Book Review of Englund’s “The Beauty and the Sorrow”

Posted on August 5, 2013 by

Confusion, chaos, rumor, fear, hope, terror, perhaps that’s exactly what you’d expect of war, but far more real when you’re reading ordinary people’s diaries, not accounts of generals or dry facts of history.

Even though I’m old enough not to have seen TV until grade school, I’m so used to cell phones and breaking news, that it’s a bit of a shock to be thrown back a century into a world where no one was sure what was going on — where news traveled -slowly and might not be correct.

I also shook my head at all the young men so eager to fight, excited about war. Those with doubts kept their thoughts to themselves.  Although an American who volunteered in the Italian army was told he was nuts by his fellow troops.

Many accounts are of typhus, smallpox, and other diseases, magnified because people were weak from malnutrition. This was partly because so many farmers were fighting, but also because the farmers still growing food could sell it on the black market at extremely high prices.  Townspeople were particularly affected since they had nowhere to grow their own food. Some of them broke into shops to get food.  But if you want luxury goods, no problem, they’re in abundant supply – corsets, high-heeled shoes, silk ribbons, chamois-leather gloves.  But forget about buying butter or eggs.

Having your fate decided by the officers above you is very frustrating

One of the horrifying aspects of WWI was how commanders forced groups of soldiers to attack over and over again in battles that were clearly hopeless. One such fight is described on page 173. An officer with only 25 men left out of 250 asked permission to fall back, but was denied permission told to attack with his remaining men yet again.

Paolo Monelli, a trooper in the Italian army, writes “it is not the risk of dying, not the red firework display of a bursting shell that blinds us as it comes whizzing down, but the feeling of being a puppet in the hands of an unknown puppeteer—and that feeling sometimes chills the heart as if death itself had taken hold of it. Chained to the trench until orders to be relieved arrive as suddenly as a cannon shot or a snowstorm, tied to ever-present danger, to a fate that is inscribed with the number of your platoon or the name of your trench, unable to take your shirt off when you want to, unable to write home when you want to, seeing the most modest needs of existence governed by rules over which you have no influence—all this is war.  The press correspondent who visits the trenches does not know this war; the officer from the general staff who ops up to ensure that he gets a medal by being with us does not know this war. Once they are hungry or tired or think they have done their job, they take out their watch and say, ‘it’s late, I have to go no.’ “

35-year-old Laura de Turczynowica, American wife of a Polish aristocrat

Throughout the book civilians are on the move, trying to escape the clash of armies, as Laura describes: “the population was pouring out of the city in long files. On carts, on foot, on horseback. Everyone making shift to save himself. All of them carrying away what they can. And exhaustion, dust, sweat, panic on every face, terrible dejection, pain, and suffering. Their eyes are frightened, their movements craven: ghastly terror oppresses them. I lie sleepless at the side of the road and watch this infernal kaleidoscope. There are even military wagons muddled into it, and on the fields retreating military, routed infantry, lost cavalry. Not one has his full equipment.” (page 16)

Because there were so many rumors flying, people often didn’t flee until they heard the sounds of battle.  They couldn’t get news because telegraph lines had been cut, and often ignored the early warning signs, such as hordes of peasants fleeing from the border with all their animals. Laura, an American woman in Poland describes it as: “men, women, children, dogs, cows, pigs, horses, and carts all mixed up in one grand mélange,” as they passed by her home.

When Laura hears artillery fire are realizes she’s waited too long to flee, she suddenly she announces that everyone must leave within 15 minutes.  She has servants and children, they all help load what they can onto 2 farm carts. Outside, there’s a chaos of  military wagons, soldiers, and a “vortex of humanity—people running—laden like horses—getting tired of the weight—dropping it—but going on”.

Her family and the servants rode in the first wagon, their luggage in the second, but halfway to the rail station, a man she knew beat up the driver of the second wagon and absconded with all the luggage.

When the enemy was pushed back, Laura returned.  Since she was quite wealthy (married to a Polish Count), the opposing army officers stayed at her home, where she found everything to be “torn, smashed, ripped out, spilled, hurled around, knocked over and fouled. Every drawer pulled out, every wardrobe emptied.  The smell is indescribably awful. The library has been completely vandalized. The contents of all the shelves have been emptied and the floor is invisible beneath a layer of torn books and papers, scattered documents and engravings. All of it trampled by rough boots.”  Every dish and plate was hurled on the floor after they were used.  In the pantry glass jars that used to have jam, honey, and vegetables had been eaten and replaced with human excrement.

As time passed, Laura began to run out of food, though luckily hadn’t found the food she hid in the sofa.  Even though she still had some money, she often couldn’t find anyone willing to sell food for money.  Potatoes and eggs cost astronomical prices.

Then the enemy returned before she could flee, and the enemy soldiers came back to live and throw wild parties in her home, while she and her children cowered in a small room at the back of the house.

Minorities in war

Currently news headlines every day are about the government and NSA spying on citizens.    Although I’m not worried about this now, what happened in WWI when war broke out gives me pause.  It’s in hard times and war that this information gets used in a bad way.  Consider what happened in Germany after war was declared.  Danes were a minority there and seen as a potential problem. Hundreds of leaders were rounded up and arrested.

Destroy food and water

Throughout the book, villages are burned, forcing the residents out, and as they flee, they block the roads that the military needs to take to get to battle.  Setting fields and towns afire is a way of destroying sustenance of the opposing army – and there are other teams running around destroying water supplies as well.

Sometimes people are able to remain, mainly by hiding in their cellars.  Towns no longer have street cleaning, so there’s rubbish and filth everywhere.  Streets are littered with abandoned furniture and other stuff.

Injuries

I had no idea that in addition to bullets, explosions could drive just about anything into a soldier, including clothing, stones, wood splinters, and so on.  One surgeon complained of patients who wanted a bullet or shrapnel to be taken out as a trophy to show people, when it would be safer to leave the projectile in his body, untouched.

Although 13% of battlefield injuries were head wounds, they accounted for 57% of deaths.  No great surprise, given that the head was the most exposed part of the body in the trenches, where soldiers spent a huge amount of time in.  In fact, the reason that soldiers hair was cut short wasn’t because of lice, but to make it easier to treat head wounds as quickly as possible.  Finally in 1915 soldiers started being supplied with helmets to reduce head injuries.

Lost

Over and over again, because no one has maps, officers have no idea where they are supposed to go or how to get there, and sometimes blunder into situations where they’re trapped, as Lobanov-Rostovsky does when he takes his men into a ravine with Germans on either side of them. Luckily the Germans are confused and fire on each other, allowing them to escape (34-36).

Luxury Trenches

Here’s a new image of the battle trenches for you: soldiers ransacked homes for loot and luxuries to decorate the trenches with, including sofas, chairs and beds.  Officers were allowed to loot first, then the rest of the troops were allowed in.

Prostitutes

Now and then wives tried to follow their husbands to the front line, but in France, the only women allowed do that were prostitutes.  Some desperate wives said they were hookers so they could stay in touch with their husbands.

At times in these accounts, women prostitute themselves for food, or even salt (i.e. p 209).  Meanwhile the men are increasingly coming down with syphilis and other veneral diseases.  Some of them on purpose, in fact there are women who charge more because they have a disease and the soldier wants to get infected to not have to go back to the front and fight.  Soldiers smeared gonococcal pus on their genitals or in their eyes (which often caused lifelong blindness) to be sent to the hospital and get out of fighting.

Rafael de Nogales came all the way from Venezuela to fight – not his first war, plus he’d panned for gold in Alaska, worked as a cowboy in Arizona, among other things.  But the Belgians didn’t want him, nor did the French, the Serbians, or the Russians.  Not wanting to go home, he joined the Turkish army, because they were willing to take him.

Ottoman genocide against Christian Minorities in Sairt

The Ottoman genocide against Christian Minorities occurred in Turkey between 1913 and 1922. Over 3.5 million Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Christians were massacred in a state-organized campaign of destruction and genocide, aiming at wiping out native Christian populations. “This Christian Holocaust is viewed as the precursor to the Jewish Holocaust in WWII. To this day, the Turkish government denies having committed this genocide.” — Prof. Israel Charney, President of the IAGS

Warning: the following account of the massacre in Sairt written by Rafael de Nogales is so gruesome you may want to skip it:

“The slope was crowned with thousands of half-naked and still bleeding bodies, lying in heaps, tangled, as if in a last embrace in death. Fathers, brothers, sons and grandsons lay as they fell from the bullets or swords. Heartbeats were still pumping the life-blood out of some slashed throats. Flocks of vultures sat on top of the heap, picking the eyes out of the dead and dying, whose rigid gase still seemed to mirror terror and inexpressible pain, while carrion dogs sank their sharp teeth into entrails still pulsing with life.”  The field of bodies blocked the road and the horses had to jump over mountains of corpses.  Meanwhile the Muslim part of the population is busy plundering Christian homes.

Conclusion

I finished the first 300 of 500 pages and then had to return the book to the library.  I haven’t checked it out again, because it was too hard to follow the narrative thread, which jumps randomly between 20 different diaries, with each long chapter representing a different year.  I would have rather have had each chapter follow one person throughout the war, it’s too hard to return to this book and pick up the thread again.

And besides, I “get it”.  Knowing the state of the world makes me want to understand what the future might be like, which is easiest to figure out by reading about failed states, wars, and history (which I’ve read a lot about, see my energyskeptic booklist).

There are patterns, it’s clear to me what will happen at some point on the Net Energy Cliff and from rising sea levels, or even sooner if nuclear or cyber war and other potential strike first.

I partly read these gruesome books to figure out a way to survive if I live long enough to see such times, but so much of it is luck and being young and healthy enough to survive the diseases that move like fire through the population.

Alice Friedemann

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Book Review of Paleofantasy: What Evolution really tells us about sex, diet, and how we live

Posted on August 3, 2013 by

Alice Friedemann’s review of: Marlene Zuk. 2013. Paleofantasy: What Evolution really tells us about sex, diet, and how we live.

My first introduction to Evolutionary Psychology was “The Adapted Mind” which posited we’re unhappy because of the tremendous difference between the modern world and the natural world we’d lived in for millions of years.  This idea was especially appealing because I love being outdoors and learning natural history.   It made sense.

But now I’m going to have to give up blaming the ancestral environment for my problems, because it appears we’ve been evolving fast enough to cope with our modern diet and lifestyle.

We can now quickly compare our DNA with ancient skeletons and see that it doesn’t take thousands of years to evolve – many adaptations, like the ability to digest milk as an adult, took place recently within just a few generations. Some other genes that have rapidly evolved are:

  • Ability to digest starch by having more copies of the amylase gene
  • Polar people have genes to deal with cold stress
  • Foragers are adapted to a wider variety of foods than agricultural people
  • Cultures that eat mainly plants have more liver enzymes to detoxify compounds found in roots and tubers than hunting cultures that depend mainly on meat

But word hasn’t gotten out to the people following the Paleo Diet and Lifestyle.  Some of their misguided notions are no doubt driven by nostalgia for a simpler past.  Nearly all times and places have had legends of a “Golden Age” and more recently, visions of Noble Savages living in harmony with nature (sadly, not true, as you can read in Shepard Krech’s “The Ecological Indian: Myth and History”).

Paleofantasists shun anything cavemen didn’t eat.  So kiss refined sugar, dairy, legumes, and grains good-bye. Embrace Meat, Fruit, and Vegetables.

The biggest bugaboo is eating starch, but there is a lot of archeological evidence and common sense that hunter gatherers ate starch, such as:

  1. I’ve read a great deal about the native tribes of California, and in many, half of their diet was acorns, which are 5% carbohydrate (whole wheat and corn flour are 7%).  The Mayans and Inca ate corn, as well as potatoes, squash, beans, quinoa and many other carbohydrates.
  2. Bits of starch grains have been found on the grinding stones from 30,000 year old sites in Italy, Russia, and the Czech Republic, where our ancestors made flour from ground up plants, combined it with water and made a pita bread on stones heated in fires.
  3. Fossil hominids had such sturdy premolar teeth it’s believed they were probably used to open seeds and chew starchy underground tubers and bulbs.
  4. Anthropologist Frank Marlowe studied the eating patterns of 478 groups around the globe. He found that no matter where you live, at least a third of your diet is going to come from plants (and in many places nearly all of your diet), so the idea our ancestors were mainly carnivorous is not true.
  5. Even Neanderthals ate starch, which we know from studying the plaque on their teeth.
  6. Scientists analyzed the DNA of human populations that had low or high starch consumption.  It turns out that cultures that eat a lot of starch have more amylase genes (and therefore more amylase) with which to process and consume starches.  Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, eat very little starch, and have 1/6 to 1/8 of the amylase humans do.
  7. Zuk says “So early humans ate crackers. What’s the big deal?” Our ancestors were smart to grind roots so the flour could be stored or carried, since often game animals were seasonal and no meat was to be had many times of the year. But word hasn’t gotten out to cavemanforum.com and other such websites, where meat reigns supreme, and carbohydrates are the ultimate evil.

The problems with this the Paleofantasy are many, here are just a few:

  1. The idea we ever perfectly adapted to an environment is false, the environment kept changing (there are theories even that we became as intelligent as we are trying to cope with the rapidly changing environment, which has never been as stable as the past 10,000 years).
  2. Did cave men exhausted from chasing animals down long for the days when humans stole kills away from lions instead?
  3. How can you choose a paleodiet when nearly every tribe ate different kinds of food?  There’s no such thing as a “natural” diet, we ate way too many different kinds of food in the past and have adapted to too many new ones.
  4. Where can you find meat as lean as in the past not from domesticated animals bred to grow quickly with more fat and fed anti-biotics? Similarly, fruits and vegetables are not remotely like the original varieties. Potatoes were bitter lumpy roots, apples in Kazakhstan so bitter they’re barely edible.
  5. One of the biggest forbidden foods of Paleo enthusiasts is starch, but we now know from above that our distant ancestors ate a great deal of starch – seeds, roots, tubers, acorns, and so on.
  6. Milk is considered an evil in many paleo-diets, but about 35% of the world’s people can digest milk and dairy products – this ability to digest lactase arose three times in different genetic ways within 3 civilizations and spread throughout the population rapidly because it was such a huge advantage, those with this mutation had more surviving children. And not just because of getting calcium and enough calories – milk is a safer liquid than the feces-polluted water near villages, the resulting diarrhea from bad water was what caused such high mortality in children under 5.  Even those without this ability can still usually eat some dairy, especially fermented cheese products such as yogurt.
  7. The latest research in gut microbes shows that our gut flora have evolved with us to help us digest new kinds of food, yet another avenue to adapt rapidly to new environments.  As our diets change, it appears that our internal microbes do too.

Some of the funniest parts of the book are when Zuk reports on the Paleofantasies she’s found in books, newspapers, or on the internet, such as the one about rock star Ozzy Osbourne attributing his survival of past excesses like drinking 4 bottles of Cognac a day to his Neanderthal genes.

Many people see agriculture as where we went wrong, and long to go back to the hunter-gatherer days, when we had a much wider diet, probably eating about 50 to 100 kinds of plants.  Now we use a mere 30 crops for 95% of our plant-based foods, 50% of them corn, rice, and wheat.

Another reason agriculture is seen as a wrong turn is that it takes so much more work than hunting and gathering.  Zuk shows that this may not be true, the skills of hunting take a long time to develop. Men aren’t at their peak hunting skills until they’re 35 and woman are best at foraging when they’re between 35 and 45.  Hunting and gathering was no bed of roses, and Zuk explains why it was not as idyllic as people imagine it to be (as well as why agriculture has advantages and benefits over hunter-gatherer societies).

Agriculture is also seen as evil because that’s when diseases gained ground, because there were large populations and infectious disease could spread more easily.  And due to less variety in foods, nutrients were often missing, leading to new vitamin deficiency diseases such as pellagra, anemia, and scurvy

What many people don’t realize is that this changed. About 4,000 years ago, skeletons from Egypt show that people regained their height, and only 20% showed any signs of malnutrition.

In addition, the more people you have, the more likely there will be good mutations for evolution to work with. The population increased so much that a good mutation which might occur every 100,000 years would now turn up every 400 years.  Favorable mutations spread faster in larger populations, speeding up evolution.  Scientists have calculated there have been almost 3,000 new adaptive mutations in the last 50,000 years in Europeans alone.

Gregory Cochran, in “The 10,000 Year Explosion. How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution” estimates that our evolution has sped up 100 times faster in the past 10,000 years than the previous 6 million years, and that even people 4,000 years ago were both genetically and culturally different from us.

Andrew Hendry believes that rapid evolution may be the norm and not the exception.

So sure, agriculture had its drawbacks, but it has positive aspects as well. Our intelligence increased dramatically and in turn led to greater cultural and technological complexity.

Paleofantasies and evolutionary psychology stories can be wishful thinking and rationalizing.  People have constructed stories to justify being unfaithful or eating junk food for example. Though it turns out that the actual amount of infidelity in America, based on DNA paternity tests, was much lower than I’d expected.  It’s only between 1 and 3.7% — not the 10% or more I’d read elsewhere.  I trust the data these lower figures come from – genetic testing for diseases to find out which parents have the genetic disorder rather than the figures from men who suspect they aren’t the father and get tested, which skews the number much higher than it actually is.

Of course, our love of junk food may be based on the adaptive craving we have for sugar, since way back when that mainly came from ripe fruit, which was very nutritious and uncommon.

Too bad we don’t also crave fiber – hunter gatherers typically ate 100 grams a day, but now the USDA daily standard is only 25 grams, and most of us don’t even get that. The average American only eats 20 grams of fiber a day.

David Kessler, in “The End of Overeating. Taking control of the insatiable American appetite”, calls the processed and restaurant food we eat “adult baby food”, because you can woof it down in 10 bites on average.  Food used to take about 25 chews per bite before you could swallow. Chewing takes time and gives your body a chance let you know you’re full.

Kessler says that the reason it only takes 10 bites is because so much fiber, gristle, and bran has been removed.  Meat is “pre-chewed” in marinades.  If the food industry could fill you up like a car at a gas station, they would, but what’s saving us is that we don’t want to drink our doughnuts.

As you’ll see if you look at site wholegrainalice, bread is called the staff of life because for millennia that was the main source of calories for people in many civilizations.  A pound of whole grain wheat flour has 54.4 grams of fiber, over twice your daily requirement, and 5 times more fiber than a pound of white flour, which only has 11.2 grams of fiber (you need 25 grams a day).   It ought to be a crime for flour manufacturers to strip the bran and germ out of wheat, where nearly all the fiber, vitamins, minerals, and essential healthy fats are.  I think the gluten-free diet is really stupid nutrition-wise, but if it’s your only way to avoid white flour and get more whole grains into your diet, then go for it.  It’s hard to find ways around the predatory industrial food system, which cares only about profits, unless you cook from scratch at home (i.e. no packaged foods).  The food industry is about as unpatriotic as you can get – processed food is a good part of why Americans are unhealthy and living less long than the previous generations, and driving our health care costs so high we’ll go bankrupt, unless the corrupt financial industry does that first.

The first book to promote paleofantasies was Walter Voegtlin’s 1975 “The Stone Age Diet”.  This was when the idea we should be eating a lot more meat like the cavemen did became popular.

Zuk mentions the 2011 U.S. News & World report evaluation of 20 diets, in which the Paleo diet came in dead last.  There were 22 experts – mainly physicians and professors of food science and nutrition, who evaluated and ranked a variety of diet plans based on

how easy to follow, ability to produce short and long-term weight loss, nutritional completeness, safety, and prevent diabetes and heart disease.

In the 2013 evaluation of 29 diets, the Paleo diet came in last again.   Here are the scores of the diets from best to worst (on a scale of 5)

4.1       DASH

4          TLC

3.9       Mayo Clinic                Mediterranean              Weight Watchers

3.8       Flexitarian                   Volumetrics

3.7       Jenny Craig

3.6       Biggest Loser             Ornish

3.5       Traditional Asian        Vegetarian

3.3       Dr. Weil’s Anti-Inflammatory            Slim-Fast

3.2       Nutrisystem                 Flat Belly

3          Engine 2                      South Beach     Vegan              Abs

2.9       Eco-Atkins                  Zone                 Glycemic-Index

2.7       Macrobiotic                 Medifast

2.3       Atkins                         Raw Food

2          Paleo                           Dukan

The Paleo diet scored low because dairy and grains have a lot of nutrients, and unless the meat is lean, the fat can give you heart disease.  There are far less carbohydrates than what’s recommended, about 23% rather than the 45-65% of your calories coming from carbohydrates that the USDA recommends.  You’re also not getting enough calcium and Vitamin D if you aren’t in the sun enough.  Read the review for all the details.

Lately studies have shown that sitting and inactivity too much of the day is one of the biggest causes of obesity and early death.  I’ve got a kitchen timer at my desk that goes off every 20 minutes to get me up for a few jumping jacks now, since apparently even working out at the gym doesn’t do any good if you sit for too long.  But it wasn’t until reading this book that I found an explanation of why sitting might be so bad for you.

Zuk writes that it’s possible the genes that metabolize glucose behave different in your body depending on whether you’re active or sedentary.  “A couch potato body sends the wrong signals to the genes, which behave as if a famine were imminent, since inactivity is historically associated with not having any food”, which tends to make your body use calories frugally and gain weight, plus the lack of exercise leads to hypertension, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s and a host of other diseases.

I also found it interesting that many women anthropologists have questioned the macho perspective of their male colleagues who promoted the idea of “Man the Hunter”.  It turns out that it’s quite likely that women hunted as well.  Adrienne Zihlman says that the old idea of “Man the Hunter came to stand for a way of life that placed males center-stage, gave an evolutionary basis for aggressive male behavior and justified gun use, political aggression, and a circumscribed relationship between women and men as a ‘natural’ outcome of human evolutionary history.”

In fact, the main function of hunting might not be subsistence at all, since hunting is often unsuccessful, and when it is successful, the meat is typically shared between many families, so a good hunter isn’t always increasing the survival of his own children.   Or put another way, big-game hunting is as unreliable as counting on earning your living as a rock star or gambler.  It’s thought by some anthropologists that the purpose of being a good hunter is a way to gain status and the respect of other people more than a way to provide calories.

Another assumption that I had about childhood – it’s longevity being due to the need to learn, may also not be true. It’s possible that a long childhood is good for the parents, since children work hard in most societies, at such tasks as gardening, caring for animals, taking care of younger siblings, and aren’t paid to do these chores.  Children are also inexpensive to feed and at some point do enough labor to more than compensate for what they eat.  It turns out that many social, hunting, and gathering skills are learned after childhood, so a long childhood to learn skills is probably not the main reason childhood lasts so long.

Hillary Clinton famously said that it takes a village to raise a child.  She had no idea how right she was, it turns out that we are what scientists call “cooperative breeders”. Which means that we go way beyond most mammals, where just the mom and sometimes the dad help out with the young.  There are only a few species where individuals other than the parents help raise the young.  Usually they’re older brothers and sisters.  Some examples are meerkats and about 8% of bird species.  In humans, you can see this in that many people besides the parents handle and play with babies and children. Zuk says she isn’t suggesting a paleo-Kibbutz where we all share the children, but in many societies, half the care is by done by other relatives and unrelated group members.  Studies of Israeli and Dutch children showed they did best when they had at least 3 relationships with adults where there was a clear message of “you will be cared for no matter what.”

Clearly that isn’t happening in America, one of the few countries were babies don’t sleep in bed with their mothers and in many other ways are raised in unnatural ways that cause our babies cry longer and louder than babies in other cultures.

Zuk has a great sense of humor and although I’ve read a lot of what’s in the book, there were enough surprises and the writing was far more entertaining than most  non-fiction on any topic, that you will probably enjoy this book as well.

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Stephen Leeb & Charles Hall on EROI & Investing

Posted on August 3, 2013 by

Stephen Leeb. 5 Jun 2013. Dangerous Times As Energy Sources Get Costlier To Extract. Forbes.

The optimists believe that our energy problems have been largely solved. I wouldn’t bet on that. The real issue with oil isn’t how much we have or even whether we can continue to increase production. 

What really matters is the cost of resources, in terms of resources required, including energy resources, to keep producing oil.  On that front, the U.S. is losing ground at an alarming pace.

Simply put, it takes energy to get energy. In today’s world, it takes rising amounts of energy to get all the new energy sources out of the ground and ready to use.

The critical concept is “energy return on investment,” or EROI.

This means the amount of energy obtained from each unit of energy invested.When oil first began to flow, its EROI was around 100, according to State University of New York professor Charles Hall.

Drillers would use 1 barrel to extract 100 barrels from the ground.

Today, it takes about 1 barrel of conventional U.S. oil to produce the equivalent of 9 barrels.

Even worse is the EROI for non-conventional oil from shale and tar sands, stands, which is about 4.

The lower the EROI, the less energy is available for the economy. If EROI were 1, the economy would be channeling all energy produced into making energy. In other words, it would be curtains for our civilization.

SUNY professor Hall estimates that for an industrial society to function and grow, EROI should measure at least 5 to 9. Oil from tar sands and shale does not make that cut.

Based on 12-month averages, oil prices today are only some 5% below their all-time peaks, although, according to the Energy Information Agency, per capita consumption of oil has decreased 17% from its 2007 high. Why don’t we see a larger price decline? Economics 101 would suggest that greater supply coupled with lower demand should produce tumbling prices. That isn’t happening, since we funnel much of the extra oil made available by lower demand and rising production into oil production itself.

Why do non-conventional energy resources have such low EROI? 

  • The drilling apparatus and infrastructure needed to extract oil from shale demand large quantities of steel, derived from iron ore, whose production and refinery in turn require energy.
  • Huge energy costs to transport of water, chemicals and other materials essential to fracking.
  • Tar sands likewise require mining equipment whose manufacture and transport consume still more energy. Mining tar sands, moreover, also uses natural gas.

Lending money to oil and gas companies is the fastest-growing part of banking.  According to Schlumberger, capital expenditures for oil and gas have grown by about 12% annually over the last decade, yet oil and gas production grew less than 2% a year.

One vicious cycle playing out in America starts with the consumer, who has had to cut back on energy use. Less energy translates into less mobility, less shopping, and in general fewer consumer expenditures. Fewer consumer expenditures mean less demand and more pressure on corporations, which are also squeezed by higher resource costs. Wages in turn get squeezed, but resource prices remain high, and the vicious circle is completed. It is no surprise that this century has seen a 10% decline in real median income, which when measured in time and depth is probably the most protracted on record.

Things may be even worse than that.

  • Resource-intensive production of oil and gas increases the scarcity and costs of other resources such as water and therefore of food, which also depends on water.
  • Resources like copper and iron ore that use a lot of water and energy are also squeezed, and you have another vicious, potentially catastrophic, cycle.

Oil and gas producers critical metrics are:

  1. Free cash flow. Negative free cash flow used to mean investment in growth, now it suggests the company is running in place.
  2. Growing production.   Slumping production, especially in non-conventional hydrocarbons, will probably require ever greater spending to sustain that growth, which to me is a recipe for long-term disaster. In fracking especially, another factor contributing to the lower EROI ratio is the high depletion rate of the wells. In an earlier era, producer growth related closely to the number of wells drilled. Today, oil production from a new well often declines sharply after the first year.

Some producers do satisfy my dual criteria. Among the larger companies Chevron and Occidental Petroleum stand out. The more  speculative small fry we like include Denbury Resources DNR and recently recommended Energy XXI. Denbury has outperformed the SPDR S&P Oil & Gas E&P ETF (XOP) year-to-date, but EXXI is down 23% so far this year.

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Over 10 million people evicted from 4.4 million homes since 2007

Posted on August 2, 2013 by

The statistics on this vary. Given that the “fix” to the September 2008 crisis was merely kicking the can down the road, with no meaningful reform having taken place, and banks in even worse shape than before by “recovering” by going back to issuing the same derivative crap they were before, the “carry trade” (borrowing 60:1 leveraged money at .5% and lending it at 3%, if interest rates go up, the banks fail), S&P back to overrating the companies that pay them more money, etc., it’s only a matter of time before another housing crash.  Don’t believe all the happy talk.

Since the Financial crisis began in September 2008, about 4.4 million foreclosures have been completed according to the May 2013 CoreLogic National Foreclosure report. Some other stats from this report:

  • About 1 million homes are in some stage of foreclosure.
    Another 2.3 million mortgages (5.6%) are seriously delinquent.
  • States with the highest foreclosure inventory as a percentage of mortgaged homes: Florida 8.8%  New Jersey 6% New York 4.8% Maine 4.1% Connecticut 4.1%

This May 2013 article makes the case that the current housing collapse is worse than what happened in the Great Depression. How Many People Have Lost Their Homes? US Home Foreclosures are Comparable to the Great Depression. NBC News reported that “5 million homes have been lost to foreclosure; estimates of future foreclosures range widely, and that foreclosures will strike another three million homes in the next three or four years.

 

Laura Gottesdiener. August 2013. The Great Eviction: The Landscape of Wall Street’s Creative Destruction. Tomdispatch.com

The Equivalent of the Population of Michigan Foreclosed

Since 2007, the foreclosure crisis has displaced at least 10 million people from more than four million homes across the country. Families have been evicted from colonials and bungalows, A-frames and two-family brownstones, trailers and ranches, apartment buildings and the prefabricated cookie-cutters that sprang up after World War II. The displaced are young and old, rich and poor, and of every race, ethnicity, and religion.  They add up to approximately the entire population of Michigan.

However, African American neighborhoods were targeted more aggressively than others for the sort of predatory loans that led to mass evictions after the economic meltdown of 2007-2008. At the height of the rapacious lending boom, nearly 50% of all loans given to African American families were deemed “subprime.”  The New York Times described these contracts as “a financial time-bomb.”

Posted in Foreclosures & Evictions | Comments Off on Over 10 million people evicted from 4.4 million homes since 2007

Lloyd’s of London EMP solar storm risk to North America

Posted on August 2, 2013 by

2013. Lloyd’s Solar Storm Risk to the North American Electric Grid. Atmospheric and Environmental Research.

Society depends on electricity for everything from communication, banking and business transactions to basic necessities like food and water.

Executive Summary

A Carrington-level, extreme geomagnetic storm is almost inevitable in the future.  Historical auroral records suggest a return period of 50 years for Quebec level storms and 150 years for very extreme storms, such as the Carrington Event that occurred 154 years ago.

The risk of intense geomagnetic storms is growing as we near the peak of the current solar cycle in early 2015. Solar activity follows an 11-year cycle.

As the North American electric infrastructure ages and we become more and more dependent on electricity, the risk of a catastrophic outage increases with each peak of the solar cycle. Our society is becoming increasingly dependent on electricity. Because of the potential for long-term, widespread power outage, the hazard posed by geomagnetic storms is one of the most significant.

Weighted by population, the highest risk of storm induced power outages in the US is along the Atlantic corridor between Washington D.C. and New York City. This takes into account risk factors such as magnetic latitude, distance to the coast, ground conductivity and transmission grid properties. Other high risk regions are the Midwest states, such as Michigan and Wisconsin, and regions along the Gulf Coast.

The total U.S. population at risk of extended power outage from a Carrington-level storm is between 20 and 40 million, with durations of 16 days to 2 years.   The duration of outages will depend largely on the availability of spare replacement transformers. If new transformers need to be ordered, the lead time is likely to be a minimum of five months. The total economic cost for such a scenario is estimated at half a trillion to $2.6 Trillion U.S. Dollars.

Storms weaker than Carrington-level could result in a small number of damaged transformers (around 10-20), but the potential damage to densely populated regions along the Atlantic coast is significant. The total number of damaged transformers is less relevant for prolonged power outage than their concentration. The failure of a small number of transformers serving a highly populated area is enough to create a situation of prolonged outage.

A severe space weather event that causes major disruption to the electricity network in the US could have major implications for the insurance industry. 

 

 

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Global Warming increases violence and wars

Posted on August 2, 2013 by

2 Aug 2013. Seth Borenstein. Global warming may fuel wars.

A massive new study finds that aggressive acts like committing violent crimes and waging war become more likely with each added degree of temperature. The study was published online yesterday by the journal Science.

In war-torn Africa, it says, every added degree Fahrenheit increases the chance of conflict between groups— rebellion, war, civil unrest — by 11 to 14%

For the United States, for every increase of 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit, the likelihood of violent crime goes up 2-4% (likely by 2065).

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Northern California marijuana harms ecosystem, has huge carbon footprint. Legalize ASAP!

Posted on July 30, 2013 by

A book review by Alice Friedemann of Emily Brady’s 2013 book: “Humboldt. Life on America’s marijuana frontier.”

The tales I hear from my friends in Mendocino and Humboldt counties fascinate me.  There are stories of mayors and sheriffs on opposite sides of the drug war plotting revenge against one another.  I’ve heard rumors of murderous felons and the Mexican mafia starting marijuana plantations next to non-growing family ranches, who can’t get law enforcement to do anything because they don’t want to risk their lives – though the officers have promised to look the other way and not do an investigation if someone kills the SOBs.   All kinds of rumors float around, I have no idea if they’re true or not, but life up there sure is interesting.

Bruce Anderson has great over-the-top columns. And I’ll never forget the amazing mock trial “Who Killed Judi Bari?” years ago at Ashkenaz in Berkeley (Anderson’s opinion can be found at “Who Really Bombed Judi Bari?” in the January 3, 2013 online edition of the Humboldt Sentinel).

The book is a romp through the various lives of people who represent different aspects of the marijuana trade.  If you’ve ever wondered why stores like the one in Laytonville advertise they have so many kinds of scissors, it’s because you’d want to buy a Fiskar’s sewing scissor to clean the buds off of marijuana.

Not that you could ever get a job doing that.  Garberville and other towns are overwhelmed by fortune-seeking transients who hope to find a job in the marijuana industry at harvest time and live in the weeds and underpasses waiting for jobs that never appear.  Growers only hire people they know, and now that it’s the second generation of hippie and logger children growing it, they have plenty of friends and family to help out come harvest time.

Meanwhile, listen to local radio station KMUD and you’ll hear about products like “sweet sticky fingers” that helps workers get the gummy resins of marijuana off their hands.  Back in the day when law enforcement swarmed over the land in trucks and helicopters, KMUD and local phone trees broadcast their location, so many growers escaped before they could be arrested. Now growers also have sophisticated motion detecting cameras and alarm systems, as well as pit bulls to defend their crops.

Bob Hamilton, a Humboldt county Sherriff’s deputy, patrols 1200 square miles.  He’s got too many crimes to solve to spend much  time busting marijuana operations, especially now that it’s semi-legal.  The Cato Institute estimates the government spent $41 Billion in 2010 on the war on drugs, but they’ve cut way back on going after the growers in California.  The Eureka Times-Standard June 21, 2013 issues says there are about 4,100 marijuana farms in Humboldt county, and on average law enforcement only shuts down 50 or 60 sites.

Humboldt County perhaps wouldn’t be such an epicenter for this crop if it weren’t for the U.S. government spraying the pesticide paraquat on Mexican marijuana crops back in the 70s, when 90% of dope came from Mexico.  By 2010, 79% of Cannabis smoked in the USA came from California.

This crop brings in over $400 million in unreported income — about a quarter of the county’s $1.6 billion economy.  It’s all cash, so growers have to find places to hide it – most bury the cash in plastic pickle barrels or mason jars deep in their yards or the woods.  Now and then a new home owner finds cash when landscaping.

Growers are keen to deliver a harvest as soon as they can before the price drops.  They’ll wash their cars so the dust doesn’t give them away to officers parked along the road looking for pot dealers.

Legalization is greatly feared, so it’s not uncommon to see the bumper sticker “Save Humboldt County: Keep Pot Illegal”.  Growers fear that once it’s legal, Philip Morris will plant thousands of acres in the Central Valley and drive the price from the current $2,000 a pound down to $50 per pound, and China perhaps would grow it for pennies.  Not totally unrealistic, given that even the “small family farms” in Napa and Sonoma have often been bought out by big players.

What really grabbed my attention were the few pages about the environmental and energy impacts. That got me doing a little research on my own, also motivated by having spent the last weekend swimming in the Eel river and being repulsed by all the green slime, perhaps blue-green algae, which can cause rashes, skin and eye irritation, allergic reactions, and at high levels, serious illness or even death (California department of public health).  Whatever was growing in the water was mainly caused by the fertilizer and pesticide runoff used to grow marijuana crops, which also starves the river of oxygen, harms life in the river, and can cause fish die-offs.

Worse yet, the growers trap so much water in ponds to irrigate the Cannibis that the river levels are artificially low.  Check out the youtube.com video “Google Earth Reveals Devastation caused by Marijuana Growers”.

The New York Times has an excellent June 20, 2013 article “Marijuana Crops in California Threaten Forests and Wildlife” that discusses these issues.  Growers poison wood rats with d-Con which kills fishers and other forest creatures. Hilltops have been leveled which start landslides and erosion, clogging streams with soil.  Other streams go dry after being diverted to irrigate crops, leaving little water for endangered salmon to spawn in.

I was very surprised to learn that most marijuana is grown indoors in Humboldt and Mendocino counties, because it is far more lucrative than marijuana grown outdoors, and you can harvest it several times a year, instead of just once.  Sungrown marijuana only fetches $30/oz at medical marijuana dispensaries.  But indoor greenhouse dope can fetch 3 times as much.  One of the reasons is that there’s a perception outdoor marijuana is “dirty” from wind-blown debris.

The energy use and carbon footprint of indoor marijuana growing is huge. Check out this peer-reviewed study at: “Energy up in Smoke: The Carbon Footprint of Indoor Cannibis Production” by Evan Mills, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Some interesting statistics:

  • The lights used to grow marijuana are as intense as those in an operating room — 500 times more than required for reading.
  • This industry uses $6 billion in energy
  • The electricity used is equivalent to 1% of national electricity consumption, or 2 million average homes
  • In California, indoor growers use 3% of the electricity
  • Off-the-grid marijuana requires 70 gallons of diesel fuel to produce one indoor Cannabis plant and up to 140 gallons if it’s a smaller or less-efficient gasoline generator.

This book brings up the fact that it would be better for the environment to grow Cannabis outdoors, and that there’s a movement up in Humboldt county to do so.

Clearly the sooner marijuana is legalized the better. Growing marijuana in Humboldt County is disaster for the Eel river ecosystem!  Cannibis should be only be grown outdoors in areas with plentiful water.

Alcohol was legalized in Great Depression because cities needing more tax revenue, and given how little reform, if any, has been done to prevent another financial collapse, we may yet sink into a deeper depression. That and legalization in Washington and Colorado, will perhaps finally lead to legalization.

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Eric Sibul on the history of replacing railroads with roads: a disaster

Posted on July 29, 2013 by

A review of: Sibul, Eric. 26 Apr 2013. Transportation Readings for American Conservatives – How did we get in such a Mess? The American Conservative.

My main problem with this article is that it heaps all the blame on liberals, so I’ve tried to cut out the right-wing propaganda and focus on why getting rid of our railroad system was such a huge mistake.  He recommends you read these 9 books in the order they appear below.

Albro Martin. 1971. Enterprise denied; origins of the decline of American railroads, 1897-1917.

Albro Martin. 1992. Railroads Triumphant: The Growth, Rejection, and Rebirth of a Vital American Force.

While the federal government assisted the construction of private railroads with land grants, this was not without a price as railroads had to carry government cargoes (mails and military supplies) and personnel at reduced cost. Railroads also paid income taxes and property taxes, perhaps making them the only form of transportation to be profitable to federal and state governments.

American railroads were quite amazing. They maintained their own infrastructure including major urban passenger terminals, provided for their own security with their own police forces, provided health care for their own employees with their own hospitals and surgeons, cleaned up their own accidents, and even maintained a cadre of transportation specialists at their own expense to stand ready for military mobilization during national emergencies.

Stephen Goddard. 1996. Getting There: The Epic Struggle between Rail and Rail in the American Century.

Helen Leavitt. 1970. Superhighway – Superhoax.

Robert A. Caro. 1975. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.

The rise to primacy of the petroleum powered motor vehicle in America was in part due to the destruction of privately owned and operated electric interurban and street railways. The CEO of General Motors (GM), Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., came to the conclusion in 1923 that the American automobile market was saturated – those who wanted cars already owned them. As a result, from the 1920s to the 1950s GM used its sizeable financial muscle through a Byzantine network of subsidiaries and holding companies to buy privately owned electric railway systems throughout the United States and systematically dismantle them, forcing former users no other alternative but to purchase automobiles. While GM and their co-conspirators, Standard Oil, Mack Trucks and Firestone Tire Company, were caught red-handed at this, they received only token fines.

General James A. Van Fleet.  1956. Rail Transport and the Winning of War.

The federal interstate highway system was perhaps the greatest American defense fraud of the twentieth century. According to Leavitt, labeling the interstate highway system as vital to national defense “was simply a ‘sweetening’ device to gain support for the program back in 1956.”

Highway transportation was actually more vulnerable in an atomic attack and interstate highway construction for defense purposes was counter to the transportation lessons learned in the Korean War where Van Fleet was commander of the Eighth Army. Both sides in the Korean conflict were heavily reliant on rail transport. Despite strategic bombing, the North Koreans and Chinese were able to keep their railroads running, supplying new offensives against the United Nations forces.

Robert Goralski et al. 1978. Oil & War: How the Deadly Struggle for Fuel in WWII Meant Victory or Defeat.

This book clearly shows the overall strategic stupidity of developing a national transportation system increasingly dependent on the consumption of petroleum. By the 1950s, the United States was an importer rather than an exporter of petroleum, increasingly dependent on distant sea lanes that could be disrupted as shown by the Suez Crisis of 1956. The virtue of rail transport from a strategic perspective has been (and still is) that it is about three times more energy efficient than motor transportation. Railroads could also be powered electrically from alternative sources such as coal, hydro, or nuclear power.

James Howard Kunstler. 1994. The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape  

Kunstler describes the long term effects of the destruction of privately owned rail mass transit systems…that led to the destruction of the traditional sense of community on a large scale. It also shows that a national economic policy based on continuously encouraging construction of patches of McMansions connected to the interstate highway system is not sustainable or fiscally sound.

Paul M. Weyrich, et al. 2009. Moving Minds: Conservatives and Public Transportation  

This book has some ideas about what to do.

 

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Exponential growth and carrying capacity

Posted on July 28, 2013 by

Watch it happen — see the populations of major cities grow in these animated maps that reveal in 60 seconds how cities have exploded in size over the last 130 years

Al Bartlett, Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado toured universities around the world to explain exponential growth, his excellent videos are here: Arithmetic, Population, & Energy

Al Bartlett. Science 1 November 2002: 981-987:  In their comprehensive review of advanced technology paths to global climate stability, Hoffert et.al. (1) open with a clear statement of the origin of the problem: “In the 20th century, the human population [of the earth] quadrupled and primary power consumption increased 16-fold” (2). If these rates were to persist through the 21st century, Earth’s population would be 16 times larger than in 1900, and the primary power consumption would be 256 times that in 1900. Even without the greenhouse problems, the obvious impossibility of continuing these growth rates would lead rational people to say that the present declines in the growth rates of U.S. and world populations are too slow and that the world’s first order of business should be to stop the growth of populations and the growth of per capita primary power consumption. Instead of advocating the obvious, the authors paint a picture of all manner of technological fixes which, at enormous expense, may provide some answers to the need to stop the growth in emissions of greenhouse gases that are associated with energy production. As is so often the case, technological fixes are offered without being reviewed in the light of Eric Sevareid’s Law: “The chief cause of problems is solutions” (3, 4). One can be sure that each technological solution will create new problems that are not indicated by calculations, equations, and technical speculations.

The article makes it clear that achieving global climate stability won’t be easy, but it ignores the first and easiest thing we should do. We should follow the lead of the countries of Europe that all have population growth rates that are presently near or below zero. These countries are making real strides toward sustainability as is indicated in the First Law of Sustainability: “Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources, cannot be sustained” (5).

More exponential growth examples

1) Chapter 8 of Hardin’s Living within Limits:  Assume 2 grams of gold grows at 5% compound interest.  In 2,000 years, this would grow to the equivalent of 4.78 x 1042 grams of gold, more than the mass of the earth — 5.983 x 1027 grams – or the equivalent of 800 Trillion earths.

2) Evar Nering, in “The Mirage of a Growing Fuel Supply”: In my classes, I described the following hypothetical situation. We have a 100-year supply of a resource, say oil — that is, the oil would last 100 years if it were consumed at its current rate. But the oil is consumed at a rate that grows by 5 percent each year. How long would it last under these circumstances? This is an easy calculation; the answer is about 36 years.

Oh, but let’s say we underestimated the supply, and we actually have a 1,000-year supply. At the same annual 5 percent growth rate in use, how long will this last? The answer is about 79 years.

Then let us say we make a striking discovery of more oil yet — a bonanza — and we now have a 10,000-year supply. At our same rate of growing use, how long would it last? Answer: 125 years.

If you want to play around with exponential growth rates, check out an Exponential Growth Calculator.  To convert an exponential number to decimal, use a Scientific notation to decimal converter.

3) M. King Hubbert has an excellent article on exponential growth I highly recommend reading:

Hubbert, M.K., 1993. Exponential Growth as a Transient Phenomena in Human History, in: Daly, H., Townsend, K. (Eds.), Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp. 113-125.

—————————

My comment: When we’ve gone back to the age of Wood after fossil fuels go away, our agricultural system is so dependent on fossil fuels we won’t be able to support over 300 million people.  Systems ecologists, who study the carrying capacity of the United States, have estimated that without fossil fuels, the USA can provide food for between 100 million (Pimentel), 150 million (Erlich), and 250 million (Smil 2000).

Matters will be made even worse by how far people live to where the food is grown — more than half of us live near the coasts, but must of the food is grown in the middle of the country.  The Ogalla aquifer which provides about a third of our food over the ten high plains states is also drying up.

Any population increase, however small, will eventually saturate the Earth. It doesn’t matter if Egyptian women have gone from having 7 to 3 children. That’s still way too many children. The population needs to drop down to carrying capacity quickly, even one child per woman might be too many given the carrying capacity of Egypt and the decline rate of oil in the future.  Egypt is way past their carrying capacity now. They relied on exports of fuel to pay for food, now they are importing oil.

Fossil fuels enabled the human population to grow at a rate of 2.0% for a while –133 times higher than the .00015 rate before fossil fuels and an overall average of 0.833% for the past 300 years, or 55 times higher than the growth rate of homo sapiens for millions of years before that (Hardin):

  • Initial human population: 600,000,000 in 1700
  • Growth rate .00833 (.833%)
  • Time unit: 300 (years)
  • Final amount: 7.3 Billion people

If we continue to grow at a .833% rate there’ll be 15 billion people in 2100.  Cut that in half, and you’ve still got 10.5 billion people.

We need a negative growth rate of 1 child per woman or less world-wide to stay under the depletion curve of oil and other fossil fuels.   It’s too late to do that.  It would have never worked anyhow, since capitalism depends on endless growth, businessmen need more customers, religious leaders want more followers, and nations more children to out-reproduce their enemies to win battles.  And ultimately it’s part of our biological nature to consume and reproduce at maximum possible levels, like all the other creatures on the planet from algae to elephants.

Alice Friedemann at energyskeptic

References

1. M. I. Hoffert et al., Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet, Science 298, 981 (2002).

2. It must be stressed that these enormous increases are consequences of negligibly small annual growth rates; of population of 1.386%, of per capita primary power consumption of 1.386%, and of total primary power consumption of 2.77%.

3. E. Sevareid, CBS News, December 29, 1970; quoted in T.L. Martin, Malice in Blunderland (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1973).

4. For instance, when the problem was the need for more electric energy, a solution was nuclear power. But nuclear power has presented a whole new set of problems, each of which, it is said, can be solved by more technology.

5. A. A. Bartlett, “Reflections on Sustainability,” Population & Environment, Vol. 16, No. 1, September 1994. Renewable Resources Journal, Vol. 15, No. 4, Winter 1997-98, Pgs. 6-23

Garrett Hardin. 1995. Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos. Oxford    University Press

Pimentel, D. et al. 1991. Land, Energy, and Water.  The Constraints Governing Ideal U.S. Population Size. Negative Population Growth.

Smil, V. 2000. Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production.  MIT Press.

Posted in Exponential Growth, Limits To Growth | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Photovoltaic solar has many problems

Posted on July 25, 2013 by

Although sunlight is renewable, photovoltaic panels aren’t.

PV isn’t ready yet. NREL (National Renewable Energy Lab) lists the technical barriers below in: PV Roadmap. U.S. Dept of Energy National Center for Photovoltaics.

  • Lack of widespread availability of low-cost feedstock and packaging materials
  • Performance and manufacturing costs of high-efficiency silicon, thin-film, and concentrator cells and modules
  • Improved reliability of modules and, especially, of balance-of-systems components
  • Lack of standard products, packages, and service offerings
  • Need for Manufacturing Center of Excellence
  • Lack of knowledge of high-throughput processes
  • Lack of standard module electrical/ mechanical “interfaces”

Photovoltaic (PV) performance in the real world is often much less than what the manufacturer claims. There are losses due to:

  • Panels accumulate dust.
  • In winter, the angle of the sun in winter is lower, so sunlight has to travel a greater distance through the atmosphere.
  • The further north you go the more solar power diminishes.
  • The air is often clogged with dust, pollution, or water vapor.
  • PV takes a beating under the sun all day, the thin-film variety, which it’s possible to produce in large quantities, and efficiency declines, producing less electricity.

Large-scale solar PV farms need to be located in desert areas, where there’s very little water to rinse off the dust that accumulates.  In 2013 the world’s largest solar-thermal plant will open, and it will need 600 acre-feet of groundwater to wash off dust and cool auxiliary equipment.  Desert groundwater is not renewable.  Meanwhile, sand storms will scour the surfaces of panels and other equipment, leading to reduced power and efficiency.

The amount of energy embodied in the full solar structure is far more than PV panels. It’s the energy required to build the PV manufacturing plant, to mine and deliver the silicon and copper, solar tracking systems, aluminum frames, concrete foundations, transmission subsystems, inverters, batteries, cement platforms, cabling, transformers, control systems, storage subsystems, backup power, the energy costs of delivering the PV components to the site where they’ll be used.

“For solar power, the life cycle for solar photovoltaic systems requires the use of hazardous materials which must be minded from the earth and can contaminate areas of land when such systems break down or are destroyed, such as during hurricanes and tornados.  Chemical pollution has also been noted to occur durnig the manufacturing phase of solar cells and modules”. p28 of “The Routledge Handbook of Energy Security”

Photovoltaic cells are made from silicon not pure enough to make computer chips. Computers need one of the most pure substances ever made – silicon that’s 99.9999999% pure, or “seven nines” of purity. That means if you had jars with ten million pennies, only one could be a misplaced nickel. Solar panels require less purity – “six nines”, which means you could have ten nickels. The solar industry feeds off the rejected scraps. Only a few firms make purified silicon, because these manufacturing facilities cost over two hundred million dollars and three years to build.

Tom Abate. Sep 4, 2006. Chip material shortage spooks Silicon Valley. San Francisco Chronicle.

To make silicon this pure, a lot of energy is used. Quartz rocks must be ground up and then heated to 2500 degrees Farenheit. It takes 800 kWh of electrical energy to make a 200-mm semiconductor wafer. If we assume this cell has an efficiency of 10% and don’t even count the energy to deliver it to a site or store the energy and retrieve it at 100% efficiency, it will take 145 years to produce as much energy as was used making it. (Assuming the PV cell produces an average of 20 watts per square meter of surface, and the cell is .031 square meters, which makes it capable of producing .63 watts. In one year, it can generate 5 kWh of energy).

[Huber and Mills] Peter W. Huber and Mark P. Mils, “No Limits: Energy and Technology,” (Banc of America Securities, Energy and Power Conference, New York June 19,2002)

The most efficient solar cells are made from expensive materials. No one has yet figured out how to build very efficient PV from cheap material. Cheap, thin, PV has a short lifespan as it grows less efficient while breaking down in the sun.

The direct current generated by solar cells can’t power a typical household’s appliances. First it has to be converted by an inverter to alternating current. For a home to be completely self-sufficient, a battery bank is required. Acid and hydrogen gas batters are heavy, expensive, and potentially dangerous.

A PV plant that could produce 5.5 TWh of power (what the Glen Canyon dam produces) would displace an enormous ecosystem, about 20 square miles. It requires 177,788 MT (megatons) of aluminum, 2,222,356 MT cement, 480,029 MT copper, 7,556,010 MWh of electricity, and 4,600,276 MT of steel. (S. Pacca, D. Horvath 2002 Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Building & Operating Electric Power Plants in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Env Sci & Tech /Vol 36, # 14 3194-3200)

Ted Trainer estimates that building a PV power plant would cost at least 48 times as much as building a coal power plant. 2003. Renewable Energy: What are the Limits?

If the PV panels use a tracking system to capture as much sunlight as possible as it arcs across the sky, it may not track properly, and the energy to build and to move the solar panels to track the sun must be subtracted from the energy gains.

PV for home use is still far too expensive for the average household to afford, and very complex to maintain and repair. And a PV system isn’t merely PV panels, there are many other components involved, such as Charge Controllers, Inverters, Fuse Blocks, devices to feed the power to the grid, or if it’s an off-grid system, batteries and an oil-based generator to keep the batteries from being drained. All of these products can break down, requiring maintenance or replacement, and require energy to build.

The amount of PV that can be effectively used on buildings is limited by how much of the roof faces south and whether trees shade the roof.

PV. by Mark Boberg.  Jun 28, 2000

PV industry, if you’re listening, here’s the challenge: commit to building and operating a PV production facility using only PV power to do it.

1)   Use your best, most efficient technology, and build 10 megawatts of PV panels. Acquire all the necessary mounts, trackers, inverters, wire, batteries, controllers, etc. We won’t even count the energy required to make all this, it’s a freebie.

2)   Find the best solar site in the World and set up your system there.

3)   Locate, lease, and set up the equipment necessary to construct a PV plant from scratch.  Select versions of all this stuff that will run on PV electrical power (invent new versions as required – an electric backhoe comes to mind).  Use a PV powered truck, train, boat to bring the equipment and raw materials to the site.  The lease cost of this stuff will be charged to the future PV production of the plant on an energy basis (i.e. equivalent PV panel lifetime energy production).

4)   Saw the wood, smelt the steel, burn the limestone for the cement, crush the gravel, machine the bolts, dig the dirt, etc, etc, and erect the building, all using the PV from your 10 megawatt system.

5)   Locate, lease, and set up the equipment necessary to produce PV panels complete (silicon production, wafer production, panel assembly, etc.)  The lease cost for this stuff will also be charged to the future PV production of the plant on an energy basis.

6)   Operate the plant, the employee housing, the stores and utilities supporting the employees, all from the 10 megawatt system.  Don’t forget to pay the employees in scrip redeemable in PV panels.

7)   Produce PV panels until “break even”, which would be something like 10 megawatts worth (item 1) plus a bunch more (items 3, 5 and 6).

8)   (Maybe) produce a bunch more “net” panels until the plant wears out.  Don’t forget to subtract any panels made to replace “burnouts” in your 10 megawatt array and PV panel scrip redemptions by the employees (I’m guessing about one to three 100 watt panels per employee per week).

9)   Divide the number of panels produced by the number of “breakeven” panels in item 7).  If the number is say, 2.0 or more, you win.  Less than 2.0, we all lose.

This isn’t really an unreasonable challenge, if PV really has what it takes to replace some significant portion of the hydrocarbon energy demand. So, how about it?  Solarex?  Siemens? Koyocera? Solec? Anybody?

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/energyresources/message/1608

Solar power requires too many subsidies

Todd Kiefer: Just crunched an “EIA report to Congress on energy subsidies (http://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/pdf/subsidy.pdf) .  In 2010 wind was subsidized at 2.16 cent/kWh and solar at 3.13 cent/kWh.   In 2013 (latest data available), wind was subsidized at 1.31 cent/kWh and solar at 6.36 cent/kWh.  Makes it easier to see why there are solar PPAs out there for 4 cent/kWh.

Full table of subsidies normalized to units of energy delivered is below.  M$ is million dollar.  Quad is quadrillion BTU.  BOE is barrel of oil equivalent.  Subsidies do not take into account offsetting federal revenues such as fees, permits, leases, excise taxes, corporate income taxes, etc.  Oil and gas generates a 2,000% return on these subsidies in federal corporate income and excise taxes alone (> $9/barrel).  Then there are the taxes from the 185,000 people directly employed in the oil and gas industry.  I haven’t researched coal in as much detail, but I’m sure the government gets a positive return.  Non-hydro renewables, on the other hand are surely net negative.”

Energy resource subsidies from http://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/pdf/subsidy.pdf

Energy resource subsidies from http://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/pdf/subsidy.pdf

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