Book Review of “Wheel of Fortune. The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia”

Posted on December 28, 2013 by

Alice Friedemann’s book review of “Wheel of Fortune. The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia”, by Thane Gustafson. 2012.

The main thesis of this book is that Russia will collapse again. Soon.  Unless Russia drills offshore and in the Arctic with Western oil company help.  Western Siberian oil is declining.  Eastern Siberia doesn’t have much oil – just 800,000 barrels per day at most –and doesn’t have the required infrastructure of roads, pipelines, cities, towns, etc.

Gustafson is aware of how hard drilling in the arctic will be (though not the ecological consequences).  An ExxonMobil engineer he interviews about the issues of the Sakhalin Island area said that the “biggest challenge was moving ice.  The whole ice pack drifts along, and if you haven’t built for it, it will drag your whole platform away”.  Also, it gets to minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit, storms create waves over 30 feet high, there are frequent earthquakes, and most difficult of all is managing the thousands of skilled specialists from hundreds of contractors and subcontractors from all over the world.

Gustafson ultimately sees a new round of conflict for control and distribution of the oil revenue spoils, resulting in renationalization, sinking oil returns, and Russia sliding deeper and deeper into debt.  The only way he sees out of this is Arctic & offshore drilling, reducing welfare payments to citizens, more privatization, encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship, and other Capitalistic ideas.  Surely he realizes this isn’t likely given that he says the current Russian culture and political system “is based largely on a rejection of the 1990s, nostalgia for the Soviet empire, and resentment of the West”.

July 2013: Former Soviet Union peak oil and gas has excellent graphs of Russian oil and gas production and where their remaining reserves are.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

Why Russian Oil Production Will Decline in the Future

Vladimir Bogdanov, CEO of Surgutneftegaz speaking about his company (p 449)

  • 60% of reserves have been produced already
  • 75% of oil is from low-grade reserves
  • 90% of what we produce is water
  • Costs are rising twice as fast as world oil prices
  • West Siberia, where two-thirds of Russian oil is produced, is declining

Energy Minister Shmatko (late 2010): By 2020 oil production likely to be down to 7.7 million barrels per day (10.1 million in 2010).

Mature fields are 80% of total oil production now (8 million barrels per day).  To offset 2% of decline in these large fields, the oil industry must add 160,000 barrels per day of new production to maintain current levels, or 1.6 million barrels per day by 2020 from poor quality, undeveloped fields at a cost of over $5 billion per year.  Another $20 billion per year is needed to keep the decline of the existing large oil fields from declining even more precipitously.  Over time, the absolute volume of decline will grow, and every new barrel will be more difficult and expensive.  In other words, by 2020 it would take $50 billion a year to produce the same amount of oil as now.

Gustafson is not very peak oil aware, the decline rate is much more likely to be over 8% from the largest fields, and he never mentions EROI.  He doesn’t have a clue about the peak oil situation.  On page 458 he writes that peak oil won’t happen until as early as midcentury or as late as well into the next century.

But he knows a hell of a lot about Russian oil – more than I wanted to know, the paraphrasing and direct quotes below are from the beginning and end of the book.

Today, Russia is even more dependent on oil revenues than before the crash. 

The renewed growth of oil production encouraged complacency and shortsighted greed. The inherited hydrocarbon wealth—already extensively explored and developed…came to be taken for granted by the political class and to some extent by the oil companies themselves, lessening the urgency of investing in new recourse of pursuing innovative approaches.  The legacy fields still held an abundance of recoverable oil, which could be produced by techniques that were not particularly advanced and quickly mastered by local operators.  The Russian oil industry in the 1990s had little need of the next-generation skills required for Arctic offshore projects or unconventional reservoirs, which would necessarily have involved foreign partners or service providers.

Therefore, over the long run, “Soviet legacy assets have acted as an anesthetic, delaying the adaptation of the Russian oil industry to modern management and technology.  The next generation of oil and gas will force the oil industry toward new oil that will be deeper, hotter (or colder), higher in pressure, more sour (more sulfur), more complex geologically, and more remote and therefore, far more costly.

There aren’t smaller, independent operators in Russia who can help make the transition to more difficult oil due to the vertical gigantism of the existing system.  Also, Russians are proud of their own practices and resist change or ideas from outside.  Above all, Russians are determined not to lose control or ownership of petroleum to outsiders.

Russian Culture hasn’t changed much

After the fall of the iron curtain, the vast majority of Russians resented the foreign ideas and new capitalism.  They continued to believe in a combination of Soviet Marxism and traditional Russian culture.  In the oil fields, the prevailing culture was the opposite of capitalism.  Workers were housed with electricity and water provided for a lifetime. The capitalistic Moscow newcomers were seen as likely to deplete the oil, and fire people like Western corporations. Old-timers like Siberian driller Vladimir Bogdanov were, and still are, revered in the oil towns.

“The Soviet system of totalitarian controls and systematic scarcity led Russians to form informal networks of collusion and exchange, to trade access, information, protection, and scarce goods.”  With no private property and extreme accumulation of private wealth criminal, the best strategy of an entrepreneur was to share or rish being attacked.  No one operated alone. “Networks of mutual trust were essential for survival…the norms of exchange and sharing—with neighbors, with partners, with political allies—have carried to the post-Soviet era. Yet in the absence of secure legal protections and property rights, these informal relations (which we call “corrupt” or “patrimonial”) continue to serve the same defensive functions as in Soviet times.   As a common Russian business saying goes, “Good friends are worth more than good contracts.”

“Many Russians see the 1990s as a disaster and a humiliation, a time of invasion by foreign powers, interests, brand names, and values”

Russian Political structure hasn’t changed much either

Most of the machinery of government survived at all levels, and especially regionally and locally.  Most of the energy sector remained under state control, though weaker in the 1990s.  The gas and electric industries especially remained within state control.  Although the oil industry broke free and became private, the state still owned the oil resources in the ground, the pipeline system, the borders, customs, and the power to control oil exports.  Although weakened in the 1990s, the state came rip-roaring back into power and control again later.

Effect of 2008 Recession: Another Crisis is Brewing

The optimism of the 2000s disappeared.  On the eve of the crash an oil price of $70 per barrel was enough to produce a surplus.

By 2012 it took nearly $120.

Capital flight resumed again after the crash at a higher rate than ever before.  Domestic investment lagged.   The political and business elite appeared to be gripped by a malaise over the future of the country, which Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 did not dispel.

In 2008 oil production declined for the first time since the 1990s.  Although growth resumed again later, it was unbalanced since the increase came from only a few large new fields.  But the vast majority of the oilfields in West Siberia are entering a long-term decline.

The costs of finding and producing oil are rising rapidly yet the tax system takes 90% of the profits.  So with no incentive to invest in new fields or technology, new drilling and exploration isn’t happening much.

The state economy and welfare system depend on oil revenues, need increasing amounts of oil revenues, at the same time that oil industry costs and income are declining.

This is a threat to the entire Russian political and social system.  Right now the system benefits from the legacy oil investments and the “windfall” profits from the rise of world oil prices – an external factor that Russia does not control (which the author calls “rents”).  Russia has depended on legacy and windfall profits for 20 years that may not be able to continue in the future.

“A flow of rents inevitably attracts rival claimants.  The story of the post-Soviet oil industry is largely that of the battle for rents—in the 1990s for the legacy rents and in the 2000s for the global windfall rents.  By the end of the first decade of the 2000s, the state had succeeded in recapturing the lion’s share of both.”  Now a large part of the political and economic system depends on oil rents.

Unless the industry is able to recapture some of the state’s share for its own needs, it will underinvest, and oil production will eventually decline.  At the end of the road lies renationalization, but even that would not be more than a stopgap, since the fundamental problem is the shrinking of margins.

“The coming decline in the flow of surplus from oil attacks the entire rent-based system and is already raising the level of conflict.  Several categories of what in the West would be thought of as costs are actually key parts of the rent-distribution system.  Russianoil and gas companies pay taxes to the state, but they also pay informal “taxes,” in the form of bribes and “social payments” to localities (known to Russians as sotsialka).  Production costs are inflated, since much of their equipment and services is purchased through networks of connected companies.  The process is subterranean, nontransparent, and largely invisible to outsiders, but it is a major channel of rents.”

“This flow is vital to the maintenance of the economy and the political system.  Rent dependence is not simply at the heart of the system; it IS the heart of the system.  The obvious implication is that if the flow of petroleum rents were ever to slacken, Russia would be deeply destabilized.”

“When he came to power, Putin saw his prime mission the restoration of stable central power.  But Putin has been unable to build a stable institutional or ideological mechanism to ensure governability over the longer term.  The system is based largely on a rejection of the 1990s, nostalgia for the Soviet empire, and resentment of the West.  That is weak glue. What remains is elite self-interest.  The result has been a spread of corruption and interclan wars, and, through the selective application of state power, a takeover of the “commanding heights” of the economy by politically favored interests.  The oil industry has been one of the sectors most affected.  The determination of state players to control the industry and to capture the bulk of its revenues has deprived it of the resources needed to renew itself and weakened its incentive to continue modernizing.”

Posted in Arctic, Books, Energy Books, How Much Left | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Philip Cafaro on immigration and population

Posted on December 27, 2013 by

Here are some of the bullet points of what to do from “Arguments for Reducing Immigration” from Life on the Brink.

  • Cut legal immigration from 1 million to 200,000 per year
  • Reduce illegal immigration by strictly enforcing sactions against employers who hire illegal workers (it is fruitless to try to lower legal immigration levels while ignoring or condoning illegal immigration).Rework trade agreements, and increase and improve development aid, to help people live better lives and rein in population growth in their own countries
  • Increase funding for family planning clinics and take other steps to improve easy, inexpensive access to contraception domestically
  • Preserve the right to abortion (forcing women to bear children they do not want is unjust, and forcing them to have illegal abortions is dangerous)
  • End tax breaks and other government subsidies that encourage American citizens to have more children

Foreign policy:

  • Increase funding for international family planning efforts, to help secure safe, affordable contraception in other countries
  • Vigorously support women’s reproductive rights (including abortion rights) and girls’ equal rights to primary and secondary education, worldwide.
  • Deny all foreign aid and any immigration slots to nations that fail to commit to stabilizing their populations or sharing wealth fairly among their citizens

Cafaro points out that if you aren’t willing to reduce immigration into the United states, then you can’t avoid the environmental implications of your position.  If you want to continue to let in 1.5 million immigrants, then you support a population of 700 million Americans by 2100, or 850 million if you supported the 2.5 million per year Edward Kennedy & John McCain bill of 2007 (which President Bush and then-senator Obama also supported).  If you want 1.5 to 2.5 million people per year, then you also want more cars, more houses, more shopping mals, more power lines, more concrete and asphalt.  You are against habitat and resources for wildlife, against water in the rivers and streams for fish, want fewer forests, prairies, and wetlands, fewer wild birds and wild animals in general.  You’d like to see human beings replace all these other species.  You reject sustainability.

Posted in Overpopulation, Population | 5 Comments

The Passengers are killing the crew of Spaceship Earth

Posted on December 15, 2013 by

What follows was written by Captain Paul Watson, who helped found Greenpeace in 1972 and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in1977.  His books include: Sea Shepherd: My fight for Whales and Seals, Cry Wolf, Ocean Warrior, Earth Force, and Seal Wars.

The earth is a planet, but because it contains complex ecosystems and living entities on a celestial body hurtling through space, it may also be described as a spaceship. 

The living entities that crew this spaceship are millions of species working within diverse ecological niches to maintain the complex life-support system of the ship. The foundation is made up of the species that most human beings regard as the lowest life forms: bacteria, insects, plankton, plants, invertebrates, and fish.

We could call them the custodians or the working crew of Spaceship Earth.  The spaceship in reality belongs to them, not us.  They run it.  We so-called higher forms of life are merely the passengers.  The custodians do not need us, but we need the custodians.

We humans suffer under the delusion that we own this planet.  We do not.  We never have and never will.  We have not been here long, and we will not be here much longer if we continue to operate in contempt of the rules of ecology and in total disrespect of the ship’s crew.

A life-support system requires some essential engineering.  We must breathe, and thanks to trees, plants, bacteria, and plankton we can.  Another necessity, water, has its quality maintained by wetlands, estuaries, plankton, and bacteria.  Eating is another component of our life-support system, and our gratitude must extend to the bacteria, earthworms, bees, beetles, ants, plants, and other animals for that privilege.  We also must have a comfortable temperature gradient in which to live.  Plankton, plants, and animals ensure the integrity of a global climate is maintained.  Finally, there must be a mechanism for recycling waste.  Bacteria, plants, insects, fungi, and animals can all take credit for this vital and often overlooked function.

The ecological reality is that no species can survive long outside of the laws of ecology.  A violation of these laws leads to extinction.  An extreme violation of these laws leads to a major extinction event.  That is the situation in which we find ourselves at the moment.  One species, our own, has radically violated the basic laws of ecology, placing us in the midst of a major extinction event.  Between the year 2000 and the year 2065, we will lose more species of plants and animals than the planet has lost in the last 65 million years.  The last major extinction event was caused when a comet collided with our spaceship.

It is like the passengers on an ocean liner partying in luxury, while slaughtering and feeding upon the engineers, navigators, and crew, only to find themselves adrift, with no place to go and nothing to eat or drink, and wondering where the crew went as they slowly starve. This is not something that most people want to hear.

The biggest problem is that people for the most part don’t care.  What we have is collective apathy fueled by distractions and diversions. This is evident in what human societies consider important.  Religion, sports, and entertainment are the three most notable forms of collective mass escapism from the realities of ecology. Consider that the video game World of Warcraft has over 11 million subscribers, and there is not a single environmental or conservation organization in the world that can equal that number of supporters.

Intelligent and ecologically concerned people cut right to the chase and declare they will have no children.  Considering that such people would be hard pressed to outnumber the regular players of World of Warcraft, this does not bode well as a solution. Ecologically intelligent men and women refraining from reproduction leave the world in the hands of the ecologically ignorant and the anthropocentrically arrogant.  If the biocentrically oriented refrain from having children, while the ecologically ignorant reproduce, the self-sacrificing people would act like cuckoo birds, paying taxes to raise the children of people who will do little to solve our problems.  The population will grow even larger, with a higher proportion in the eco-idiocracy.

Then there is immigration, which enables less responsible countries like Catholic Mexico and Muslim Pakistan to export their surplus numbers to other countries.  And since rich countries consume many times more resources per capita than poor countries, immigrants moving from poor nations to rich nations increase their consumption enormously, making global ecological problems even worse.

Social justice advocates will be angered by this, but the reality is that the laws of ecology are unconcerned with how humans treat each other.  Alleviating poverty and empowering minorities are noble endeavors but irrelevant to the basic fact that resources are finite and there are limits to growth.

As populations increase and carrying capacity is reduced, the costs of food and commodities will continue to rise.  Societies will not be able to keep up the charade of “sustainability”, a word that has been used to mask the destruction of resources.

Before we are faced with potential collapse, especially when fossil fuel resources are diminished and overall global carrying capacity is reduced, concerted attempts should be made to lower our populations.

Rather than endure genocide, war, famine, or pestilence, societies may choose to implement a more humane answer, although one that is in opposition to what is often falsely seen as a fundamental human right: the right to unlimited procreation.

Having children should be seen as a limited right with commensurate responsibilities.

Limit parenthood to those who are able to show they can provide financially and educationally for their offspring, and discourage all couples from having more than 2 children, who should not be raised in abject poverty or ignorance, nor should future children be forced to live in a crowded, ecologically barren world.

This would not only reduce our current excessive demands on the biosphere but also prepare us for a future balanced relationship between humanity and an ecologically restored Earth.  It would also help ensure that couples a few centuries from now can exercise their right to have a child or two of their own.

The world 100 and 200 years from now will be vastly different from what we see today.  The end of oil will be the end of civilization as we know it and the beginning of a new relationship between humans and nature.  The alternatives to fossil fuel energy are not practical; at least not if we expect them to provide the sort of cheap, abundant energy we have gotten used to in recent years.  Solar and wind power probably cannot satisfy the needs of 7 or 8 billion people.  Nuclear energy requires vast amounts of fossil fuel to extract finite resources of uranium ore, process and transport the uranium, and there is no way to safely and securely store the nuclear waste.

It’s time to back off from the all-you-can-eat passenger buffet.  The crew of this magnificent spaceship needs our respect and our support.  They also need to be given some rights; most importantly, the right to survive, flourish, and continue to do what they do best: keep us all alive.

The needs of the crew are more important than the needs of the passengers, and we humans have been enjoying first-class service at the expense of the crew for too long.  We will survive only by rejecting the anthropocentric perspective in favor of a biocentric point of view, and by living in harmony with all other species.  We must realize that any species, including our own, survives as part of a collective whole, in accordance with the laws of diversity, interdependence, and finite resources.

 

 

Posted in Overpopulation, Population | Tagged | 1 Comment

Richard Heinberg and Post Carbon

Posted on December 13, 2013 by

December 2013

During the past decade Post Carbon Institute’s influence has grown markedly, thanks in no small part to all our supporters and allies. And we’re proud of the impressive list of accomplishments we’ve racked up (see this) in that time.

Where do we go from here? That depends on what’s needed and what’s possible.
Our mission remains consistent, but our projects tend to shift as global events unfold (for example, my two most recent books, The End of Growth and Snake Oil were written in response to the global financial crisis and the recent North American fracking boom, respectively). We have a general understanding of what likely will drive change over the next decade: peak net energy, climate change, resource depletion, and financial bubbles. However, how these main drivers interact with established economic and political institutions, growing population, and Earth’s already-strained ecosystems will no doubt deliver some surprises—which may upset everyone’s plans and expectations, Post Carbon Institute’s included.
At the same time, what we can do will depend upon our capacity. We’re basically a nine-person nonprofit organization—not so big, in the general scheme of things, even taking into account our 30 Fellows and tens of thousands of loyal supporters. And our staff is already frenetically busy maintaining existing programs.
At Post Carbon Institute, we trace the systemic interactions of energy, environment, economy, and society; show the likely results of current trends; develop strategies for successful transition to a post-growth, post-carbon future; and promote community resilience as the single most important goal that people everywhere can strive toward. In short, we support a fundamental and urgent reshaping of our society so that we can withstand the shocks of the 21st century and learn to thrive within ecological limits. Not a small task.
Because Post Carbon Institute focuses on a range of sustainability crises, any one of which could command all of our resources and more to address, we never find ourselves short of new project ideas. If we could increase our capacity, here are just a few of the things we might do:
  • Seed and support Community Economic Laboratories. This is a project I outlined in Chapter 6 of The End of Growth. Local centers for post-growth economic development are emerging in many places, including my hometown of Santa Rosa, but more are needed, and some coordination would be hugely beneficial.
  • Develop a Resilience Corps. We already have AmeriCorps and Green Corps, so how about a training program for young adults that blends a systemic understanding of the crises at hand with practical, hands-on skills building and community service?
  • Turn disaster rebounding into resilience building. We know more extreme weather, energy shocks, and economic disruptions are on the way. Why not develop a program for encouraging a pattern of recovery that leaves communities more sustainable and resilient than they were before, by emphasizing renewable energy and local food systems?
  • Multiply the impact of community resilience enterprises by tracking, networking, and supporting these efforts, and by helping them access investment and grant capital.
  • Document—and educate the public and policymakers about—the short-term nature of the shale gas and oil “revolution.” We’ve already pioneered this work with our “Drill, Baby Drill” and “Drilling California” reports, and Snake Oil, but more is on the way—stay tuned.
  • Support smarter community resilience building. Help form a learning and collaboration network of groups and organizations that are building community resilience in different locations using different models.
  • Expand the reach of Post Carbon Institute. PCI already has had some success establishing international partnerships, translating information across multiple languages, and developing Post Carbon Outposts in other countries.
  • Increase post-carbon educational offerings. There’s huge potential for increasing knowledge and skills, through formal academia and MOOCs (“massive open online courses” aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web), as well as skill-building locally and virtually.
  • Create a program of Resilience Studies for universities, community colleges, and engaged citizens.
  • Expand our use of creative media (including video, animation, music, and art). We’ve enjoyed some success with a series of animations (starting with the 1.5 million views of “300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds”), using the power of popular culture and social media to reach a growing population of people with messages of resource limits and resilience-building responses.
How many of these projects will we actually take on in the years ahead? That depends on you. In case you haven’t guessed, I’m about to ask for your support. There are a lot of worthy nonprofits out there asking for your dollars right now. I don’t know of any that premise their work on the kind of systemic, integrative, and response-based analysis of energy, economic, and environmental issues that PCI specializes in. If this means something to you—if you’ve found our work helpful in your own efforts to build a more resilient, sustainable, and equitable future—then please consider an end-of-year donation.

Post Carbon Institute

Posted in Expert Advice, Think Tanks, What to do | Comments Off on Richard Heinberg and Post Carbon

Dave Foreman: More Immigration = More Americans = Less Wilderness

Posted on December 5, 2013 by

Dave Foreman. 2013. More Immigration = More Americans = Less Wilderness. Earth island Journal.

The Big Thing facing Earth today – dwarfing all else – is the mass extinction of animals and plants unprecedented in size and scope for 65 million years, and wholly unprecedented in its cause. This ghastly crash in species abundance is happening from highest peak to deepest sea, from the poles to the equator. It is caused by one species – we humans – and our breathtaking population boom. In the last two millennia our numbers have grown nearly thirtyfold, from a mere 250 million to more than 7 billion today.

Our leap in numbers has wounded Earth in seven deadly ways. One: Direct Killing – from overfishing to slaughtering elephants for ivory. Two: Habitat Destruction – wiping out wild ecosystems. Three: Habitat Fragmentation – isolating wildlife with roads and subdivisions. Four: Upsetting Ecological and Evolutionary Processes – wildfire, river flooding, predation. Five: Spread of Exotics – disease, plants, and animals that wreak havoc on native species. Six: Biocides – from pesticides to antibiotics. Seven: Climate Chaos – driven by greenhouse gas pollution from our addiction to fossil fuels.

More people – whether rich or poor, First World or Third – make each of these wounds more deadly. But thanks to our high-flying lifestyles and unwillingness to soften them, each of us in the United States contributes disproportionately to all Seven Deadly Wounds. This is why conservationists have long called for stabilizing America’s population. Simply put, the world cannot afford more Americans.

Some 40 years ago, Americans lowered our total fertility rate from the heights of the Baby Boom down to replacement level – fewer than two children per woman. At the time, demographers thought the US might peak at 250 million people. This was not to be, due to the 1965 Immigration Act and subsequent legislation that quadrupled legal immigration and ensured continued population growth. In the 40 years since Earth Day, our numbers have shot up to more than 300 million people due mostly to an imprudent immigration policy.

Acknowledging how a growing US population threatened wild things and human well-being, conservation groups such as the Sierra Club took ethical, thoughtful stands to stabilize population. Besides encouraging Americans to have fewer children, they also called for Congress to manage immigration for no net growth.

In 1989 the Sierra Club declared: “Immigration to the US should be no greater than that which will permit achievement of population stabilization in the US.” Around the same time, The Wilderness Society wrote: “To bring population levels to ecologically sustainable levels, both birth rates and immigration rates need to be reduced.” The organizations’ policies had everything to do with the United States’ responsibility to lessen its impact on ecosystems and nothing at all to do with nativism or being anti-immigrant.

Unfortunately, conservation groups have lost the courage they had a couple of decades ago to stand up for wild nature. Now, organizations like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace are praising the Senate’s just-passed immigration “reform” bill. They are throwing their arms wide for more people, with little thought for those here now who struggle to find work, or for the wealth of wild things that need our protection more than ever.

How many more people would the Senate immigration law bring in? According to the Center for Immigration Studies, 30 to 45 million more people, on top of the 400 million currently projected by the Census Bureau for 2050. The Pew Hispanic Center forecasts that 82% of this growth will be from immigrants and their US-born descendants. If immigration were capped so that in-and-out migration matched (the Sierra Club’s earlier policy), the 2050 Census Bureau projection is 327 million. But the Senate bill doubles current immigration levels, blasting the 2050 population up to 445 million and putting the country on track for a population of 600 to 700 million by 2100.

No wonder the immigration boosters – right or left – never talk about numbers. The numbers are a nightmare.

What do these numbers mean? How many more tons of greenhouse gases? How many more wild acres taken over by housing, highways, shopping malls, coal mines, clear-cuts, and oil and gas drilling pads? How much more energy use? How much more water use, and the dams and groundwater pumping that’ll be required? How many other beings will we sentence to death to make way for more people? Will humanity’s footprint be allowed to stomp out the hope that is the heart of the Endangered Species Act and the Wilderness Act?

Failing to address these questions in any discussion of immigration is irresponsible. Why has no one called for an environmental impact statement on immigration policies? I do so now. A thorough EIS on immigration to the United States might be the most important EIS ever done. It is one way to bring all the glossed-over, ignored consequences of a rapidly growing population into full public debate.

Environmentalist cheerleaders for the Senate immigration bill talk only about supposed social justice benefits for those in the US illegally. They overlook the impacts of population growth and bite their tongues on the ecological disaster of expanding the border wall. A comprehensive immigration EIS would bring such issues to the fore.

It should be clear enough: Twice as many people in little more than one human lifetime is not a sane person’s notion of progress.

Vote for Dave Foreman’s position here

Dave Foreman, a co-founder of EarthFirst! and the founder of the Rewilding Institute, is author of Rewilding North America. He is a member of the population stabilization group Apply the Brakes.

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Read Chagnon’s “Noble Savages” instead – “Falling Sky” is co-written by one of his attackers

Posted on December 3, 2013 by

A book review by Alice Friedemann at energyskeptic of “The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman” by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert.

Anyone who knows about the baseless, hateful attacks on Chagnon by Tierney and other cultural anthropologists like Bruce Albert, who helped write this book, will not read it. My apologies to Davi Kopenawa, the Yanomamo native co-author, for not reading this book, because such accounts are rare and the insights probably fascinating. But it’s impossible to know how much Kopenawa’s views were twisted or influenced by Bruce Albert.

You can read about Albert’s attack on Chagnon on pages 396-397 in “Noble Savages” (at books.google.com & the “Look Inside” at amazon).  Here is a short summary. Bruce Albert and Alcida Ramos wrote a letter of complaint to the editors of Science magazine about Chagnon that accused his 1988 article in Science of:

  1. Being “racist,” an accusation often used by radical cultural anthropologists to deprecate anything that can be construed as having been inspired by sociobiology
  2. Chagnon was guilty of complicity in genocide
  3. Chagnon had faked his data
  4. Chagnon had deliveberately concealed the fact that diseases were the main source of death among the Yanomamo in order to make violent deaths appear to be the most common cause of death
  5. Chagnon encouraged and abetted sensational, negative press coverage of the Yanomamo at a time when they were being invaded by miners
  6. Chagnon’s Science article was the main reason Brazilian officiels were going to separate the Yanomamo into 21 “micro” reservations.  This was a false accusation repeated so often by anthropological opponents that it is now an unchallenged “truth” in the community of activist anthropologists.

Chagnon characterizes Albert as a French national who sometimes worked among the Catrimani Yanomamo. “His data came largely from Giovanni Saffirio, a Consolata priest who operated the Consolata mission on the Catrimani River. Both were known less for their ethnographic accomplishments than for their efforts as political advocates of Brazilian Indians in general and the Yanomamo in particular”.

I am appalled that cultural anthropology is still closer to creationism than it is to science, still uninformed by evolution, and stuck in pre-enlightenment superstition – ironic since this field studies superstition in other cultures while thinking it has none itself.

We are at peak everything, but most importantly, peak oil, the master resource that unlocks all others.  97% of transportation runs on oil.  Out of fish?  Take a factory ship to the ends of earth and find the last schools with sonar.  Out of water? Build a desalination plant with fossil fuels that runs on fossil fuels, or use fossil-fueled pumps to drain the last water out of aquifers.  Civilization is about to unwinde.

We need to understand how societies may behave as we slide down Hubbert’s Curve back to the age of wood, since alternate energy doesn’t have the EROI needed to run civilization as we know it (see booklists at energyskeptic).  Can we keep from sliding all the way to the tribal level and lose the rule of law?

As a woman, I’d like to know if we could protect women from being property and subject to male violence as we go back in time to a wood-based society.  Is there a way to maintain equality of work and education besides adopting a Bonobo culture (just kidding)?  If anthropologists could help us figure out rituals, bonding, and institutions based on existing societies or that we could foster now, this would be useful information, and I hope evolutionary anthropologists are working on it.

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Aaron Lehmer-Chang in Earth Island Journal

Posted on December 3, 2013 by

Environmental groups, pundits, politicians, and the average citizen think alternative energy is a solution to climate change and the energy crisis.  It took me years to figure out why this wasn’t true.  I can speed your learning curve up — for a quick overview read LBL scientist David Fridley on alternative energy. For a deeper understanding, see my alternative energy reading list.

It’s popular to say that even if fossil fuels are declining, we still have enough left to burn the planet up.  Not true!  That’s the “good news” about peak fossil fuels.  Humans and millions of other species probably won’t go extinct and we won’t be able to cross all 9 boundaries.

We’re not only at peak oil, we’re at peak coal and peak natural gas.  The remaining fuel is far away, under water or ice, deep down, nasty, gunky, and often has less energy than the good stuff we’ve already extracted.  Methane hydrates have been, and always will be, impossible to use.

I’m grateful that Lehmer-Chang realistically looks at how to descend the energy ladder.  We need more leaders like him who have spent the past decade working on the transition to a lower energy world.

Aaron G. Lehmer-Chang. Preparedness Matters More than CO2 Targets. Winter 2014. Earth Island Journal.

“Instead of saddling future generations with a crumbling, oil-dependent infrastructure, our legacy must be to carefully apply the resources we have left to fertilize, fortify, and beautify our world.  We face challenging times ahead from the global warming that is already coming, along with the consequences of overshooting our planet’s resource limits. We must brace ourselves.  All of this will require redirecting fossil fuels from wasteful consumption toward these ends”:

  • Shift our infrastructure away from fossil-fuel dependency
  • Migrate threatened coastal communities and economies inland
  • Rehabilitate rural economies
  • Replenish eroded soils
  • Rebuild diverse local food systems
  • As the snow pack diminishes from climate change, we’ll need rainwater catchment, reforested watersheds, and efficient irrigation systems.
  • As sea levels rise, we’ll need to build more dikes, levees, and channels.
  • We’ll need to de-pave many of our streets, and parking lots to free up space for growing food, open up covered creeks, and reseed natural landscapes.
  • We’ll need to energy retrofit our buildings
  • revitalize rail transport lines
  • Retool our decaying manufacturing infrastructure.

—————–

I know from having followed Bay Localize for many years that these are just a fraction of the ideas Lehmer-Chang has about how to cope with the energy transition ahead.

This is in my “What to Do” section, but the whole article is worth reading because peak oil and climate change issues are brought together.  Climate change activists do not want to recognize peaking of fossil fuels because it is threatens their existence, since if fossil fuels are declining, then so will greenhouse gases.  Climate Change activists propose a switch to alternative energy. That appeals to a broad audience.  It’s certainly not de-paving, “50 million farmers”, and other realistic ideas that people don’t want to hear.  Kunstler brilliantly explains how we came to be such a “magical thinking / techno-optimist” society in his book “Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation“.  It’s sure looking like our inability to face reality is going to make the energy transition more of a cliff than a walkable slope.

People and organizations that don’t have happy optimistic ideas find it hard to raise money, gain followers, and sell books.  The demand for positive thinking at all times and places is driving us away from realistic solutions.  I applaud Aaron Lehmer and hope that Earth Island Journal will publish his writing more often and do more to get Bay Localize the attention this organization deserves.

Alice Friedemann

 

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The “Solar Revolution” is financial, not from new breakthroughs

Posted on December 3, 2013 by

Jeff Himmelman makes the case that the “solar revolution” is caused by new financial instruments and strategies in the New York Times August 9, 2012 article “Here Comes the Sell”:

The innovation that has pushed Sungevity and the rest of the residential solar industry straight into adolescence over the past 5 years was financial, not technological. Solar technology is hardly new. In 1954, Bell Labs discovered that purified silicon, doped with arsenic and sliced into thin wafers was capable of converting sunlight into electricity.

The innovation that made this possible — selling solar services instead of solar panels — was pioneered in the commercial market by Jigar Shah. In 2003, he started a company called SunEdison, which offered a solar-power purchase agreement (P.P.A.) to commercial customers.

Instead of having to pay all of the money for a solar installation up front and then having to carry that payment as a debt on their balance sheets, which no publicly traded company wants to do, companies contracted with SunEdison to have solar panels put up at no initial cost. SunEdison then charged the companies for the amount of energy that the panels produced at a fixed rate for a period of 20 years — a rate that was less than what the companies were already paying the utilities, and that would ultimately save them even more money as energy prices inevitably rose over time. The bold stroke was that they were selling the power, not the hardware.

The revenue stream from the 20-year P.P.A. contracts allowed SunEdison to raise capital from outside investors like Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and MetLife. The banks pay for the solar systems and then reap the returns on their investment through tax credits and a negotiated share of the monthly P.P.A. payments.  SunEdison sells the systems to the banks at a profit and charges recurring maintenance fees and the banks have a reliable revenue stream that also offsets their tax burdens.

Five years ago, third-party-owned systems accounted for none of the residential solar market. In the first quarter of 2012, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, 63 percent of new solar systems in California were third-party-owned, and in Colorado, that number was as high as 80 percent. The solar lease has been a key driver for the explosive growth in the residential solar market in California and, increasingly, across the country.

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Pesticides & Parkinson’s in California’s Central Valley

Posted on November 30, 2013 by

Horowitz, J. 2012. Parkinson’s Alley.  Recent studies have found statistical links between pesticide use and an outbreak of Parkinson’s disease in California farm towns. Researchers even know which chemicals are the likely culprits. What’s the government doing about it? Not much. Sierra Magazine.

Some neurologists dub the 300-mile-long string of Central Valley farm towns between Bakersfield and Sacramento “Parkinson’s Alley,” and recently released statistics back them up. A study published last year by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that Central Valley residents under age 60 who lived near fields where the pesticides paraquat and maneb had been used between 1974 and 1999 had a Parkinson’s rate nearly five times higher than other residents in the region. Ziram is also of concern. The EPA banned maneb on corn, grapes and apples in 2005, but still allows it to be used on almonds.

Research into the link between pesticides and Parkinson’s in the Central Valley dates back to 2000, when UCLA epidemiologist Beate Ritz began comparing mortality records with pesticide-application reports. She discovered that California counties reporting the highest pesticide use also had the highest rates for Parkinson’s-related deaths. Examining agricultural records from 1989 to 1994, Ritz found that when insecticides were applied to more than a third of a county’s acreage, the risk of its residents’ dying from Parkinson’s disease increased 2.5-fold. She also found studies that revealed that as many as 40 percent of the area’s Parkinson’s cases are never mentioned on death certificates, possibly because many migrant workers fail to report the disease, or move on before symptoms arise.

Ritz and her research team found that Central Valley residents who consumed private well water and lived within 500 feet of farmland with documented long-term pesticide use were almost twice as likely to get Parkinson’s disease. In the Visalia area, over 1 million people have tap water that isn’t safe to drink because of nitrate contamination from manure, fertilizers, and leaking septic tanks. More than half of Central valley communities use groundwater for their drinking supplies.

It’s expensive to test for pesticides, and it isn’t required.

For the article, the author tested 10 wells and found herbicides bromacil, diuron, and simazine, the weed killer atrazine, banned in Europe but still widely used here.

In 2007 the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the EPA tested for pesticides in 278 domestic, school, and farm wells in 16 states and found pesticides in 152 of them (45%).

 

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New York Times review of “Countdown” by Alan Weisman

Posted on November 30, 2013 by

A book review by Nathaniel Rich, October 11, 2013, New York Times of:

COUNTDOWN. Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? By Alan Weisman

If we wanted to bring about the extinction of the human race as quickly as possible, how might we proceed? We could begin by destroying the planet’s atmosphere, making it incapable of supporting human life. We could invent bombs capable of obliterating the entire planet, and place them in the hands of those desperate enough to detonate them. We could bioengineer our main food sources — rice, wheat and corn — in such a way that a single disease could bring about catastrophic famine. But the most effective measure, counterintuitive as it may be, would be to increase our numbers. Population is what economists call a multiplier. The more people, the greater the likelihood of ecological collapse, nuclear war, plague.

As Alan Weisman’s “Countdown” amply demonstrates, we are well on our way. Some seven billion people are alive today; the United Nations estimates that by the end of the century we could number as many as 15.8 billion. Biologists have calculated that an ideal population — the number at which everyone could live at a first-world level of consumption, without ruining the planet irretrievably — would be 1.5 billion.

Weisman’s jeremiad amounts to a world tour of our overpopulation misery. He begins in Jerusalem, where he learns that construction firms worry about running out of sand, despite the fact that half of Israel is a desert. Water is in short supply, too. Because of agricultural irrigation, the Jordan River is now a “fetid ditch”; pilgrims who attempt to bathe at the spot where Jesus is said to have been baptized will develop a rash and, if they swallow the water, will most likely vomit.

Niger has the world’s highest fertility rate (about seven births per woman), maintained in part by the persistence of human slavery. The Philippines have a glut of fishermen, but are running out of fish. Pakistan is set to become the world’s fourth-most-populous nation by 2050. “We’re praying that Pakistan only doubles,” the director of a Pakistani health organization says. “We are a crowded, underdeveloped nation — more a crowd than a nation. So we’ll have more illiterates, more youths without productive jobs and more chaos.

If we dramatically reduce the planet’s human population, we might have a future here. Then again, it might already be too late. Weisman raises the example of the passenger pigeon. During the 19th century it was one of the most abundant birds on earth, with as many as five billion in America alone. The passenger pigeon went extinct in 1914, but it was doomed long before then, even as it still numbered in the millions, since its habitat and food supply had already dwindled beyond sustenance level. “Was it possible,” Weisman writes, “that my own species might also already be the living dead?

“Countdown” is a bleak sequel to “The World Without Us,” Weisman’s elegant account of what would happen to the planet should human beings suddenly vanish. That book drew its subtle and visceral power from Edenic descriptions of an Earth reclaimed by its forests and oceans, healing from the wounds inflicted by civilization. With its imaginative force and vivid storytelling, it had the power of the best speculative fiction; but in “Countdown,” “there’s no imagining.

Perhaps motivated by the urgency of his theme, or frustration over the intransigence of the problem, Weisman abandons subtlety in favor of making his message — we need to slow our rate of procreation, if we want to survive — explicitly and didactically in every chapter. His dire warnings, and the warnings of the scientists and government officials he interviews, are unrelenting, with variations of the following sentence appearing at regular intervals: “In the entire history of biology, every species that outgrows its resource base suffers a population crash — a crash sometimes fatal to the entire species.

Weisman visits more than 20 countries and interviews countless local scientists, families and policy directors, but the problem is always the same: There are too many people. The culprits are:

  1. modern medicine, which has caused life expectancy in the last two centuries to nearly double;
  2. innovations in agronomy, which have dramatically increased global food production;
  3. a failure to provide contraception to women.

From Thomas Malthus to Paul and Anne Ehrlich, authors of “The Population Bomb” (1968), population doomsayers have endured ridicule and vilification, largely because their predictions of imminent doom fail to materialize on schedule.

Even when fertility drops below the ­replacement rate, it will take decades for the population to begin to decline. At today’s rate, world population would stabilize at 10 billion by 2100. But that will most likely never happen, Weisman writes, because seven billion people “are already turning the atmosphere into something ­unlivable.

The grim prophecies are illustrated with statistics. Each year the world adds the equivalent of another Germany or Egypt; by 2040, China will have more than 100 million 80-year-olds. We add another million people every four and a half days.

Over the course of the book, man is likened to a cancer; to “a voracious monoculture” that sucks “resources in at the cost of the rest of life on the planet”

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