot equivale a 1,85 km/h. o 1,1 milla naútica). “Marsk, la mayor compañía de buques del mundo, con más de 600, ha adaptado los mismos para navegar con reducciones de consumo de combustible del 30%, lo que le ha supuesto ahorros de más de 65 millones de libras. Las máquinas de los barcos son, tradicionalmente, despilfarradoras de combustible. Diseñadas para operar a altas velocidades, queman el barato “petróleo bunker”, y no están sujetas a las mismas normas de calidad de aire que los coches. En el boom marítimo antes del año 2007, el buque “Emma Maersk”, uno de los buques portacontenedores más grandes del Mundo, podía quemar alrededor de 300 toneladas de fuel al día, emitiendo alrededor de 1.000 toneladas de CO2 a day, aproximadamente la misma cantidad que la emitida diariamente por los 30 países con menores emisiones en el Planeta. El portavoz de Maersk Bo Cerup-Simonsen expresó: “El balance de costes y beneficios es claro. Cuando se reduce la velocidad en un 20%, el consumo de combustible se reduce en un 40% por milla naútica. La ralentización de la velocidad ha venido para quedarse. Su introducción ha sido el factor de mayor importancia en la reducción de emisiones de CO2  durante los últimos años, y aún no hemos desarrollado todo su potencial. Nuestro objetivo es reducir estas emisiones en un 25%.” Por otro lado, se están introduciendo algunos sistemas de ahorro de energía en la navegación de los buques que pueden reducir el consumo de combustible en un 20%.

Finalizan sus actividades dos operadores turísticos británicos por problemas financieros

 Pese a la recuperación turística y del crecimiento del transporte aéreo en el primer semestre del año 2010, los “coletazos” de la crisis financiera, de incierto futuro, siguen mermando la estructura empresarial del sector de la logística del transporte y alojamiento turísticos, especialmente en el mercado británico, de especial significación para Canarias. - El operador británico de viajes Sun4U cesó su actividad el 11 de agosto. - La compañía “Kiss Flights”, que operaba, entre otros destinos, con las Islas Canarias, también cesó su actividad con fecha de 17 de agosto de 2010, afectando a turistas con estancia en el archipiélago. Según los analistas (Fuente: Hosteltur), el mercado de touroperadores británico ha sufrido un “necesario ajuste”, especialmente en el año 2009, fruto del crecimiento veloz registrado en el último lustro, lo que ha tenido como consecuencia una reducción de la oferta a la población británica. ¿Afectará al turismo británico la próxima subida de los precios del petróleo, prevista por algunos expertos? ¿Tendrá repercusión sobre los mercados financieros y la capacidad de compra de los británicos? Los asesores financieros de Goldman han advertido que la demanda de petróleo está superando a la oferta, con un descenso importante de los “inventarios” de crudo disponible en los habituales lugares de almacenamiento para su distribución posterior: preven un precio del “petróleo Texas” entre los 85 y 95 dólares el barril durante el resto del año, contribuyendo así a hacer del año 2010 un periodo de “precio medio alto” del petróleo, sólo superado por los 100$ de precio medio del año 2008.

Fallece Matt Simmons, el banquero americano que advirtió del cenit del petróleo

 Matt Simmons, una de las personalidades más conocidas en el ámbito de los divulgadores del “cenit del petróleo” y la crisis energética, falleció el día 8 de agosto de 2010, en Maine, EE.UU. Este banquero tejano, fundador tras la crisis energética de 1973 de la compañía Simmons and Company, publicó un controvertido libro en el año 2005 sobre la posibilidad de que el principal yacimiento de petróleo del Mundo, Ghawar, en Arabia Saudí, entraría de forma inminente en una situación de declive que arrastraría tras de sí al conjunto de la producción de crudo mundial. Durante la crisis de precios del petróleo del año 2007 y 2008, divulgó de forma reiterada su opinión sobre el inminente del cenit del petróleo que, en su opinión había ya tenido lugar, y sobre las implicaciones económicas del mismo. Participó de forma activa en diferentes convenciones de la Asociación para el estudio del cenit del petróleo y el gas (ASPO), especialmente de su delegación en los Estados Unidos. Abogó en los últimos años de su vida por el desarrollo de la energía maremotriz como una vía de promover una revolución energética sin dependencia de los combustibles fósiles, fundando en el año 2007 el “Ocean Energy Institute“, en Maine. La web www.crisisenergetica.org ha sido una extensa divulgadora del trabajo de este experto en recursos energéticos, desde el año 2004. Descanse en paz. Actualización de la noticia:   Las principales páginas informativas en internet sobre el cenit del petróleo han dedicado homenajes a Matt Simmons. Destacamos aquí (textos en inglés): - Carta obituario del Presidente de honor de ASPO, Dr. Colin Campbell, en la que destaca su papel como activo divulgador, desde su ámbito financiero y de experto en servicios energéticos, del cenit del petróleo, y en la búsqueda de alternativas para la “segunda era del petróleo”. - Carta del Presidente de ASPO, el físico sueco Kjell Aleklett, que hace una semblanza de la participación de Simmons en el primer encuentro internacional de ASPO en Uppsala (Suecia), en el año 2002, lugar en el que se acuñó el luego popular término de “peak oil”, o cenit del petróleo. - Síntesis del trabajo de Matt Simmons, como divulgador del cenit del petróleo, realizado por Gail Tverger, en www.theoildrum.com. - Homenaje a Simmons, en la página web de ASPO - USA.-

(Varias fuentes)

How Much Is Left? The Limits of Earth's Resources, Made Interactive: Scientific American

UK government held secret peak oil talks - 23 Aug 2010 - BusinessGreen.com

¿HACIA EL ESTRANGULAMIENTO DE LA PRODUCCIÓN MUNDIAL DE PETRÓLEO?

La Carta de la Bolsa

Cenit-del-petroleo.com

Cada vez más informes …

El informe de la “Oxford University” sugiere que las reservas de petróleo mundiales se han exagerado un 33%: [LINK, INGLÉS] El “United Kingdom Energy Research Center” indica que hay una alta probabilidad de que el petróleo barato alcance su zenit antes del 2020: [LINK, INGLÉS] El ejército de los EEUU sugiere que el cénit del petróleo [...]

Repsol y la era pospetróleo

El país publicaba hace unos días el artículo: Repsol se prepara para la era pospetróleo La escasez de crudo y el coche eléctrico obligan a las petroleras a reinventarse [...] según explicó hace poco su presidente, Antonio Brufau, suponen “convertir Repsol, de una compañía de crudo y gas, en un grupo de energía para el transporte”. El de [...]

Conferencia sobre Decrecimiento en Barcelona

Estimados Lectores, Este fin de semana estaré en Barcelona en un congreso sobre sostenibilidad, Ecología y decrecimiento económico. Espero conocer a algunos de vosotros. En uno de los grupos de trabajo también estará Pedro Prieto de AEREN. Os informaré dentro de lo posible del progreso del congreso. Participaré en los grupos de trabajo, 13. New technologies y 22. Energy [...]

Visiones de otro tiempo

Sant Cugat mueve ficha con su conferencia sobre el peak oil.

La ciudad española de Sant Cugat es una de las ciudades europeas de referencia en la gestión estratégica de la administración pública. Tienen implementada, desde hace años, una metodología muy eficáz que les ayude definir con mucha claridad su Visión (el auto-retrato de éxito dentro de 3-5 años) y las estrategias  que les llevará a la consecución de su visión. Hace unas semanas, esta ciudad ha demonstrado su faceta innovadora una vez mas con la organización de su conferencia sobre el peak oil. Hasta ahora son pocas las ciudades de España que hayan tomado el tiempo para informarse sobre el tema de peak oil. (Muchas ciudades de los EE.UU y de otros paises de Europa ya tienen iniciativas en marcha ).  El pasado 16 de julio el ayuntamiento de Sant Cugat, a través de su foro Sant Cugat Tribuna y en colaboración con la cámara de comercio, me envitó a dar una conferencia sobre el peak oil y sus repercusiones. En la audiencia, junto con miembros del ayuntamiento, asistían líderes de empresas y de industrias de Cataluña. Es el primer paso, y el mas importante: INFORMARSE. Los siguientes pasos serían: evaluación de la “resiliencia” o vulnerabilidad de la organización (la ciudad, empresa o industria) contra la volatilidad de los precios y la disponibilidad de petróleo elaboración de plan estratégico de mitigación

Peaker = Agorero? Creo que no…

Para aquellos de nosotros que somos conscientes de la idea del cenit del petróleo y sus posibles repercusiones, creo que es seguro decir que compartimos un sentimiento de incertidumbre sobre el futuro. ¿Cómo se traducirá el peak oil  en nuestra vida cotidiana? ¿Cómo se ve el futuro como consecuencia del peak oil? No hay escasez de opinión sobre estas cuestiones, sin embargo, nadie sabe a ciencia cierta la respuesta. Me paso horas investigando el tema casi todos los días. Existe muchísima información contradictoria, desde las advertencias “basadas en datos” de un colapso total del desarrollo, hasta promesas de enormes avances tecnológicos “ya desarrollados” y esperando en las alas. ¿El nivel de vida dará un importante salto hacia adelante o nos dirigimos de nuevo a la edad de piedra? Desde siempre me han “acusado” de ser optimista e incluso pacificador!! (y siempre me ha gustado la etiqueta:-)) Hoy soy, entre otras cosas, un Peaker. Y aunque no sé a ciencia cierta como será la vida en 5, 10 o 30 años, he visto que hay una oportunidad aquí – y no estoy hablando de las energías renovables en este caso. La oportunidad a la que me refiero es el día de hoy y como lo queremos vivir. El cenit del petróleo, y sus posibles ramificaciones, nos impone una oportunidad de aprender como nunca hemos aprendido hasta ahora. - Podríamos empezar a entender que nuestra buena fortuna material no es realmente “nuestra”. No nos pertenece, ni es permanente. - Nuestra buena fortuna material no define quienes somos (interiormente), y podría desaparecer mañana por númerosas razones, entre ellas el peak oil, la guerra, el cambio climático, una crisis económica prolongada y profunda, los desastres naturales, etc … Si eso llegara a suceder, guste o no guste, seguirás siendo tú (aunque sea de forma más incómoda!) - Aprender a re-descubrir a nosotros mismos mediante el reconocimiento de nuestra vulnerabilidad y reconociendo que nos hemos alejado de algunos conceptos básicos que han formado parte de la esencia humana durante miles de años. Cosas como: * Ordeñar una vaca o cabra * Elaborar pan, vino, cerveza, queso, etc. * cultivar y mantener una huerta * Criar pollos , gallinas (y otros animales) * Construir un muro o estructura de piedra (o de madera) * Hacer fuego (sin cerillas ni mechero) * Elaborar herramientas básicas * Tejer * Pescar y cazar * Contar cuentos (tradición oral), hacer música (instrumentos, canciones) * Inventar juegos * Etc etc etc .. Independientemente de lo que nos depare el futuro, hay un enorme valor en familiarnos de nuevo con las muchas actividades que históricamente han formado parte de lo que significa ser humano. Comer pan que has hecho con tus propias manos es algo increíble!…una experiencia casi mistica! (perdona el hipérbole)  ¡Pruebalo con tus hijos y veras! Por supuesto, todo esto sería de enorme utilidad si las consecuencias del cenit del petróleo son tan graves como muchos creen. Pero independientemente de lo que puede o no suceder como resultado de peak oil, sugiero que aprovechemos la oportunidad de aprender y re-descubrir una parte importante de lo que somos.

Las ultimas previsiones de la EIA sobre la producción de liquidos: ¿me creerías si…?

¡Este gráfico es patetico ! No puedo evitar pensar en mis días como ejecutivo y lo que hubiera sido de mí si hubiese presentado tal cosa en cualquier reunión seria. “Llegaremos a 90mbpd en 2009 … ¿me creerías si te dijera en 2011? ¿Qué te parece el 2023 ?…” Sería gracioso, si las consecuencias no fueran tan serias. Si lees bien entre líneas, se ve el reconocimiento tácito de que el cenit del petróleo ya está aquí (el crecimiento débil previsto para el resto de esta década.) Esta es una concesión que llega tarde y aporta poco. Además, la curva de crecimiento más allá del 2020, toma la misma forma que todas las anteriores: “previsiones de cornucopia”. Entonces, ¿qué hacemos con esta información? Tal y como ilustra Fred Magyar en TOD (abajo), tal vez hay una extrapolación útil…!?!

Observatorio petrolero sur

RESUMEN DE NOTICIAS | 3.sep.10

*Dale gas: volvió la reducción en suministro a las empresas El Gobierno ordenó profundizar la reducción del suministro de gas a grandes y medianas industrias al menos hasta el lunes, porque un error de cálculo sobre la evolución del consumo de los hogares y las bajas temperaturas registradas en los últimos días pusieron al sistema gasífero al límite de su capacidad de abastecimiento | VER+ | *Las eléctricas vuelven a pedir un alza de tarifas Ana Falbo LA NACION Con el guiño del Gobierno, publicaron un aviso para denunciar el bajo costo de la energía | VER+ | *Luz verde para extender los contratos petroleros Río Negro ya dispone de un esquema jurídico para renegociar la concesión de cada área hidrocarburífera, a pesar de que vencen a partir del 2015. Ayer, la Legislatura aprobó ese encuadre legal, con el voto de la mayoría ya que el justicialismo rechazó la iniciativa | VER+ | *Jerárquicos Petroleros piden retomar negociaciones con el sector empresario Esta tarde, los jerárquicos petroleros se reunirán en plenario de delegados para analizar las medidas que adoptarán. También exigen actualizar sus salarios ante los recientes aumentos que se otorgaron en otros gremios que se desempeñan en los yacimientos | VER+ | *Explotó y ardió otra plataforma de crudo en el golfo Una mancha de petróleo de más de 1,5 kilómetro de extensión era visible ayer tras la explosión e incendio de una plataforma petrolera en el Golfo de México, informaron los guardacostas estadounidenses, citando a los empleados de la plataforma | VER+ |

Dale gas: volvió la reducción en suministro a las empresas

El Gobierno ordenó profundizar la reducción del suministro de gas a grandes y medianas industrias al menos hasta el lunes, porque un error de cálculo sobre la evolución del consumo de los hogares y las bajas temperaturas registradas en los últimos días pusieron al sistema gasífero al límite de su capacidad de abastecimiento El Ente Nacional Regulador del Gas (Enargas) se reunió ayer con las transportadoras TGN y TGS para analizar la situación y concluyeron que el volumen de gas cayó abruptamente en dos días porque se está consumiendo más de lo que ingresa a la red nacional a través de los yacimientos, lo que se importa por barco y lo que proviene desde Bolivia. El nivel mínimo de gas recomendable en los caños de gas de TGS es de 198 millones de metros cúbicos y el máximo de 218, pero ayer el volumen se ubicó en 192 millones de metros cúbicos. Eso generó problemas de presión en el suministro en las localidades alejadas de la “puerta de entrada” del gas. La inyección total de ayer alcanzó los 122 millones de metros cúbicos y el faltante para entregar el suministro con presión normal fue de 12 millones de metros cúbicos. Del total suministrado, 6,8 millones provinieron de Bolivia; 9,9 del GNL para regasificar del buque instalado frente a las costas de Bahía Blanca y 106 millones de metros cúbicos de producción local, según detalló el diario Ambito Financiero. Con esos datos, el Enargas decidió aumentar las restricciones en el suministro de gas a empresas, que habían comenzado el lunes. La medida afectó entre otras compañías a Cerri, una terminal que produce gas para garrafas y cilindros. La empresa tiene capacidad para procesar cinco millones de metros cúbicos diarios pero ayer sólo recibió 800.000 metros cúbicos. Pero en el sector aseguraron que no faltarán garrafas a menos que se extiendan las bajas temperaturas. También impactó en las generadoras metropolitanas Costanera, Puerto y Dock Sud, que tuvieron que operar con combustibles líquidos. Las empresas ya habían sufrido cortes o reducciones en el suministro de gas en julio y agosto, y en muchos casos ayer  recibieron el mínimo técnico que les permite mantener los hornos encendidos y retomar la producción rápidamente cuando se normalice la situación. Además, el retorno de las bajas temperaturas provocó ayer que el consumo de energía superara los 19.000 megavatios, por lo que se importaron 980 megavatios desde Brasil. Pero el consumo de energía estaría afectando el nivel de las represas hidroeléctricas del Comahue, que se encuentran por debajo del máximo normal. MDZ Online

Las eléctricas vuelven a pedir un alza de tarifas

Con el guiño del Gobierno, publicaron un aviso para denunciar el bajo costo de la energía Ana Falbo LA NACION Las asociaciones que nuclean a los generadores y distribuidores de electricidad lanzaron ayer una campaña publicitaria que señala que el precio del consumo diario de energía eléctrica, en el 90% de los hogares de la Capital Federal y el Gran Buenos Aires, es más bajo que el de un alfajor o el de envíar tres mensajes de texto. Aunque el Gobierno no se sumó a la solicitada con forma de aviso, fuentes del sector afirmaron que sí aceleró los tiempos y exigió su publicación para evaluar la reacción de los usuarios y abrir el camino a la eliminación de subsidios sin pagar el costo político. El texto, publicado ayer en los principales diarios nacionales -y firmado por las asociaciones de generadoras y transportistas, Ageera y Ateera, respectivamente, y por las distribuidoras Edelap, Edenor y Edesur-, afirma que “9 de cada 10 domicilios de Capital y GBA pagan menos de $ 1,33 de luz por día desde 1992″. Y agrega que “toda la luz de un departamento un día entero cuesta lo mismo que mandar tres mensajes de texto”. La comparación intenta no sólo apelar a la concientización de los usuarios sobre los bajos valores que tiene la tarifa de electricidad respecto de otros precios, sino que también procura estudiar la reacción social y, a partir de ahí, abogar por la implementación de un aumento tarifario. La campaña publicitaria es impulsada por los distribuidores de energía eléctrica, a los que se sumó el resto del sector, que originalmente iban a llevarla a cabo sin fechas preestablecidas. Pero los tiempos se aceleraron. El motivo fue que -según fuentes del sector- el Gobierno, al enterarse del mensaje que se preparaba, comenzó a presionar y a exigir su publicación inmediata. ¿La idea? Generar un mejor ambiente para discutir un ajuste tarifario. Críticas a los medios Marcelo Mindlin, presidente de Pampa Energía, dueña de Edenor, fue ayer la única voz que habló públicamente sobre el aviso que firmaron las empresas de distribución, generación y transporte de energía eléctrica. Como referente del sector, Mindlin dijo ayer a Radio 10: “Nosotros estamos en constante conversaciones con el Gobierno y entendemos que la política, que empezó hace un año y pico, dos años, de ir reduciendo gradualmente los subsidios es la política adecuada. El problema es que muchas veces cuando el sector o el Gobierno avanza en el sentido de reducir los subsidios, la reacción de los políticos y muchas veces de los medios es desmedida. No se actúa con responsabilidad y, de esa manera, se hace mucho más difícil ese proceso de ir de a poco regularizando la situación de las tarifas. No tiene que ser cada cosa una discusión política; tenemos que enfrentar la situación con responsabilidad”. El ejecutivo explicó que las empresas del sector querían, a través de la solicitada, llamar a la reflexión en un contexto en el cual la demanda de energía eléctrica fue récord en julio y los bajos precios “inducen al derroche”. “Lo primero que tenemos que hacer como sociedad es entender que esto no es realista y que tenemos que ir a un esquema más viable donde solamente subsidiemos a aquellos que realmente lo necesitan, mientras que todos aquellos que pueden pagar el verdadero costo de la electricidad lo empiecen a hacer”, agregó Mindlin. Asimismo, afirmó: “Hemos llevado algunas propuestas al Gobierno. Nos parece muy importante lo que está haciendo el Congreso, que está discutiendo un marco de tarifa social que no es otra cosa que definir cuál es el universo de los clientes que sí necesitan ser subsidiados y después discutiremos si es el 10, 20 o el 30 por ciento de los clientes los que tienen que ser subsidiados. Lo que no puede ser es que sea el 90% de los clientes porque el 90% de la población no es pobre”. 9 de cada 10 domicilios * Pagan menos de $ 1,33 de luz por día desde 1992 en la Capital y el GBA, según las empresas. $ 25 Precio promedio por factura * Es lo que paga el 89% de los clientes de Edenor, Edesur y Edelap en la Capital y el GBA. 10% Reajustes parciales * A esa porción de clientes se le subió la tarifa por la baja de subsidios, según Mindlin, de Pampa Energía. La Nación

Ni nuclear ni otras

Reconocimiento del cénit en Córdoba

El Consejo Local de la Juventud de Córdoba aprobó recientemente un documento reconociendo el cénit del petróleo y sus implicaciones. Se aprobó en asamblea y por unanimidad, con representación de NNGG del PP, Juventudes Comunistas, una asociación de heavies, otra de roleros, Juventudes Obreras Cristianas, Cruz Roja Juventud, etc. En los últimos tiempos firmaron documentos similares otros entes zonales en diversos lugares. Aquí hablamos en alguna ocasión de ello.En Menorca un dirigente de PSM se comprometió hace unos meses a elevar la cuestión al menos a un Ayuntamiento. No me consta su cumplimiento.Declaración del Consejo Local de la Juventud de Córdoba acerca del cenit del petróleo y sus implicacionesEl Consejo Local de la Juventud de Córdoba, como plataforma de participación juvenil que representa, defiende y reivindica los derechos de los y las jóvenes ante las instituciones públicas, se marca como objetivos, entre otros, "Defender los derechos e intereses de los y las jóvenes adoptando posicionamientos públicos en torno a las problemáticas que les afectan y proponiendo a las instituciones la adopción de medidas encaminadas a su solución"; "Abogar por la lucha por la paz y la convivencia, manteniendo una actitud firme de defensa de los derechos humanos y apostando por la solidaridad y la cooperación internacional"; y "Promover la protección de la naturaleza y el medio ambiente en la búsqueda de un desarrollo sostenible". Por todo ello,Clic aquí para continuar leyendo...Considerando:- Que la energía no es un recurso más, sino el requisito previo para que existan los demás recursos.- Que el transporte, los sistemas de agricultura industrial, los complejos sistemas urbanos, además de muchos productos básicos para nuestro modo de vida actual (automóviles, plásticos, productos químicos y farmacéuticos, pesticidas, refrigeración, etc.) y todas las actividades que integran nuestra economía están sostenidas por la hipótesis fundamental de un siempre creciente suministro energético barato.- Que el petróleo es responsable de aproximadamente el 32% del consumo total anual mundial de energía primaria y del 95% de las necesidades energéticas del transporte y Córdoba es totalmente dependiente del suministro externo de energía.- Que la producción de petróleo de muchos países ha comenzado a declinar y que la producción a nivel mundial está cercana a su máximo (cenit del petróleo) y entrará a continuación en un periodo de irreversible descenso.- Que el próximo declive de la producción mundial de petróleo propicia una serie de amenazas tales como un incremento de la competencia por los recursos, un aumento de la inestabilidad geopolítica o más pobreza.- Que el Informe Hirsch, encargado por el Departamento de Energía de los EE.UU., tratando sobre la necesidad de reducir el impacto que supondrá el cenit del petróleo advierte que, para poder enfrentarlo de manera efectiva, serían necesarios 20 años de esfuerzos anticipados en la transformación del modelo social.- Que no hay alternativas reales para sustituir al petróleo al nivel de consumo actual dadas sus características, entre las que se destacan su altísima densidad energética y su alta tasa de retorno energético.- Que sustituir el petróleo por la extracción y combustión de otros combustibles fósiles más ineficientes, como petróleos no convencionales o carbón, supone una amenaza aún mayor para el medio ambiente.- Que otras energías no aportan soluciones: la energía nuclear de fisión no es renovable y provocaría el cenit del uranio en pocos años si se implantara masivamente, la producción de los aprovechamientos de las energías renovables se sustenta en otra fuente energética, y la hipotética puesta en marcha de la fusión nuclear rebasa los plazos de toma decisiones para afrontar el problema.- Que las alternativas al transporte, como las provenientes del carbón y el gas natural, requieren grandes consumos de energía. Las primeras aumentan considerablemente las emisiones totales de gases de efecto invernadero a la atmósfera, las segundas sufrirán el mismo cenit que el petróleo apenas unos años después. Los combustibles provenientes de biomasa compiten con la fertilidad del suelo, impactando en la sostenibilidad de la agricultura en general.- Que España no posee prácticamente reservas ni de petróleo ni de gas, pero consume el 2,1% del total de la producción mundial de petróleo (es decir, 13,5 barriles per cápita al año o 2.147 litros per cápita al año) y el 1,2% de la producción de gas (391.143 GWh en 2007).- Que, como consecuencia de la escasez, es muy probable que los esfuerzos del sector privado para trasformar y adaptarse a las nuevas circunstancias lleguen demasiado tarde. Por tanto, se hace necesaria la intervención anticipada de las Administraciones Públicas para prevenir el impacto social y económico.El Consejo Local de la Juventud de Córdoba resuelve:- Reconocer plenamente el desafío del cenit del petróleo.- Apoyar la adopción de un Protocolo Mundial de Agotamiento.- Apoyar la creación de estudios acerca de las potencialidades energéticas del municipio y las necesidades de las diferentes actividades de la ciudad, en el ánimo de desarrollar un plan comprensivo que incluya protocolos de actuación y planes de continuidad.- Instar a todas las administraciones públicas a tomar conciencia del problema y poner los medios necesarios en la búsqueda de soluciones.- Animar a todas las entidades, asociaciones y a todo el tejido social cordobés a hacer un frente común ante este reto sin precedentes con vistas a educar y concienciar al resto de la sociedad.Córdoba, a 27 de enero de 2009

Irse de peaknik con una caravana

Para aquellos que se han extrañado un poco de que desapareciera casi de repente después de la actividad bloguera (y en Internet y fuera de él en general) de los últimos años, una simple explicación: necesito trabajar de vez en cuando como todo hijo de vecino.¿Y de qué puede trabajar un peakoilista? Pues restaurando caravanas viejecitas.¿Que qué tiene que ver con el tema de las energías y su escasez, y su relación con el crecimiento demográfico exponencial? Pues... por ejemplo que una caravana es para irse de peaknik*.También puede ser una caravana un sitio donde vivir fuera de la gran ciudad cuando tienes pocos recursos (bien sea por mala suerte, bien porque te apetezca tener poca cosa incluido pocos quebraderos de cabeza).También puede ser una manera barata de escapar los fines de semana al campo sin tener que pagar hoteles y restaurantes todo el tiempo, pues llevas contigo cocina, nevera y lavabo. De ninguna manera recomiendo, sin embargo, viajar distancias largas innecesariamente y por capricho, seguro que en tu región hay lugares preciosos donde pernoctar de vez en cuando; de lo contrario perdemos por un lado lo que ganamos por el otro.Y por último, puede ser una buena base de experimentación con los sistemas de recaptación de energía (las supuestamente renovables, alternativas y bla, bla...). La vida en una caravana es normalmente una vida de sencillo: los grifos emanan pocos litros por minuto (más bien por hora en una caravana), las luces interiores son pequeñitas y tenues, no hay espacio para muchos aparatos consumidores de energía, la nevera está reducida a la mínima expresión, también el extractor de humo dado el tamaño de la misma cocina... Así hay pie para consumir poco gas y electricidad.Ahora falta ver si se puede llegar, de manera razonablemente sencilla, a ser totalmente autónomo (en la recaptación de la energía, obviamente difícil será en la fabricación de los sistemas) con ese bajo nivel de consumo. Porque lo de decimosegundos con ascensor y aire acondicionado absolutamente autónomos ya hemos visto en estos últimos años que va a ser que no, por lo menos por ahora.Trataré de ir probando, con el tiempo, de diseñar sistemas de alimentación energéticos para una caravana, de manera que se pudiera vivir en ella permanentemente sin necesitar, para cocinar, iluminarse, calentarse e higiene, de electricidad de la red ni gas. Al final va a ser que no se puede tampoco sin tener que acudir a un sinfín de sistemas complejos, y va a ser que sí si nos conformamos con otro estilo de vida, pero eso lo iremos viendo sobre la marcha...Mientras tanto, no he olvidado plenamente la actividad informativa, alguna charla acaba cayendo de vez en cuando, volveré a pasarme en cualquier momento por Radio-Alaquàs, en Menorca estamos esperando para una semana de éstas el reconocimiento del cénit de los fósiles por parte de las autoridades... Y de vez en cuando apareceré por aquí.Saludos a todos.*Para quien no lo haya captado, es un chiste --o no--, construido con el anglicismo peaknik, que es aquella persona muy interesada por el cénit (peak en inglés) del petróleo, y por su similitud con la palabra pícnic, que es una comida en el campo.

2 tuyas y 1 mía, 3 para cada uno

Que la mayoría de periodistas no pueden informarnos de cuánto consumimos o dejamos de consumir, porque no comprenden de qué se trata si se incluye la palabra vatio, y así tampoco pueden hacerlo comprender, ya lo hemos visto muchas veces. En una noticia reciente, donde se saca a relucir el supuesto ahorro de la convocatoria de apagón del pasado sábado (el enésimo apagón voluntario, éste de una hora, ya no de cinco minutos, será para que nos vayamos acostumbrando...) se vuelve a confundir el término, pues dice«en Mallorca y Menorca la bajada fue de 6,96 megavatios de los casi 700 totales consumidos en esa franja horaria»y en una franja de tiempo no pueden consumirse megavatios, sino megavatioshora. En todo caso, y siempre que sí fueran megavatios, debería decir «de los casi 700 demandados en el momento álgido de esa franja horaria».Pero lo que podíamos sospechar y hoy confirmar, además, es que algunos tampoco conocen los fundamentos más elementales de las matemáticas. En la misma noticia dice que el apagón de una hora«ha permitido un ahorro del 1,03% de energía en el sistema Mallorca-Menorca, y de un 2,35% en el Ibiza-Formentera»De esos datos podríamos sacar la media, por ejemplo teniendo en cuenta la población de la islas gimnesias por un lado (864.000 personas según la Wikipedia) y la de las pitiusas por otro (119.000). La cifra resultante sería algo entre el 1,03% de unas y el 2,35% de las otras, evidentemente. Tanto da para el caso (bueno, en realidad es 1,19%), el tema es que el periodista no sabe hacer tal faena, ya no porque no supiera buscar los datos de población y hacer las correspondientes operaciones [(864.000 x 1,03 + 119.000 x 2,35) / (864.000 + 119.000)], sino porque al parecer cree en realidad que la media se hace ¡sumando las dos cifras, directamente!, y así ha titulado la noticia: El 'apagón' permite un ahorro del 3,38% del consumo eléctrico en Baleares.Ojú.

Peaknik (Twitter)

Peaknik: RE: No one notices that every time they narratively dodged us they did it blowing out our minds? Fiction is all about … http://disq.us/dmq61

Peaknik: RE: No one notices that every time they narratively dodged us they did it blowing out our minds? Fiction is all about … http://disq.us/dmq61

ASPO International

Peak Oil - an analysis by German Military

A study by a German military think tank has analyzed how "peak oil" might change the global economy. The internal draft document -- leaked on the Internet -- shows for the first time how carefully the German government has considered a potential energy crisis. The Peak Oil issue is so politically explosive that it's remarkable when an institution like the Bundeswehr, the German military, uses the term "peak oil" at all. But a military study currently circulating on the German blogosphere goes further. The study is a product of the Future Analysis department of the Bundeswehr Transformation Center, a think tank tasked with fixing a direction for the German military. The team of authors, led by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Will, uses sometimes-dramatic language to depict the consequences of an irreversible depletion of raw materials. It warns of shifts in the global balance of power, of the formation of new relationships based on interdependency, of a decline in importance of the western industrial nations, of the "total collapse of the markets" and of serious political and economic crises. read more

UK peak oil alarm revealed by secret official talks

Behind government dismissals of 'alarmist' fears there is growing concern over critical future energy supplies. Speculation that government ministers are far more concerned about a future supply crunch than they have admitted has been fuelled by the revelation that they are canvassing views from industry and the scientific community about "peak oil". The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is also refusing to hand over policy documents about "peak oil" -- the point at which oil production reaches its maximum and then declines -- under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act, despite releasing others in which it admits "secrecy around the topic is probably not good". Terry Macalister and Lionel Badal has written an article about this in The Guardian where they highlight the events going on behind the scenes in the UK government. Read more: The Guardian

Obituary to Matt Simmons from ASPO China

It was with a great sense of loss when we heard of Matt Simmons death. We wanted to express our greatest sympathy, and our hearts are truly saddened. Matt Simmons was one of the great pioneers of popularising Peak Oil, and was a great entrepreneur which founded the Ocean Energy Institute. He dedicated all his life to the work and his reaserch. His book, named "Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy", gave all of us a truth, which was that the world's oil industy has already arrived the turning-point and we have entered the post oil age. Besides his book, as a global energy expert, his many reaserch presentations and lots of publication materials were a valuable tool for us. His contributions to the world and us will never be forgotten, and all of us will miss him for ever. Feng Lianyong and other members of ASPO-China Web: ASPO China E-mail: fengly@yahoo.cn

Oil Depletion Protocol

ASPO's Stuart McCarthy on the ODP in QLD

Stuart McCarthy of ASPO Brisbane discusses the recent response to a petition for the state of Queensland to adopt the Oil Depletion Protocol and other Australian peak oil news. Read more.

The Oil Depletion Protocol in Earth Island Journal

Richard Heinberg discusses the Oil Depletion Protocol in the Winter 2007 edition of Earth Island Journal. Click here to read more.

Bush urged to break US oil dependence

By Carola Hoyos in London, Edward Luce in Washington and Krishna Guha in Beijing Published: December 13 2006 22:07 | Last updated: December 13 2006 22:07 The Bush administration should act decisively to break America's dependence on oil, said a group of leading US business executives and senior military officers in a report presented on Wednesday to the White House and Congress. The bipartisan group, which includes the chief executives of Fedex, UPS, Dow Chemicals and some of America's best known retired generals, urged Washington to recognise that "pure market economics will never solve the problem" of US oil dependency. The report poured cold water on the Bush administration's goal of reducing America's dependence on foreign oil, rather than on oil in general. It urged Mr Bush and the new Democrat-controlled Congress to set up a plan to halve the American economy's oil-intensity by 2030. George W. Bush has repeatedly identified "energy independence" and immigration reform as two of the issues most likely to attract bipartisan support following the Republican loss of control of Capitol Hill in mid-term elections last month. "Events affecting supply or demand anywhere will affect consumers everywhere," said the report, brought out by the Energy Security Leadership Council, a think tank. "Exposure to price shocks is a function of how much oil a nation consumes and is not significantly affected by the ratio of "domestic oil" to so-called "foreign oil". The report also warned Mr Bush, who is expected to announce new energy independence measures in his annual State of the Union address to Congress next month, that America's oil dependence makes it acutely vulnerable to terrorist attacks. America's transport system is 97 per cent dependent on oil. More than 90 per cent of world oil supply is controlled by foreign governments. "America must address this critical weakness." Said P.X. Kelley, a retired Marine Corps general. "An oil supply interruption cannot be reasonably dismissed as improbable." However, there is deep-seated scepticism about the willingness of the Bush administration, which has yet to endorse the theory of global warming, to take the tough steps most energy experts say are necessary to reduce America's dependence on oil. Last January Mr Bush declared that America was "addicted to oil". But Mr Bush's announcement was not followed by any significant change in energy strategy. "There is very little reason to believe that the White House will take the tough measures necessary to make this happen," said a Washington-based energy lobbyist. "There is no appetite, say, to impose a carbon tax or for putting a floor under the price of oil that would incentivise investors to put their money into alternative energy." However, the US administration wants to step up co-operation with China on energy efficiency and the use of alternative fuels. Energy and the environment will be among the topics addressed in Friday's final session of the US-China strategic economic dialogue involving top officials meeting in Beijing. The dialogue is the brainchild of Hank Paulson, US Treasury Secretary, who has a strong track record as an environmentalist and is treated with suspicion by some US conservatives as a result. Lack of binding targets for China and other big emerging market countries such as India to limit their greenhouse gas emissions was one of America's principal reasons for refusing to ratify the Kyoto accord. Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006 See article here.

The Oil Drum

The Fake Fire Brigade Revisited #3 - The Biggest Part of Business As Usual - Electricity

Below the fold is the 3rd in a series of follow up posts providing analysis on the difficulties of maintaining our current energy paradigm with renewable energy (generally, 'the fake fire brigade'). The main authors are Hannes Kunz, President of Institute for Integrated Economic Research (IIER) and Stephen Balogh, a PhD student at SUNY-ESF and Senior Research Associate at IIER. IIER is a non-profit organization that integrates research from the financial/economic system, energy and natural resources, and human behavior with an objective of developing/initiating strategies that result in more benign trajectories after global growth ends. The authors have written an extensive follow-up to the questions raised in the original posting and I've broken into 5 pieces for readability - the 3nd installment, with a focus on electricity generation in an energy transition, is below the fold. This installment has been delayed a few weeks due to Hannes taking time off to get married.... The Biggest Part of Business As Usual - Electricity In this third installment in this series, we want to put some emphasis on one of the most important enablers of human civilization of the 20th century: electricity. Its ubiquitous availability from every power plug is something we take for granted, despite the fact that stable electricity production is probably one of the most complex continuous endeavors of mankind, and one where many poorer countries fail. In this post we would like to provide an overview of some of the properties of electricity, describe its nature (as a flow based system), and explain what challenges it faces in the future -- especially those related to maintaining current delivery patterns once we have to increasingly rely on inputs no longer coming from fossil fuels that can be stored and burned mostly at our discretion, but from increasingly stochastic, largely uncorrelated flows such as solar or wind. Electricity is a core topic of IIER's research, because for us, maintaining anything that more or less resembles our current advanced economies is synonymous with uninterrupted, reliable electricity which mostly comes as a discretionary service to the user. Users, in this case, aren't just private consumers, but also industrial and commercial applications, which are part of any advanced society. Electric power is also the area of greatest debate, greatest hope and greatest investment, and the area where IIER thinks that societies face challenges with all their current attempts. Presently, OECD countries are targeting electricity generation as a means to meet carbon emission reduction goals, while simultaneously encouraging the development of non-fossil fuel based transportation (e.g. electric vehicles) and other moves away from coal and oil in industrial applications. They do this -- so we think -- without a robust plan as to how to maintain today's delivery security. All plans aim at combining wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear, super- and smart grids into one new robust delivery system, and there seems to be general agreement that this will actually work. But after thorough and unbiased research of the characteristics of electricity delivery systems, the parameters of those new technologies and the discrepancies between assumptions and reality, we are now skeptical as to whether societies will be able to provide stable electricity at acceptable prices going forward. We realize that this statement is almost considered a sacrilege. Below, we will try to explain our concerns step by step, and why we fear that investing hundreds of billions in an electricity system that is far more complex and far less reliable will lead us in the wrong direction, given the details of our current situation. Once again, a clarification: we are not arguing the fact that we slowly have to move away from fossil fuels and start using more renewable sources to provide our energy needs. However, we disagree with the common notion that societies can make this renewable energy transition and still receive the same services as today: stable and affordable electricity not just for private consumption, but for all uses that are part of an advanced industrialized society. IIER's Electricity Availability Index In our first post, we introduced IIER's Electricity Availability Index. It measures the availability of electricity in a country based on penetration (% of population with electricity) and reliability (outages and duration of outages per average customer). Figure 1 -- IIER Electricity availability index Some commenters questioned the relationship between electricity and wealth (measured in purchasing-power adjusted GDP per capita). Such was the first hypothesis we tested when developing the EAI metric. The chicken-and-egg question can - as we think - be resolved quite easily, by testing in which directions we find the outliers. In case the assumption of "wealth is possible without stable electricity" is correct, there should be countries with low electricity availability that still are quite rich (measured in GDP per capita). However, these do not exist, the "richest" outlier is resource-rich Botswana (diamonds, copper, nickel) with close to $14'000 per capita and an EAI of only 21.9%. On the other hand, we do find rather poor countries with almost 90% electricity availability (such as The Philippines and Mongolia, with a per capita GDP of around $3'500), which leads to the conclusion that the correlation is unidirectional, or in other words: You don't have to be rich to have stable electricity, but your country needs stable electricity to become (or stay) rich. The benefits of electricity There are two discrete aspects of electricity's importance to society: the benefit of its ubiquitous on-demand availability, and the severe side-effects of power interruptions. Let's look at a simple illustration. Few companies in OECD countries install backup power for desktop computers, despite the risk of data loss during a power outage. The reason is economic -- outages are so rare that the possible the cost for buying, maintaining and operating the backup equipment outweighs the risk of outage, which is why only servers and data centers are deemed worthy investments into power backup solutions. In emerging or developing countries, backup systems are commonplace, but only if businesses can afford them. But most local businesses cannot, which makes it primarily an option for international corporations, while local companies are at a disadvantage. Other applications, particularly of industrial nature, can't even operate with backups; they simply need a power guarantee. The pots of an aluminum smelter require uninterrupted power 24/7, 365 days a year. If the power is lost for more than a few hours, not only does the process stop, but after a short while the aluminum begins to congeal, with the consequence that the entire pot has to be scrapped, incurring costs of millions of dollars. Or think of a shopping mall that suddenly goes dark. No lights except for emergency lighting, no access to transaction services to process a credit or debit card, no elevators or escalators, and ultimately no sales. There are multiple studies on the cost of "reliability events" in power grids, each reporting very significant losses (a lot of research has been done at Berkeley Lab, documents can be found at: http://certs.lbl.gov/CERTS_P_Reliability.html). So while -- as many people correctly say - power outages are just a nuisance to private households as long as they don't exceed the time a fridge or freezer can hold its temperature, they are a threat to all more complex industrial and commercial activities that make our societies "advanced" and require the humming of electricity-driven machinery almost around the clock. This now ties back to the Electricity Availability Index -- many things are either impossible or economically not feasible in environments where grid stability becomes an issue. And even for applications where it is theoretically possible to ramp them up and down without efficiency or material losses based on energy availability, there are significant social costs associated with unpredictability. If there is no power, should we send all the workers home for a week, and call them again at 1am on the Sunday when supply comes back? We can certainly do this, but in reality we would probably rather cease many of those activities, because the opportunity cost of underutilized equipment and labor becomes so big that the final objective no longer makes economic sense. What is electricity and how is it delivered There are two ways that electricity is supplied. In smaller, poorer, or more remote areas, electrical production is achieved by a standalone solution that provides comfort or capabilities to those able to afford it. Often this is provided by diesel generators which can produce electricity as required, or by standalone hydro, coal or natural gas power plants which serve a local area or industrial activity. Increasingly, solar panels combined with batteries provide this service, or wind turbines in conjunction with oil based generators. The key characteristic of this type of delivery system usually is very high cost per delivered kWh. In richer economies or even in urban areas almost all around the world, electricity is delivered via a centrally managed grid, which balances inputs and outputs effectively to ensure that demand is always met. In poorer countries, this often does not work out, with the consequence of regular grid breakdowns. In OECD countries, however, we are so used to the grid's reliability that even small power outages regularly make the news headlines. Below, we will mostly focus on grid based systems, as only those are capable of delivering the basic industrial and commercial services for societies we are used to receiving. What we get from our power sockets as "electricity" is the product of an electric current that is converted into useful work by an appliance. To make sure that those appliances work, particularly more fragile ones involving electronics, voltage and frequency must be standardized across entire regions (for example 120V/60Hz in Northern America or 230V/50Hz in Europe). An electricity delivery system can be compared to a complex set of water pipes where water (electricity) enters at multiple points and is withdrawn at hundreds of thousands of faucets. Contrary to a water delivery systems, these electrical 'pipes and faucets' are so fragile that they almost immediately burst or collapse when too much or too little water is in the system. Or in other words -- electricity is a fully flow based system, where inputs and outputs have to be matched at any point in time with deviations of less than 0.5% between supply and demand (see ENTSO-E manuals for more detail: https://www.entsoe.eu/index.php?id=57, particularly the one on "Emergency Procedures") . Figure 2: Grid based system (Source) Currently, this system is fully supply-controlled (i.e. production is following expected and actual demand), which is why it has become so beneficial to society. It delivers seemingly unlimited and unrestricted amounts of energy to each room in our homes, offices and factories, and except for heavy loads in an industry or computing (server farms), there is no user-level planning required before flipping a switch, plugging in a heater, turning on a computer. Electricity just flows according to one's needs. Later, we will examine demand side flexibility, but first, we want to focus on the supply side, which is where electricity systems are controlled today. Figure 3 -- schematic delivery system (current status) To meet demand, which follows the cycles of human ecosystem patterns (days, nights, work/non-work days, heat, cold) is today matched by a combination of power sources that together form a highly flexible supply system, which also includes reserves to match unexpected demand spikes or sudden supply-side failures, for example when a power plant experiences an emergency shutdown. We will dive into the different load patterns and reserve provisions a little further down, but the key characteristic of a vast majority of inputs today is that they are fully predictable and mostly controllable. This is because inputs come from steady flows (like a running river), but by a large majority from stock based resources that can be consumed whenever there is a need, such as coal, natural gas, stored water or nuclear power (the latter could, for reasons to be discussed further down, also be seen as a steady flow). So in essence, what we have built is a highly complex system that converts steady flows and stocks into a well-managed, demand driven flow of electric current. Figure 4 -- types of inputs into electricity grids What most OECD countries plan to do is to replace some of those steady flows or stocks on the supply side by adding more and more renewables with erratic flows. Currently, those stochastic, non-controllable flows from solar and wind power account for a maximum of 5% of total power production in each interconnected grid systems we are aware of [see Table 1 for the U.S. (combining Western and Eastern interconnection for lack of data) and for the European interconnected grid system -- ENTSO-E], but by 2030, most countries in the Western world plan for 20 or 30% of electricity to be delivered from those two sources alone, accompanied by other new technologies. Table 1: wind and solar power share in 2009/10 for major grid systems (EIA 2010, ENTSOE 2010) In Europe, the almost 5 % of solar and wind are very irregularly distributed, with some countries totaling close to 0%, and others already experiencing up to 20% (Denmark) of those renewable sources. All those countries with high shares manage their problems with the significant help of their neighbors. Very small Denmark for example uses the comparably huge water power systems in Norway and Sweden to buffer its heavily variable wind outputs. This grand plan -- to maintain something that already now is highly complex by adding multiple layers of complexity -- is something we are very concerned about. The overlying challenge is to keep a flow-based demand system working while stochastic, non-controllable flows gain a significant share of supply, and to do so without jeopardizing grid stability, and at a price which is still affordable. We believe that most people underestimate this challenge and that it actually may be insurmountable. Important: "affordable" in this case doesn't mean it can be paid by individual households for their relatively small amount of required electricity, as they may be able to bear 20 or 25 cents for a kWh, but instead for an entire industrialized society with the need to provide all the goods and services that make it what is considered "advanced". Figure 5 -- shift to larger amounts of stochastic flows What is an acceptable price for electricity? What a high cost of oil does to societies has been well researched and documented in a number of papers (see: http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/ECS/IEW2005/docs/ppt/IEW2005_Maeda.ppt) . High oil prices seem to be a clear inhibitor of economic growth and early indicators of coming recessions. The reason behind this is the fact that the higher the cost for energy is, the less of our efforts can go towards discretionary spending (Hall, Powers and Schoenberg 2008). It is an inherent property of EROI: the energy and money we spend to procure and extract energy, is unavailable to spend on discretionary and non-discretionary investment and consumption. There is no reason why the situation should be different for energy inputs other than oil, as higher energy costs always leads to this diversion away from consumption and investment. However, creating a benchmark is not easy, as electricity rates have been relatively steady during the times when oil prices fluctuated heavily, which gives us no past reference. Using oil, where a relatively solid research base exists, we wanted to create a benchmark for "tolerable" electricity prices. Some papers suggest that oil prices that grow from 25 to 35 dollars have a negative impact of 0.3-0.5% on GDP in various countries (http://www.iea.org/papers/2004/high_oil_prices.pdf). We currently are at around $80/barrel, and are still in the middle of a bad crisis, which just looks less bad because governments have started to run up deficits at a breathtaking pace. At $150/barrel, in 2008, the current recession began with a vengeance, and many researchers suggest that high oil prices had their fair share in pricking the problem. So based on experiences from 2008, we can probably assume that oil prices around $150 per barrel choke many economic activities, as the marginal cost becomes unbearable for many private and commercial consumers alike. Even at the current price of approximately $80/bbl, transportation and other energy-intensive sectors are under heavy pressure, and oil prices push commodity prices up. As a reminder: During the past 50 years, the median price for oil stood at about $25/bbl (inflation adjusted to current dollars). If we look at energy content in a barrel of oil (6.1 GJ or 1700 kWh), a price of $150 translates to a cost per kWh of 8.8 cents, $25 translates to 1.5 cents per kWh in oil. The difficulty now comes in finding a meaningful comparison between oil and electricity. Oil is a high quality and high density raw energy source with excellent properties with respect to transportation, storage and processing, while electricity provides a distributed service at a comparably high quality. We assume that the same energy content in electricity is of higher value to society when compared to oil, which thus can bear a higher cost for the same amount of energy (this was also part of the Divisia index developed by Cleveland et.al.: http://www.eoearth.org/article/Net_energy_analysis). One method of comparison would be to compare the ability to convert a specific source to heat (http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat5p4.html). To produce the same amount of useful heat, about three times as much oil is required when compared to electricity. So while the lower limit would ask for a direct 1:1 comparison, a "bonus" factor of three for electricity sets the upper limit. However heat -- today -- is no longer the key use of oil; heat may be produced with natural gas or coal at much lower cost (at less than a third of that of oil). In the predominant applications for crude oil today, transportation fuels and chemicals, electricity is at a clear disadvantage. We therefore decided to assume a bonus for electricity in the middle of the two possible values at 200%, i.e. we attribute twice as much value to a kWh in electricity when compared to crude oil, and equally, set the threshold for economic trouble at twice that of oil. Table 2: relative prices of electricity and oil Under such an assumption, we see in Table 2 that electricity prices become critical at around 9 cents per kWh, equivalent to about $70/barrel of oil, and then unbearable at 15-18 cents (equivalent to 130-150$ oil). This is an average value for an entire industrial society, as wealthy private consumers can tolerate rates even higher than 20 cents per kWh. But unfortunately, a society doesn't just consist of consumers; it also needs to produce goods and services, and there, a cost of 15-18 cents will definitely be unacceptable. Given that Chinese manufacturers often operate with final electricity cost between 4-5 cents per kWh, even the 2008 average price paid for industrial electricity of 6.83 cents puts domestic U.S. companies at a significant disadvantage. At today's electricity levels, highly energy-intensive applications are no longer competitive, which is already visible in industrial trends -- it is not only labor-intensive work that is going abroad, energy-intensive industries such as aluminum smelting and steel manufacturing are leaving areas with high electricity cost. Another method available to create a metric for "acceptable" electricity prices is to use the ratio of electricity cost to total GDP. At the average rate of 9.74 cents per kWh of delivered electricity, all electricity consumption costs the United States about 2.6% of U.S. GDP. If we separate out the industrial portion of GDP (2,737bn US$ in 2008), a similar portion (2.5%) is spent on electricity, at the average price of 6.83 cents. Should this price -- for example -- triple to 20 cents, suddenly 7.4% of total industrial cost would go towards electricity. This is far more than the profit margins of most energy-intensive industries. For the U.S., where a large portion of heavy industry has been cut back already due to the relatively high cost of labor and energy compared to other places, such an increase may seem bearable. But what if China would operate under the same regime, replacing current low-cost electricity from coal with expensive new sources? In China, electricity alone totals to approximately 3.5% of GDP at an average cost of 5 cents/kWh, quadrupling the cost per kWh to the same 20 cents would demand that the country diverts 13.8% of its GDP to electricity. This is not feasible, as it -- together with oil, coal and natural gas, would divert more than 25% of total GDP towards energy alone -- representing a society-level EROI of 4:1. One of the reason why China fares so badly here is because the country provides a lot of the cheap energy Western societies no longer have, and then import it embedded in goods. Table 3 -- electricity price sensitivity U.S. and China If we want to run a complete industrial society, looked at on a global scale, energy prices above certain levels are not sustainable, as they reduce available surpluses for consumption and investment. And unfortunately, those cost levels of 15-20 cents per kWh on average are exactly where societies are headed with the planned changes. We will cover those aspects in more detail further below, when looking at individual technologies. Meeting demand -- in more detail In order to understand what we need and what we receive from multiple technologies, it seems important to split out the various types of load grid operators have to deal with. Base load -- defined as the long-term minimum demand expected in a region -- is usually provided by technologies with relatively low cost, high reliability and limited ability to modulate output. This includes nuclear power plants, lignite coal plants and hydroelectric water mills in rivers. Those plants typically have to operate continuously at relatively stable loads, as otherwise their efficiency is reduced significantly, leading to higher cost per unit of output. Also, re-starting those power plants is relatively time-consuming and inefficient. In most countries, base load capacity is capable of covering approximately 100% of low demand (during nights and weekends). Intermediate or cyclical load -- the foreseeable portion of variety in loads over a day is provided by load-following sources that can modulate to higher or lower output levels -- or almost entirely be turned off and on within a relatively short time. However, these sources usually require some lead time to grow or reduce output, for example some coal power plants. Today, natural gas is used for a significant portion of cyclical load. Peak load -- usually required within very short periods of time for a few hours a day -- can be provided only from sources that can be turned on and off within minutes, this typically includes gas and small oil power plants as well as stored hydropower (dams or pumped hydro). Peak capacity can be provided by spinning reserve plants (e.g. running plants that can increase capacity quickly) or by non-spinning sources, which can be turned on within minutes. Beyond technology limitations that make it difficult or uneconomic to ramp capacity up or down quickly, the key factor in the eligibility of a technology for the use in peak, cyclical and base load mode is the cost share between capital investment and fuel cost. The higher the fuel cost share, the more suitable a technology becomes to support peak power; the higher the investment share, the more operational hours are required to arrive at an acceptable average price per kWh. We will look at this issue further below, but this for example is the main reason why nuclear power is such a bad load-following or peak source. Demand flexibility has a (high) cost Another point has to do with the flexibility of electricity use, i.e. the possibility of turning something on when supply is abundant, and turning it off when power is scarce. The problem lies with the nature of most uses: many applications are simply inflexible, like those that require something to run for 24 hours a day - data centers are among them, and so are some key industrial processes. Lighting is not flexible, nor is access to heavy uses of electricity in households, such as cooking, using electronics or most kitchen appliances. We also want hot water and cool air when we need it, and usually we don't want to schedule our laundry because someone tells us to do so, even though this is probably the easiest part. Now some applications, particularly heating (air and water) and cooling (air and goods), indeed have certain flexibility potential. We can run a freezer or air conditioner that produces ice to bridge supply gaps, or we can build a water heater which produces enough hot water to get us through the day, a very common application today in Switzerland, where night energy rates are often half of daytime rates even for households. However, such a time shift comes with tradeoffs: any application that uses storage instead of directly converting electricity into the desired quality output (heat or cold here), ultimately adds cost, for several reasons. Making equipment flexible comes at a cost, either the cost of information transfer (for price-regulated markets) or the cost of storing the required energy for later use. France has been quite active at experimenting with contracts allowing them to regulate energy according to supply, where customers pay less for power that can be cut off at any point in time. This is especially important in France because of the inflexible nature of their generation technology mix with almost 70% coming from nuclear power. Yet the flexibility French grid operators were able to evoke from that market mechanism, despite the heavy incentives, was around 2-3% of total peak demand (according to RTE, the French grid operator). Most users obviously prefer the inconvenience of higher prices versus the inconvenience of service interruptions, even for things that are not mission-critical. This fact leaves us with approaches that actively shift energy consumption without affecting the end-user. Mostly, this translates to some kind of storage, which has a number of disadvantages. Every piece of equipment that includes a storage mechanism is significantly more complex than one that operates without, and because of that complexity becomes more expensive, more energy-intensive in its manufacturing, and more exposed to failure. Additionally, each storage process incurs losses. If we produce hot water at night that should last through the entire day, some of the heat dissipates, dependent on how well insulated the storage tank is (again this is dependent on cost and effort, as well as space). The same is true for air-conditioners or freezers that use ice produced at night as buffer -- they are less energy efficient overall. Both applications can still be economical for the end user and society as a whole if they use cheap base-load power at night and avoid using peak electricity during the day. Ice-based air-conditioning systems are quite common in office buildings in some parts of the U.S., where utilities charge different rates between night and day. But there is a caveat: all those approaches are geared at balancing two almost steady systems with fully predictable 24 hour cycles, nightly base load production and daily usage patterns with a peak or two. Thus, the maximum storage time required is 10-15 hours, which reduces system complexity as well as conversion and storage losses to acceptable levels. Now with renewable energy supplies, we are suddenly confronted with irregular patterns that can include days to weeks of over- and undersupply. In those cases, storage and conversion losses beyond a few days become almost insurmountable hurdles, as cumulative losses grow quickly over time. So in a nutshell -- there are technical solutions for many of these problems, but often the outcome no longer makes economic sense -- neither for the individual user nor for a society. Moore's law and receding horizons A key assumption of many forward projections for renewable energy production is that the technology will become cheaper and cheaper over time. Unfortunately, this isn't true for many technologies, especially as fossil fuel inputs become more expensive. One of the often cited rules in energy discussions is Moore's law, which describes the fast advancement of capacity improvements (and price decreases) in computing power. It says that the density of calculation power can double every two years, and has been relatively consistently achieved since 1970. This has led to the fact that a smartphone today has more capacity than large mainframe computers in the early Seventies. However, outside electronics, Moore's law does not apply and has never applied for anything. A physical structure remains a physical structure, and does not have the multiplication potential that comes from miniaturization. We may be able to raise the efficiency for a photovoltaic panel from 18 to 20%, but not double it every two years no matter what we do, given the physical limits. The same is true for the materials used for its manufacturing; we might reduce them, but often by 10-20% and sometimes at the cost of more complex tools and purer materials (which also require energy). And erecting a modern wind turbine always requires steel, concrete and many advanced materials, which won't change, no matter how much we optimize it. For normal industrial goods, price curves often show an asymptotic form. When a technology is new, neither its production nor its outputs are focused on efficiency; production facilities are small and processes involve a lot of manual labor. Also, new technologies often get produced in advanced economies with higher labor and energy cost. With maturing manufacturing technologies, more efficient and scaled up factories, and the inclusion of lower cost labor and energy from -- for example -- China, production becomes cheaper and prices fall. Eventually, when labor and production costs become optimized, the decline in price of the product slows, until it reaches a stable retail price more dependent on the raw materials and energy required to produce and transport the good. In many cases, the picture for raw materials and raw-material-driven products begins to look like the dotted line, despite rapidly growing output: Figure 6 - Marginal cost curve for supply-constrained resources During the past few years, we have seen this important reversal in this key underlying trend, which briefly visited our economies in 2008 when - with rising resource prices -- everything from food to fuels became suddenly more expensive. Thanks to the economic crisis and reduced demand, this phenomenon has partially disappeared, but for some key commodities (such as copper, iron ore, coking coal and some others), we are already back to pre-crisis levels or higher. This is the "glass-half-full" trend, which applies to almost all natural resources, but first and foremost energy. Even if we -- as many people correctly state -- have enough of something in the ground, getting it out becomes more difficult, has to happen further away and in geopolitically riskier places etc.. This is confirmed by the cost for new power plants, where cost estimates have recently gone up based on higher input cost (for almost everything ranging from nuclear to coal to wind towers), and even for solar panels, the permanent reductions experienced in the past haven't continued between 2003 and 2008, despite rapidly growing production. The last important cost reduction happened since around 2006, when Chinese manufacturers entered the market, bringing low-cost production energy (mostly coal-based) into the game. Not truly a sustainable model. And, in 2009, due to overcapacity and massively reduced raw material prices, costs came down again, and there might even be more room for some reductions, but this story has an end once input prices go up. Figure 7 - Cost of solar panels ((Pdf warning) If that core trend of higher energy cost, particularly at the historically lowest-priced end, cannot be reversed, which we doubt it can, this has implications for everything that uses those inputs, as it raises the price with the cost of the raw materials and the energy that go into them. This effect might, in turn, effectively end the trend of lower and lower prices for everything, including energy generation technology, no matter what it is. Figure 8 - The "old" trend ............. Figure 9 - The "new" trend Base load power -- a real problem Except for solar and wind, most of the technologies currently seen as potential future output providers deliver base load power. This is true for biomass, for geothermal, for nuclear, and to a certain extent for coal. All those generation approaches have only limited load following capabilities, for very different reasons. Now, stochastic renewable sources (mostly wind) coming into play, often with a "right of passage", i.e. no limits in selling into the grid at a preferred price. Whoever comes next only gets to sell when there is still demand, and -- in a free electricity market like we have it in most OECD countries -- that means that prices for coal, nuclear and other base load outputs without a preferred status (biomass mostly has that status), drop sharply. Some analysts have even considered this a positive phenomenon, but actually it is not. What it really does: due to the preference of wind, it pushes marginal price (but not cost) of those steady sources down and thus makes base load generation economically unattractive, because less steady demand at lower prices simply translates to an unacceptable risk for investors. Spot markets are among the key reasons why no more nuclear and hardly any coal power plants were built in Western economies during the past decade. In a future electricity system, we will see an increasing disparity between a growing pool of inflexible (for cost or technology reasons) base load power, a mission-critical pool of peak and cyclical load capacity, and that new, unpredictable pool of sources that deliver whenever they deliver, irrespective of demand. A new electricity mix If we use some currently available numbers for various electricity generation techniques, we might come up with the following for generation capacity in the United States, without any subsidies: Table 4 -- cost and suitability of various generation technologies We are aware of the fact that the above numbers are being disputed, which is why we have included broad ranges. This is not the point we are trying to make -- the point is incremental replacement of fossil fuel-based plants, especially cheap coal with more expensive technologies has the potential to lead to large increases in the price of electricity. Now on top of the generation cost shown in Table 4, we have to bear the cost for maintaining and operating the electricity grid, which delivers the power to homes, offices and factories. For a standard grid today, which does not have to do much more than transmit electricity generated according to demand, this might add about 2-3 cents per kWh. When looking at the cost ranges above, it becomes quite obvious that even the lowest cost sources already bring the total price of electricity dangerously close to what industrial users can afford. Now on top of the generation cost shown in Table 4, we have to bear the cost for maintaining and operating the electricity grid, of metering, and some profit margins for the utility companies which delivers the power to homes, offices and factories. For the U.S. today, where the grid does not have to do much more than transmit electricity generated according to demand, this adds between 2 and 7 cents per kWh. Table 5 -- approximate share of final electricity cost (multiple sources, IIER calculations) When looking at the cost ranges, it becomes quite obvious that even the new lowest cost sources already bring the total price of electricity dangerously close to what industrial users can afford. What really matters is "useful energy" And now comes the challenge: Only power that meets someone's demand has a positive price. If I am asleep and someone offers me free power to light my entire house like a Christmas tree, I don't care. On the other hand, when the food in my freezer starts to thaw, I would probably be ready to pay a very high price for the few kWh it needs to keep that device going. The same is true in aggregate. Spot electricity prices go as low as 0-3 cents during the night (or even negative, http://www.scribd.com/doc/27816762/Negative-Prices-in-Electricity-Market), and up to 12, 15, sometimes even 50 cents at peak times during the day. Now what we need to measure in order to understand the entire delivery system is not so much about the prices paid for one kWh of electricity produced, but instead the cost of electricity delivered according to demand. We want to determine how much it costs to provide a kWh from a particular source to supply our human energy demand patterns, and if that doesn't work in a straightforward manner, we have to estimate the extra cost required to either shift it to the right time, or to shift demand to the time of production. Only once that has been factored in, do we know how expensive a kWh of electricity from a particular source really is. Sources with little flexibility, such as coal and nuclear or run-of-river hydro plants, mostly produce around the clock. Given their low average cost, the average prices received are profitable, despite the fact that during the night they sell below full cost, but usually above marginal (fuel) cost. The rest (power plant investments, non-flexible operations cost) are incurred irrespective of plant outputs. Thus, adjusting output to more closely meet demand would incur even higher cost (or efficiency losses, or both), put stress on the equipment and require higher operations and maintenance efforts. If we had to run our grids with just those base load sources, electricity would be more expensive, either from those efficiency losses, from lost overproduction during the night (to still meet peak demand), or from additional measures to shift demand, such as incentives and storage (either in the network or in end-user appliances, as described above). This would add to the basic generation cost. After including these extra efforts, electricity generated in coal or nuclear plants (see section below) would have to sell at a higher price than just the generation plus distribution cost. Other sources, mostly dammed hydro, oil, and natural gas, are generally able to deliver exactly on time. (hydro only to a limited extent, as certain minimum flows need to be maintained in order to keep ecosystems in rivers below the dam intact). In general, we can turn them up when demand rises, and cut production back as soon as less power is needed. Those sources do not require extra cost on top of their generation cost and the basic effort to operate a grid. A kWh of electricity produced from natural gas thus usually costs approximately 6-10 cents (obviously as long as natural gas prices don't change). For sources that don't have the characteristics described above, things become trickier. We wouldn't be talking about smart grids, high voltage DC lines, storage in ELVs, and more, if it wasn't for the fact that most of the sources we want to add to our grid are unpredictable beyond the reach of our weather forecasts. For sources that are capable of producing everything between 0% and 100% of total nameplate capacity at any given time, irrespective of demand, we need to have very different approaches to make them work, and none come cheaply. So overall, as with all energy sources, we have limits in electricity cost to make it bearable for people. And not for us rich people who plan future energy systems, but also for everybody, and for those industries that manufacture the stuff we all use. To be continued... Next week, we will go through a list of all the currently available technologies for generation, transmission and storage, and review total feasibility and cost for each including transmission and grid management, and show certain trends for the future, and, ultimately, provide our assessment as to whether these technologies will be able to deliver what we need to keep grids going. *************************** Previously in this series: The Fake Fire Brigade - How We Cheat Ourselves about our Energy Future Revisiting the Fake Fire Brigade - Part 1 Revisiting the Fake Fire Brigade - Part 2 - Biomass - A Panacea?

BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Stack Off, but Another Incident - and Open Thread

Once again I am indebted to MoonofA, who is giving a more detailed hour by hour report, of some of the incidents that I miss. Fairly rapidly on Thursday afternoon, the team of ROVs and surface vessels moved forward with the removal of the existing infrastructure over the Deepwater Horizon well, with the intent of replacing it all with a functioning blowout preventer from the 2nd relief well (which now looks to be no longer necessary at all). One of the first steps was to move the methanol feed (used to dissolve and remove hydrates from the internal structures of the stack) down from the rams of the top stack to feed into the original BOP. This was used to ensure that the different parts of the stack, such as the rams, were able to function, when needed. And now, I presume, the hope is that it will similarly ensure that the BOP rams can function if needed. Removing the line from the stack Replacing line on the BOP Once the feed line had been moved, then the Enterprise came in and lowered the latching device that has been floating just above the stack for the past few days. It did not take long (and by doing so did not convey the difficulty) to drop the cap over the top end of the stack, and not long thereafter the stack was released and lifted away from the underlying transition and the original BOP. Approaching the stack The more interesting part of the exercise will come when they start to lift the original BOP and the transition spool. There are a number of different scenarios that have been proposed, depending on what happens, and why, as the first lift begins. If they can lift the BOP with the underlying drill pipe (DP) still attached, then they appear ready to grab hold of the DP after the BOP has risen a short distance, and cut it off. This will make it easier to get the BOP to the surface, and means that a more conventional fishing tool can be used to capture, and bring up the remaining length of the DP. Toolpush, for example, mentions some of the options available. Sliding into place The capping stack was released at about 4:30 pm Central, whereupon Admiral Allen issued the following statement: "Under the direction of the federal science team and U.S. government engineers, BP has completed the capping stack removal procedure – an important step in the process to remove and preserve the damaged BOP. This procedure was undertaken in accordance with specific conditions I set forth in a directive authorizing the capping stack removal and BOP replacement last week. BP will continue to follow these required conditions for the BOP removal procedure, which is expected to commence this evening. I will continue to provide updates as necessary." One of the problems with the feeds from the Q4000 is that they are not time-stamped, so that it is hard to know if the latest glance at the feed below the moon pool, which shows that the pipe hasn’t moved since I last looked, is current or not. Another Incident: Mariner Energy Platform Fire The other significant news today was of the fire on the Mariner Energy platform in the Vermillion block of the Gulf of Mexico. The fire now appears out and there was apparently no leakage from the wells that were connected to the platform. The platform is in 340 ft of water, and was fed by 7 wells collectively supplying 1,400 bd of oil and 9.2 mcf of natural gas, that is now shut in. I note that they were apparently water-blasting the rig and repainting it. One of the things to be careful of in those cases is the static electric charge that can build up in water vapor around the operation. From the Coast Guard report: However, at this time, that is just conjecture, and we will have to see what the investigation reveals.

Drumbeat: September 3, 2010

Peak oil and happy cows Type the phrase 'peak oil' into any popular internet search engine, and you will not be short of results to wade through. Like the fuel itself, the topic generates a lot of heat and hot air. This week on One Planet, reporter Richard Hollingham seeks to define the term 'peak oil' before asking leading experts whether they believe the event is nearing. We then sit down with the world's number one energy analyst Fatih Birol. He is chief economist at the International Energy Agency, and advises countries from America to Japan on energy policy. There is plenty we need to ask him about - from the Deepwater Horizon disaster, to drilling off the coast of Greenland, to recent claims that China is now the world's largest energy consumer.... Oh, and what does he think about peak oil? Peak oil, "Big education" and "Big science" Regarding my own area, higher education, I take for granted that it will at best shrink considerably in size and scope. As late as in the early 1950's less than 5% of an age cohort in England, France or Australia went on to higher education/university studies - and that still represented a doubling compared to only a decade or two earlier. Peak Denial about Peak Oil A funny thing happened on our way to permanent prosperity and unlimited cheap oil. The right to prosperity was yanked out from underneath us by the current Greater Depression. The worldwide economic downturn has masked the onset of peak cheap oil. US natgas rig count climbs 4 to 977-Baker Hughes NEW YORK (Reuters) - The number of rigs drilling for natural gas in the United States rose by four this week to 977, its first gain in three weeks, according to a report on Friday by oil services firm Baker Hughes in Houston. FACTBOX - China's refinery expansion plans BEIJING (Reuters) - PetroChina has won approval from the National Development and Reform Commission to double refining capacity at its Huabei plant to 200,000 barrels per day (bpd), the China Petroleum Daily reported on Friday. The expansion is scheduled to be completed in October 2012 and the plant will be fully commissioned two months later, the newspaper report said. Shallow-water platform fire raises wider questions on oil safety The fire Thursday at an oil platform off the Louisiana coast may not, in the end, do much harm to the Gulf of Mexico. But it could still mean trouble for both the Obama administration and the oil industry - by raising new questions about the gulf's oil fields. A CEO Fights Feds, But Feds Don't Fight Fair Todd Hornbeck beat the Obama administration once again on Wednesday, and yet he is still losing. Hornbeck was first to challenge the administration's industry-crippling moratorium on deep-water drilling in the Gulf. He handily won an order striking down the moratorium in federal district court. He won again in federal appeals court. Yet with the stroke of a pen, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar simply imposed a second moratorium after the court blocked his first. Analysis: Security, Regulatory Reforms Revive Colombia Oil Production After a period of steady decline, Colombia has seen an increase in oil production due to Colombian government efforts to curb drug and insurgent-related violence in the country and implement regulatory reforms to make investment in Colombia more attractive. Despite strong production growth in the 1980s and 1990s, Colombia production began to decline due to increasing drug cartel and insurgent-related violence, low oil prices and unattractive contract terms that pushed upstream activity into a decline, according to analysts at Barclays Capital. Comment: meeting the challenge of energy diversity It's simple -- improve energy efficiency and provide a stable framework to encourage investment in renewable resources. It's not rocket science and it's happening successfully overseas. While countries such as Sweden now deliver almost half of their energy from renewables, we languish almost at the bottom of the EU league table, on 3 per cent. That's despite boasting pretty much the best renewable-energy resources in Europe. Deadly riots in Mozambique over food prices "The high-income countries can pay even if cereal prices double. For them, it is not such a big deal. Many people in Asia and Africa simply do not have that option. For them, the only choice is to cut out a meal. That is the only adjustment they can make." Storm surge a growing menace as sea levels rise worldwide The large waves, storm surge, and flooding that Hurricane Earl will spawn as it strikes Massachusetts tonight comes with an added dollop of trouble: sea level rise. Very gradual, and in some cases accelerating, rises in sea level off our coast over the last century will boost the height of Earl's storm surge -- expected to be 1 to 4 feet -- meaning the wall of water will be able to travel that much farther inland and over higher elevations to flood basements, streets, and other low-lying areas. Corporate alliances help keep state parks afloat CUYAMACA RANCHO STATE PARK, Calif. -- A visitor has to look closely to find it, but here, in a remote mountain forest of Southern California, is a sign of what's to come for state parks across the USA: Corporate logos. From California to New York, states are turning to corporations for financial backing as recession and budget woes prompt cuts in public dollars to maintain parks. South Africa: Car sales surge 50% as buyers skip carbon tax avoidance Pre-emptive buying to avoid the carbon dioxide emissions tax on new cars, which came into effect on Wednesday, and sales to the car rental industry drove new car sales last month to their highest level since January 2008. New car sales rose 49.6 percent to 33 541 units last month from 22 413 units last August. American Samoa, unlike California, bans plastic bags American Samoa, a U.S. territory, will soon make it illegal for stores to hand out plastic shopping bags -- a step that California rejected earlier this week. We need a better understanding of the 'environmentalist's paradox' We hear lots of concerned chatter these days -- not least, here on this site - about peak oil, peak water, deforestation, resource depletion and the like, but a popular riposte offered by those doubting such concerns is something commonly referred to as the "Environmentalist's Paradox". The argument goes thus: "Why, despite resource depletion and the degradation of ecosystems, is average human well-being improving globally?" People such as Matt Ridley, author of the Rational Optimist, argue that environmentalists are needlessly downbeat about humanity's prospects. After all, we are a resourceful, adaptable, highly intelligent species more than capable of riding out any current concerns (if only we would de-shackle ourselves from free-market constraints). As a counterpoint, we have the likes of Jared Diamond, author of Collapse, arguing that we should heed the lessons provided by failed civilisations of the past who extinguished themselves by over-exploiting their available natural resources. The latest edition of the journal BioScience includes a fascinating paper which examines just this paradox. Crude Oil Heads for Weekly Decline on Forecast for U.S. Jobless Increase Oil declined, headed for a weekly drop, on forecasts that a U.S. government report will show the jobless rate rose in August for the first time in four months, threatening the recovery in fuel demand. Futures are down 1 percent this week. Analysts surveyed by Bloomberg estimate the August payrolls report from the Labor Department will show the U.S. economy lost 105,000 jobs. Crude gained yesterday after an fire on a Gulf of Mexico oil and natural-gas platform prompted speculation that tighter regulations will cut production. `Bear Flag' Signals a Decline in Oil Price to Near $60 Crude oil is set for a drop to near $60 a barrel, extending a descent started in May, according to a technical analysis by independent analyst Jim Stellakis. "Last month's breakdown in crude oil is continuing the longer-term bearish pattern which was started by the May decline," Stellakis said. The bear flag pattern is signaled after a break occurs below a rising trading range. Record Russian Oil Premium Vanishes on Refinery Run Cuts Russian crude's unprecedented premium to North Sea Brent is vanishing as European refiners switch to higher-value blends and scale back purchases to protect their profits. Oil May Fall as U.S. Refineries Conduct Seasonal Maintenance, Survey Shows Crude oil may fall next week as U.S. refineries perform seasonal maintenance, reducing demand, a Bloomberg News survey showed. Fourteen of 34 analysts, or 41 percent, forecast crude oil will decline through Sept. 10. Ten respondents, or 29 percent, predicted that futures will rise, and 10 projected prices will be little changed. Last week, 41 percent of analysts forecast an increase. Crude warning for policymakers South Africa imports around two-thirds of its liquid fuels. The government's strategy regarding security of liquid fuel supply assumes that sufficient crude oil imports will be both available and affordable in the foreseeable future. The emphasis has been on ensuring that adequate quantities of refined products are available to meet rising demand, especially in the economic heartland of Gauteng. Russia to double gas imports from Azerbaijan in a fresh blow to EU-touted pipeline project MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia's Gazprom on Friday clinched a deal to double supplies from Azerbaijan in a bid to expand its control over gas produced by former Soviet republics. ...The European Union was planning to use Azerbaijan's vast energy resources as a key source of gas for a major pipeline project, Nabucco, to bring Caspian and Central Asian gas to Europe, bypassing Russia. Ukraine May Give Russia Joint Control of Pipe to Cut Gas Prices (Bloomberg) -- Ukraine is willing to give Russia joint control of a pipeline to southeastern Europe in exchange for access to natural gas supplies, Prime Minister Mykola Azarov said as the country's negotiate a gas venture. The governments are seeking to create the venture between NAK Naftogaz Ukrainy and OAO Gazprom, both of which were once part of the Soviet gas monopoly, by year-end, Azarov said in an interview in his Kiev office yesterday. The agreement would reduce the price Ukraine pays for Russian gas, he said. No sign of oil after Gulf platform fire: Coast Guard NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) -- An oil and gas platform operated by Mariner Energy burst into flames in the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, but the crew of 13 escaped and there were no signs of an oil spill, the Coast Guard said. U.S. Probes Mariner Fire in Gulf of Mexico That Sparked BP Spill Deja Vu The fire started on or near upper-deck living quarters and was not caused by an explosion, Patrick Cassidy, a spokesman for Mariner Energy, said in an e-mail. The company said oil and gas production from the wells controlled by the platform, known as Vermilion 380, has been shut down. Mariner may be facing BP-style crisis NEW YORK -- Just a few months ago Mariner Energy was celebrating its imminent marriage to Apache Corp. On Thursday, Mariner found itself in the middle of a potential BP-style crisis, with a rig off the coast of Louisiana that exploded and perhaps was leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Mariner shares dropped on the news, shedding more than 2 percent. Shares of Apache also fell. Blaze Shakes Oil Industry HOUMA, La.--The fire that engulfed an oil and gas platform Thursday in the Gulf of Mexico heightened pressure on the energy industry, which is battling greater regulation and a deep-water drilling ban. U.S. offshore oil fire may delay lift of drill ban WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The Obama Administration is likely to stay focused on toughening regulatory oversight of the U.S. offshore oil industry and may push back lifting a ban on deepwater drilling after the latest accident in the Gulf of Mexico, analysts said on Thursday. The fire on a Mariner Energy oil and gas platform in shallow waters of the U.S. Gulf on Thursday was a major setback for companies hoping for an early end to the government's drilling moratorium and raised more questions about the safety of offshore drilling. BP Says Limits on Drilling Imperil Oil Spill Payouts BP is warning Congress that if lawmakers pass legislation that bars the company from getting new offshore drilling permits, it may not have the money to pay for all the damages caused by its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The company says a ban would also imperil the ambitious Gulf Coast restoration efforts that officials want the company to voluntarily support. BP oil spill costs surge to $8bln LONDON (AFP) -- British oil giant BP revealed Friday that the devastating Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster has cost it eight billion dollars so far -- with a sharp rise in payments in the last month. Factbox: U.S. Energy Disasters in 2010 HOUSTON (Reuters) -- Energy production and distribution in the United States can be a dangerous pursuit, in spite of strict safety regulations for oil, gas and coal producers and processors. Following is a look at energy-related disasters that have rocked the United States in the course of 2010, including the deadly and environmentally destructive oil spill at BP's Macondo prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, which began in April. Dreams of ships pass in the night Fazel Fazelbhoy is a man with a vision. With the age of easy oil passing, the chief executive of Topaz is casting further afield, and that means deep offshore. In the wake of the BP spill, such projects are fraught with risk, but this dreamer's reveries include Brazil. Russia Transneft not to increase 2011 oil fee (Reuters) - Russia's oil pipeline monopoly Transneft will not increase oil shipping fees in 2011, Interfax news agency quoted the company's head as saying on Friday. "We are not going to raise the tariff at all," Nikolai Tokarev said. Petrobras May Raise Up to $75 Billion in Sale of Shares Petroleo Brasileiro SA, Latin America's largest company by market value, will sell as much as 129 billion reais ($75 billion) of new voting and preferred shares to investors and the government. Wheat Rises on Russian Export Ban; Mozambique Riots Wheat rose in Chicago after Russia, the world's third-largest grower, extended a ban on grain exports into next year, raising the prospect of higher food prices that already have sparked riots in Mozambique. ...Residents of Mozambique's capital, Maputo, were on strike for a second day yesterday in a protest over higher food and utility prices. At least seven people have died in clashes with police and another 280 injured, Cabinet spokesman Alberto Nkutumula said yesterday. Scramble for food companies a warning of crisis to come The corporate activity is a storm warning of how food shortages and famine will reshape the world and corporate strategies. The Economist notes that by 2050 world grain output will have to rise by half and meat production will need to double to meet demand at a time when growth in grain yields is flattening out, there is little extra farmland and renewable water is running short. Similarly, rising food prices are a poke in the eye that the world needs to remind us of how fragile the food production chain has become. The drought and bushfires in Russia, combined with limits on grain exports, have resulted in a 70 per cent price spike in wheat futures, which has caused prices for soy and barley to go up by 10 per cent. Police say attacks on Pakistani minorities kill 23 QUETTA, Pakistan -- Suicide bombings targeting religious minorities killed at least 23 people in Pakistan on Friday, driving up the toll of sectarian assaults in a country already battered by massive flooding. The EPA's new gas-mileage labels are good but not perfect THE ENVIRONMENTAL Protection Agency is asking for comments on its proposed new gas mileage stickers for automobiles -- so here's ours. Rating the new fuel economy labels The EPA's proposed fuel economy labels range from baffling to genuinely useful. From Detroit, a fix for smog-belching motorcycles DETROIT (CNNMoney.com) -- When Americans debate the impact of fuel emissions on the environment, they usually talk about cars and trucks. But what about smaller vehicles like motorcycles, scooters, lawnmowers and ATVs? Riding a lawn tractor for just an hour spits out as much pollution you'd get from driving a car for hundreds of miles, according to former Ford Motor Co. engineer Kyle Schwulst. Report Says Heat, Not Smart Meters, Hiked Bills After Pacific Gas & Electric, the giant California utility, began installing smart meters in the state's Central Valley, the company was swamped with complaints from residents that their utility bills had increased. But an independent review of the smart meters released Thursday found that the devices were functioning properly and attributed the high charges to a heat wave last year that coincided with their installation as well as poor customer service by P.G.&.E. Reactor design poses dilemma The nuclear industry's federal regulator will face its first big decision early next year when it evaluates the design of a Korean reactor that conforms to most nations' safety standards, but was rejected by a regulator in Europe. The debate centres on a device known as a "core-catcher" that is built under the steel vessel containing the reactor core and serves as a last line of defence in a worst-case meltdown scenario. Disasters data are our only guide Nuclear industry regulators have only two sets of real-world data -- Three Mile Island and Chernobyl -- to draw on when weighing the merits of safety systems to prevent a catastrophe at nuclear power plants. Mass Extinction Threat: Earth on Verge of Huge Reset Button? Mass extinctions have served as huge reset buttons that dramatically changed the diversity of species found in oceans all over the world, according to a comprehensive study of fossil records. The findings suggest humans will live in a very different future if they drive animals to extinction, because the loss of each species can alter entire ecosystems. Some scientists have speculated that effects of humans - from hunting to climate change - are fueling another great mass extinction. A few go so far as to say we are entering a new geologic epoch, leaving the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch behind and entering the Anthropocene Epoch, marked by major changes to global temperatures and ocean chemistry, increased sediment erosion, and changes in biology that range from altered flowering times to shifts in migration patterns of birds and mammals and potential die-offs of tiny organisms that support the entire marine food chain. EPA to issue more rules in climate fight The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will roll out more regulations on greenhouse gases and other pollution to help fight climate change, but they will not be as strong as action by Congress, a senior administration official said. Climate Risks That Every Executive Should Know About We often think that climate change is something for the government to worry about -- the news is packed full of debate around government response to global warming, whether it's the climate bill, or how China is outpacing us yet again in carbon markets. But there's a more immediate risk to companies in the U.S., something that is much closer to home and independent of whatever the public sentiment happens to be on climate change. For the first time in history, executives and their companies are being held liable for activities that contribute to global warming. It's not a debate, it's already happening. New website to track climate aid, key to UN talks GENEVA (Reuters) - A website launched on Friday will help track whether rich countries are keeping a pledge to come up with $30 billion in climate aid for the poor, seen by the U.N. as a "golden key" to progress in talks on global warming. India needs to shift from coal to other sources of energy: IEA India will need investment of $4.5 trillion in the energy sector to cut carbon emissions as part of a global initiative to reduce global warming by 2050, the International Energy Agency Executive Director, Nobuo Tanaka, said here Friday. The United Nations Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change has said global emissions of carbon dioxide have to come down by 50 percent to limit the increase in average temperate to between 2 to 2.4 degrees centigrade. Ministry sets up task force to study North Pole policies TOKYO -- The Foreign Ministry said Thursday it has set up a task force to examine Japan's policies concerning the North Pole, as melting ice due to global warming opens the door to increased ship navigation and chances for resource development in the Arctic sea. The panel comprises deputy directors general of various bureaus at the ministry as the matter concerns such sectors as economy, security, environment and international law, a ministry official said. World cannot afford worsening disasters, warns UN climate change chief The world cannot afford escalating disasters of the kind recently witnessed in Pakistan and Russia, the top United Nations climate change official said today, underscoring the need for governments to take swift action to lead the world towards a low-carbon future. Tibetan nomads struggle as grasslands disappear from the roof of the world Like generations of Tibetan nomads before him, Phuntsok Dorje makes a living raising yaks and other livestock on the vast alpine grasslands that provide a thatch on the roof of the world. But in recent years the vegetation around his home, the Tibetan plateau, has been destroyed by rising temperatures, excess livestock and plagues of insects and rodents. The high-altitude meadows are rarely mentioned in discussions of global warming, but the changes to this ground have a profound impact on Tibetan politics and the world's ecological security.

Energy Bulletin (peak)

I can save the world better than you, nyah nyah!

A short history of the peak oil movement and reflections on wizards, Transition and the interstices of reason. Let us start with persona, since one goes to any prizefight to see the metaphorical battle of two created characters, embodying sides, virtues, faults.In this Corna... John Michael Greer, owner (by a whisker over Bob Waldrop) of the finest beard in Peak Oildom, Archdruid, moral descendent of Toynbee and Gibbon, considerer of declines in centuries, not weekends. No Zombies for Greer - we are Rome, and we might as well deal with it, dammit. in this Corna...Rob Hopkins, beardless founder of the Transition movement, permaculturist, endless energetic optimist and municipal leader, student of the first half of the British century, bent of reorganizing his community and the world to adapt to energy descent. If we could live without that energy once before, well, we can do it now, and let's get at it. read more

Exponentially on purpose: a century-and-a-half of ignored warnings

The peak oil debate is a case of history repeating itself: people have been ignoring warnings about exponential use of finite resources for a century and a half. No-one wants to hear the argument. Even International Energy Agency forecasts of record world oil demand, and warnings that the "era of cheap oil is over" made barely a ripple in the media. read more

Housing & urban design - Sept 3

-Americans want smaller homes, not McMansions-HafenCity: A Case Study on Future-Adaptive Urban Development-Straw Bale Model House read more

Google News

Peak oil and happy cows - BBC News

Peak oil and happy cowsBBC NewsType the phrase 'peak oil' into any popular internet search engine, and you will not be short of results to wade through. Like the fuel itself, ...

Peak Denial about Peak Oil - OpEdNews

The Market OraclePeak Denial about Peak OilOpEdNewsThe organizations that have an interest in looking farther than next week into the future have all concluded that the downside of peak oil will cause chaos ...Leaked German Military Study Warns of Peak Oil CrisisMilitary Technologies (blog)Oil politics will keep growing uglierGreenbangCrude warning for policymakersMail & Guardian OnlineNatural News.comall 9 news articles »

PM Politics Links: The economy, jobs, sharp elbows, peak oil and an attack on ... - Plain Dealer

Plain DealerPM Politics Links: The economy, jobs, sharp elbows, peak oil and an attack on ...Plain DealerView full sizePresident Barack Obama reports on the economy as the latest unemployment figures are released, Friday, Sept. 3, 2010. ...

Oilism

Get Rich With Crude Oil Trading In 2010!

Ecuador signs $1 billion loan deal with China

Oil rig explodes off La. coast

PeakOil.com

US makes bio-fuel research grants

WASHINGTON, Sept. 2, 2010 — Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced research awards under a joint DOE-USDA program aimed at improving and accelerating genetic breeding programs to create plants better suited for bioenergy production.  The $8.9 million investment is part of the Obama Administration’s broader effort to diversify the nation’s energy [...]

Guardian: Environmentalist’s Paradox

We hear lots of concerned chatter these days -- not least, here on this site – about peak oil, peak water, deforestation, resource depletion and the like, but a popular riposte offered by those doubting such concerns is something commonly referred to as the “Environmentalist’s Paradox”. The argument goes thus: “Why, despite resource depletion and the degradation of ecosystems, [...]

WSJ: Oil Price Ignores Long-Term Supply Worries

By Angus Mcdowall You could be excused for seeing a grim metaphor for the death of the oil age in the scenes of destruction visited on the U.S. Gulf coast this summer. However, production from the ocean floor is growing more quickly than from any other type of reserve and is supposed to allay concerns about 'peak [...]

Aleklett Energy Mix

Military Study Warns of a Potentially Drastic Oil Crisis

Ten days ago there was an article in the Guardian where they wrote that Peak Oil has been on the government's agenda although it does not want to discuss it. Yesterday an article was published in Spiegel Online International where they assert that the Ge rman government also has Peak Oil on its agenda, Military Study Warns of a Potentially Drastic Oil Crisis. Earlier this year there came a report from the American military and if you put this together with the fact that organizations within the OECD have been in contact with me to discuss this issue we have a clear signal that 10 years of work has begun to leave its mark. Personally I can only give one piece of advice -- you who want to plan a future 10 years in advance must nu have Peak Oil on your agenda. För 10 dagar sedan fanns det en artikel i the Guardian där man skrev om att Peak Oil fanns på regeringens agenda fastän man inte ville diskutera det. Igår kom en artikel i Spiegel online International där man hävdar att även den tyska regeringen har Peak Oil på agendan: Military Study Warns of a Potentially Drastic Oil Crisis. Tidigare i år kom det en rapport från den amerikanska armen och om man lägger ihop detta med det faktum att Organisationer inom OECD har varit i kontakt med mig och diskuterat denna problematik har vi nu en klar signal på att 10 års arbete nu börjar ge avtryck. Personligen kan jag bara ge ett råd, ni som vill planera en framtid 10 år från nu måste ha Peak Oil med på agendan.

Hubbert’s Peak, The Coal Question, and Climate Change

Professor David Rutledge from Caltech, USA, will on September 2 give the following seminar: Hubbert’s Peak, The Coal Question, and Climate Change When: September 2, time: 14:00, where: Ångströmlaboratoriet, Uppsala universitet, room 80127 Abstract: An accurate estimate of the long-term production of oil, gas, and coal would be helpful for the ongoing policy discussion on alternatives to fossil fuels and climate change. It takes a long time to develop energy infrastructure, and this means it matters whether we have burned 20% of our oil, gas, and coal, or 40%. In modeling future temperature and sea-level rise, the carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is the most important factor. The time frame for the climate response is much longer than the time frame for burning fossil fuels, and this means that the total amount burned is more important than the burn rate. Long-term oil, gas, and coal production are traditionally estimated by government geological surveys from measurements of oil and gas reservoirs and coal seams, together with an allowance for future discoveries of oil and gas. We will see that where these estimates can be tested, they tend to be too high, and that more accurate estimates can be made by curve fits to the production history. You can call 070 425 0604 if you like to have details.

Will Peak Oil influence Sweden's traffic planners? / Kommer Peak Oil att påverka Sveriges trafikplanerare?

On the Swedish Transport Administration's homepage it says: We are responsible for long term planning of systems for road, rail, sea and air traffic. We are also responsible for construction, operation and maintenance of national roads and railways. One year ago the government decided to merge all authorities concerned with traffic into the new Transport Administration. The activities that were drawn into this merger on 1 April 2010 were: • Activities of the Road Authority • Activities of the Rail Authority • Activities concerning long-term planning of infrastructure and the national interest at the Maritime Authority • Activities concerning long-term planning of infrastructure, operation and investment contributions to non-national airports and • Activities concerning model development and analysis We can state that there are few national activities that will be affected by Peak Oil to a greater extent than the Transport Administration. Just a few months after the Transport Administration began its work I was contacted by its head of strategic development who wondered whether I might come and give a presentation on Peak Oil when the Transport Administration's leadership group were to meet in August. Of course I said yes and today I have been in Borlänge to speak to them. I am very pleased that Peak Oil is already on their agenda from the start as they now gather to plan Sweden's future transport systems. We at Global Energy Systems at Uppsala University hope that this is the beginning of future collaboration and that our research can help to form Sweden's future transport systems. (Swedish) På Trafikverkets hemsida står det: Vi ansvarar för långsiktig planering av transportsystemet för vägtrafik, järnvägstrafik, sjöfart och luftfart. Vi ansvarar också för byggande, drift och underhåll av statliga vägar och järnvägar. För ett år sedan beslutade regeringen att föra samman allt som har med trafik att göra till det nya Trafikverket och de verksamheter som den 1 april 2010 fördes över var: • verksamheten vid Vägverket, • verksamheten vid Banverket, • verksamheter rörande långsiktig infrastrukturplanering och riksintressen vid Sjöfartsverket, • verksamheter rörande långsiktig infrastrukturplanering, driftbidrag och investeringsbidrag till icke statliga flygplatser samt • verksamheter rörande modellutveckling/analysverktyg vid SIKA. Vi kan konstatera att det finns få statliga verksamheter som kommer att påverkas mer av Peak Oil än Trafikverket. Redan ett par månader efter det att verket startade sin verksamhet blev jag kontaktad av chefen för strategisk utveckling som undrade om jag kunde komma och hålla ett föredrag om Peak Oil i samband med att Trafikverkets ledningsgrupp samlades i augusti. Självfallet tackade jag ja och idag måndag har jag varit i Borlänge och berättat om Peak Oil för ledningsgruppen. Det känns fantastiskt att Peak Oil redan från början finns med på agendan då man nu samlat skall planera Sveriges framtida transportsystem. Vi i Globala Energisystem vid Uppsala universitet hoppas att detta är början till ett framtida samarbete och att vår forskning kan hjälpa till att forma framtidens Svenska transportsystem.

OilWatch

Statement of Climate Justice Now! on the outcomes of COP15

for sign-on by 5 January 2010 Organisations and individuals are invited to endorse the statement visit www.climate-justice-now.org (http://www.climate-justice-now.org) Call for “system change not climate change” unites global movement Corrupt Copenhagen ‘accord’ exposes gulf between peoples demands and elite interests The highly anticipated UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen ended with a fraudulent agreement, engineered by the United States and dropped into the conference at the last moment. The "agreement" was not adopted. Instead, it was "noted" in an absurd parliamentary invention designed to accommodate the United States and permit Ban Ki-moon to utter the ridiculous pronouncement "We have a deal."

La historia de la falsas soluciones climáticas

La Historia del Mercado del Carbono http://storyofcapandtrade.org (http://storyofcapandtrade.org/) es una mirada rápida, bien fundamenta, ademas de entretenida, a la principal solución climática que está siendo discutida en Copenhage y en el Capitol Hill. La conductora Annie Leonard presenta a la gente que está en el centro de este esquema –comerciantes de energía y financieros de Wall Street-. Ahí se examinan “los demonios en los detalles” de la actual propuesta de comercio de carbono: permisos gratuitos para grandes contaminadores, falsas compensaciones y distracciones de lo que realmente es requerido para enfrentar la crisis climática. Si tu has escuchado sobre el comercio de carbono pero no estás seguro de cómo funciona (o a quién beneficia), este documental-filme es para tí. Este documental esta hecho al estilo de La historia de las cosas.

Southeast Asian Leaders - Go for Solution Not Delusion!

A Joint Statement, Copenhagen, Denmark, December 14, 2009Copenhagen - 14 December 2009: We, members of Oilwatch Southeast Asiai and Indonesian Civil Society Forum for Climate Justice (CSF) declare our common position and demands on the current climate negotiation in COP 15 UNFCCC Copenhagen. We have witnessed the lack of leadership among industrial countries to significantly cut carbon emission let alone show their responsibility to support developing countries to tackle the impacts of climate change.

Final Energy Crisis

The Spanish Anarchist Collectives; Look what we can do!

Most people would probably doubt that we could organize satisfactory communities without vast state bureaucracies and corporations. The achievements of the Spanish Anarchist workers collectives in the 1930s show what miracles ordinary people can do. We are entering severe scarcity where centralised and globalised systems will fail to provide for us and we will have to develop highly localized economies. read more

The Transition Towns Movement; its huge significance and a friendly criticism

It is not oil that sets your greatest insecurity; it is the global economy. lt doesn't need your town. It will relocate your jobs where profits are greatest. It can flip into recession overnight and dump you and billions of others into unemployment and poverty. It will only deliver to you whatever benefits trickle down from the ventures which maximise corporate profits. It loots the Third World to stock your supermarket shelves. It has condemned much of your town to idleness, in the form of unemployment and wasted time and resources that could be being devoted to meeting urgent needs there. ln the coming time of scarcity it will not look after you. The supreme need is for us to build a radically new economy within our town, and then for us to run it to meet our needs. Republished on carolynbaker.net. read more

Well done GW: It's a dirty job but someone has to do it

Political analyst, Dr Ted Trainer, takes political spectators of the world to task for their harsh judgement of President Bush's achievements. He calls Bush's detractors, "Not just uncharitable but lacking in insight about the way the world works and what has to be done to maintain our way of life." He says, "President Bush has done a great job here in very difficult circumstances, and he does not get due credit", and explains just why... read more

Plazoo

Peak Moment TV

A Natural Builder Renovates for “Social Architecture” too

Thursday, August 19, 2010. Natural builder Lydia Doleman of Flying Hammer Productions gave us plenty of stories about the urban neighborhood community that’s evolving from two adjoining homes she purchased with friends. And she gave us a tour of the cob studio and recently-completed straw bale home. When Lydia and a friend bought a Craftsman-style home in a Portland neighborhood, they renovated it  earthen wall surfaces, healthier paints and more. Following permacultural principles, Lydia wanted to keep as many resources on site as possible, like rainwater catchment to keep water in the land rather than diverted into the city sewer system. When she built the cob (clay and straw) studio, she included a living roof so the land taken by the studio is “returned” to growing plants. Some years ago when an adjoining rental house became available, she contacted the owner and purchased it. She took the fence down between the parcels, and put glass french doors on both house sides facing into the central commons. This “social architecture” was an invitation for residents to interact with one another, evolving into a community that now houses about a dozen people in three homes (see “Fences Down: Creating Community in the City“). Lydia gave us a tour of the recently-completed third home. It’s architecturally modeled like the others yet far more resource efficient. It has a 500 square foot ground floor with a single kitchen, dining, living room plus an extra room, and 300 square feet in the second story with two bedrooms and bath. The structure is framed like a traditional “stick built” home but boasts thick straw bale insulation, hydroponic heating in the floors, natural cob wall finishes, salvaged wood where possible, and custom-built windows. A metal roof feeds rainwater collectors, and it too has a living roof ready for planting. Solar hot water will be joined by solar electricity soon. She also gave us a tour of the charming small cob studio. But I’m going to let you wait see it in the video! Building structures, social structures. Starting with what’s already in place and then…enhancing it, bending it towards shared living, a lighter footprint, sustainability. (www.theflyinghammer.com).

Fresh Homemade from a Bakery CSA

The enticing fragrance of fresh yeasty bread beckoned us into Jen Ownbey’s converted-garage bakeshop in Olympia, Washington. A huge variety of loaves graced her shelves: yeast breads, regular and gluten-free; quick breads with mixtures of grains; sweet treats. While we chatted, she whipped up a batch of quick bread made with locally-grown zucchini -- without using a recipe! As she deftly cracked eggs together and poured them into the mix, Jen said that shareholders in her Eight Arms Bakery CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) get a yeast and quick bread each week plus baked sweet treats. She also brings her fresh baked goods to the local growers markets and natural foods stores. We happily came away with a loaf of teff and cornmeal bread with molasses and caraway. Jen may not have eight arms, but given the prodigious amount and variety she bakes each week, it sure seems like it! (www.8armsbakery.com)

Broadening the Conversation about Childbirth

A conversation with three co-editors of Squat Birth Journal wasn’t on my original taping schedule. But when they contacted me, I thought it’d be a great topic for a show. Natural child birth, birthing without interventions and drugs, is about as sustainable an alternative (to the medical system) as it gets. I had a dynamic and fascinating conversation with Jaydee Sperry (independent midwife), Meghan Guthrie (student midwife), and Danny Scar (aspiring midwife) (photo, right to left). Squat’s byline is “An Anarchist Birth Journal.” The people in the radical birth movement want to broaden the the conversation about options for families giving birth. We conversed about “medicalized” midwives working within the medical system; midwives and doulas (who support the mother during labor) outside the medical system; the ability of midwives to facilitate higher-risk births like breech or twins; health insurance limitations and why laws regarding midwifery need changing; educational efforts so families know their options for birth; birthing within a caring community. Returning to natural childbirth seems an essential element for sustainable living. After all, we’re all here because the vast majority of our foremothers practiced natural childbirth, most likely with midwives and within the embrace of community. (squatbirthjournal.blogspot.com).

Twitter

RT @stunetii: RT @BuryCoal Europe's worrisome dependence on Russian fossil fuels: http://burycoal.com/blog/?p=166 #ClimateChange #PeakOil

RT @stunetii: RT @BuryCoal Europe's worrisome dependence on Russian fossil fuels: http://burycoal.com/blog/?p=166 #ClimateChange #PeakOil

RT @LionelBadal: #IEA Chief-Economist on #peakoil and critics of his World Energy Outlook http://bbc.in/cyYCCv (from min. 12) #oil

RT @LionelBadal: #IEA Chief-Economist on #peakoil and critics of his World Energy Outlook http://bbc.in/cyYCCv (from min. 12) #oil

RT @BuryCoal Europe's worrisome dependence on Russian fossil fuels: http://burycoal.com/blog/?p=166 #ClimateChange #PeakOil

RT @BuryCoal Europe's worrisome dependence on Russian fossil fuels: http://burycoal.com/blog/?p=166 #ClimateChange #PeakOil

PowerSwitch

Peak oil alarm revealed by secret official talks

Speculation that government ministers are far more concerned about a future supply crunch than they have admitted has been fuelled by the revelation that they are canvassing views from industry and the scientific community about peak oil .The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is also refusing to hand over policy documents about peak oil – the point at which oil production reaches its maximum and then declines – under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act, despite releasing others in which it admits secrecy around the topic is probably not good .Read the original article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/aug/22/peak-oil-department-energy-climate-change)

UK energy minister to hold Peak Oil summit

Lord Hunt, the energy (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/energy) minister, is to meet industrialists in London tomorrow in a bid to calm mounting fears about the disruption that could follow a sudden shortage of oil (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/oil) supplies.In a significant policy shift, the government has agreed to undertake more work on whether the UK needs to take action to avoid the massive dislocation that could be caused by the early onset of peak oil – the point that marks the start of terminal decline in global oil production.Read more (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/21/peak-oil-summit)

How long before the lights go out?

Bad news for energy consumers continues to come thick and fast. Bills have more than doubled in the past six years, and could rise a further 25 per cent in the next decade according to a wide-ranging report published yesterday by OfgemRead more (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/7153724/How-long-before-the-lights-go-out.html)

Peakoil News

We have already entered peak oil,' IEA source reportedly claims

http://rawstory.com/2009/11/we-entered-peak-oil-iea-source-reportedly-claims/By Stephen C. Webster Two International Energy Agency whistleblowers have come forward with startling claims about the world's supply of crude oil, according to a report published Tuesday."We have [already] entered the 'peak oil' zone," an unnamed former IEA official told British newspaper The Guardian. "I think that the situation is really bad."A second whistleblower reportedly claimed that the IEA's current figures are inflated due to pressure from the United States and a pervasive fear that the announcement of falling oil output in the future could cause markets to respond with panic.The claims come on the same day the IEA plans to publish its annual "World Energy Outlook" report for 2009. "Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further," one of the IEA sources reportedly told the paper. "And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources."The agency reported in its 2008 World Energy Outlook that a field-by-field analysis of production trends revealed "that decline rates are likely to rise significantly in the long term, from an average of 6.7% today to 8.6% in 2030."The whistleblowers see things differently."The IEA in 2005 was predicting oil supplies could rise as high as 120m barrels a day by 2030 although it was forced to reduce this gradually to 116m and then 105m last year," one of the sources claimed. "The 120m figure always was nonsense but even today's number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this."In a 2008 interview with Fatih Birol, chief economist at the IEA, Guardian environment writer George Monbiot reported that the IEA had expected peak oil output to be reached in a decade or two. "In terms of non-Opec [countries outside the big oil producers' cartel]," Birol reportedly said, "we are expecting that in three, four years' time the production of conventional oil will come to a plateau, and start to decline. In terms of the global picture, assuming that Opec will invest in a timely manner, global conventional oil can still continue, but we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau as well, which is, of course, not good news from a global-oil-supply point of view."The 2008 World Energy Outlook suggested peak oil would be reached in 2030.The prediction that peak oil production was approaching in 2020 was enough to "scare the pants off" Monbiot, considering the predicted implications of a global energy crunch in just over a decade. However, if the allegations by The Guardian's whistleblowers are indeed true and peak oil has been reached, dark days loom for the global economy. According to The Wall Street Journal, the agency is not expected to announce the arrival at such a dramatic conclusion. Instead, the 2009 report due out Tuesday will predict slower growth in demand for oil, the Journal reported.Reuters added: "While the Paris-based IEA has repeatedly warned that a lack of investment could lead to a strain on supply, it maintains that there is enough oil in the ground."

The End Of Fossil Fuel

forbes.com By Chris Nelder, 07.24.09, 03:00 PM EDT Prepare for a radically different lifestyle as global crude oil production peaks and begins to decline. You will never see cheap gasoline again. You will probably never see cheap energy again. Oil, natural gas and coal are set to peak and go into decline within the next decade, and no technology can change that. Peaking is a simple concept. We generally exploit natural resources in a bell-shaped curve, with the rate of extraction increasing over time until we reach a peak and then gradually slowing down until we stop using them. Peak oil is not about "running out of oil"; it's about reaching the peak rate of oil production. It's not the size of the tank that matters, but the size of the tap. Read more about how soaring energy prices will transform our lives in our special report on $20 a Gallon. The peak is usually reached when resources become too difficult to extract, or too expensive, or they are replaced by something cheaper, better or more plentiful. Unfortunately, we have no substitutes for oil that are cheaper or better. According to the best available data, we are now at the peak rate of oil production. After over a century of continual growth, global conventional crude oil production topped out in 2005 at just over 74 million barrels per day (mbpd) and has remained at that level ever since. Read All Comments rtsUtil.addRtsBox('rateStoryP2',{source_type:"story",source_id:"2009/07/24/peak-oil-production-business-energy-nelder.html"}); The additional "oil" that brings the oft-cited world total to 84 mbpd today (down from 87 mbpd last year; according to U.S. government data) isn't conventional crude, but, rather, unconventional hydrocarbons, including natural gas liquids, "extra heavy" oil, synthetic oil made from Canadian tar sands, refinery gains, liquids produced from the conversion of coal and natural gas, and biofuels. Oil production is expected to go into terminal decline around 2012. The principal reason is that the largest and most productive fields are becoming depleted while new discoveries have been progressively smaller and of lesser quality. Discovery of new oil peaked over 40 years ago and has been declining ever since despite furious drilling and unprecedentedly high prices. When it begins to decline, rate of crude production is projected to fall at 5%, or over four mbpd, per year--roughly equivalent to losing the entire production of Latin America or Europe every year. The decline rate will likely accelerate to over 10% per year by 2030. The Paris-based International Energy Agency estimates that the world would need to add the equivalent of six new Saudi Arabias by 2030 in order to meet declining production and growing demand. Obviously, there aren't another six Saudi Arabias waiting to be discovered, and unconventional liquid fuels simply cannot fill such a yawning gap. Natural gas is likewise expected to peak some time around 2010-2020, and coal around 2020-2030. Oil, natural gas and coal together provide 86% of the world's primary energy. By the end of this century, nearly all of the economically recoverable fossil fuels will be gone. From now until then, what remains will be rationed by price. There will be shortages. Renewable energy--solar, wind, geothermal--currently makes up less than 2% of the world's primary energy supply, and although growing very rapidly, it is not on course to fill the fossil fuel gap, either. As fossil fuels peak and then decline, the world's economies will be forced for the first time to live within a shrinking, not expanding, energy budget. They will adapt to this new reality by repeating the cycle we saw over the last 18 months: commodity price spikes, leading to economic destruction, leading to supply destruction, leading back to price spikes. Only in recessionary periods, like now, will there be excess supply. How this will affect the global economy, and our lifestyles, cannot be overstated. Former chief economist for Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce World Markets, Jeff Rubin, and oil investment banker Matthew Simmons have concluded that it means no less than the end of globalization. Americans, who constitute 4% of the world population but consume 25% of its energy, will have radically different lifestyles. Production of everything will have to be re-localized. Instead of our food traveling an average 1,500 miles before it reaches us, it will have to come from nearby and use organic methods instead of requiring 10 calories of fossil fuel inputs for every calorie of food we eat. Rather than shipping ore to China and shipping it back to the U.S. as steel, we'll need to revive our domestic steel industry. "Bedroom communities" will die and ideally be reborn as fully functional independent communities. It means the end of long commutes. The coming energy shortage is the most serious crisis the world has ever faced, but it could have a very positive outcome. In theory, the Earth's wind, solar, geothermal and marine resources could each provide more than the total energy the world consumes every day, if we had the ability to harvest them. As fossil fuel prices rise, the price of renewably generated electricity will continue to fall. If we are wise and lucky, we will rapidly improve the efficiency of our built environment, deploy renewable capacity and convert to an all-electric infrastructure that runs on it. Fortunately, political momentum is now leaning strongly in this direction. If we move fast to re-localize production and proceed with the renewable revolution, we could end the 21st century with a largely carbon-free economy, putting an end to climate change and averting resource wars. We would have healthier food and a safer, more resilient and equitable world. Chris Nelder is the author of Profit from the Peak--The End of Oil and the Greatest Investment Event of the Century and the coauthor of Investing in Renewable Energy. He blogs on GetRealList.

'$20 Per Gallon' by Christopher Steiner

Los Angeles TimesChristopher Steiner looks ahead and projects, $2 at a time, how rising gasoline prices will transform civilization.By Matthew DeBordAmazon.com - $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the BetterDuring the summer of 2008, Americans found out just how much was too much to pay for gas. On July 11, a barrel of oil hit $147.27, which translated into $4.11 for a gallon of regular gas at the pump -- the highest price ever reached in the U.S. And that was just the average. In some places, the price got close to $5 a gallon. It was the Summer of Pain.Many people who'd never heard of "peak oil," or who'd been trading in one SUV for another, or who'd scoffed at the idea that Americans would ever drive less, suddenly learned that when the price of a finite commodity spikes, even cherished habits change. And it's not just about driving: Our entire American way of life, in fact much of the global economy, has been built over decades on cheap oil: Seafood and plastic toys from China can flow freely around the world. The price of bread and milk stays low. Airlines can engage in price wars.But when the price of oil rises dramatically, inflation can kick in, scarcity can become the order of the day, freeways empty, General Motors and Chrysler slide into bankruptcy, and the American way of life grinds to a halt. Of course, after the price of oil crested in 2008, it quickly collapsed, leading some observers to speculate that the Summer of Pain was a blip on the radar.But for the first six months of this year, the price was steadily rising. Though it has stabilized and even fallen in recent weeks, it may begin a slow, undulant march until gas literally costs too much for anyone.This is the altered state of petroleum consciousness that Christopher Steiner, a trained engineer and writer for Forbes, envisions. And it's happening quickly, he points out. "As the middle class continues to explode in China, India, and scores of other spots circling the earth, hundreds of millions of additional cars will hit the roads," he writes. Many of those cars will be like the $2,200 Tata Nano, a "people's car" created for Indian consumers who've been riding bicycles and motor scooters for generations. "People want what Americans have had for decades: easy cars and an easy life. These people will get what they want, but in the process they will catalyze a global economic reformation on a scale never seen. . . . " Even the tattered remnants of the Detroit Big Three want a piece of this market: As General Motors left bankruptcy at home, it was selling more cars than ever in China.Steiner has adopted a nicely readable structure for the book. Starting at $4 a gallon, each chapter tracks what will happen when gas hits a particular price, escalating by $2 until he gets to $20. He visits an airplane graveyard in order to explain how $8-a-gallon gas will crush the airline industry. At $14, he checks out an abandoned Wal-Mart "ghost box" and imagines a grim end to the car-dominated exurb. "Stores will return to the downtowns of yore as small towns' populations . . . return to the small-town infrastructures that their grandparents and great-grandparents built."By $18 a gallon, high-speed railroads serve our travel needs, and by $20 a gallon, we just can't do oil anymore. And like a lot of people who've studied our post-oil energy options, he comes down on the side of nuclear. Eventually, he's replaced transatlantic flights with leisurely ocean passages akin to the grand liners of yesteryear. Except these new Queen Marys will run on nuclear reactors. Personal cars will be a thing of the past. Citizens of the future will wonder why we ever thought we needed them.By now, you may have noticed a great bifurcation here, typical of newbies to the study of spiking oil prices. We Americans will find our existence irrevocably altered to the point where we are forced to inhabit a downmarket green fantasy, harvesting power from wind and ocean currents, breaking our addiction to automobiles and generally living with less. Meanwhile, the developing world will have become the new first world, with a middle class with disposable income that Americans lack filling China, India and other rapidly growing countries with roads, cars and petroleum products. At least until all the oil runs out and they, too, must convert to lives of noble deprivation.Some of Steiner's speculations will happen. In particular, rising global energy demand could have a disastrous impact on food cultivation, which at the industrial scale needed to feed a populous planet requires fertilizers synthesized from natural gas. Nuclear power will be an obvious alternative-energy choice when gas settles into double-digit per gallon prices.Personal mobility could be another story, however, and here Steiner gets into tricky territory when he latches onto start-up electric car companies and gee-whiz mobility providers. In fact, good old internal-combustion engines running on gas may be with us for much longer than he thinks. Even $10 per gallon gas would be acceptable if efficient gas and hybrid engines can achieve significantly higher mileage, which is technologically feasible. Widespread electrification of transportation will come, but we could have to wait until the middle of the century, or even longer. The romance of the personal automobile won't fade so fast in the U.S., especially if it increases its hold elsewhere.There's also a glaring omission in "$20 Per Gallon" that should be addressed. Much of the ground that Steiner covers, with a certain boyish, gearhead utopianism, was traversed in much more apocalyptic fashion by James Howard Kunstler in his 2005 book, "The Long Emergency." Kunstler's arguments, which are actually more ecological than economic, are well known and widely debated. So it seems remarkable that Steiner, who comes to many of the same conclusions, fails to acknowledge a book that's been around for four years and actually anticipated the 2008 gas mini-crisis. "$20 Per Gallon" also reads at times as if it were hurriedly written. Still, Steiner has served up a terrific speculative primer on a future of much pricier energy and all that it may entail.DeBord writes the Shifting Gears blog for Slate's the Big Money and has written widely on the automobile industry and the future of mobility.

Early Warning

SIP Home Embodied Emissions

In this post, I continue looking at the simple whole house embodied carbon emission model I studied here for a conventional home, and here for a straw bale home. Today I'm looking at what happens if we use SIPs - structural insulated panels - as the wall system. SIPs are large structural panels consisting of two skins of oriented strand board, plywood, or similar, bonded to either side of a thick layer of rigid foam (polystyrene, polyurethane or similar). SIPs are probably the leading technology for building super-insulated houses, and there are dozens of manufacturors in the United States producing them.In particular, I assume that to get thermal performance comparable to a straw bale building we need to use a 10" SIP, containing about 8" of rigid insulation, giving about an R-40 wall once the insulation has aged a decade or so.(Also, I note that in response to this comment by Jim Camasto, I added 2" of rigid foam insulation under slab and outside basement walls to the model for all three houses. That added about half a tonne of embodied carbon emissions in each case).Here are the embodied and sequestered carbon emissions for the SIP house:Comparing this to the conventional home:Basically, the SIPs make modest increases in both the embodied carbon emissions and the sequestered carbon (essentially because the extra skin of OSB contains more material than the studs in the conventional home, as well as the additional insulation).Of course, if the houses is heated/cooled with carbon based energy, the emissions saved through the life of the home, versus the conventional home, will dwarf these embodied/sequestered differences.Comparing again the straw bale home:the main environmental advantage of straw bale from this perspective is the sequestration. In particular, if the operational energy of the house is to come entirely from renewables, so there will be no operational carbon emissions, then straw bale offers the possibility of having the house carbon negative on a embodied basis as well as on an operational basis.There are of course a number of other considerations:The aesthetics of straw bale are quite different, with thick walls with slightly wavy surfaces, versus the more conventional rectilinear appearance of SIP walls.SIPS are much more widely available and familiar to architects, contractors, banks, and building officials - straw bale is still a bit fringe and is often done with significant amounts of owner labor.  A SIP building is probably lower risk.SIPs probably present larger issues with offgassing of toxics into the interior space.Straw bale walls probably present larger maintenance issues, especially in cold wet climates (though certainly it can be done).Personally, after this exercise, I still want a straw bale house :-)

Straw Bale Model House

Today, I continue yesterday's project of exploring the carbon implications of various housing technologies.  In particular, I consider the exact same home, except with infill straw bale walls.  The exterior size of the home has been increased slightly in order to keep the interior sizes of the rooms constant.  The wall detail is assumed to be stick framing with bales notched to infill between, and with 1" of lime plaster on both sides of the wall.ICE doesn't have values for the density or embodied carbon emissions in straw bales.  I found the density of straw bales as 7.6lb/cu. ft here.  I take the embodied energy of straw from here as .24 MJ/kg, which corresponds to 6.59 ml diesel/kg straw, which, with a density of diesel as 0.832 kg/l, and an average formula of C12H23 corresponds to an embodied carbon emissions content of 0.0047 (extraordinarily low).  Meanwhile, I take the sequestered carbon content to be the same as my estimate of softwood, ie 34% by weight (at 15% moisture content).That gives this for the overall embodied carbon emissions and sequestered carbon in the home:That can be compared to yesterday's numbers for a conventional technology home (here shown on the same y-axis scale as the straw bale one):The embodied carbon emissions barely changed: although straw is a very low embodied energy material, lime plaster is not, and we needed to increase the size of roof and foundation to allow for the thicker walls (remember the model 1.0 house has a full poured concrete basement).  Thus the big gain, and it is big, is in the sequestered carbon in the bales: the overall sequestered carbon is now substantially more than the embodied carbon emissions in the house.I'll make one controversial point here about house size: if you believe sequestering carbon from agricultural wastes in buildings is a good thing, then smaller may not be better!Of course, the environmental benefit will come more from the lowered heat usage of the home than the embodied energy upfront.  But straw-bale is not the only way of achieving that, so the next post in this series will look at using foam-insulation based super structural-insulated-panels (SIPs).Finally, if you'd like to look for my errors, here are the details (units as per yesterday).  Again, remember that embodied carbon emissions are uncertain to a few tens of percent, so these calculations can never be highly precise.Note: an early version of this post, which was only up for a few minutes, had a units error in the density of straw bale which caused the carbon sequestration to be overstated. It has been fixed.

Embodied vs Sequestered Carbon in a Model Conventional House

In this post, I try to take a look at the amount of embodied carbon emissions, as well as the captured carbon in lumber etc, for a an entire house, as well as a very quick comparison of the operating carbon emission to the embodied carbon emissions.These are somewhat notional calculations for a simplified house.  Partly, this is because as soon as we try to be very accurate, we would have to start to get very specific to a particular site and house design, and set of building codes, and the increased accuracy about that particular house wouldn't generalize.  And other-partly, it's because it's too much work for a blog post to try to track down the embodied energy of the door-handles.  Finally, embodied carbon emissions in building materials are sufficiently variable and uncertain that there isn't any point in trying to be super-precise about anything else. So here, I just confine myself to the main structure of a simplified house, built in a somewhat generic North American style.  Still, I think I've been comprehensive enough to capture the main components of the house.This post will consider a reference house using fairly conventional construction techniques.  Then in future posts I can use the same spreadsheet to consider variations.  Commenters should feel free to chime in with corrections.The assumptions for this particular model house are as follows:45'x29' internal dimensions of the house, with two stories above ground.Full basement, with eight foot high, 12" thick poured concrete walls on a 2'x1' footing, and with a 4" thick basement slab2x6 walls, 24" centers, with R-18 fiberglass insulation in the cavity, drywall on the inside, 3/4" OSB sheathing plus 1" of rigid foam insulation (R-5) and 1/2" clapboards on the outside.Partition walls of 2x4 plus drywall on either side that run fully across the middle of the house in both directions (essentially cutting each floor, and the basement, into four equal size rectangular rooms - obviously this is particularly simplistic floor plan, but stands as a proxy for all the infinite variations of real floor plans).Floors with 2"x10" joists, plus 3/4" OSB subfloors and 1/2" hardwood flooring.2"x10" rafters, with R30 insulation between them.Asphalt shingles, on the 8:12 pitch roof gable end roof, with an 2' all round overhang.So the house has 2600 sq ft, plus an unheated basement and undeveloped attic.Some things that are currently neglected:Furnishings and appliancesWindows are assumed to be similar in embodied emissions to the wall that would be there without themEmissions associated with construction professionals traveling to the site (don't fly in an architect from the other side of the country repeatedly!)My embodied carbon numbers come from ICE, as do the material densities.  Captured carbon in lumber components are calculated based on the assumption that the wood has 15% moisture content and the dry portion is of chemical composition CH2O.  It should be realized that embodied carbon emissions vary widely according to the specifics of where and when the calculation was done.  So these numbers should be viewed as having uncertainties of a few tens of percent.In particular, the embodied energy in lumber is dominated by transportation energy, so it's tremendously advantageous to source lumber close to the house to reduce its embodied energy.Also, I break out the sequestered carbon in the lumber separately, since it's controversial whether or not you should take credit for it or not.  Traditionally, I think a lot of environmentalists viewed cutting down trees to put the lumber in houses as basically raping the earth and bad per se.  I guess I would tend to concur if the lumber in question was coming from the remaining old growth redwoods or virgin tropical forests (complete with hunter-gatherer inhabitants).However, from the standpoint that climate change is the biggest overarching threat to all ecosystems everywhere, it seems to me that sequestering carbon in tolerably managed secondary forests and then putting it into buildings for an extended period (the longer the better) is basically a good thing.  It beats burning the wood and putting the carbon immediately back into the atmosphere anyway.Given the above, the overall embodied carbon emissions and sequestered carbon for "v1.0" of my model looks as follows:As you can see, the sequestered carbon in the conventional house offsets a sizeable fraction of the embodied emissions.  (In my view, especially in my region where trees are growing like weeds, the right column is basically "good" and can be viewed as offsetting the "bad" in the left column).   Indeed, if one were to a) skip the basement, and b) locally source the lumber, you could probably have a conventional house that sequestered more carbon than had been emitted to manufacture the materials.As several commenters pointed out in earlier posts, these numbers are small compared to what the house will likely use during its life.  If we take this graph:for average direct residential energy use, which comes from this post, we can see that the average household uses 100 million btu per year, which probably comes to carbon emissions of around 2.5 tonnes/year - again with an uncertainty of a few tens of percent depending on the mix of fuels etc.  So amortized over the 30-300 year life of building components, the embodied or sequestered emissions will only be a few percent of the total used.Still, they are probably particularly important right now, as the sooner they go into the atmosphere (or come out of the atmosphere), the longer they will have to influence the climate during the critical twenty-first century.Finally, for anyone who wants to double-check the details, here they are: dimensions in feet, densities in kg/cubic feet, and emission/sequestration coefficients in kg carbon/kg material, and total emissions in tonnes of C.  Click to get a version big enough to read.

Associated Content

25 Words -- Peak Oil Theory

Peak oil assumes we're on a downward slope and oil will run out. This After Green thought suggests oil is ruinous no matter what the theory is.Contributor: Stephen C. RosePublished: Jul 17, 2010

Peak Oil

An explanation of Peak Oil from a former Oil Industry Executive.Contributor: D NelsonPublished: Jul 16, 2010

Aviation After Peak Oil: is There a Future?

Aviation is consuming jet fuel in record quantities. We are very near peak oil. The impending conflict is truly sobering. Does aviation have a realistic plan? Can biofuels rescue the industry from total collapse?Contributor: Dave JacksonPublished: May 27, 2010

GetREALlist

A Peak Oil Reference

I have been engaged in some non-energy related projects of late, so I haven’t been writing. But I realized that I have been remiss in not alerting my readers to a Peak Oil Reference section that I authored recently for ASPO-USA.  Despite the volumes of material that have been written on peak oil, there still did not exist (to the best of my knowledge, anyway) a single online reference that presents this very complex topic in a form that’s both accessible to newbies, and that links to the deeper data and theory. So I built one, on contract with ASPO-USA, based on some of their existing material and my old “Peak Oil Media Guide” from 2008. It’s still a fairly skeletal first draft, comprising only 16 web pages, but hopefully it will grow, and serve as a useful guide to the public, the media, and others. It is located here: Peak Oil Reference I invite feedback and suggestions for future revisions.

Video chat with Howard Lindzon on energy and population

Yesterday I had another web video chat with StockTwits founder Howard Lindzon on the future of energy and its implications for global population, plus related subjects. View the video (32 minutes) below the fold. (If you are having trouble viewing the video, click here.)

Interview with Financial Sense 7-24-10

I appeared on the Financial Sense with Jim Pupalava program today to discuss the shifting of oil supply and demand to the developing world and the diminishing influence of the international oil companies; the “energy suicide” of shutting down offshore oil drilling; the long-term production losses due to deepwater drilling rigs leaving the Gulf of Mexico; the slim hopes of new production from tar sands, Saudi Arabia and Iraq; and the urgent need to begin energy transition. You can download the show (1 hour) here: RealPlayer WinAmp Windows Media MP3 My segment begins at 47:04.

The Telegraph: Oil and Gas

BP spill costs still $90m a day after oil leak sealed

BP's Gulf of Mexico oil spill is still costing the oil giant $90m (£58m) a day, despite the fact that the leak was stopped a month ago.

White House Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs on oil platform explosion

An oil platform explosion off the Louisiana coast triggered fears of a repeat of the BP Deep Horizon oil spill.

BP oil spill costs rise to $8bn

BP said the cost of the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill has risen to $8bn (£5.2bn).

Mobjectivist

Tasseography

Oil Watch MonthlyBecause of the magnified nature of the production scale I find it interesting to place the data on the real scale, which shows the zeros and the full temporal range. See the short black segment in the following figure, which signifies the range reported on TOD. I don't really understand this infatuation with what I consider noise riding on top of the more important overall scaled profile. Readers must feel a need to see this magnified view which I don't quite grasp.Is it because people have become accustomed to using the information for futures trading or anticipating the stock market? I presume that every little glitch provides a chance to make some money.Or do we suffer from climate change envy where temperature trends get studied to death? That works in a different context because temperatures normally occupy a narrow range and the important signal can get buried in the measurement noise. Or do people want to anticipate seeing that sudden, precipitous drop that will signal us going over the cliff?More likely the answer is that we continue to plot the magnified view because we can and it gives us a strawman to argue back and forth over. The term tasseography describes this behavior.Noise can tell us something but it to first-order it really only tells us what we already know. The fewer the number of independent measurements or actors in the market, the greater the noise and fluctuations.

GOM Maximum Production Rate and Macondo

I did some analysis based on Berman's post from a few days ago:(Estimated Oil Flow Rates From the BP Mississippi Canyon Block 252 "Macondo" Well)I think he messed up the statistics because of his use of a truncated data set from the MMS and the log-normal distribution he used.I wasn't sure exactly how he got his data but I essentially had to screen scrape the data off of about 18 PDF files giving the Maximum Production Rate (MPR) going back to 1975: http://www.gomr.mms.gov/homepg/pubinfo/repcat/product/MPR.htmlI plotted the results histogram against a model of dispersive aggregation for reservoir sizes. The maximum rate is then a simple proportional draw-down from the reservoir size. Bigger reservoirs have a higher rate and smaller reservoirs have a smaller rate -- nothing to argue about here as it is a pretty safe approximation. The way you read this histogram is that the flat regions have the highest frequency.The integrated underneath the two curves is equal and about 16.5 million barrels per day peak. Don't confuse this with any rate attainable from the GOM; it is high because it sums up the peaks from a span of years. The median value is 200 barrels per day.The interesting point in the curve is that the model predicts a higher peak rate for the largest reservoirs, the curve goes off the graph to above 400,000 barrels per day. Now, I would think that the operators would never try to have that throughput from a single well. So what do they do? Of course they split it into several wells to extract the maximum amount from that reservoir and essentially throttle that from an individual well.Since the total amount is conserved between the two curves, the bulge that you see in the data is the extra wells drilled to make up for the excess. My model is totally based on the principle of Maximum Entropy applied to reservoir sizing, and the reordering of the rank histogram is caused by artificial constraints set by human intervention. Notice that all the small reservoirs effectively require no throttling.The point of this comment is that working wells are likely throttled but the Macondo could conceivably be higher than the maximum of 50,000 barrels per day that Berman suggested. The operators have no way of throttling it until the relief wells are put in place. Of course this kind of throughput is very rare, as at the most a couple of dozen out of 10,000 reservoirs will get this big and generate this potential, but this is the way that nature operates, a big fat-tail effect.

Petroleum Engineering

With all the discussion on the Gulf Oil disaster going on, lots of petroleum engineers and others from the oil industry have pitched in with their opinions. In which case we can see exactly what they think of their profession.One commenter, an authority on reservoir engineering apparently had this to say about Peak Oil:We understand how our business works, certainly. Guys like us, (those IN THE KNOW) have been declaring the end of oil since at least 1886. In Pittsburgh to be specific. Can't say we didn't give the rest of you noobs plenty of warning.So let me understand this statement. Oil industry types apparently have always known that the end of oil would occur since day one. I wonder why no one thought to just ask them? How did we miss that one?This same fellow has huge problems with my analysis, because he thinks that what I do amounts to "curve fitting".I mean seriously, who else would confuse curve fitting with knowledge?In truth, most of the forecasters who point to continually increasing oil production well into the future base their projections on very little real knowledge. They actually practice curve fitting, i.e. fitting a curve to the production level that we need, because they have no other justification for a realistic outlook.Bayesian analysis works by using past knowledge to predict future outcomes. We have so much knowledge about previous discoveries, reserve growth mechanisms, and extraction rates that our ability to predict should work very effectively ... if we would just start universally using this kind of approach. The other benefit is that the analysis keeps on getting better and better with time due to the Bayesian updating process. The mathematician Laplace first applied this powerful mode of probabilistic reasoning in the late 1700's to real problems, but we still have holdouts in various disciplines. To top it off, if you have a real model underneath the knowledge, it makes the forecasting that much more powerful.Let them get through diffy-q, I suppose the only other gang besides engineers forced through that one are the more mathematically inclined....and they are mostly jealous because their theoretical skills don't translate into income very well. Common knowledge in college that students that went into geology, civil, and petroleum engineering didn't want to get stick in a desk job. Lots of them could not imagine being sedentary for 8 hours a day.

PeakOil Task Force

Oil fuels UK producer prices rise

A BBC news online article looks at oil prices and a rise in the price of goods. “The prices of goods leaving UK factories rose at their fastest rate for 13 months in January, fuelled by a jump in the cost of oil, figures show.” Read the full article.

Peak demand, going mainstream

The FT Energy Source blog reviews comments by BP chief executive Tony Hayward. Read the full article.

Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure, says whistleblower

Watchdog’s estimates of reserves inflated says top official By Terry Macalister Guardian.co.uk, Monday 9 November 2009 21.30 GMT The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying. The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves. The allegations raise serious questions about the accuracy of the organisation’s latest World Energy Outlook on oil demand and supply to be published tomorrow -- which is used by the British and many other governments to help guide their wider energy and climate change policies. In particular they question the prediction in the last World Economic Outlook, believed to be repeated again this year, that oil production can be raised from its current level of 83m barrels a day to 105m barrels. External critics have frequently argued that this cannot be substantiated by firm evidence and say the world has already passed its peak in oil production. Now the “peak oil” theory is gaining support at the heart of the global energy establishment. “The IEA in 2005 was predicting oil supplies could rise as high as 120m barrels a day by 2030 although it was forced to reduce this gradually to 116m and then 105m last year,” said the IEA source, who was unwilling to be identified for fear of reprisals inside the industry. “The 120m figure always was nonsense but even today’s number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this. Read the rest of the story on the Guardian website

Peak Energy

Transition Culture

Voices of the Transition: a trailer

Here’s a short treat for a Friday afternoon, a good way to sign off for the week, a trailer for a film being made by Milpa Films called ‘Voices of the Transition’.  Looks like it is going to be rather good…. Here’s what Nils Augilar of Milpa Films told us about the production: “it is totally independent, non commercial, passion driven and collective (as far as it is possible to involve different actors in the production process). We managed to get grants from different foundations (EU, France, Switzerland), which permits us to operate very freely, neither bound to structures, nor to political or economical doctrines… Also, our goal is to use very diverse channels to promote the permacultural, agroecologial and TT propositions showcased in the movie: we would like to organize debates in schools (very important), as well as public open air projections, presentations on documentary festivals, and partly a free internet diffusion. A DVD is also going to be edited in 4 different languages (german, english, spanish, french), which will permit to show it in different other european countries”.  They are now looking for some additional funding in order to finish the film off … perhaps you might be able to help?

An August Round-up of What's Happening out in the World of Transition (with loads of videos!)

Two months’ worth of round up in quick succession… normal service will be resumed next month.  So, let’s start this roundup in Europe,  with an interview with Ellen Bermann of Transition Italia, sat on a terrazza somewhere with a rather nice view (understanding Italian an advantage…). Transition in Germany is going on well, with another successful training and a further one coming up on 9 October in Bielefeld, so if you're interested do get in touch with them. There are also lots of new registered users for their German-speaking Transition Network, as well as meetings with key players in German peak oil organisations, and increasing interest from the media as more articles appear in German publications. And congratulations to TT Bielefeld as they celebrate their first year! Thanks to Gerd for this update.  Here is a film of him giving a presentation about Transition (understanding German will help considerably.)…. Down to New Zealand and Australia, TT Invercargill will be holding a Spring Festival in September, which will bring people, organisations and businesses together that are working on sustainability and environmental issues so they can be show-cased and celebrated, so get involved if you're down that way. TTs in Northland, where unemployment rates are higher than elsewhere in New Zealand, will be holding two community-led job summits to discuss ways of creating new jobs and rebuilding local economies. This is a wonderful idea and hope it will be very successful… There are celebrations as Australia gains new TTs in Transition Yarra and TT Wallan! So if you live locally, try to get along and join. TT Cambridge is planning a World Café workshop where they'll be developing a shared vision for their community, and also form working groups for further action. They'll also be seeking commitment to become an official group in the coming months. In the UK there's an offer to learn new skills in eco-building in return for your labour… sounds like a great opportunity to learn new useful skills. And more skills sharing as Transition Worcester organises a series of 2 hour bicycle maintenance courses throughout August and September. Portabello's TT, PEDAL, will be participating in a Community Energy Conference to speak about Community Energy Possibilities. They're well placed to talk on this subject as they've just been awarded a large grant for their community energy project. It should be a very worthwhile day. PEDAL is also celebrating Portobello's very first organic market! TT Alness is helping its local community save energy, reduce its carbon footprint and save money by offering free home energy checks. Here's a call to get Transition Shetland started, so if you're up that way then please get involved! And if you can, go to visit TT Linlithgow and join their mini Transition gathering and harvest celebration. They're very keen to meet other TTs around Scotland and share ideas and activities. The soon-to-be-official Transition Saltash, together with Saltash Environmental Action Group, will be holding a Transition Fortnight of festivalling, freebooting (not the piracy kind) and doubtless some feasting. They were awarded a grant of £3250 by the town council for their green festival, so congratulations T Saltash! And then they'll also hold their Unleashing -- very exciting -- so try to get along and celebrate with them. More festivities as T Finsbury Park organises its 'Well Oiled Festival' focusing on communicating the Peak Oil message, as well as celebrating their existing relocalisation activities. TT Bellinge and Orrell have a wonderful download called '12 things you can do to move towards a lower energy lifestyle'. It's great…have a look! TT Kingston has launched its own food co-op called 'From the Ground Up', which delivers organic fruit and vegetables each week together with a selection of other goodies…right to your door. If you live close-by, then make the most of it! TT Louth is busily creating community food gardens (see left) and is asking anyone living locally to volunteer their time, and there are some lovely pics of a garden that's already producing food. TT Wandsworth also has a community garden, designed and created in partnership with Wandsworth Council and has just been launched. Congratulations! Maps are wonderful things! So here is an explanation of how to make a fruit map of your town on googlemaps…fantastic! And here's one that was made earlier…Thank you TT Brixton for getting this started. And now for a little video of T Bro Gwaun's float at the recent local carnival…. Making pedal-powered smoothies in Halesworth... TT Halesworth got people exercising on their pedal-for-your-smoothie day to help raise awareness of energy use (see right), and there's also news of their Bike Aid Scheme which distributes emergency repair kits around the town. TT Horncastle have lots of exciting events going on including a nature trail for kids and, together with Horncastle Now, a chill-out day to help raise funds for solar panels in Mali. TT Stoke Newington is also being very busy with events from bike maintenance workshops to harvesting Hackney… and here's a lovely report of an urban fruit harvesting day around London… Transition Homes's community consultation event. TT Totnes held an exhibition and consultation day on the low cost low impact Transition Homes project to explain to people all about it, answer questions, and ask for feedback on possible locations. TT Tooting together with the Energy Saving Trust is organising a free training day so you can learn how to carryout basic energy audits on home and community building. And have a look at Steph's blog to see where our flip-flop-footed wanderer has got to now and whether she could be heading your way!  She was recently spotted back in Devon, co-presenting a workshop with Rob H. at the West Country Storytelling Festival… Across in the US, Dallas is celebrating as it becomes TT Dallas…welcome and congratulations! And here's Nils to chat to you about Transitioning Lake County in a little video he's called 'An Invitation to Imagine: part 1'… The New Eden Collaborative and Transition Newburyport together held a Local Flavour Community Potluck Picnic, and here's a nice commentary and some lovely pics. Transition in Colarado has been the focus of an hour-long TV show on PBS in Denver for a programme entitled Transition Cities, fascinating viewing, which you can see below… Transition Cheltenham will be hosting a local food banquet, and has also produced an on-line local food directory.  In Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, at the Victoria Region Transition initiative picnic, they built a model ecohome out of cardboard (complete with wind turbine), filmed it, and put it on YouTube…. … you can also see a great selection of photos of the picnic here.  And now to South America for a report on a well-attended weekend workshop in Chile. This is great news!  Finally, here is a repeat performance by our young American friend who closed last month’s roundup with his Spongebob piece.. here is again with some ‘Transition Town Floetry’ filmed in a back garden somewhere….

Further Reflections on ‘The Big Society’

We have a guest post today, from Jules Peck (see left), originally posted at Citizen Renaissance.com.  We have had some initial explorations of this here at Transition Culture already, but Jules offers some useful additional insights into what the Big Society agenda might mean for Transition, and vice versa.  Our thanks for allowing us to publish his piece here. Big Society – Small State. “Countering Margaret Thatcher's famous declaration, David Cameron has asserted that "there is such a thing as society". His vision for this society is based on his Big Society programme of "social action, public service reform and community empowerment… a shift from state action to social action".  His concept of the Big Society makes a distinct break, at least rhetorically, with the individualist neo-liberal model of the Thatcher era. And its success rests, to a large degree, on the abilities and energy of citizens, communities and the third sector. Citizen Renaissance Movements like Transition Towns (of which I am a great fan) would argue that they have been active in building a Big Society for years. In giving her support to the Transition Towns community initiative, Theresa May MP reinforced the party's' appeal to citizen and community-centric values saying "This is an interesting initiative aimed at getting communities to come together to think seriously about how they can at grass roots level plan for the future and start to make the changes that will be needed." And a good friend of mine, Transition Towns Chairman Peter Lipman, has also met Big Society Network Chairman Lord Wei at his request to discuss how the Government's policies and rhetoric can support Transition Towns. This is all very positive and I know that many of us involved in Transition are interested to see in what way the new Government are willing to support their work. However, it is important to ask what role Conservatives see for the state in supporting and empowering this? We know that Cameron and most Tories are ideologically anti-state. Cameron has gone on from the above to say "it's just not the same thing as the state". Their view is that the state needs to roll back and allow society to roll forwards. But this raises a number of questions. Firstly, what support will the state be willing to give citizens, communities and the third sector in their work on community? And secondly, what roles will the state play in removing neoliberal market barriers to community flourishing? The role of the state in supporting community flourishing On this first point, we have seen that the Big Society programme includes things like; reforming planning to give neighbourhoods more ability to determine the shape of their communities, powers to help communities save local facilities and services, training a new generation of community organisers and supporting the creation of neighbourhood groups, supporting the creation and expansion of mutuals, co-operatives, charities and social enterprises, and using funds from dormant bank accounts to establish a Big Society Bank, which will provide new finance for neighbourhood groups, charities, social enterprises and other nongovernmental bodies. This all sounds positive and maps well against many of the things Transition and other citizen and community groups are doing around the country already. Indeed extra powers and funds for Transition and other community groups will be welcomed. But will this come with strings attached and a demand that the Government has a say in what is specifically intended to be a grassroots deliberative and democratic movement co-created by citizens themselves? The role of the state in removing barriers to community flourishing As Green Alliance CEO Stephen Hale has said "The neo-liberal version of Conservatism that has had such a strong influence on American and British Conservative thinking over the past thirty years has proven very environmentally destructive. It has promoted 'market forces' to the detriment of communities and family life. It has tended to foster economic growth without a proper regard for the environment, and to be reluctant to intervene in imperfect markets. There are notable exceptions of course, but the dominant underlying ideology has led to irreversible environmental damage." Amongst a host of other issues for which there is no space here, such neoliberalism includes a dogmatic fear of an appropriate, facilitating role for the state. So what of the role of the state in supporting the strengthening of community? Let's take Conservatives at their word and see what they have said on this. Andrew Tyrie MP writes this "Our success will partly be measured by the extent to which we can convince the public that reining back the intrusiveness of the state under a conservative government will not lead to the atrophy of community. The state will nonetheless discharge important obligations in supporting communities, institutions and individuals, but not always from the centre." Cameron has also been clear that there is a role for the state in supporting community "we achieve progressive aims through decentralising responsibility and power to individuals, communities and civic institutions. The task of Government is to create the environment in which the social norms and institutions which enable reciprocity can flourish." Oliver Letwin agrees with this "[Personal freedoms] can indeed only be achieved through 'collective action'. They all need action from government… But much of that action has to work through family and community and social enterprise -- essential ingredients of safer streets and of the escape from poverty… Thatcher wanted to roll back the frontiers of the state. Brown wants to roll forward the frontiers of the state. Cameron wants to roll forward the frontiers of society." And so does David Willetts "[F]ree market economics, like patriotism, is not enough… the conservative tradition placed as much importance on our shared values and our sense of community as it did on the role of private property and free markets.  The task of Government is to create the environment in which the social norms and institutions which enable reciprocity can flourish." Finally, ResPublica's Philip Blond is quite clear that Compassionate Conservatism needs to repudiate neoliberalism and shift to Conservative values which are "socially conservative but sceptical of neo-liberal economics". All well and good, some of the leading players in the Government seem to be saying that there is a role for the state in empowering community flourishing. This rhetoric is all very well. But often what has come hand in hand with a neoliberal free market approach has been a strong belief in low taxation, especially for the wealthy, and in cuts in the size, nature and extent of the welfare state. Heading in the wrong direction? No one will have missed a parallel agenda of another leading player in the Government and his massive spending cuts. Economist David Blanchflower has said that Osbornes pre-election commitments to massive spending cuts, now being delivered in power "amounts to a declaration of class war". The Big Society programme has a series of policies which invoke and encourage the strengthening of community. However, it is not yet clear whether these efforts will be undermined by the spending cuts agenda which could threaten to do great damage to communities and Britain's poorest citizens. Some of the cuts threatened will have significant impacts on social justice and communities. One example includes more than 400,000 vulnerable citizens, including pensioners and victims of domestic violence, possibly being in line to lose their homes and see care entitlement scrapped if the Treasury carries out its threat to cut 40% from the £1.6bn 'Supporting People' Programme. Other likely cuts include things like Sure Start, the Future Jobs Fund, the scrapping of free school meals for 500,000 low-income families, the free swimming scheme for children and pensioners, the Future Jobs Fund, the Child Trust Fund, the freezing of child benefit, the cut in housing benefit and the VAT rise. All of these may well act to hollow society out from the centre and mean it is far less able to focus time and energy on grassroots change. A recent report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (interestingly the previous employer of Osborne's main advisor Rupert Harrison) shows clearly that the spending cuts agenda will hit the poorest in society hardest. The report concluded "Once all of the benefit cuts are considered, the tax and benefit changes announced in the emergency Budget are clearly regressive as, on average, they hit the poorest households more than those in the upper middle of the income distribution in cash, let alone percentage, terms." There are also real concerns also that a reliance on the third sector and on private companies is both lacking in accountability and likely to fall short of the gap created by cut backs in state support for communities, their infrastructures and their services. Many third sector organisations get significant proportions of their funds from local councils. As these councils are now being forced to cut up to 30% of their expenditures, this will hit the third sector's ability to deliver on Cameron's Big Society vision. Services such as after-school clubs, play schemes, domestic violence charities, rape crisis centres, parenting programmes, projects to tackle youth crime, and support schemes for isolated older people are all threatened by these cuts. With other donations falling as a result of the recession and this to continue to worsen with the VAT rise in January; many third sector organisations are very worried. Sir Stuart Etherington, chief executive of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, has said "Small scale community activity is fundamentally important to civil society. It depends on small grants, and if these are wiped out this will remove the very support structures that community groups depend on and undermine the big society." Likewise Stephen Bubb, CEO of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations, said the cuts meant the government would struggle to "close the gap between its heady rhetoric and current reality. It's just like the 1980s. Charities are seen as the easy target." Stephen Cook, Editor Third Sector has echoed this saying "The mantra of 'doing more with less' will be carved on the doorway of more and more voluntary groups. In these circumstances it is increasingly important that we hear more about the big society from the government than pious rhetoric and the gnomic utterances of Lord Wei." And Toby Blume, CEO of UrbanForum has said "The credibility of the Big Society is significantly undermined by the impact of economic policy on charities and voluntary groups, as announcements of cuts to funding emerge on an almost daily basis." Minister for Civil Society, Nick Hurd MP has responded to these challenges saying "There is clearly a significant risk to the Big Society agenda," and that he will be telling other ministers to "think about the impact on the local and voluntary sector" and "make sure the state minimises the damage." Conclusion and questions for the Big Society So this raises a few questions which the Big Society really must answer. Will support for citizen/community initiatives come with Government strings attached? Or will Government recognise that a key element in the success of grassroots initiatives like Transition is that they are 'of the people and for the people'. And that they are based on participative democracy and emergent properties of citizens flourishing within their own communities. In short not things which Government should seek to influence. And most importantly of all, how will the Government ensure that the current spending cuts regime does not completely undermine all their fine talk of rolling forwards a Big Society? About the author Jules was for two years Director of David Cameron's Quality of Life Policy Group, advising the Conservative Party on wellbeing and environment issues. A committed Citizen, he has spent the past 20 years advising business, NGOs and government institutions on sustainability issues and Wellbeing. In a varied career Jules has worked in on environmental issues in Brussels at the EC, in the US and EU in marketing and public affairs roles with a number of companies and internationally for WWF as a Global Policy Adviser. Jules's recent publications include: Blueprint for a Green Economy (2007), Let Them Eat Cake (2006), Hope and Glory (2008).

Transition Voice

Postcarbon Cities

Getting Out From Behind the Wheel

The New York Times' "Green Inc." blog explores reactions to a previous article on the Vauban car-free development in Freiburg, Germany. Post Carbon Cities author Daniel Lerch is quoted in this article.

Small, Green and Good: The role of neglected cities in a sustainable future

Smaller cities have a distinctive and vital role to play in the work of the new century: they will be critical in the move to local agriculture and the development of renewable energy industries. Their underused or vacant industrial space and surrounding tracts of farmland make them ideal sites for sustainable land-use policies, or "smart growth." (This article quotes Post Carbon Cities author Daniel Lerch.)

Post Carbon Cities ending daily news posts

As of 10 January 2009 we are no longer collecting news articles on the Post Carbon Cities website. When we started this service two years ago, news and information on city responses to energy and climate uncertainty was hard to come by. Climate change and fossil fuel depletion have since become widely recognized concerns among local decision-makers and planners, so the time has come to shift our efforts elsewhere. Post Carbon Institute continues to do research on how local governments can best respond to and prepare for energy and climate uncertainty. Our database of local government actions will remain on the site and continue to be updated, as will our accompanying resource database of relevant resolutions and reports. If you'd like to keep following the news we find interesting, you can visit or subscribe to our feed on the bookmark-sharing site del.icio.us. Our News Archives will remain online for a few more months. Daniel Lerch, author of Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty, will continue blogging and posting articles on the Post Carbon Institute website. We hope our work at Post Carbon Institute continues to be useful to you. Please send your questions, concerns and suggestions to us using the contact form.

Community Solution

Good News from the Department of Energy

July 6, 2010 Pat Murphy, Executive Director Progress sometimes appears to be very slow in changing minds and attitudes relative to energy and CO2. Neither does it appear to follow a straight line -- rather it seems as if little is happening and then suddenly a major shift occurs. This seems true of the Department of Energy (DOE) when it comes to energy use in buildings. To those of us focused on reducing building energy consumption, it was quite a surprise -- almost a shock -- to hear about the Recovery through Retrofit Program that was announced by the White House last October. http://www.whitehouse.gov/assets/documents/Recovery_Through_Retrofit_Final_Report.pdf This is a well funded effort ($390 million) intended to make a breakthrough in energy retrofitting for existing homes. There is much talk about Green Building, Passive Houses and Super Insulated houses which lower energy consumption for new buildings; but the country is now building only about half a million new dwellings per year while the number of existing homes is near 113 million. The government understands this. The Recovery through Retrofit program is not intended merely to retrofit some buildings but rather to develop new systems approaches and techniques to do this on a mass scale. This is a competitive program so the bidders must be innovative with well thought out plans if their efforts are to be funded. The RPQ for the program required that a municipality partner with people from industry, business, educational institutes, and other interested parties to qualify for submittal. The program allowed a municipality to designate a non profit if it decided not to submit a proposal itself. Community Solutions was designated as the non profit for Yellow Springs. Together with a group of business and educational institutes and consultants, we submitted a response to the second phase of the RPQ. (Another $60 million) We just learned that we were not one of the winners. We had a good proposal and I am pleased that there were some even better. While we were in the middle of preparing our response, the government announced another program, the so called Cash for Caulkers, which has been renamed Home Star. This is a new proposed national incentive effort for residential efficiency retrofits, not yet approved by Congress. (This is not competitive with Retrofit for Recovery efforts.) Home Star also recognizes that the national need is to retrofit the existing stock rather than to focus on new building. The technologies developed in the Retrofit for Recovery efforts will hopefully reduce the cost of retrofitting so Home Star can provide more retrofits within its budget. Many of the plans for housing are included in a February presentation by DOE which details their retrofit plans as well as the quite massive expenditures on energy in general. http://www.naseo.org/Events/energyoutlook/2010/presentations/Hogan.pdf In May 2009, the DOE provided an upgrade for its popular "Energy Savers Booklet" http://www1.eere.energy.gov/consumer/tips/pdfs/energy_savers.pdf This is a must read for anybody interested in reducing their home energy consumption. I have followed the DOE's upgrades to this booklet for some years and the latest version is excellent. It's a great primer for home energy curtailment. Another document important for those interested in reducing their home energy consumption is produced by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE). ACEEE has published a very impressive book Consumer Guide to Home Energy Savings for 17 years, putting out a new version just about every other year. Version 9 came out in 2007 and it is without doubt one of the best books on home energy savings. The combination of this with the DOE "Energy Savers Booklet" is a great education for all of us concerned with energy use in our homes. ACEEE has now made a condensed version of the book available on its web site. http://www.aceee.org/Consumerguide/ I recommend buying the book and studying it carefully. ACEEE has a long term relationship with the DOE via Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), one of DOE's 10 National Labs. Arthur Rosenfeld was an acclaimed high-energy physicist at Berkeley Lab, was a member of the California Energy Commission twice and was also the winner of the Enrico Fermi Award, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious awards for scientific achievement. Rosenfeld moved from basic physics research into energy in the 1970s. He founded the Center for Building Science at Berkeley Lab, where the electronic ballast for the Compact Fluorescent was developed as well as glass coatings. Rosenfeld was the co-founder of the ACEEE. ACEEE puts on a bi annual conference "Energy Efficiency in Buildings" at Asilomar in Pacific Grove, California. (next one August 2010). Last December (2009), the DOE gave $15.9 million in stimulus funding to the Berkeley Lab to build a "national user facility" that will attract researchers from around the U.S. and the world to study best practices for improving building energy efficiency. The lab will focus on creating net-zero energy buildings and will test new air conditioning systems, lighting, on-site power generation, plus new kinds of roofs and skylights. Additionally, the lab will investigate new methods of constructing windows, walls and floors. Also, last December the DOE launched a new website called Open Energy Information. (www.openEI.org) intended to bring energy technology information to the public. This is a Web site that makes energy information and resources more available to everyone. In addition to information about building energy efficiency that is available to project developers, OpenEI has data sets related to worldwide solar and wind potential, information on climate zones and related best practices. One sector of the site, dubbed VIBE (Virtual Information Bridge to Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy), brings together a number of Web resources related to solar, wind, biomass and transportation. It's gratifying to see the DOE begin to take big strides in supporting the reduction of energy use in existing buildings. Retrofit costs are still high and funding difficult to obtain but this should change over the next year. The nation's consciousness is moving away from new green buildings to impressive energy retrofits of the existing stock. This will also provide employment for hundreds of thousands of the one million or more building tradespeople who are out of work. Sometimes we think that government is an obstacle. But government is essentially the reflection of the people. I have been involved in building energy efficiency for decades. Suddenly the government has stepped out well ahead of the pack. This is very good news. It doesn't mean that we should reduce our efforts to lobby the government or that the many individuals who have made substantive progress should retire. Rather it means that our institutions are ready to lead. What is also noteworthy is that the government is doing this in partnership with communities. This is cause for celebration.

False Hope or Hardship? Comments on Pope and McKibben Essays

February 4, 2009 By Pat Murphy Executive Director, Community Solutions Carl Pope, head of the Sierra Club, in a January 22, 2009 article entitled "Moving the U.S. off Carbon with Less Pain, More Gain" takes issue with Bill McKibben's November 5, 2008 article entitled "President Obama's Big Climate Challenge." (Both published in Yale Environment 360, a publication of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies). McKibben identifies the scale and risk of the challenge noting it will be unpopular and could damage Obama's political future. Pope begins his critique by acknowledging that he shares McKibben's conviction that we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 to 90% by mid-century. But Pope argues that the right investment in technology is all that is needed to manage this reduction. The essence of his position is that a well-designed package of market reforms — which does not require austerity — will lead to a prosperous, low-carbon future. He writes, "The assumption that the costs of climate recovery will be prohibitively high simply does not stand up to scrutiny." I believe that it is Pope's positions that do not pass scrutiny and that it matters a great deal whether Pope is correct. Pope himself says there's a fundamental difference between a mind-set that concludes sacrifice is needed and a mind-set that sees only an economically attractive transition. He labels this as the difference between "sacrifice" and "reform." Of course, "sacrifice" sounds disconcerting, even scary, while "reform" sounds comforting and moderate. Pope has thus slanted his argument against what he calls sacrifice. By implication, Pope's position is that no significant lifestyle changes will be required from us. Pope's main arguments begin with a reference to a McKinsey & Company report, which says reducing U.S. emissions by 2030 could be achieved with a negative cost, since the need for reductions represents investment opportunities that would increase the productivity of the overall U.S. economy. Pope discusses the case of California, pointing out that in a 35-year period the state's residents maintained constant per capita energy consumption while the rest of the nation increased 50%. Unfortunately for Pope's thesis, this period of California's history is not one of reduction in energy use. Remember that Pope conceded we need a national reduction of around 90% in greenhouse gas emissions. To achieve that reduction, Californians per capita will still need to make reductions on the order of 50 to 60% by 2050 (while the rest of us may need to reach a full 90%). Is Pope suggesting that Californians can make 50 to 60% cuts in their energy use without sacrifice? Pope next presents a picture of today's creaky and anachronistic energy system. He says, "Right now, we generate electricity in power plants designed -- and in some cases built -- in the Taft era (hydro), the Coolidge era (coal), or the Kennedy era (nuclear). We ship electricity in transmission grids equipped with electromechanical switches whose fundamental design goes back 80 years. We burn gasoline in internal combustion engines that haven't changed much since Henry Ford, and those engines are in SUVs built on 40-year old assembly lines. And 50 percent of the fuel we use to heat and cool our buildings radiates directly into the sky because many of those buildings have never been modernized for energy performance." Pope's portrait is, at best, highly misleading. He does not propose replacing the Taft-era dams with new ones. (And why would he? I suspect their generators have been replaced or rewired many times.) Aging coal plants are not necessarily inefficient. It's true that coal plants were once less than 20% efficient and now are near 35% (including the latest ones) but there is little room left for improvement in the technology of turning water into steam. Electromechanical switches are not high energy consumers and replacing them with electronic ones will save little fuel. Contrary to Pope's assertion, the internal combustion engine has in fact improved by about 1.5% per year ever since Henry Ford's time. (The best-explored alternative, the fuel cell engine, has never made it out of prototype phase.) In short, Pope's evidence does not support his implied conclusion that there are significant reductions in fossil fuel use to be gained by modernizing the nation's electricity generation and auto assembly processes. Pope moves on to endorse a complaint we often hear from business interests, namely that rapid improvement will come to energy markets if we only eliminate barriers to innovation. But what barriers does he have in mind? It isn't barriers to innovation that explain the snail-like process toward carbon capture, or the recent cancellation of Future Gen in particular -- it's the sheer technical challenge of storing billions of tons of CO2 underground for thousands of years. IGCC power plants on a world-wide basis have not proven themselves reliable and efficient. Improvements in wind and solar technology have come from massive amounts of government subsidies, including major contributions from the government's own research labs like NREL. Both wind and solar are now growing at 50% per year (still with subsidies) and there has been massive public and private investments in both technologies -- but prices remain high, and the sum total of their contribution to the nation's electricity supply remains under 2%. Pope seems to imagine that shifts in U.S. government policy can mandate rapid technical breakthroughs. But the evidence shows that governments in other nations have subsidized and invested for years without earth-shattering results. Wind power still requires a big propeller and a generator. Fortunately, Pope does accept that a rapid national transition to a low-carbon economy will not be without some pain and expense. He acknowledges that some parties will not be as better off as others. He admits that there will be a significant price tag to accelerate the transition. But he aims to convince us that this price tag will come from making those who emit carbon pay for their pollution and the costs of climate disruption. Somehow, in his view, taxing the emitters will both accelerate the transition from fossil fuels and make the overall global economy fairer. But he ignores the basic fact that the emitters of carbon are us! It's not the Ford or General Motors plants that are the problem, it's the trucks and SUVs that we Americans have chosen to drive and the big houses we have chosen to inhabit. Does Pope believe that we will call a significant new tax on personal carbon emissions a "reform" rather than a "sacrifice"? Pope says he agrees with McKibben when the latter says, "Doing what actually needs to be done . . . would involve -- directly or indirectly -- raising the cost of continuing to live as we do right now." But then he focuses on the wastefulness of people who drive Hummers, or air condition rooms that have fires blazing in the fireplace. (This is a miniscule part of the population) He acknowledges how much "energy waste happens because ordinary people live in leaky buildings with outdated appliances" but doesn't recognize the sacrifice implied when he also concedes that such people "cannot easily or affordably upgrade." He expresses sympathy for small business people buying a Ford Econoline with an old design that gets 15 mpg, but then wonders why they don't drive modern hybrid panel trucks that get 30 mpg. (He criticizes Detroit for not offering such a vehicle; but I doubt any global manufacturer offers one.) Pope seems to conclude it is Detroit's fault for not offering better vehicles, while completely ignoring the choice of tens of millions of Americans to drive SUVs when more efficient cars are available. This familiar environmentalist refrain -- blame the producer but not the consumer -- serves to obscure the financial hit (another sacrifice, perhaps?) that millions of owners of low-mileage vehicles are now bound to take. Pope claims to share McKibben's despair over U.S. materialism but insists that austerity for the American people will not be required. He hypothesizes two schools of thought on this issue. One school suggests modest carbon reduction goals to mitigate economic pain or the give-away of carbon permits to businesses. The other school compensates those who use carbon sinks. He notes in this case that Peabody Coal does not own the Amazon, nor Exxon-Mobil the Maldive Islands, but the corporations use the Amazon and Indian Ocean to absorb their emissions at huge cost to others. Who are these "others"? I assume Pope means me and all the other citizens -- citizens, that is, who use electricity from Peabody Coal and drive vehicles fueled with Exxon oil. Once more, in Pope's version of the story, the responsibilities of citizens are not called into question -- oil companies are the sole evil-doers. Pope goes on to compare his views on revenues from carbon permits with those of McKibben, and finds the latter's lacking. Pope wants to use the revenue from carbon permits to aggressively pursue better technologies. He argues for investing in energy efficiency rather than new power plants. He believes that serious energy market reform and regulation of the producer can rapidly reduce the demand for fossil fuels of the consumer by putting a price on carbon emissions. Pope then calculates that a carbon price of around $30 per ton can be funded by a gasoline tax of approximately 30 cents per gallon. Revenues would go to the U.S. Treasury, and Congress would allocate them first to low-income consumers to mitigate the increased costs of gasoline and electricity, and second to investments in climate change solutions with a focus on energy efficiency and renewable energy. Finally, he wants building codes to reflect the American Institute of Architects' goals of achieving carbon-neutral buildings by 2030 (new construction only), ignoring the 100s of millions of existing inefficient buildings. Pope proposes incentives including upping the price of carbon generated to send a more powerful signal to investors to back low-carbon alternatives if progress is slow. Other incentives would return some carbon taxes to the citizens to allow them to buy more efficient products. About $60 billion to $180 billion a year would go to the government to meet the various costs of transitioning to a low-carbon economy. Pope acknowledges that he does not know how fast we can improve the energy productivity and lower the carbon/energy ratio of our economy. One might suspect that he also doesn't know how much it would cost. He argues for redirecting benefits from the polluting and uncompetitive technologies of the past to cleaner, higher performance, new energy options. Finally he says the level of sacrifice we face will fall in direct proportion to how effectively we use carbon revenues to motivate and deliver the new energy options. However, he provides no analysis or estimates of time and costs to achieve reductions -- seemingly just hoping the technology is there somewhere. What Pope does not see is that by taking the positions discussed above, he has not refuted McKibben's call for sacrifice. Americans are perfectly free to purchase new energy-saving products and technologies right now, but would have to sacrifice some other purchase to do so. There are triple-paned argon-filled windows on the market, for example, which would reduce home heating costs. But they are expensive enough that many would call buying them a "sacrifice." Gas-saving cars using advanced technology have been available now for a decade. But hybrid sales are still less than 2% of the market. High-mileage Honda Fits and Toyota Yarises are available for those who can't afford a hybrid -- granted these models require sacrifices of size and comfort compared to SUVs. Americans can buy a host of energy efficient products today — assuming they are willing to give up comfort, convenience, and cash. Their cars might be a bit more crowded and might not be as safe. Americans can buy more energy-efficient houses -- if they are willing to put more of the construction cost into a better building envelope, and sacrifice larger rooms. Utility bills can be lowered by settling for smaller appliances or turning off the extras in the garage. Compact fluorescent bulbs can be installed immediately, though few Americans have actually done even this. Americans have consistently rejected energy-saving technologies for the sake of style, one-upmanship, comfort and convenience. In my view, Bill McKibben said something important and accurate when he pointed out that if Americans are to achieve the ecologically necessary reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, they will need to sacrifice many things -- and not just those which are considered to be luxuries. Carl Pope, by contrast, suggests that we will not need to give up anything. Technology and innovation, spurred by simple changes in government policy, will provide us a 60 mpg 4,000 pound SUV and a 3,000 square foot McMansion that will use less energy than an electric bike and a modest apartment. Mr. Pope's paper came out at roughly the same time as the January/February issue of Sierra magazine. The cover of that magazine included a figure painting a cartoon house green. (Yes, the term "green-wash" came to mind.) On page 12 of the magazine, the columnist "Mr. Green" responded to a woman in Dayton, Ohio inquiring about the cost-effectiveness of solar panels on her home. Mr. Green responds that installing a solar energy system to generate power for the average household costs roughly $80,000 after rebates and tax credits. Will this woman be able to add panels without sacrifice? I think not -- Americans have no such deep pockets to make these changes. A second article in the magazine entitled "Emerald Cities" suggests in an upbeat manner that major changes are happening in urban areas and refers to LEED building standards, product of the U.S. Green Building Council which has certified only two thousand of the nation's 5 million commercial buildings. And LEED buildings at best reduce energy use by only 25%. He does not seem to know that the so-called "green" LEED standards and Energy Star appliance ratings have saved only a few percent of the energy consumed in buildings — after pushing their brands for over a decade. And what about the 100,000,000 existing homes? How much will they cost to retrofit and can Americans do this while maintaining their current life style? I think not. Bill McKibben's essay, by contrast with Pope's critique, is grounded in a realistic sense of the difficulties we face. It will be long and hard to gain significant efficiency for a new infrastructure when so called "green" buildings and cars offer on average no more than a 15% improvement in efficiency. Making the existing infrastructure energy efficient involves change of an almost unimaginable scale. This will not be achieved without massive sacrifice from Americans, voluntary or involuntary. The idea that investment in technology is all that is needed is naïve and dangerous. The crisis is huge and Winston Churchill's comments come to mind as he readied England for a long war: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind." There was a war on then -- and there is no less a war on now as we battle the U.S. materialism over which Pope says he shares McKibben's despair. Pole calls for a new environmentalism. And McKibben and millions of others, including myself, share this sentiment. But a new environmentalism based on the market economy and the now discredited thesis that greed is good is essentially no environmentalism at all. Environmentalists who claim there will be no need for sacrifice, and reject Churchill's call, are part of the problem, not the solution.

The Risks of Plan B

By Rob Content Program Manager, Community Solutions The details are still under intense discussion in Democratic Party power centers like Chicago and New York. But there is good reason to expect that within the coming weeks and months the Obama administration will announce a broad set of policy initiatives, likely including a heavy dose of executive orders. These policies will be designed first and foremost to address the deepening economic collapse by reassuring bankers, autoworkers, and road crews across the United States that they will still have work-sites to go to. Many of the jobs the government will try to save will involve energy and transportation, such as the construction and maintenance of today's low-mileage car models, and the repair of roads and bridges on which fleets of commercial trucks deliver consumer goods to retail shelves. Efforts such as these can be seen as attempts to extend business as usual, or "Plan A." Plan A, to which the Bush-Cheney administration closely hewed, consists of encouraging the fossil fuel industry to extend its traditional dominance of the nation's energy supply operations. This includes mining and drilling, refining and transporting, and, more generally, defining and shaping public understanding of where electricity, transport and heating fuels, and fertilizers and pesticides/herbicides all come from. Plan A may have suffered a bit of a dirty face the last eight years at the hands of the Iraq War, expanded public concern over global warming, and spikes in prices at the pump and in utility bills. Nevertheless, it remains hugely profitable, deeply entrenched in the nation's infrastructure, and responsible for supplying the lion's share of the energy on which the consumer/commuter's daily lifestyle utterly depends. But the Obama administration's policies on energy and the environment are also likely to include some key elements that differ significantly from those of the departing Bush administration. As such, they will deserve to be recognized as the opening stage of a distinct "Plan B." Current indications are that we will see pages borrowed from Jimmy Carter's conservation playbook -- surely a good thing, and one to be welcomed by most in the peak oil and climate change community. Also likely to win general endorsement would be an effort to publicize and extend the "greener cities" approach spearheaded by Richard M. Daley in Chicago. And many among us will likewise be pleased to see a more prominent place at the table for the wind and solar industries. Unlike Plan A, Plan B will emphasize waste reduction, the development of alternative energy sources (especially renewable ones), and investment in higher efficiency technological innovations. We should not underestimate the space still available for Plan B to be fully explored, and then deeply embraced, by American consumers. Acceptance of the hybrid car has been steady but also slow; nearly a decade passed before the first million vehicles were on the roads. By and large, Americans still "want" gas-guzzlers -- even if many breadwinners can no longer find the credit to purchase them or always afford to fill their gas tanks. Our home insulation efforts lag behind our generally low awareness of their affordable benefits. Only a tiny fraction of Americans purchase carbon-offsets for their airplane trips or electricity consumption. The experience of long-distance travel by air or car, for business or for pleasure, remains a fixture of "the good life," one to which many are eager to return just as soon as the government delivers its solutions to our current problems. For these reasons (and many more), a shift in our national discussion of energy issues in which Plan B finds its voice alongside Plan A should probably be acknowledged as a profound -- even perhaps a revolutionary -- change. And there's the rub. For many in the Peak Oil community -- and certainly for us at Community Solutions -- the success of Plan B is a long shot. Any administration, however well-advised and civic-minded, that commits itself and our remaining resources to Plan B is gambling. The success of Plan B depends upon a series of technological breakthroughs which in turn will depend upon the availability of massive financial resources to sustain technological research over at least several decades; even more massive resources would then be required to implement the results. Committing so much to such an uncertain approach indicates to us a limited understanding of how dire our energy predicament has already become. Those of us who see the brightest prospects for a secure and sustainable culture in widespread voluntary curtailment of energy consumption -- what we call "Plan C" -- therefore harbor a set of serious reservations about Plan B. We begin with mixed feelings at best about fresh infusions of research funds for carbon capture and sequestration, so-called "advanced" bio-fuels, and carbon nuclear fusion. We are concerned that political speeches and policy goals contain so few acknowledgements that these unproven technologies may in fact turn out to be unprovable. In addition, we will find it hard to swallow endorsements by the new Administration of such pale green approaches as LEED standard building construction, intensive new public subway or trolley developments, and "green" consumerism. (Our Executive Director Pat Murphy has also now developed a highly critical evaluation of the pluggable hybrid car -- which, as he argues, should more credibly be called "the coal car" since its batteries would be recharged with electricity generated mostly by coal-burning power plants.) At Community Solutions, we therefore advocate instead a set of much deeper green approaches. (We have discussed labeling them "red" to signal our sense of urgency.) We support Passive House building construction standards -- particularly as they may be used to retrofit existing homes, a Smart Jitney approach to mass ride-sharing using the existing vehicle fleet, and a significant curtailment of the consumer economy in favor of a simpler, healthier, non-affluent style of life. What the elements of Plan C have in common -- and so what distinguishes them from the bulk of Plan B approaches -- is that they require no technological breakthroughs, can be implemented starting immediately, and would be far less time and resource-intensive to complete. No doubt others involved in Peak Oil discussions would change a point here or there in their own assessment of Plan C's advantages over Plan B. Strenuous disagreement over certain points would expected and respected as well. But my aim here is to draw attention to a larger dynamic -- and the potential consequences of failing to understand that dynamic in advance. The dynamic is this: An energy transition from Bush's Plan A to Obama's Plan B is likely to be felt as a major and decisive shift in U.S. national consciousness, as well as in policy detail. This shift of plans may be as wrenching and controversial a change in national character as has been achieved since the gradual awakenings of the civil rights era. It should be no surprise that a shift of this magnitude would contain some risk of failure, and the possibility that Plan B might fail therefore merits open and serious discussion. We should be talking about whether Plan B is really a risk worth taking -- and  even if so, whether some investment should simultaneously be made in the low-risk, high-reward Plan C. As a contribution to this discussion, we suggest a challenge to policy planners in the new administration: Invite the public to articulate its greatest concerns about how and why Plan B might fail. We believe there will be many concerns along these lines. Our own top three are the following: • The scale of financial investment in the electrical grid, as well as the power plant infrastructure, that would be required to meet national energy needs through wind and solar generation (and the fossil fuel supply required to back them up during periods of intermittency). • The time-scale to replace 100%, or even 50%, of the electricity supplied by today's conventional coal-burning plants with electricity generated from alternative energy sources, either nuclear or renewable. • The additional demand on the national electricity supply if 20 million Americans, or even 10 million, purchase cars that are recharged by plugging in to the grid (and so at best achieve carbon dioxide emission reductions no better than those of today's non-pluggable hybrids). As the Inauguration of Barack Obama approaches, we find ourselves waiting, like many of our fellow citizens, to see what a charismatic, talented, and credentialed new generation of leaders will offer us. And we find ourselves concerned that they will come up short. Any version of Plan B based upon the core elements outlined above will be in our estimation too little, too late. The new President's program on energy and the environment will also be, on deeper analysis, his approach to the declining availability of fossil fuels and to global climate change. As such, it will represent our nation's best chance to address these fundamental challenges at their roots. Should this opportunity be missed, we will all experience the consequences of further delay in making the deep changes that are required -- the kind of realistic, practical changes that characterize Plan C.

Culture Change

Peak Oil is History

Publisher's note: Dmitry Orlov authored Reinventing Collapse, based on his firsthand observations of the collapse of the USSR and the socioeconomic prospects for the U.S. His new article describes the key physical, social, political and economic factors which energy industry analysts must take into account when forecasting oil production in order for their forecasts to be meaningful. Peak Oil is History is exclusively on CultureChange.org until November 1. - JL The marketing blurb on the back cover of the first edition of my first book, Reinventing Collapse, described me as "a leading Peak Oil theorist." When I first saw it, my jaw dropped -- and remained hanging.

The Countless Centuries

I went for a five-hour walk in the desert yesterday morning and came across a second crumbling old castle out in the desert; I'd discovered one a few months ago. Close to it I found a series of stone-lined wells, about ten or twenty meters apart, with water in them about fifty meters down. But some of the land had been excavated, or perhaps recently re-excavated, between some of them, so I could see that the wells all connected underground.

Renewable Energy Realities for Both Sides of the Atlantic

In the past week Culture Change's independent oil industry analyst Jan Lundberg weighed in on renewable energy, electrification and overpopulation for a high-level Europe audience and for the U.S.'s iconic environmental group, the Sierra Club. For Europe, Jan's message focuses on ground rules for imagining renewable energy on a massive scale. For the Sierra Club, Jan passed along to its Executive Director and magazine his concerns regarding oil's overwhelming role today and what that means for electrification and electric cars.

DeGrowth

Democracia

Baptiste Mylondo

THEMES DE RECHERCHE Revenu inconditionnel et systèmes de redistribution Sociologie du travail Économie solidaire et consommation engagée PUBLICATIONS Ouvrages : Ne pas perdre sa vie à la gagner. Pour un revenu de citoyenneté, Paris, Homnisphères, mars 2008. Des caddies et des hommes. La consommation citoyenne contre la société de consommation, Paris, La Dispute, octobre 2005. Ouvrages collectifs dirigés : La décroissance économique. Pour la soutenabilité écologique et l'équité sociale, (dir.), Bellecombe-en-Bauges, Le Croquant, octobre 2009. Pour une politique de décroissance, (dir.), Lyon, Golias, octobre 2007. Articles dans des ouvrages collectifs : « Peut-on être payé à ne rien faire ? », dans Paul Ariès (dir.), Viv(r)e la gratuité. Une issue au capitalisme vert, Lyon, Golias, mai 2009. « Travailler moins, trois fois moins ! », dans Jean-Pierre GELARD (dir.), Travailler plus, travailler moins, travailler autrement, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, mars 2007. Articles et tribunes : « Imbécile valeur travail ! », dans Politis du 27 août 2009. « Le salaire du labeur. Souffrance au travail et consolation consumériste », sur Mouvements.info, mai 2009. « Revenu d'existence : ni pauvres ni soumis ? », dans Silence !, mars 2009. « Face à la crise, peut-on payer les gens à ne rien faire ? », dans Le Sarkophage, janvier 2009. « La chasse aux fraudeurs », dans Le Sarkophage, mai 2008. « Le revenu de citoyenneté peut-il être suffisant ? », sur Revue du Mauss Permanente, décembre 2007. « Le RMI est mort, vive le RMI ! », dans Le Sarkophage, octobre 2007. « Contrôle de productivité. La travail comme instrument de contrôle social », dans Silence !, juin 2007. « Travailler ni plus, ni moins, bien au contraire ! », dans L'Humanité du 14 avril 2007. « Revenu maximum autorisé ou revenu inconditionnel de citoyenneté », sur decroissance.info, février 2007. « Consommer moins pour travailler moins », dans L'Humanité du 28 décembre 2005. EXPERIENCE PROFESSIONNELLE 2009 : Chargé de cours d'économie à L'ITECH et l'ECAM de Lyon 2004 - 2008 : Créateur et animateur de la Société Coopérative d'Intérêt Collectif Alter-Conso, système de distribution de produits agricoles locaux en circuit court sur l'agglomération lyonnaise.

Local organizing committee

Local organizing committee (preliminary) Joan Martinez-Alier, François Schneider, Giorgos Kallis, Mario Giampietro. Amalia Cardenas, Beatriz Labajos, Christian Kerschner, Claudio Cattaneo, Christo Zografos, Cristina Madrid, Elisabeth Gsottbauer, Federico Demaria, Filka Sekulova, Giorgio Mosangini, Leah Temper, Mariana Walter, Marta Condé, Monica Vargas.

PostPeak Living

You've Bought Your Last Car

Actually, you've probably bought the last of a lot of things, but I remember being struck when I first heard James Howard Kunstler say, "Most Americans have bought their last car." So I'm going to use the example of cars to demonstrate why that is and why we won't get off of fossil fuel in time. read more

Global Energy Resources Overview

Kjell Aleklett, President of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, has a very accessible but definitely information-rich lecture on global energy supplies. read more

Essential Dmitri Orlov

Dmitri Orlov watched Russia during its collapse and he has insightful observations about peak oil and what we can expect to happen here. read more

Post-Oil Cities

The Archdruid Report

Green Wizardry: A Response to Rob Hopkins

Since the Green Wizards project got under way two months ago, I've wondered off and on whether it would field any sort of response from the Transition movement. Thus it was not exactly a huge surprise to read Rob Hopkins' blog post on the subject yesterday. I admit that the tone of his response took me aback, and so did the number of misrepresentations that found their way into it; I have no objection to criticism -- quite the contrary, an idea that can't stand up to honest criticism isn't worth having in the first place -- but it might have been helpful if Hopkins had taken the time to be sure the ideas he was criticizing were ones I've actually proposed.When I sat down to start this week's post this morning, I considered going through his comments one by one and correcting the misrepresentations, but what would be the point? Those who are minded to take his statements at face value will doubtless do so anyway; those who are interested in checking the facts can find my views detailed at quite some length in the series of posts beginning June 30 of this year. Instead, I think it's more useful just now to talk about the things Hopkins' critique got right. Rob Hopkins is a smart guy, and even though he's garbled a fair number of the details, his post raises useful points regarding some of the core issues I've tried to bring up in the Green Wizards posts.The first of those is that one of the motivations behind the Green Wizards project is a recognition of the limitations of the Transition Towns project. I've discussed my concerns about that movement on several occasions on this blog, and don't see any need to repeat those comments just now. The crucial point, though, is one that Hopkins himself cheerfully admits: that neither he nor anyone else in the movement can be sure that it will accomplish what it's trying to accomplish.That's a bold statement, and one that's worthy of respect. Still, it has implications I'm not sure Hopkins has followed as far as they deserve. If the difficult future ahead of us can't be known well enough to tell in advance what strategies will best deal with it, in particular, it seems to me that it's a serious mistake to put all our eggs in one basket, whether it's the one labeled "Transition" or any other.This is the underlying strategy that guides the Green Wizards project. I've argued here that the best approach to an unpredictable future is dissensus: that is, the deliberate avoidance of consensus and the encouragement of divergent approaches to the problems we face. The Green Wizards project is one such divergent approach. It tries to address a broad range of possible futures with a flexible set of tools, but there are no guarantees; it's entirely possible that the project will fail, or that the future will turn out to be so different from my expectations that it could never have succeeded at all.That last comment could be said just as accurately of the Transition approach, and of course that's exactly the point. Neither project offers an answer to all the challenges the future might dump on us, and neither one is guaranteed to work. This is why I've tried to craft the Green Wizards project to fill in some of the gaps the Transition Town movement fails to address. Does that make the two projects mutually exclusive? Not at all; it could as easily be argued that they're complementary -- though it also needs to be remembered that the two projects taken together don't cover all the possibilities, either. Other projects will be needed to do that, and if we're lucky, we'll get them.This leads to the second point that Rob Hopkins got absolutely right, which is that the Green Wizard project isn't a solution to every problem the future has in store for us. I'm not at all sure where Hopkins got the idea that the project is predicated on an imminent fast collapse, which is very nearly the opposite of my views -- the most popular of my peak oil books so far isn't titled The Short Descent, you know -- but he's quite right to say that I consider peak oil, and more generally the impact of fossil fuel and resource depletion on an economy and society that depends on limitless growth, to be the core driving force of the next century or so of social crisis and disintegration. (The main impacts of anthropogenic climate change, according to most climatologists, will come further down the line.) That's what the Green Wizard project is intended to address, and criticizing it for not trying to do what it's not intended to do is a bit like criticizing a hammer because it's not a very good saw.The Seventies-era appropriate technology that's at the core of the project, for that matter, is only one of many options that could be used within the strategy I'm proposing. I chose that option partly because it's something I happen to know well, having worked with it for thirty years now; partly because it evolved to deal with the consequences of energy shortages in a time of economic turmoil, and that promises to be a fair description of the decades just ahead of us; and partly because I've discovered that a great deal of what was learned back in the days of the appropriate tech movement never got handed down to the people in today's peak oil scene.I've also found that a great many people who are worried about peak oil take to the old appropriate tech material like a duck to water, once they learn about it, and are refreshingly likely to do something practical with it. One of the challenges most of us who speak publicly about peak oil face all the time is the honest question, "Yes, but what can I do about it?" Hopkins has offered his answer to that question, and it's an answer that's clearly satisfactory to many people, but it's not suited to everybody.The birth of the Green Wizard project itself came about as a result of that last fact. The project started with a post here that tentatively suggested the archetype of the wizard, and the toolkit of the old appropriate tech movement, as the starting points for an option worth exploring as we move deeper into the Age of Limits. That post fielded more comments and email than any other Archdruid Report post has ever gotten, and a very large number of the responses amounted to "This is what I've been looking for." Many of the people who responded in that way have gone on to begin saving energy, planting gardens, and doing other admirably practical steps. Should I have closed that door in their faces, and insisted that they had to embrace the Transition agenda or do nothing at all? I trust not.This leads in turn to the third point that Rob Hopkins got unquestionably right, which is that the Green Wizard project is not aimed at building resilient communities. That's the core of the Transition Towns strategy, if I understand Hopkins' writings correctly, and the Transition Towns program is certainly one way to go about trying to do that -- though it's not the only way, and not necessarily the best way in every case. What I'm not sure Hopkins has grasped is his strategy isn't the only game in town.To begin with, as I've just mentioned, there are plenty of people who are interested in doing something about the challenges of the future, but for whom the Transition program is not a viable option. There are people, quite a few of them, who live in communities full of rock-ribbed conservatives who believe that global warming is a hoax manufactured by the Democratic Party and that we'd have all the oil we need if the government allowed unrestricted drilling, and as many who live in communities full of liberals who believe just as firmly that their SUV lifestyles can run just as well on wind farms or algal biodiesel as on fossil fuels. There are people who, for one reason or another, are not suited to the work of community organizing, and others who have been there, done that, and would sooner gnaw a rat's pancreas than sit through another round of long meetings in order to produce another round of elaborate plans that everyone involved knows will never be anything more than ink on paper. Insisting that such people ought to follow the Transition program anyway is not going to have any useful result.Yet there's another issue I don't think Hopkins has addressed, and it comes right back to his cheerful admission that there's no guarantee the Transition program can do what it's supposed to do. The Transition program assumes that the best way to deal with the impending crises of the future is to organize for resilience on a community level, and it also assumes that the best way to do this is to produce a discreetly managed consensus within individual communities, turn that consensus into a plan, and then act on the plan. Neither of those assumptions is a certainty, and there are reasons -- some of which I've discussed in this blog -- why strategies based on them may be doomed to fail.This point deserves making in the clearest possible terms. It's pure speculation, however appealing the speculation might be, that communities are the best option, or even a workable option, for building the sort of resilience Hopkins has in mind. Even if he's right, it may no longer be possible to build communities that are resilient in any meaningful sense, in the face of the troubles bearing down on us at this point. Even if it is still possible to do so, the methods the Transition movement proposes may not be a viable way of doing it. Based on his public writings, I believe Hopkins would agree with these statements. That being the case, though, we're back to the point I made earlier: in the face of an unpredictable future, it's wise to explore more than one possible response.The Green Wizards project is an attempt to create one of these alternative responses. As I've already suggested, it's partly inspired by an attempt to fill in some of the gaps left open by the Transition program, and so it should come as no surprise that it differs from the Transition program in a great many respects. It doesn't claim to be a solution to every problem the future might throw our way, and so it's pretty much guaranteed that there will be things the Transition program covers that the Green Wizard project does not, and vice versa. It doesn't focus on the creation of resilient communities, but instead of criticizing it for that reason, Hopkins could as well have said that Transition already has that covered, and alternative projects could use their time more wisely by tackling other issues Transition is not well positioned to address -- which, again, is what the Green Wizard project is trying to do.That this wasn't his response troubles me. That's not because I think Hopkins ought to accept all the presuppositions behind the Green Wizards project -- if he did that, presumably he'd have launched some project like it, instead of the one he did in fact launch -- or because I think the Green Wizards project shouldn't be criticized. As I mentioned toward the beginning of this essay, any idea worth having is worth critiquing, and the skill of learning even from harsh criticism is essential to projects of the kind Hopkins and I are pursuing, each in his own way. Equally, when criticism misses or misunderstands its target, it can be useful to point out where this has happened, and try to clarify the issues under debate. Still, there's a line of some importance between such responses and the kind of defensive stance that treats any critique as an assault to be repelled, and any alternative project as a potential rival to be quashed.I don't think that Hopkins and the Transition movement have crossed that line yet, and I trust they will recognize the risks and stay well back from it. Still, it worries me that recent responses on the part of Hopkins and other people in the Transition movement to criticism have begun to display traces of the defensiveness and the spirit of rivalry to be found beyond that line. I'm thinking particularly of the responses fielded by Alex Steffens' critique of the Transition movement on his Worldchanging blog. I'm by no means a fan of Steffens, but he raised points that deserve more attention, and a more substantive and less dismissive response, than I feel they received.Ultimately, though, the way people in the Transition movement choose to respond to its critics is their choice, not mine. Meanwhile, the Green Wizard project is moving ahead. I'm pleased to announce that after many requests from participants in the project, an online forum for aspiring green wizards is live at http://www.greenwizards.org; a tip of the wizard's hat to Teresa Hardy and Cathy McGuire for the hard work that made this happen.I'm by no means sure what the next steps forward will be. This project is barely two months old, and has already expanded and developed in ways that I never anticipated; for the foreseeable future, at least, improvisation is the order of the day. Still, aspiring green wizards and more casual readers alike can expect another exploration of the practical options ahead of us in next week's Archdruid Report post.

The Care and Feeding of Time Machines

The distinction between intensive and extensive food plant production discussed in last week's post has implications that go well beyond the obvious. When you garden a backyard or a few acres intensively, you can spare the time, energy, and resources to do things you can't do on an extensive farm of a few hundred acres, and the payback can be spectacular. This week's post is going to explore one set of these possibilities. I could be prosaic and give that set any number of labels, but half the fun of the Green Wizard project consists of pointing out the way that many of the possibilities open to us just now stray over the border into the realms of fantasy and legend, so I'll use a slightly more colorful term for the approaches I have in mind. What we'll be discussing, then, is the art of making and using time machines.The gardener's art, after all, requires a close attentiveness to time, and in particular to dimensions of time that contemporary culture doesn't grasp as well as it should. We're so used to thinking of time as an abstract numerical measurement -- so many minutes, hours, days, or what have you -- that it's often easy to lose track of the fact that for living beings, time always has a qualitative dimension as well as a quantitative one. In the temperate zone, for example, four o'clock in the afternoon is a completely different time for living things in January than it is in August, and twenty days means something completely different for living things at one season than it does at another.Skilled gardening depends on these qualitative differences. Most of the best gardeners I've ever known made it a habit to go out into the garden first thing in the morning and stand there, hands in pockets, doing nothing in particular except trying to get a sense of what the garden was doing, or ready to do, on that particular day. Most of them also had a collection of ground rules setting out the basic rules of garden timing, with wiggle room so they could be adjusted for the vagaries of weather and the like. Choosing the right time to plant particular crops, in particular, is a fine art, and usually ends up supported by traditional incantations that are handed down from generation to generation. In the soggy Western Washington climate where I learned organic gardening, for example, it was the received wisdom that you had to get your peas in the ground by George Washington's birthday in order to get a good crop. Where I now live in the north central Appalachians, in the same way, I've been told repeatedly by gardeners that it's time to plant corn when the leaves on the oaks are the size of a mouse's ear. Mind you, I don't know for a fact that there's an Appalachian Standard Mouse whose ears all the local oldtimers have carefully measured, but I'm not sure it would surprise me.The differences between one time and another are crucial throughout the annual cycle of the garden, but they become especially so in the earlier and later parts of the growing season, when a few degrees of temperature one way or another can make the difference between successful germination and a failed crop, and the threat of an unexpected frost looms over the garden beds like Godzilla over Tokyo in a Japanese monster movie. That's when gardeners wish they could somehow conjure up a couple of spare weeks of frost-free weather for spring planting or a spare month of good weather in fall to let some late-ripening crop finish its life cycle.This is where the time machines come in, of course. Now of course we could call them "season extenders" or simply ways to stretch the number of weeks in which your garden can be productive, but why not go for the more colorful label?There are two distinct approaches to the care and feeding of time machines, and you can use either or both of them in a backyard garden of the sort these posts are discussing. The first relies on the simple botanical facts that not all plants have the same response to temperature, and that crops with different seasons can overlap quite closely in an intensive garden without interfering with each other at all. The second relies on the equally simple botanical principle that temperature, not day length, determines the season limits for nearly all food crops, and cold -- especially freezing cold -- is the primary limiting factor over most of the temperate zone, so anything that changes the temperature in and around your plants changes their effective season.The first time machine, as far as I know, was invented by a forgotten backyard gardener by the name of A.B. Ross, whose 1925 book Big Crops from Little Gardens I'll be scanning and making available for apprentice green wizards as soon as time permits. Ross found that he could plant his garden in three shifts -- "prior crops" of plants that germinate well in spring's cool temperatures, "main crops" of plants that need summer heat to thrive, and "follow crops" of plants that can handle fall frosts when ripe -- and do these three shifts in two rows, planted much more closely together than the ordinary garden practice of his time thought possible. His methods rely on intensive gardening methods -- you couldn't get away with them in a big field -- but in their own context, they work very well indeed.Here's how it works. First thing in spring, as soon as the soil is workable, you prepare your garden beds and start planting rows of prior crops -- snow peas, early radishes, curly lettuce, spinach, and the like -- with three feet between each row, putting in a new row every ten days or so, so your harvests will be staggered and you won't end up with too much of anything to eat at any one time. Once weather permits, you start planting your main crops in rows spaced midway between the prior crops, so they begin to grow while the prior crop is maturing. By the time the main crop is maturing, the prior crop is gone, and you've had time to work a little compost into the now-empty rows; that's when you plant the follow crop for fall and winter -- cabbage, kale, turnips, more snow peas and radishes, and so on. By the time these are ready to put on their full growth, the main crop has been harvested. The result is that you get three harvests out of one garden bed.Ross worked the same trick within individual rows as well, training his plants up poles, for example, to minimize the amount of ground they shaded. The only later book I know of that refers to his method, John and Helen Philbrick's Organic Gardening for Health and Nutrition, comments that "one sometimes needs a diagram of the plantings to locate certain plants in the jungle that is likely to result." This has certainly been my experience; it's the only gardening method I know that results in a vegetable garden as dense as a weed thicket or an old-fashioned cottage garden, not to mention one that bears continuously from late spring through the first couple of killing frosts.The second way of building a time machine is a good deal more popular these days than Ross' clever method. It relies on a principle that we'll be applying repeatedly in these posts -- the ability of simple technologies to turn solar energy into useful amounts of diffuse heat. If you've ever climbed into a car that's been left in the sun for a few hours on a hot summer day, and yelped when your arm brushed against a vinyl seat heated to the sizzling point, you know the basic trick: a contained space with a transparent cover that lets sun in, but won't let heat out, warms up very effectively in the sun's rays.That's the trick that our second set of time machines use. There are any number of methods of applying it, starting with the cloche. What's a cloche? A transparent, bell-shaped cover with an open bottom that you plump down on top of a plant in spring, before the weather warms. Sunlight streams in through the cloche and warms everything inside -- the air, the plant, and the circle of soil within the edges of the cloche -- but the heat can't get back out anything like as easily as it gets in. You can spend a lot of money to get elegant glass cloches with or without little vents on top, or you can take ordinary 2-liter bullet bottles, strip off the labels, cut off the bottoms with a good sharp knife or a pair of snips, and you're good to go. Cloches are especially useful when setting out seedlings early in the season, when the cold can hinder plant growth and there's still some danger of frost; by the time the plants are well established and starting to bump up against the limits of the cloche, the weather's usually warm enough that you can take them off, give them a good wash, and put them in the basement for next year.The next step up from the cloche is the row cover. What's a row cover? Imagine a cloche grown long and wide enough to cover a good section of a garden bed -- say, eight feet long, two feet wide, and two feet high. Most of the ones I've seen and handled have a framework of wood or one-inch PVC tubing and are covered on the top and sides with clear sheet plastic; duct tape usually plays a role in there somewhere as well. You put it over plants you want to protect against cold and frost, just as you do with a cloche. If you live in a windy area, you'll need stakes to keep it from blowing away; if you live in an area that gets hot sun even in spring, you'll want to make sure things don't get too hot for comfort under the row cover in mid-afternoon, and prop it up along one long side to let excess heat get out if this becomes an issue.Ready for the next step? That's a cold frame, which might best be described as a permanent row cover. Your standard cold frame has wooden sides and back, and a hinged lid on top, slanted down toward the southern side, that's made of glass or transparent plastic; the front can be wood or glazing, depending on your preference; the bottom is a garden bed. The colder your climate, the more carefully you have to insulate the back and sides and weatherstrip the opening around the lid to get good results. Think of it as a sminiature solar greenhouse with access from the top and you've basically got the idea. Choose the location for your cold frame well, so it will get plenty of sun in winter, and you can get hardy crops from it year round.The final step in the succession, the ultimate backyard garden time machine, is a solar greenhouse. This isn't a simple project, and needs to be put together by someone with at least basic carpentry skills. If that's you or someone you know, though, don't hesitate, because a solar greenhouse in a good location can have spectacular payoffs, starting with a year round vegetable supply. If you can arrange to have it backed up against a south-facing wall of your home, for that matter, it can turn into a source of solar space heating -- we'll be discussing that in a later post.The value of all these methods for extending the growing season, and making seven months do the work of nine or more, is simple enough when you remember that the system that supplies fresh vegetables and other nutrient-rich foods to your local grocery store is spectacularly dependent on an uninterrupted flow of cheap petroleum-based fuels and agricultural chemicals. It's likely to be a while before supplies of bulk grains and dry legumes run short anywhere in North America, but a serious disruption in petroleum supplies -- something that could happen for political or economic reasons with essentially no warning -- could leave most people in the industrial world scrambling to get access to anything else. Having a thriving backyard garden that keeps you and your family comfortably supplied with vegetables is one kind of security; being able to teach other people in your neighborhood how to do the same thing is another kind of security, and both are worth having.ResourcesThe two books referenced in this week's post are A.B. Ross, Big Crops from Little Gardens, and John and Helen Philbrick, Organic Gardening for Health and Nutrition. The latter is readily available; the former is tolerably rare, and (since it's long out of copyright) will be scanned and posted on the Cultural Conservers Foundation website as soon as time permits.There are any number of good books on cloches, row covers, cold frames and solar greenhouses. Three books that have been mainstays of my library are Rick Fisher and Bill Yanda's classic The Food and Heat Producing Solar Greenhouse, William Head's Gardening Under Cover, and the predictably massive and detailed Rodale Press book on the subject, James C. McCullagh (ed)., The Solar Greenhouse Book. All three of these have detailed plans for solar greenhouses, and the latter two also cover some of the smaller species in the same family of time machines.

Two Agricultures, Not One

Talking about the future after peak oil is a challenging thing. One of the things that makes it most challenging is the extent to which so many people seem unable to imagine any way of doing things that isn't business as usual in some lightly modified form. Last week's post made a passing reference to this odd blinkering of our collective imagination, in the context of current worries in the peak oil blogosphere about "peak phosphorus."It's true, of course, that the rapid depletion of the world's reserves of rock phosphate, a key ingredient in chemical fertilizers, is a serious short term problem. Today's agricultural systems depend on chemical fertilizers, and there aren't any other abundant and highly concentrated sources of mineral phosphate available to be dumped into the intake hoppers of fertilizer factories. Still, this doesn't mean that we're all going to starve to death; it means that the way we produce food nowadays is not long for the world, and will be replaced by other ways of producing food that don't depend on mass infusions of nonrenewable resources.Those other ways already exist, and have the benefit of well over a century of practical experience and testing. What makes it difficult for many people to notice them, or factor them into a sense of the future, is that they don't look like industrial agriculture at all. To borrow a metaphor from computer technology, they aren't plug-and-play components; they presuppose radically different relationships among land, resources, farmers, crops, and consumers; and as they expand into the space left blank by today's faltering industrial agriculture -- a process already well under way -- the new social forms defined by these relationships differ so starkly from existing forms of food production and distribution so greatly that many people have trouble fitting the new possibilities into their view of the future..Of course this same pattern pervades nearly all current debates about peak oil. Consider the endless bickering over the potential of renewable energy. Most of that bickering presupposes that the only way a society can or should use energy is the way today's industrial nations currently use energy. Thus you get one side insisting that windpower, say, can provide the same sort of instantly accessible and abundant energy supply we're used to having, using some equivalent of the same distribution systems and technologies we're used to using, while the other side -- generally with better evidence -- insists that it can't. What nearly always gets missed in these debates is the fact that it's quite possible to have a technologically advanced and humane society without, for example, having electricity on demand from sockets on every wall across the length and breadth of a continent, or mortgaging our future to allow individuals to zoom around in hopelessly inefficient personal vehicles on an extravagant system of highways. The sooner we start thinking about what kinds and forms of energy wind turbines are actually best suited to produce -- rather than trying to forcie them onto the Procrustean bed of an electrical grid that was designed to exploit the very idiosyncratic kinds of energy you get from fossil fuel supplies -- the sooner windpower can be put to use building an energy system for the future, rather than propping up a failing one from the past. What stands in the way of this recognition, of course, is the emotional power of today's ideology of progress, the purblind assumption that the way we do things must be the best possible way to do them.A similar set of blinders blocks the way to a clear sense of our agricultural options in the age of peak oil. It's indicative, for example, that a recent post here on composting brought several denunciatory responses insisting that there was no way for one family to produce enough compost to fertilize a 640-acre wheat farm or the equivalent. In one sense, that sort of response is quite correct; in another, it's completely beside the point, because you wouldn't use homebrewed compost to fertilize a 640-acre wheat farm at all. Composting, especially on a home scale, is aimed at a different part of the complex land use pattern of a sustainable agricultural system.If you hopped into a time machine and went back to visit farm country a century or so, to the days when sprawling interstate highway systems and fleets of trucks hadn't yet made distance an irrelevance over continental scales, you'd notice something about the farms of that time that you won't find in most farms today: each farm had, apart from its main acreage for corn or wheat or what have you, a kitchen garden, an orchard, a henhouse, and a bit of pasture for a cow or two. Those had a completely different economic function from that of the main acreage, and they were managed in a completely different way. Their function was to produce food for the farm family and farmhands, where the main acreage was used to produce a cash crop for sale; and they were worked intensively, while the main acreage was farmed extensively.The shift in prefixes between these two words defines a nearly total change in approach. Extensive farming, as the term suggests, involves significant acreage. It maintains soil fertility through crop rotation and fallow periods, rather than through fertilizers or soil amendments. The basic tools of the trade are a plow and something to draw it -- horses or oxen, when you don't have factories to produce tractors and fossil fuels to power them -- with add-ons up to and including the huge horse-drawn combines that lumbered over American fields in the 1920s. The crops that you can grow with extensive farming in temperate regions, in the absence of cheap abundant energy, are pretty much limited to grains, dry beans and dry peas, but you can produce these in very substantial amounts, and they store and ship well, so they make good cash crops even if the only way to get them to market is a wagon to the nearest river system and a canal boat from there.Intensive gardening has to be done on a much smaller scale; among other reasons, the labor it requires is too substantial to be applied to acreage of any size. It maintains soil fertility by adding whatever soil amendments are available -- compost, manure, leaf mold, a fish buried in every corn hill, you name it -- and the basic tools of the trade are a hoe and somebody who knows how to use it. The crops you can grow in an intensive garden account for everything other than grains and dry legumes, from the first spring radishes to the leeks you overwinter under straw; the chickens, the cow, and the fruit from the orchard all belong to this same intensive sector and participate in its tight cycles of nutrients. In an age without fossil fuels, very little of what can be grown intensively can be transported over any distance without spoiling, so intensive growing is always done close to where the food will be eaten.That's why every farm in the America of a century ago had its own intensive kitchen garden, orchard and livestock, and it's also why every American city a hundred years ago was ringed with market gardens, chicken farms, dairies, and the like, to keep the shelves of urban grocers filled with something other than grains and dried legumes. It's also why most American urban houses from a century ago, even the cramped little row houses that were built for factory workers, had a little plot in back that got at least a few hours of sunlight a day. That was where the kitchen garden and the hens went; they were as much a part of an ordinary urban household as the pantry.Thus America a century ago had two separate systems of food production. You would have seen exactly the same thing in most other countries at the same time; if you left your time machine parked in some Iowa barn, hopped the train to New York, and booked passage on a tramp steamer headed around the world, you could count on finding much the same sort of double system busy at work in most of your ports of call. If you caught the train to Paris while your ship was taking on cargo in Marseilles, you would find that the market gardens around the French capitol were using the ancestor of today's deep bed intensive gardening to keep their customers supplied with produce; if you had time to kill in Kowloon while the cargo from Marseilles was unloaded, you could travel inland a bit and see another ancestor of today's organic gardening thriving on little patches of land, while the monotonous green of rice paddies spread in every direction around them.The great transformation of American agriculture in the middle decades of the twentieth century, which was exported around the world under the banner of the "Green Revolution" a few decades later, centered on the abandonment of the intensive half of this system, and its replacement by extensive farming of all the crops that used to be grown intensively. That transformation was only possible because chemical fertilizers could (temporarily) replace the nutrients intensive gardening methods put into the soil by other means, and because petroleum-powered transport could (just as temporarily) make it possible for produce to be shipped across continents and oceans without spoiling, either in processed form or more recently in some semblance of its fresh condition.The Green Revolution in particular was surrounded by massive propaganda campaigns about feeding the world, but I trust most people by now realize that much of its actual agenda focused on turning the rest of the world into a source of luxury crops for the industrial nations. The model they used was the one pioneered in the early 20th century by American fruit companies in Central America, right up to and including the corporate-backed kleptocracies that contributed the phrase "banana republic" to the English language. The project was a success, in narrowly economic terms; the replacement throughout the Third World of small farms growing food for local consumption with big farms growing export crops for overseas markets duly followed, as did the mass expropriation of land that has flooded Third World cities with dispossessed farm families ever since, and the inevitable famines and public health crises as well. Recent attempts to turn what foodstuffs are still produced in the Third World into automobile fuel for the industrial nations are simply one logical outcome of the same process.Unfortunately for the architects and beneficiaries of this system, though perhaps fortunately for a good many others, the whole project depended on huge supplies of fertilizer feedstocks and fossil fuels, neither of which have turned out to be available indefinitely. For the world's nonindustrial nations, then, the end of the industrial age thus ushers in a difficult but ultimately positive shift in which the mechanisms of foreign export, along with the wild distortions of political and economic power they produced, come apart at the seams. For the world's industrial nations, on the other hand, the end of a system that kept shoppers happily supplied with strawberries in January promises to usher in a time of food crisis in which a system of intensive local production will need to be revived in a hurry.It's thus not accidental that the material discussed here in recent posts has focused on exactly the sort of small-scale intensive organic gardening that is well suited to fill this niche in the human ecology of the near future. For that matter, it's not accidental that much of the last half century or so of research and experimentation into organic food growing has focused on exactly this sort of intensive production; it doubtless helped that it's a lot easier to afford a backyard or two for experimental garden plots than it is to arrange for 640 acres or so to use some innovative organic farming method or other -- though this has also been done, with good results. Some of my readers may be in a position, now or in the future, to try their hand at extensive farming using organic methods to produce grains and dry legumes, and a century from now maybe half the American population will be making their livings that way, but they will also have their own kitchen gardens, henhouses, and so on -- and a much larger fraction of readers here and now are in the position to do the same thing.The productive potential of intensive gardening, especially under emergency conditions, should not be underestimated. A team of researchers at pioneering organic-gardening group Ecology Action found, on the basis of extensive tests, that it's possible to feed one person year round on a spare but adequate vegetarian diet off less than 1000 square feet of intensively gardened soil. (The details are in David Duhon's book, listed in the resource section.) In the more troubled parts of the future ahead of us, some of us may have to do just that; a great many more of us will need to be able to garden in order to pad out potential irregularities in a food supply that's desperately vulnerable, over the short term, to fluctuations in the price and availability of fertilizer feedstocks and fossil fuels. The victory gardens of past wars are likely to be a useful template for the survival gardens of the deindustrial future.A little further down the road, as the resource and energy base for conventional farming begins to run noticeably short, the shift toward a more sustainable extensive agriculture will have to follow. I don't expect to contribute much to that, as I don't have any experience with large acreages; green wizards in training who are interested in pursuing extensive organic farming thus will have to do a fair bit of their own homework. For the moment, though, intensive gardening is the more urgent of the two, and it's also the one with which I have some thirty years of hands-on experience in one form or another. The habit of abstract speculation about other people's knowledge is not as useful as some seem to think; more useful and more important just know is teaching what one knows.ResourcesThere are plenty of books on small-scale organic intensive gardening available these days; everyone has their favorites. John Jeavons' How To Grow More Vegetables is among the most popular, though there are also plenty of people who swear at it rather than by it. Most of these latter seem to like Steve Solomon's Gardening When It Counts, so having both of these on your shelf may be a good idea. Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening is particularly good if you've never grown an edible plant before. Two other favorites of mine, out of print but readily available on the used book market, are John Seymour's The Self-Sufficient Gardener and Duane Newcomb's The Postage Stamp Garden Book.The claim that intensive organic gardening can feed one person year round on less than 1000 square feet is documented in detail in David Duhon's book One Circle, out of print and not always easy to find; my copy was purchased at a book sale where, to their lasting discredit, an organic farming and gardening organization that will go unnamed here was selling off their entire library of Seventies green wizardry books for pennies on the dollar. Another book that covers some of the same ground, and supports the same claim, is John A Freeman's Survival Gardening.

Question Everything

Could Free Markets Solve All Economic Problems?

George Mobus Fundamentals of Market Economies I did a series on Sapient Governance a while back, by which I meant using the wisdom of nature to fashion a set of mechanisms that would govern human behavior and economic activity. Governance is not just about laws and regulations, but about natural mechanisms like the markets to coordinate how humans interact and exchange the products of their efforts. I used the concept of autopoiesis from biology to demonstrate that there are mechanisms taken from hierarchical control theory that help coordinate work processes within any kind of economy, in nature and in human society. The point was that markets are mechanisms for coordinating the web of production operations that are distributed throughout the whole system. This is accomplished by variable exchange, by which I mean that messages are exchanged between operational entities that lead to the control of the flow of resources between those parties. This happens within cell metabolism and it happens in the human economies. The details are obviously different, but the purposes and dynamics appear to be pretty much the same. As such they fit into the general theory of systems and systems science should be able to say something useful about markets. The thesis presented here is that effective markets are local phenomena that can only help coordinate interactions between trading entities that have sufficient information regarding the underlying value of the good or service being traded. Markets cannot solve globally inherent problems. They are incapable of broadcasting sufficient information to all parties and to all levels of participation in large-scale webs of trade. People, not markets, decide on value and when to make exchanges. A market is not more than a mechanism for exchange and can only work if the people involved have insights into the basic work that went into producing the good or service. The modern economy is too diverse, with too much special (and technical) expertise imbued within production processes, and too distributed in space and time for participants to have adequate information on the underlying work value that should form the basis for prices. The situation is also complicated since modern markets include multiple competing participants. From hierarchical control theory we know that under conditions of competition equitable distributions of resources and built wealth are jeopardized without some form of logistical level coordination. Economies, unlike metabolism in a living cell, are rife with competitive forces. The general belief is that competition is what drives innovation and keeps costs down. While true on the surface, this mechanism depends on complete honesty to withstand the temptation to cheat. Humans are notoriously susceptible to that temptation as has been witnessed most recently in every specialized market in our economy. Currently various legislated rules and regulations along with government agencies (watchdogs) are used to provide a patchwork and mostly band aid approach to logistical control. It can be said that Reagan and Clinton-era deregulations have exposed the weaknesses of unfettered markets to cheating. Clearly markets, left to themselves even a little bit, are incapable of equitable distribution behavior when human participants are the decision makers. This is particularly cogent in the current age when markets appear to be failing us so blatantly. Today we see that an over-reliance on markets as mediators of transactions has led to massive market failures in housing, securities, and most infamously in so-called financial derivatives. But there is a more subtle way in which over-reliance on market mechanisms in more common transactions has led to dislocations and general failure. The housing market is a prime (not to make a pun) example. The so-called housing bubble has resulted from an inability of buyers and sellers to prudently and properly place a realistic value on properties. A herd mentality took over and everyone was convinced that prices of houses would always go up. People started thinking of their homes as financial investments and, more recently, as automatic teller machines (ATMs) that, as they appreciated on the 'market', could be used as collateral for loans to buy other goods. The supposed rising prices of homes (everybody wanted one so the demand was always going to go up) buoyed the general economy in the sense that every time one sold the higher sales price contributed to the gross domestic product (GDP) growth. And as home sales were always going up, so was the GDP. GDP is used as an overall gauge of how well the economy is doing. The market failed miserably in this case. It failed in the case of financial products called mortgage-backed securities and all sorts of derivative based on mortgages. Even so, many conservative and libertarian voices are calling for freer markets rather than regulations be imposed from the government. Their argument is that the markets in question were never truly free and hence that was the cause of their failures. Basically, the claim is that free markets will solve ALL economic problems. To some that argument sounds reasonable, but as I hope to show, it is fallacious. And, as it turns out, so is the argument that more regulations are needed. At least that argument is fallacious unless one is quite careful to recognize what sorts of regulatory mechanisms actually work; they turn out not to be the usual governmental agency with a stick in its hand. Nature has some answers; logistical control has evolved in biological systems to coordinate operational-level, market-like exchange mechanisms. But economists and politicians never think to look to nature for their policy answers. In order to understand why markets fail we need to look at how they evolved from the earliest modes of exchange between tribes. Humans evolved a number of mental/moral thinking patterns that enabled such trading. Those thinking patterns help keep trades fair on average by balancing the value placed on one's own efforts and resources versus that the other places on his. Attempts to claim higher value than was warranted were generally easily caught and sanctions against the 'cheater' were imposed to punish the attempt (or if the trade was made and found to be wanting afterward). Over time, the evolution of culture, particularly after the advent of agriculture, had a major impact on trading relations and methods. By tracking the changes in dynamics of markets we might hope to see where the limits of market mechanisms lie and understand how it is that markets like the housing one have failed. I use the word failed advisedly. By failure I mean an inability to keep trades fair and equitable for everyone involved. Libertarians (free market champions in spite of evidence) will argue that the markets did work in that prices corrected after the bubble. But that abstract concept of correction leaves a wake of misery for millions of families as they loose their homes in foreclosures. They bought at the market high and were forced to repay loans on those high prices even as the value of their 'investment' tumbled. When some of them lost their jobs, on top of that, they had no recourse but to walk away, losing everything. This is not my idea of a market working. Markets should exist to support human well being. If there are crashes and bubble bursts then that is not working in my book. So why do markets exist in the first place? A simple answer is that given by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations, that with many people producing excess goods of one kind, and with that many people needing goods that others have produced, exchanges of value-for-value are inevitable. Each producer is found to be good at what they do, hence the excess, and with many good producers engaged in the enterprise of social living, everyone comes out ahead, compared to if they were to try to produce every necessity on their own. Markets exist to help people fulfill their needs. Trade: Why Markets Exist and How They Work In all likelihood you have been to a farmers market, possibly near your home. They are making a revival as a popular place to buy local produce and various trinkets, artwork, furniture, and numerous goods made by local artisans. There is something both exciting and comforting about these markets. Somehow you feel closer to the products by buying directly from the producers. But for most of us city dwellers, we still have no real conception of what went into making the products and have a tendency to pay whatever the posted price is for it. Dealing directly with the producer-vendor we somehow feel we are getting a fair bargain; not paying more than the item is actually worth in terms of the producer's costs and efforts. As romantic as these farmers markets are to most city dwellers, they are really nothing compared with open-air markets in many rural areas and developing nation towns of the world where producer-vendors are also buyers from other producer-vendors. Open-air markets provide a mechanism for buyers and sellers to exchange goods and services directly from producers to consumers. Even so, these markets generally run on monetary exchanges for goods and services rather than direct barter. Figure 1. Open-air markets have become popular around the US. In many parts of the world, this is the main kind of market for exchanging goods and services.   The original form of a market was for two or more specialized producer-vendors to negotiate a trade, an exchange of goods/services, in terms of units of one product for units of another. This is bartering. Surprisingly, even though the monetary exchange system has come into dominance throughout the world, there are still many situations (where money is scarce or the economies have been under inflationary stress) where barter is still operative. It is a fallback form of market that people can inherently grasp. It isn't easy to negotiate unit-to-unit exchanges, for example, how many sheep equal one cow? But people have worked out the value-for-value equations many times over and deals can be struck. Figure 2. The first markets were simple matters of barter exchange of goods and services between two or more producer-vendors. The exchange details (units of one product for units of the other) were negotiated. In the early days when most participants had some idea of what effort and resources went into producing the product they wanted (dashed curved arrows), the relative values of units of products was more easily determined.   The key to barter markets was the degree to which the specialized producer-vendors still had some idea of what kinds of costs the other producer had incurred along with an idea of how much value-added effort he had to put into producing a finished product. A sheep farmer, for example, might have a good idea of the relative value of a cow even though he doesn't raise cattle himself. There are sufficient similarities between cattle and sheep that one can make educated guesses. This insight into the costs of resources and effort to produce the desired product allowed the negotiations to produce reasonable value-for-value trades. Certainly every trader wants to get the most return for their product and the best price for the other product. So negotiations aren't foregone as to outcome. A lot of human perception, proclivities, and other psychological factors enter into decisions about perceived relative values. The sheep farmer might be desperate for cow milk and give up six sheep one time. But another time the cow farmer may be in need of wool and be willing to take only five sheep in exchange for one cow. It is in this sense that a market is 'free'. The participants are free to decide based on their own needs and perceptions of relative value. They won't strike a deal unless both are within reasonable range of one another in the needs-value space. But note, it is only possible to have a free market when both participants have relatively reasonable (not perfect) information regarding the costs involved in the work of the other. If one participant feels that the other is trying to gain too much of a 'profit', then his sense of fairness can intervene to drive the bargaining toward a more reasonable exchange rate. Or he can walk away in a huff looking for someone who is not trying to steal his shirt. Barter is not a smooth way to trade because of the problem of differences in discrete unit sizes and the difficulty of deciding how many units of one product are 'worth' one unit of another product. Money was invented to smooth out the exchange of goods and services (also see: What is money, really?, a look at the deep relationship between physical money and energy available to do useful work). The invention of money solved quite a few problems in economic exchanges. And it probably helped accelerate the movement toward greater and greater specialization in trades. But both the use of money and increasing specialization probably contributed to an increase in difficulty for markets to work as well as they had under direct barter. Relative Value and Psychological Factors: Price in a Money-based Market Over time, and as societies became more reliant on more specialized workers the ability of any one participant to grasp the basics of relative costs/value of the good or service being sold diminished. The cost basis for value added became cloudy. Sellers took to setting prices denominated in the coin of the realm and left it to buyers to decide if the price fairly reflected the underlying value of the product. By underlying value I mean the sum of resource costs and production effort that went into the production of the good (or service, though these remained more transparent since the work was done on the spot). These represented the basic value added to the resources to make something the customer wanted. Effort has no absolute measure attached to it. For one thing skill has a lot to do with how much effort needs to be applied. A very skilled worker can produce a widget with less effort than an unskilled one. Thus there is a difference in input of energy that a skilled producer might be able to exploit when the customer might have to pay a higher price (because of more effort needed) to a less skilled producer to get the same product. Thus the skilled producer is in a position to demand a price greater than the sum of resource costs and his own effort, reflecting an award for being so efficient -- his profit. Every producer wants profit. This goes back to the early agriculture days when farmers planted more than they would consume so as to have some left over just in case. With grains this is particularly the case since grains can be stored for long periods. Granaries could be built up as a hedge against bad years, source of new seed to expand in future years, or to trade for other food stuffs or trinkets. Profit means you are safer and can do more production in the future, so it is a natural desire to want to make it. In the arena of food, profit means obtaining more energy (and nutrients) in the food than was expended in the effort of growing the food. This is represented as energy returned on energy invested (EROI or EROEI). It is the basis of wealth production. Now we run into some problems. As shown in the figure below, in a more generalized money-based market with more specialized participants the dynamic begins to change. Figure 3. Money-based markets with specialized participants have a different dynamic.   In the earlier, simpler, barter-based economy a buyer could make a rough estimate of the relative value of his own efforts compared with those of the sellers. He also had a reasonably good idea about the resource costs compared with his own. The market had a reasonable amount of transparency because the nature of the work being done was not that foreign to all involved. In fact it was probably the case that most participants knew almost exactly what was involved since most were to one degree or another semi-self sufficient. That means they may have actually done the same kind of work. The reason for specialization had a lot to do with relative efficiency and personal preferences. If I have a knack for sheering sheep and like the life of a sheep rancher, and if you like raising cattle and are very good at it, why should both of us do the same work? I could raise a cow or two, but suffer from inefficiencies in doing so. As long as I know I can always buy a cow from you, there is no reason to keep raising a few myself. As society became more complex, with more specializations, it became difficult to always have insights into what the cost basis of a product might be. It became difficult for buyers to gauge the relative costs and efforts compared with their own labor. As towns grew and tradesmen developed businesses their workers only knew that their labor paid off in a certain amount of cash. The problem was, how much of that earned income cash should they use to buy various commodities in the markets? How could they be sure that the seller was not trying to take advantage of their ignorance of what costs had been incurred and whether the they were just trying to make a larger than fair profit? Buyers were reduced to having to evaluate the worth of a product on their surficial perceptions of the product itself and an inner sense of how much they needed it. It is hard to say when people started to keep household budgets in any kind of explicit fashion, but I'm pretty sure every buyer did a subconscious calculation to see if the price being demanded squared with the amount of hard earned cash he was willing to part with. Open-air markets today still have that feel about them in that the seller posts a price and the buyers have to decide if that sounds about right. There may still be some room for negotiations -- haggling over price -- in many situations, even today. But as market sizes grew and additional participants began to enter to fulfill yet newer roles, to facilitate merchandise movement, yet again a new dynamic emerged. Bear in mind that all the while that marketplaces were evolving, along with societal complexity, one factor that almost no one gave much attention to was actually enabling this change in dynamics. From the time when humans first domesticated fire, their access to sources of exosomatic (outside the body) energy for doing work have been increasing. Humans have been exceedingly good at discovering ways of extracting energy from natural resources, wood, animals, water, wind, and later fossil fuels. They have been incredibly good at finding technological ways to exploit those energy resources to do the work of production. And they have been exceedingly good at inventing new products that could be built using the new technologies. Increasing flows of energy allowed humans to engage in ever increasing forms of commerce, including long distance trading. It allowed increasing specialization or rather allowed the increase in complexity that demanded greater specialization (division of labor) in order to produce most efficiently. Markets were now not so much a place, in the village or town, but a network of relations across a city and even between regions. Markets became more abstract in the sense that they existed in the minds of participants more than in one specific location. They were real enough in terms of goods and services being traded for cash and even promises to pay cash at a later time. Markets were working. In spite of a loss of transparency -- buyers knowing what basic values accrued to products and services -- markets seemed to flourish and serve the basic purpose of making peoples' lives better. Here we have a mystery. If buyers were increasingly unable to work out subconsciously what something was worth in terms of the effort and resource costs that went into it, then how could fair deals still be struck. The answer is found in the increasing entry into markets of numerous producers vying for the same customers. As the populations of towns increased the tendency for numerous individuals to develop similar skills and produce similar products increased as well. Since all needed to eat, they strove to produce at a cost that could be reflected in a good price for the buyer. Competition The simple answer to what kept markets working for so long is that more sellers competed for the same buyers' coins. Competition drove producers to strive for best prices. On the other hand, where competition was stifled, sellers could set prices based more on what they thought the buyers would be dumb enough to pay. Monopolies have been considered a bad thing by economists because they can charge whatever they like, and if they are in the business of producing some essential product or service, they can really mop up the profits. How competition kept markets honest is a great story. It is one that conservatives love to tell over and over. And, for the most part it is true. But once again, there was a deeper factor that was at work, unrecognized by market observers. While competition was a necessary condition for market success it was hardly sufficient. What was going on behind it all was the continuing increase in energy flow enabling the increase in availability of work opportunities. As long as everyone could get access to energy (labor and machines) the impetus behind market success in making life better for all, or at least most, was at play. At the dawn of the industrial revolution energy flow was abundant (with the rise of coal) and so was the resultant wealth. The notion that a rising tide lifts all ships took hold and the belief that markets were the engines of wealth production (a la Smith's invisible hand) became the zeitgeist of the age. Those who took an interest in economic activity as a subject to study for its own value looked for causal models of why the market worked so marvelously to produce the results of wealth production. In competition and its underlying mechanisms they found their proximal causes. And that story has stuck ever since. Too bad they didn't look deep enough. Here are a few mythic tales. Production Efficiencies, Economies of Scale, and "Features" Whereas in older versions of markets the willingness of a buyer to purchase goods for money often involved trust that came from dealing with a few, historically reliable vendors who one felt were honest in setting their desired price, as more roles for market participants evolved, it became difficult for buyers to be certain they were getting good deals. This left buyers with having to judge relative value based mostly on their ability to pay, on their budget. As mentioned above, some producers were more skilled at producing their products than others. Skill and finding ways to lower input costs had a direct impact on profits. Perhaps many different producers were attempting to sell their goods to the same population of buyers. Another mythic story has it that producers, eager to out compete the others funded innovation, invention, and technology that reduced costs and allowed them to pass those savings on to customers. As with all myths there is some truth to this one. But as with the whole story of competition, this one needs closer scrutiny. Underlying the ability to innovate is the fact that abundant, cheap energy allowed the possibility for innovations to occur. First, by the fact that energy was so cheap, firms could afford to invest some profits in R&D efforts to find innovations. Second, those innovations invariably involved the use of energy-using machines that could translate power into useful work at production rates that beat human labor. Again, energy being cheap allowed the trade off between machines and labor to favor machines. Economists had long measured production efficiency in terms of labor dollars used per unit of production. They did not worry about machine (physical) efficiency because it simply didn't matter except in the way it allowed the reduction in labor costs. Increasing labor efficiency translated into a competitive advantage to those firms that could employ innovative technologies. They gained greater control over their profit potential by charging just under what other producers in the market were charging but not necessarily as low as their cost savings would have permitted. There is an irony in the use of machines and cheap energy to substitute for human labor. In 1865 William Stanley Jevons observed a paradox (now called Jevons' Paradox) in noting that as a work process (e.g. mining coal) became more 'efficient' by virtue of using machines to increase production, instead of simply being happy with the reduction in labor at a given production rate, the tendency was to increase production (and consumption). As the steam engine made it possible to mine more coal (by pumping water out of the mines), using coal as its fuel, industry simply absorbed the increased availability and the industrial revolution was off and running. The reason for this paradox is simple. It involves the thought that 'efficiency' is measured in terms of classical economics inputs, labor, capital, land. Energy costs went down because coal became more abundant and thus cheaper to buy. By economic measures this meant that the energy inputs (measured in monetary terms) became relatively insignificant as inputs, hence the process appeared to be more efficient. Had anyone thought about it, however, they would have realized that from an energy standpoint it wasn't efficient at all. A lump of coal can do a lot more work per unit time than a human or even a horse because it is energy dense and burns at a high temperature compared with its surroundings. But the early steam engines were very inefficient from the physical viewpoint. Since the demand for coal rose dramatically with the evolution of the Industrial Revolution, the water could not be pumped out fast enough to allow deeper mining. This fact spurred the innovation, for example the Watt engine improved performance over the Newcomen engine, that would lead to higher true machine efficiency (and help in the science of thermodynamics) and, thus, reinforce the cycle. Of course, the big fallacy in this innovation story is that it could go on forever. Coal was a finite resource and by the mid 1800s Great Britain felt that fact rather fiercely. Fortunately there was another form of fossil fuel that could replace many applications of coal just starting to be produced in large quantities. Oil would keep the engines of industry running, especially with regards to transportation. Nevertheless, the finiteness of coal should have been a warning that allowing the effects of Jevons' observation to go unchecked would one day cause serious effects in the economy. Yet, at the time, oil seemed to be incredibly abundant, so much so that I suspect the majority thought it was infinite. Yet another factor is lauded as a means to compete more effectively and that is the idea that when you buy, say component parts for your product, in large quantities, you can negotiate better deals on per unit costs. This leads to lower costs in the product and an ability to further increase profits and/or pass on savings to customers. Either way it leads to competitive advantage. Here is an incentive to grow the business so as to be in a position to buy those large quantities. Other production factors can also benefit from size. Henry Ford discovered that mass production in assembly lines generated greater savings and gave him a great advantage. But Ford may have missed the boat on another factor that leads to higher competitiveness. He mandated that all Model T's would be black since that allowed for great savings when it came to paint costs. What he didn't get is that people also value unique features that seem to give products more bang for the buck. Given two products with exactly the same function, people will pay more for the one that does it with a little more style. It is human nature, of course. But it is just one more way in which the underlying true value of a product can be obfuscated. All of these factors tend to hide real costs from the buyer's observation. As a result who can actually say what something as complicated as an automobile is worth compared to the basic needs for its functionality. And that is what leads to value-for-value trade problems. How much is a house worth? The answer is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. In other words we will let competition and the markets decide on value and not worry about real costs (including external costs such as environmental degradation). The markets will decide rather than humans. Competition Keeps Markets Honest The beauty of a competitive marketplace is that if you, as a buyer, don't like the price or quality at one vendor's stand, you can shop around till you find a deal more to your liking. Competition is viewed as a good thing in markets. Competition keeps prices down and quality high, or so the story goes. Indeed the general belief is that competition drives innovation and pushes prices downward by finding cost savings as discussed above. The Walmart phenomenon is supposed to be, by free market advocates, the latest, and perhaps most prominent, example of this effect. Walmart (formerly Wal-Mart) is hailed by libertarians as a prime example of innovation in supply chain management in order to offer American shoppers great prices. The details of how those innovations work have come under heavy criticisms, however, since they use their economies of scale to squeeze profits from suppliers and drive wages down. In fact, competition gets cutthroat and dirty. It can, and has forced companies to do dishonest things in order to win the approval of customers and, in the case of publicly traded stock companies, shareholders. When that happens, companies can turn decidedly dishonest. Once again this is a function of transparency. In the first markets I could walk by the cow farmer's place and see his operation and have a sense of his methods, etc. Today nobody (and it seems that includes some CEOs) has a good sense of operations of other companies. As the saying goes, we're better off not knowing how they make sausage. But then how do we judge the intrinsic value of the products they make? We've always believed that growth in the economy meant continuing expansion of opportunities for accumulating wealth. And while energy flows were increasing that was basically true. If the size of the game pot is growing and everybody gets a fair shot at winning then it doesn't have to be a zero sum kind of game. The problem is we are now entering a period in which energy flows are going to be forever shrinking until we reach a lower level of flows from alternative energy sources. That level will be much lower than we are used to. So the game pot is shrinking. And when it is shrinking and everyone playing is used to being able to get more of a growing pot, what do we do? We beg, borrow, and steal. Which is exactly what you are seeing in today's developed economies. The stealing is starting to get more favor from corporate America, it seems. Competition was a useful factor in promoting innovation and keeping companies honest when products were simpler and more directed at basic functionality. It was also workable as long as energy flows were increasing. But now competition is probably past its usefulness as a market mechanism for producing equitable distribution of wealth. Indeed, under current conditions, anything that promotes and sustains competition is simply hastening the demise of the economy due to rampant dishonesty needed to keep up the guise of successful production. When and Why Markets Fail My thesis has been that markets are only just a mechanism for allowing the exchange of value-for-value in a localized transaction and work only when both parties to a trade have adequate information regarding the intrinsic value of the product being traded. In a money economy the value of cash ought to be related to a standard unit of work (energy) so that its value is known to all. Of course, thanks to Milton Friedman money is now just another commodity the purchasing power of which varies idiosyncratically with market perceptions. The other half of the trade, a product or service, needs to have a transparent intrinsic value as well. Markets will fail to provide an adequate mechanism for achieving global equitable distribution when these conditions are not met. And it is easy to show how they are not met in today's complex economic system. But moreover, the argument goes on to claim that these conditions can never be met because opacity is intrinsic to complexity. It is a human decision maker who must, in the end, evaluate the worth of a product, and in our complex economy with complex products that ability is minimized to a point that ordinary buyers cannot really know what the value of something is, other than their estimate of what it will do for them. This is especially true and amplified in consumer market products where motivations to buy include psychological factors like social status and sexual attraction. Thus, merely adding governmental regulation on top of an already flawed mechanism will do little to correct the situation. Markets have been failing in every quarter. We need to understand why and develop better coordination controls that will help achieve equitable distribution without the distortions that too many politically-based policies inevitably introduce. What is Something Worth? Markets fail when buyers consistently fail to assess the worth of products so as to make informed decisions on buying from one producer versus another. Judgments of worth are based on two components. One is a perception of what the product will do for the buyer, its functionality or utility. Note that this need not be a rational judgment. In fact, as noted above, many judgments of value are based on emotional effects rather than utility in the traditional economic sense. One of the major flaws of modern neoclassical economic theory has been the rational agent or Homo economus making sound judgments before buying. Fortunately many contemporary economists have realized this flaw and the field of behavioral economics is using experimental psychology to figure out a better model of purchasing agents. The other factor involves having a sense of how much something costs the producer to produce and how much value-added effort the producer expended in the process. We humans have a built-in sense of fairness that dictates our feelings about exchanges. Tit-for-tat is the default position with some variance on either side, but not a lot. If we feel someone is selling us something that cost them very little but are asking a large price, we would generally not buy it. Along with our emotional desire, which may override our sense of the unfairness aspect if we perceive the object to be of unusually high impact on our well being, we formulate a subconscious sense of value or what something is worth. And then if the price is right... What happens when you have no way of knowing what the intrinsic or cost-based value of a product is? How do you formulate a judgment? All the average buyer can do is judge based on superficial appearances. If a car looks racier and sexier than others, does that mean it has a higher intrinsic value? Did the manufacturer expend more effort and pay more for parts? How would you know? You might, if your rational side is in control, go to a quality reporting source like Consumer Reports, which makes an attempt to test products in the consumer markets, to see if they think the car has high intrinsic value. The traditional model for prices in markets is based on the classic supply-demand relation in economics. As mentioned before the right price is what buyers are willing to pay for something. The playoff between supply and demand (the aggregates of what producers put on the market and of buyers of those goods) determines the average price. If demand goes up due to buyers perceiving more use of the product, then at a given level of supply the price will be pushed upward to reflect it. At some higher price, demand will stabilize and a new equilibrium will obtain. So the theory goes that the market will decide the price and all buyers have to do is decide if they can afford the product at whatever price has been set. All well and good, perhaps, except for those products that buyers perceive are worth far more (that is they are willing to pay much higher prices for) than they really are intrinsically. This is what creates bubbles in markets. Without a baseline in intrinsic value buyers cannot judge the worth of a product and can only base their buying decisions on their emotion-based want and what the going price in the market appears to be. And depending on supply, buyers become competitors trying to out bid one another. The intrinsic value of a product depends on costs that the producer paid for components, labor, overhead properly allocated, and fixed capital properly depreciated. If the prices of all of these items were similarly based on intrinsic costs then the cost-value aggregation would be recursively applied all the way down the supply chain and the cost build up would reflect true costs. But buyers of components have the same problem that buyers of consumer goods have in not having insights into those intrinsic costs. In an economic system where information on costs of inputs is considered proprietary it is in the interest of suppliers to keep it that way. Thus one never knows if the price being paid reflects a real value or if it is just where the market happens to be taking us. Sellers have an incentive to keep the market opaque (or what they call 'proprietary'). In the name of profit they will always seek ways to cut costs without necessarily passing the savings on to buyers. Even Walmart, after squeezing suppliers through threats of taking their business elsewhere doesn't always and immediately pass the lower costs on to customers unless they are being threatened by their competition. The game of capitalism is to maximize profits and thus shareholder equity. Never let that be forgotten. Unfettered Competition in a Non-Growing Real Asset Economy The timing of market failures is another big question. From the above we can imagine how market bubbles get started and inflated because of a lack of value sense among buyers. They are too easily caught up in a herd mentality and the self reinforcing feedback loop where seeing prices escalate, they feel a sense of panic that they need to bid the price up further to beat out the competition. It turns out that as long as buyers are generally making more income over time (or believing they will in the future) and there are ever more buyers entering the markets over time, the economic measure of the market (not its intrinsic aggregate value) can rise without seeming to cause too much of a problem. These conditions are met as long as the economic system in which the particular market is embedded is growing. The housing market in the US and earlier in Japan are examples. And that condition had been met as long as energy flow was increasing throughout much of history. But starting around the early 1970s the . It was still growing but at a slower pace each period. It had entered the top part of an 'S'-shaped curve. This is the point beyond which the marginal return on energy (and money) invested in getting more gross energy out of the ground went into serious decline*. And as economists are fond of reminding us, such conditions cause a decline in period to period profit growth. When the rate of marginal energy return started to diminish the real work that needed to be done to support the production of real (actual physical) wealth began to diminish as well. Almost nobody noticed because nobody paid attention to net energy and its role in production. Nor were they paying attention to the declining growth rate of real assets. Instead financial wizards started to push financial 'instruments' and 'products' onto the financial markets. Ordinary people started thinking of their homes as investment that paid dividends. Everyone was fooled into believing the economy was still growing over the last several decades The sales of these products and consumer goods based on money borrowed from supposedly appreciating asset values fluffed up the GDP. Indeed the demand for services in the artificially buoyed economy led to the creation of many jobs. All of which led economists to declare the economy healthy. In reality it was moribund. Real wealth was being produced at declining rates. What was being called real wealth, trinkets and toys made in China, further enhanced the illusion that our material wealth was expanding. Behind the scenes, as is now painfully obvious, governments ignored important infrastructure investment letting entropy work its will on bridges and power grids were not upgraded to deal with the growing demand. We let slide the deep basis of society and the economy for superficial and illusory marks of a healthy economy. We, in the west, shipped manufacturing and other jobs off to Asia because it was expedient and supported maintaining the bottom line. Of course a few companies that could not sweep their cost structures under the Asian rug were stuck looking for another way out through creative bookkeeping. Companies did what they had to to keep the illusion of America and the other OECD countries as economic engines producing wealth, when in fact it was producing hot air to pump into the bubbles. Without real growth in the real asset base, especially when there is growth in population, you will find that markets will crash and fail at the slightest provocation -- call it the trigger effect. One little hitch and a bubble or two will bust and bring the whole edifice down with it. That is what we are witnessing now. Put simply, markets fail when they (or to be more correct, their participants) cannot adapt to the realities of changed conditions with respect to energy flows. Reduce the net energy input per unit of time and the markets will first try to compensate with superficial and hollow fluff transactions (that presumably do not require large amounts of energy in order to be carried out, just a computer and some creativity). By ignoring infrastructure, and by companies ignoring investment in R&D, and by families and governments ignoring savings, we could hide a considerable amount of sin under the bed, at least for a while. But eventually it catches up. People respond to and make attempts to adapt to changes in profits, period-over-period. But profits are but a pale reflection of the underlying reality of energy flow. Moreover, the method of response, the reaction to boost profits by whatever means available, turns out to be counter to the logic of declining energy flows. The latter demands doing less real work, whereas the logic of profits demands doing anything that makes it seem as if profits are still expanding. And you can't have it both ways. The failure of markets means that many buyers and sellers will not be treated with equitable distribution. In one sense one might say it is equitable that people loose their equity because they simply got greedy or selfish and wanted more than the underlying value in the market could bear. They got what they deserved. However, for every one hundred or more losers there were a few winners who were just as greedy or selfish, but also lucky in their timing. When Markets Work For the Good of Humanity Should markets serve humanity or should humanity serve markets? It seems that as things stand today we have accepted as the answer to that question the latter. By elevating the market mechanism to an almighty level as solver of all problems we have subjugated our humanity to serve them. We have lost sight of the purpose of trade that evolved from ancient times. Our blind faith in markets to resolve all economic (and as it turns out political) issues is a malaise. Yet we have seen that at an appropriate scale a market does, indeed, solve a fundamental economic problem. The take-home lesson in all of this is that markets are legitimate mechanisms for facilitating exchanges of goods and services and providing information regarding the need for specific kinds of wealth production, a fundamental objective of capitalism. But they only work when all participants have sufficient value information with which to judge the efficacy of transactions. Information has become increasingly hard to come by in today's complex and highly distributed economy. Products are so complex that the general buyer cannot judge the intrinsic value reliably. Competition for buyers and among buyers for products with such bad information resources leads to distortions and bubbles that eventually burst, hurting the last ones into the fray. But even with bubbles and lost presumed assets when they burst, as long as the underlying real economy was growing by producing ever more physical assets of real economic worth (not just trinkets and toys) the pain could be absorbed and eventually forgotten. The problem now is that the production of real assets is starting to decline and we are entering a period of diminishing growth because we have diminishing net energy available to do the work. Markets cannot solve this problem because it is a real physical constraint. For example, the rising price of, say, oil will not result in more investments in substitute fuels (like corn ethanol) or alternative energy sources like solar or wind, because these latter are not actually physically viable substitutes. They do not have the energy density potential that fossil fuels have, and on top of that, the energy capture and conversion capital needed to make them work at all is based on using fossil fuels to build them. If the price of fossil fuels goes up with reduction in supply, so does the cost of alternative energy capital. No market can change basic physics. Transparency in the work that was accomplished in producing goods and services to be sold in a money-based market kept sellers honest. Basic fairness kept sellers from trying to cheat and extract a higher than necessary profit. Competition in markets is workable when there are few participants whose behavior is observable by all other participants. If a good is scarce and there is competition among buyers, social mores can operate to make sure the goods go to those who can make best use of them. When the competition is among sellers to sell a good, it acts to motivate sellers to produce the best quality good most efficiently so as to pass on savings. But perhaps most important of all, markets work when the scale is local and all of the parameters are accessible by human participants. Once markets get too large, and complicated, all of the above factors are negated. While it is true that local exchanges can still proceed as if a market is local (e.g. between any two vendors/buyers in a supply chain), the large-scale result is not the simple sum of all the local two-party exchanges that it seems. To summarize, markets work when: Buyers have adequate information Sellers are restricted to reasonable profit margins Competition among buyers is regulated to assure best uses Competition among sellers is regulated to assure non-overuse of resources Not expected to provide coordination over larger scales (smaller is better) The system as a whole is either in steady-state or growing.   Expecting markets to solve economic problems when any of these conditions are violated (as is the case in our current global economies) is folly. Hierarchical Control Theory and Market Coordination Using markets to help coordinate the equitable distribution of wealth is not, however, a lost cause. Markets have such wonderful properties when properly implemented that it would be silly to abandon them completely. The question is, what sort of meta mechanism would allow markets to do what they are good at while keeping them from violating the above considerations? That is where hierarchical control theory might serve. The issue is one of logistics. How do we move resources to the points of use where they will benefit the majority of the people most of the time? Applying hierarchical control theoretic approaches actually suggests a straightforward and relatively simple solution (see Figure 4 below). For each local market, provide a monitor function that keeps track of the seller's value added by monitoring actual costs. In practical terms this would involve opening the managerial accounting books to an agency that is tasked with summarizing the data and providing it to the customers. Note that there is no 'regulation' involved in this operation, in the typical sense of government regulation. The monitor has no authority to force the seller to do anything. Its only responsibility is to provide buyers (or potential buyers) with value information so that they are in a position to make an informed decision. This simple act will help keep sellers honest. Buyers can decide for themselves how important it is to their interests to buy regardless of how much profit the seller might be trying to make. The monitor function will, of course, have to be certain it is collecting real data and not just fluff that the seller is putting out. It will have to monitor its own monitoring function and assure its own veracity. But these are not difficult conditions to meet. Internal auditing is a well established process for commerce. Figure 4. Monitored markets help provide information feedback to buyers to ensure transparency regarding intrinsic value.   Of course, monitoring may not be sufficient when human actors are involved. Cheaters are almost certainly going to emerge over time. In that case some form of enforcement of rules must be a part of the process. There must be a way for the monitoring function to detect cheating and to pass this information on to an enforcement agency that has access to appropriate sanctions to cause the seller to conform to social norms. But such a type of coercion is not the main point of a hierarchical control system. It is a last resort put in place to compensate for some unfortunate human weaknesses. Figure 5. In the event that monitors detect cheating some form of rule enforcement is needed to cause the seller into conformance with social norms.   Local market coordination is not the last word. Every buyer can be a seller to someone else further down a supply chain. Thus the scale and scope of markets can be much broader than simple markets such as the open air form. In this case the coordination control provided by the monitor/enforcer will not suffice. Hierarchical control shows us that a higher level coordination function is required to ensure the inter-market (i.e. supply chain) function smoothly. Figure 6 shows this from a macroscopic view. Before the libertarians scream out about 'planned' economies, note that this level of coordination is established after the market network is formed in practice. That is, the supply chain is emergent from the needs of the society; the coordination control is established a posteriori to assist the smooth functioning. The details of how this is accomplished will need to be the subject of another whole essay. The point here is that such a level of coordination is needed to ensure the smooth function of a collection of local market mechanisms. Figure 6. Assuming that local markets have coordination as in Fig. 5, more complex markets (e.g. a supply chain) require another, higher level of coordination. The blue ovals represent local coordination as above. The purple oval, the coordinator is a much more complex function that attempts to balance resource inputs and various outputs such that the whole market achieves an optimal performance.   We, that is our current markets and governance systems (e.g. EPA, Federal Reserve, and Federal Trade Commission are examples), already try to accomplish this task of providing logistical control, but we do it blindly without really understanding what we are doing. The way these agencies come into existence is more from reaction to a market failure than from forethought. Such systems have been cobbled together without much of an overarching theory. And that is why our current market systems regulatory approaches fail so badly. We do not use understanding of hierarchical control as it works in nature to design and operate adequate coordination mechanisms in our market economies. We try to implement something that seems appropriate (through our policy development mechanisms which are anything but rational approaches as currently constituted), but these are more often band aid approaches. Mostly we implement regulatory agencies which invariably trigger reactionary responses from the libertarians. Much as I hate to admit it, the libertarians, while mindlessly doing so, are actually responding correctly to a fallacious approach on the part of progressives. Blind regulatory agency is not the way to achieve hierarchical management of complex markets that might otherwise provide valuable distribution of resources. We need to approach this from the standpoint of understanding reality. That is not a currently popular approach, unfortunately. But, as I hope I have established, neither are simple minded free markets the solution. I take my lessons from nature. It turns out that the hierarchical control architecture that I have pointed to for markets is a main feature of the success of living systems. We can actually see this at work in, for example, the metabolism of living cells and the energy flows of ecosystems. The science is well known though still complicated. It is not something that one could expect lawyers to grasp until they had some education in physiology and/or systems ecology. Or, better yet, if they were educated in systems science and then looked at social systems as living organisms! Markets are useful in solving some very local problems regarding trade. They do not fail when properly applied to local conditions. But they are not panaceas to all economic problems. The American way is to assume they are panaceas and this is now proving disastrous to not only the American, but the world economies that have tried to emulate the US. Several economies, e.g. the Chinese, are mixes of command (regulatory a priori) and market-based. They are showing variable degrees of success in terms of providing equitable distribution of wealth. They are not pure capitalism, which has demonstrated its inability to grasp the issues of environment, but neither are they pure planned economies such as was practiced in the former USSR. It remains to be seen if they will grasp the importance of balancing the market (local) mechanisms with the social (global) mechanisms of hierarchical management. Unfortunately, ultimately, it depends of human judgment. Long-time readers will know that I have a great deal of skepticism about that! The day that a policy maker understands what autopoiesis is will be the day that I have hope that we might achieve an economic model that will benefit humanity as it should. Living systems evolved the capacity to have wonderfully regulated economies a long time ago. We humans could benefit tremendously by learning the lessons of nature.   * Energy return on energy invested (EROI) for oil started to take a nose dive when off-shore drilling and other hostile environment operations (e.g. North Slope of Alaska) started to become larger factors in the domestic supply of oil. The kinds of physical facilities you need to go after this remote oil are substantially more than that needed to drill and pump conventional land-based wells.

Should we return to a growth economy?

Krugman to the Rescue First off, in fairness, we have to recognize that Paul Krugman is a liberal. His blog is called the Conscience of a Liberal, so I take him at his word. I can understand his ideological stance with respect to wanting to relieve the American people who have lost their jobs and their homes. I can understand his railing at Tim Geithner (Treasury Secretary) and Ben Bernanke (Fed chairman) about the stupidity they are showing in not providing a stimulus to the economy that will relieve the pain and suffering (rather than a stimulus to the bankers and Wall Street to help their managers earn even bigger bonuses). Krugman has heart, I'll give him that. But here is what being stuck in a liberal ideology gets you: This Is Not a Recovery, 26 Aug. 2010. The remedy, for Krugman and every other neoclassical economist is growth. I'm afraid I have to say, for one of the smartest economists in the world he sure is dumb! He gets that the so-called economic recovery is a sham. He gets that what the government is doing is appallingly weak compared to what it should be doing under historically relevant conditions to truly stimulate the economy to produce jobs and get people back to work. What he doesn't understand is that these are not historically relevant times. This isn't the same situation as existed in 1932. What he s proposing is exactly the wrong thing to do if you care about the long-term. He wants to return to a growth economy based on consumer spending*. The pain he wants to relieve includes that which the American public is suffering not being able to go to Wallmart and shop to their hearts' content. What, oh what, will it take to get people like Krugman to see reality? This question is especially cogent since reality is slapping us all in the face. You would think that Nobel Prize winners would be able to know when they are being slapped in the face and wake up to see that reality. “Thanks, I needed that.” George, Get With the Program Man No doubt if we did get back to a growth economy, in the range of 5+% annual, that this would help create more jobs