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

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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”

Posted in Extinction Books, Overpopulation | Comments Off on New York Times review of “Countdown” by Alan Weisman

Algal blooms more toxic due to climate change and crop fertilizer runoff

Posted on November 30, 2013 by

Paerl, H.W. et al. October 25, 2013. Blooms Bite the Hand That Feeds Them. Science Vol. 342 no. 6157 pp. 433-434 

Eutrophication from climate change, dams, higher carbon dioxide concentrations, drought, and nutrients from farm and urban runoff is increasing the size, duration, and toxicity of algal blooms in freshwater lakes and estuaries around the world, which threatens aquatic organisms, ecosystem health and human drinking water safety.

One of their toxins, microcystin, is a liver toxin and possible carcinogen.  Cyanobacteria go back around 3.5 billion years and are some of the oldest microorganisms on the planet, existing when there was no oxygen. They’re extremely adaptive, having survived ice ages, mass extinctions, and other disasters — so adaptive that now they’re threatening some of the life they once made possible.

Of the 123,000 lakes in America larger than 10 acres, at least a third may have these toxin producing cyanobacteria.

August 9, 2014. Don’t feed the Microbes. NewScientist.

THIS is not a health drink. The waters of North America’s Lake Erie turned lurid green this week, thanks to a bloom of toxic bacteria. The bloom has now receded and the water is drinkable again, but the challenge is to stop it happening again. The blue-green cyanobacteria Microcystis aeruginosa built up at the western end of the lake, which is the main source of drinking water for Toledo, Ohio. The bacterium produces a toxin called microcystin, forcing Toledo to turn off the water supply. Such blooms are increasingly common in Lake Erie, as phosphorus from fertilisers runs into the water and feeds the cyanobacteria. To prevent blooms, Ohio must stem the flow of phosphorus, says Jeffrey Reutter of Ohio State University in Columbus. Farmers should test soil to help them only use as much fertiliser as is necessary, and apply it when planting so unused phosphorus isn’t left lying around.

 

 

 

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US Department of Energy 1980 oil rationing plan

Posted on November 25, 2013 by

Preface. This plan was written after the two energy crises in the 1970s, but never enacted. Republicans voted it down in Congress. Perhaps the Republican plan is to ration by wealth. But how well would that work? Chaos and looting will make it hard to buy gasoline or drive anywhere and not have your car stopped and looted.

Which makes me more optimistic that Stan Cox’s certainty rationing has to happen is quite likely.  His book “Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing” is one of the top plans the U.S. should be making for the future. The book has far more sophisticated plans than the 1980 one, and it ought to be ready to implement before oil shortages occur.

Alice Friedemann    www.energyskeptic.com women in ecology  author of 2021 Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy best price here; 2015 When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity, XX2 report

* * *

USDOE. June 1980. Standby Gasoline Rationing Plan. U.S. Department of Energy Economic Regulatory Administration, Office of Regulations and Emergency Planning.  PDF: D1980 Department of Energy Gasoline Rationing Plan

Excerpts:

This report details how gasoline would be rationed, the way allotments will be distributed, how to allocate rations to private individuals, what share motorcycles/mopeds will get, hardship needs, etc.

Agriculture will receive what it needs from the outset, what remains afterward will be divided on a state-by-state basis.  Ration coupons that have not been redeemed will be freely transferable.

Supplemental allotments will be issued for certain priority activities, such as national security, agriculture, law enforcement, fire fighting, United States Postal Service, emergency medical services, public passenger transportation, sanitation services, search and rescue, snow removal, telecommunications services, gas and electric utilities service, newspaper distribution, energy production activities, vehicle rentals and firms engaged in for hire mail and small parcel transportation and delivery.

Allocation of coupons to individuals

570.24 Limitation on Distribution of Ration Rights. One of the recurring comments on the issue of whether ration coupons should be allotted to licensed drivers or registered vehicles was that the per vehicle system disproportionately favors persons who already own more cars or who can afford to purchase additional cars. Another popular comment was that people will buy several “junkers” in order to receive extra ration rights.

In response to these comments, DOE has incorporated a new § 570.24 in the final regulations which provides authority to limit the number of allotments distributed to any person or household. As a matter of policy, it is desirable to impose a reasonable limit on the total number of allotments given to persons or households that have several registered vehicles, not all of which are used intensively. DOE has not yet arrived at a practical mechanism that would accomplish that objective, so the plan does not provide for any specific limitation. During pre-implementation, however, an equitable and enforceable means of imposing a limitation on allotments will be developed.

Many comments urged that motorcycles and mopeds be provided with the same allotments as passenger cars to reward use of the more fuel efficient two-wheeled vehicles. We have not been persuaded by this argument. First, many people may be tempted by such a proposal to buy a relatively inexpensive moped to receive an extra allotment of coupons for their car. Second, owners of motorcycles and mopeds would not benefit by being able to drive more because of their increased allotments. Our analysis shows that allotments for motorcycles and mopeds which are in amounts less then allotments for automobiles still would allow the more fuel efficient motorcycles and mopeds to be driven significantly more than the average mileage for such vehicles. Therefore, full allotments more likely would result in only a monetary windfall since the excess coupons would be sold on the exchange market. Motorcycles and mopeds therefore will receive an allotment index less than 1.0.

In the comments section, you’ll see that people representing groups such as marinas, telecommunications, rental car companies, Alaskan residents, etc., asked for special allotments. Businesses argued they should get more coupons, since individuals can cut back their discretionary driving.

Diesel-powered vehicles also will not receive an allotment index, as diesel fuel will not be subject to rationing under this plan.

The plan provides that eligibility for ration allotments will be determined primarily on the basis of motor vehicle registrations, taking into account historical differences in the use of gasoline among States. The regulations also provide authority for supplemental allotments to firms so that their allotment will equal a specified percentage of gasoline use during a base period. A priority classification, including, for example, national security, newspaper distribution, rental vehicles, agriculture and for hire mail and small parcel transportation and delivery, is established to assure adequate gasoline supplies for designated essential services.

Ration rights are required by the regulations to be provided by end-users to their suppliers for each gallon sold, and suppliers must provide “redeemed” (cancelled) ration rights to their suppliers on a gallon-for-gallon basis in order to be re-supplied. Ration rights are freely transferable. A ration banking system is created to facilitate transfers of ration rights and redeemed ration rights. Each State will be provided with a reserve of ration rights to provide for hardship needs and to alleviate inequities. A small national reserve also is established to meet emergency needs and other national purposes.

Development of any end-user gasoline rationing plan necessitates difficult tradeoffs between equitably meeting the diverse needs of millions of gasoline users and creating a program capable of rapid implementation with limited administrative complexity. Although the rationing plan, if fully implemented, would be costly and administratively complex, options have been incorporated into the plan to provide, to the maximum extent practical, equity among gasoline users though out the Nation and to provide flexibility to minimize disparities within States.

Any gasoline rationing plan will inconvenience large numbers of gasoline users and will cause hardships to many persons. But in times of serious shortage, gasoline rationing would assure access to some gasoline by all motorists (particularly priority users) and would also help to eliminate waiting lines, stabilize the market for gasoline, and mitigate the economic dislocations caused by a severe petroleum shortage.

The hostage situation in Tehran and the recent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan have continued to provoke further turmoil and unrest in the Middle East, an area which supplies over 60 percent of the petroleum consumed by the Western industrial nations. The beginning of the 1980’s, therefore, is characterized by insecure foreign sources of petroleum and a potential threat of gasoline shortages, underscoring the need for the government to have in place a Standby Gasoline Rationing Plan as soon as possible so as to be prepared to manage a severe gasoline shortfall.

EPCA sec. 201(d) defines a severe energy supply interruption as a national energy supply shortage which the President determines has resulted or is likely to result in a 20 percent shortfall, with respect to projected normal demand, of gasoline and middle distillate fuels for a period of at least 30 days. The shortfall must be one which is not manageable under other energy emergency authorities, is expected to persist for a substantial period of time and is expected to have a major adverse impact on national health or safety or the national economy. An international energy program obligation must have comparable impacts. The President must notify the Congress of his finding together with a request to implement rationing.

For each ration period, DOE will project the national total available supply of gasoline. This amount will determine the total number of ration rights that will be made available. These ration rights will be distributed generally as follows:

(1)   A small percentage of these rights will be reserved for distribution for a National Ration Reserve.

(2)   The total number of ration rights to be distributed to classes of end-users within each State will be determined on a State-by-State basis that takes into account historical use of gasoline by those classes in that State. With the exception of agriculture, allotments for firms and priority activities in each State will be taken from that State’s share of total allotments. Agriculture priority allotments will be distributed before distributions are made to individual States to avoid distortions that might otherwise be caused to other classes of end-users because of the size of this priority category. Under this procedure, each class of end-user in one State would share any shortfall equally (as measured against historical use) with the corresponding class of end-user in other States.

(3)   A percentage of each State’s ration rights will be reserved for a State Ration Reserve, from which the State will make distribution to meet hardship needs.

(4)   DOE will provide allotments to firms and priority class activities on the basis of their historical use of gasoline.

(5)   In each State, the remaining ration allotments will be distributed to all other registrants, eligible individuals and other persons entitled to allotments on a per vehicle basis.

Entitlements for Ration Allotments

  1. Eligibility for ration allotments will be primarily on the basis of motor vehicle registration. However, DOE will implement a system by which such allotments will be supplemented for all business firms and priority users based upon their historical use of gasoline. Persons (whether individuals or firms) with the most recent valid vehicle registration for an eligible vehicle will receive ration allotments. Authority is provided for a limit to be imposed on the number of ration rights distributed to any person or household. Provisions will be made for the expeditious transfer of eligibility for ration allotments when a vehicle is transferred. Provisions also will be made to enable purchasers of new cars to obtain ration rights on an expedited basis.
  2. All vehicles, except motorcycles and mopeds, will receive the same allotment. Motorcycles will receive one-fourth of the allotment for other vehicles, and mopeds will receive one-tenth of an allotment. Firms will receive the same per vehicle allotments but will be able to supplement them with additional allotments to reflect their historical usage of gasoline.
  3. DOE will issue supplemental allotments for certain priority activities, such as national security, agriculture, law enforcement, fire fighting, United States Postal Service, emergency medical services, public passenger transportation, sanitation services, search and rescue, snow removal, telecommunications services, gas and electric utilities service, newspaper distribution, energy production activities, vehicle rentals and firms engaged in for hire mail and small parcel transportation and delivery.

G. The Ration Rights Market

  1. Ration coupons that have not been redeemed will be freely transferable. DOE does not intend to regulate the ration rights market directly, but the final plan reserves the right to do so, if in DOE’s judgment such regulation becomes necessary to prevent abuses.
  2. In order to facilitate the establishment of a market for ration coupons, DOE has the authority under the regulations to sell some ration rights to the public, provided such sale does not cause the total number of issued ration rights to exceed the total amount of gasoline available. In addition DOE can authorize the States to sell ration rights from the State Ration Reserves (see below). DOE also is authorized, to the extent appropriations are available, to buy and sell coupons whenever necessary to equilibrate the number of issued ration rights with the actual supply of gasoline.

H. National Ration Reserve

A percentage of the total ration rights issued will be reserved for the establishment of a National Ration Reserve. The National Ration Reserve will be used to meet national disaster relief needs and other national emergencies, to provide allotments to Canadian and Mexican firms that drive vehicles across the border for the purpose of conducting business in the United States, and for such other purposes as DOE finds necessary.

I. States’ Role in Gasoline Rationing 1. A percentage of the ration rights to be issued within each State will be reserved for distribution to that State as a State Ration Reserve, to be used by the State primarily for the relief of hardship. The States will have broad discretion and flexibility in the administration of the State Ration Reserves but will be required to submit to DOE a plan describing how the State Ration Reserve will be administered before receiving the ration rights. DOE can authorize the States to sell to the public a portion of the State Ration Reserve in order to facilitate the establishment of a market for ration coupons.

The definition of “emergency services” has been expanded to include search and rescue activities and utilities services. These activities too will be entitled to receive supplemental allotments of ration rights as priority class firms.

It should be noted that this plan deals only with the rationing of gasoline. Gasohol, which typically is a blend of 90 percent unleaded gasoline and 10 percent ethyl alcohol, will be subject to rationing only to the extent of its gasoline content. Therefore, the purchase of a 90/10 blend of gasohol will require only nine-tenths as many ration rights as the purchase of the same volume of pure gasoline.

The focus of this issue is gasoline use for agriculture, a priority activity, which constitutes a significant portion of gasoline use in some States. By way of illustration, during certain calendar quarters gasoline consumption for farming in several farm States ranges from 15 to 50 percent of total consumption. Additional amounts of gasoline are used in these States for distribution and processing of agricultural products. In other jurisdictions, gasoline use for agriculture is much less significant. If, as proposed in the notice of proposed rulemaking, the supplemental allotments for agriculture were deducted from each State’s distribution of the total available ration rights, and assuming that the agriculture priority class is provided 90 percent of its base period gasoline use, then in a 20 percent shortfall the average non-farm motorist in a State with 50 percent base period agricultural use would receive about 68 percent of his base period use. This is to be compared with 78 percent of base period use for the average motorist in a State where agriculture consumed only 10 percent of the base period supply of gasoline.

In order to cure this disparity and assure that the average motorist class of end-user in a State with substantial gasoline use for agriculture does not suffer a disproportionate burden of the shortfall, we have made an adjustment to the calculation formula. Under this adjustment, supplemental allotments for the agriculture priority are taken from the national supply of ration rights before calculating each State’s allotment, rather than being taken from each State’s allotment. The effect is that agriculture receives exactly the same amount as it would have had its ration rights been taken from the State’s allotment, but the ordinary motorist class of end-user will not suffer a disproportionate burden in a highly agricultural State. Such an adjustment is not necessary with respect to other priorities because there is no evidence that gasoline usage by any other priority class of end-user will dis-proportionately affect in any material way the gasoline available to the ordinary motorist class of end-user. Thus, under the plan, each class of end-user within a State will share the shortfall equally (as measured against historical use) with the corresponding class of end-user in other States.

Many people who commented urged that motorcycles and mopeds be provided with the same allotments as passenger cars to reward use of the more fuel efficient two-wheeled vehicles. We have not been persuaded by this argument. First, many people may be tempted by such a proposal to buy a relatively inexpensive moped to receive an extra allotment of coupons for their car. Second, owners of motorcycles and mopeds would not benefit by being able to drive more because of their increased allotments. Our analysis shows that allotments for motorcycles and mopeds which are in amounts less then allotments for automobiles still would allow the more fuel efficient motorcycles and mopeds to be driven significantly more than the average mileage for such vehicles. Therefore, full allotments more likely would result in only a monetary windfall since the excess coupons would be sold on the exchange market. Motorcycles and mopeds therefore will receive an allotment index less than 1.0.

All vehicles (except motorcycles and mopeds) will have the same index number and therefore will receive the same ration allotment (in a given State), regardless of fuel efficiency. This will give a significant advantage to fuel efficient vehicles.

Diesel-powered vehicles also will not receive an allotment index, as diesel fuel will not be subject to rationing under this plan.

570.24 Limitation on Distribution of Ration Rights. One of the recurring comments on the issue of whether ration coupons should be allotted to licensed drivers or registered vehicles was that the per vehicle system disproportionately favors persons who already own more cars or who can afford to purchase additional cars. Another popular comment was that people will buy several “junkers” in order to receive extra ration rights.

In response to these comments, DOE has incorporated a new § 570.24 in the final regulations which provides authority to limit the number of allotments distributed to any person or household. As a matter of policy, it is desirable to impose a reasonable limit on the total number of allotments given to persons or households that have several registered vehicles, not all of which are used intensively. DOE has not yet arrived at a practical mechanism that would accomplish that objective, so the plan does not provide for any specific limitation. During pre-implementation, however, an equitable and enforceable means of imposing a limitation on allotments will be developed.

The allotment limitation would not be intended to preclude the distribution to a person or members of a household of additional ration rights granted from the State Ration Reserve. Thus a person or household with a bona fide need for more than the prescribed limit of allotments would have the opportunity to recoup lost allotments from the State Ration Reserve. Section 570.24(b) provides that ration rights that would be distributed to a person or members of a household but for the limitation in subsection (a) will go to the State Ration Reserve so that the State would not in any way lose ration rights as a result of the limitation.

For purposes of this section, household is defined in § 570.24(c) as persons related by blood or marriage who live together in a single residence.

We specifically asked for comments on the question of whether business should receive a higher ration level than individuals. Most businesses which commented supported this concept, agreeing that individuals can conserve by eliminating discretionary driving.

Section 570.43(b) of the regulations provides that unredeemed ration rights are freely transferable. This provision constitutes the authority for a ration rights exchange market, which should promote a more efficient use of available gasoline. We do not anticipate regulating the ration rights market through price controls or any other mechanism. However, in order to prevent abuses in the market that might arise, § 570.43(b) gives DOE authority to regulate the market if necessary. Furthermore, as noted in earlier sections, DOE will be authorized by the proposed regulations to buy and sell coupons.

References

Cox, S. 2013. Any way you slice it: the past, present, and future of rationing. New Press

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Zero to One Child per Woman: The only possible solution at this late date

Posted on November 24, 2013 by

Excerpt from “The Sky Is Falling: Chicken Little Was Right All Along” by Don Wilkin Nov 2013.

“I am convinced the only equitable, humane, and effective way to pull our fat out of the fire at this late date, if it could be done at all, would be to immediately and dramatically reduce human fertility worldwide to half of replacement for the next three to four generations, somewhere between “one or none” and “one will do, stop at two.”   All other attempts to live more sustainably would be – in fact are being – entirely undone by our huge and growing numbers.  Such restraint would have to continue until we got our numbers WAY down, certainly below a billion, and possibly below half a billion depending on how long it took.  That level of voluntary reproductive restraint, I don’t need to tell you, would be unprecedented in human history.  Economic collapse is a far more probable resolution to our overshoot problem.

Realistically, most of us won’t survive global economic collapse.  The vast majority of us have neither the skills nor the resources to survive in a purely local economy.  Despite the earnest efforts of groups like Sierra Club and the Transitions network, it is unlikely that anything can now stop the global economy – and human civilization with it – from collapsing around our heads sometime in the next two to four decades.  Most will apparently blithely continue to enjoy our final faux prosperity while it lasts.  By the time the meltdown gets their full and undivided attention, it will be too late.

I take little comfort in being old enough to be cashing in my chips before the most serious stages of civilization’s decline and collapse.  That doesn’t make it any better for my kids and grandkids.  I feel we owe them a realistic assessment of the predicament we have left them.  My heartfelt warning to them is that children born today are probably being sentenced, should they survive to adulthood, to living through the darkest period of human history.  The decision to bring a child into the world today is – or should be – an excruciating one, a choice between small hope for a survivable future with starkly limited opportunities versus a far higher probability of a much more debased, dispiriting one.

If this past century represents the pinnacle of human ability to sustainably manage and equitably share our global commons, and if, despite our big brains and digital libraries overflowing with the accumulated wisdom of all human history, we can aspire to no higher economic goals than ever-greater material consumption, constant growth, and perpetual crowding at the expense of all other species on this planet, including other humans, it might be better if human reproduction were put on the evolutionary back burner for a very long while.  Only a radical pruning provides any hope for a post-human “founder” population sometime in the future with substantially more reverent attitudes toward Earth and more caring and social responsibility toward one another.”

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