The scientific consensus: we are screwed if we don’t act soon

Posted on June 28, 2013 by

May 21, 2013. Scientific consensus on maintaining Humanity’s life support systems in the 21st century.  Essential points for policy makers. Stanford University.

Earth is rapidly approaching a tipping point. Human impacts are causing alarming levels of harm to our planet. As scientists who study the interaction of people with the rest of the biosphere using a wide range of approaches, we agree that the evidence that humans are damaging their ecological life-support systems is overwhelming.

Science unequivocally demonstrates the human impacts of key concern:

  1. Climate disruption—more, faster climate change than since humans first became a species.
  2. Extinctions—not since the dinosaurs went extinct have so many species and populations died out so fast, both on land and in the oceans.
  3. Wholesale loss of diverse ecosystems—we have plowed, paved, or otherwise transformed more than 40% of Earth’s ice-free land, and no place on land or in the sea is free of our direct or indirect influences. Pollution—environmental contaminants in the air, water and land are at record levels and increasing, seriously harming people and wildlife in unforeseen ways.
  4. Human population growth and consumption patterns—seven billion people alive today will likely grow to 9.5 billion by 2050, and the pressures of heavy material consumption among the middle class and wealthy may well intensify

By the time today’s children reach middle age, it is extremely likely that Earth’s life-support systems, critical for human prosperity and existence, will be irretrievably damaged by the magnitude, global extent, and combination of these human-caused environmental stressors, unless we take concrete, immediate actions to ensure a sustainable, high-quality future.

We must all work hard to solve these 5 global problems immediately: climate disruption, extinctions, loss of ecosystem diversity, pollution, human population growth and resource consumption.

The document then lists over 520 names and institutions of the scientists who participated in this document

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Ministry of Defence Strategic Trends South Asia out to 2040

Posted on June 11, 2013 by

Strategic Trends Programme. Regional Survey – South Asia out to 2040. Ministry of Defence.

Nafeez Ahmed. June 2013. Rising energy prices will challenge western way of life – MoD report. The Guardian.

Converging global trends will dramatically lower prosperity in the future.

A combination of overpopulation water and food shortages, climate change, rising energy prices, and social unrest are likely to lead to internal chaos and external wars by 2040 in South East Asia (and elsewhere).

The depletion of cheap and easily extractable oil combined with food and water shortages from climate change and population growth will result and create sustained high energy prices.

When energy and food prices spike long recessions will likely follow, resulting in social unrest and rising nationalist movements.

Oil is like to reach $500 a barrel by 2040 because of the demand for fossil fuels in China and India as well as supply volatility in the Middle East.  This competition for resources could lead to clashes.

Climate change

Climate change will worsen matters greatly from flooding, heat-waves, drought, less food production, more and stronger storms. Rising sea levels will force millions of people to move elsewhere.

Water shortages

Over 2.5 billion people will suffer from water scarcity, not only limiting growth but creating a greater chance of war within and between China, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Food shortages

Lack of food from the above factors is likely to lead to mass migration, unrest, and war as millions of people flee after rice crops fail.  The crop failure from climate change, soil erosion, and increasing pests and weeds will at first affect mainly those at or below the poverty line.

Demographic time bomb?

China and India aren’t likely to be able to continue economic growth given all of the above factors. With nearly 40% of the world’s population it will be hard for them to prevent social chaos as food and water grow scarcer.  This scenario is even more likely because of the vast numbers of uneducated people, unfair distribution of wealth, ethnic tensions, awareness that it doesn’t have to be this way via the internet, and a huge amount of inequality and corruption throughout all institutions.

End of growth due to resource price spikes?

The West too is facing a dark future — the more resources that flow to Southeast asia, the rest there is for the West to consume.

The report concludes that the “western ‘way of life’” with its large  “variety of consumer choice” and cheap energy – will be “increasingly challenged as lifestyles follow GDP levels and ‘normalise’ across the globe.”

Within the US and UK, the bulk of the populations will be affected by: “… rising energy and resource prices, and the declining availability of finance to sustain discretionary spending. In such a context, this could lead to periods of sustained recession in the West, causing increasingly protectionist policies to be adopted.”

About The Report

This report was published by the MoD’s Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) as part of its Strategic Trends Programme in January. The DCDC is an MoD think tank within the Defence Academy site at Shrivenham.  The report used data from many government agencies and departments, including the MoD’s Strategy Unit, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, the Cabinet Office, and the Foreign Office – as well as two private institutions, Standard Chartered Bank and Now & Next.

The report concedes that the “‘relative’ decline of the West is likely to lead to a new power framework where alliances are constantly reassessed and negotiated.” This will also see “the declining influence of existing international institutions such as NATO and the UN Security Council.”

In this context, the report predicts an accelerating coalescence between nation states and global capital, noting that: “The line between government, and private industry protection of intellectual property of key technologies for security and wealth creation, may become increasingly blurred… [as] blueprints, patents and formulas will be increasingly seen as the foundations of wealth generation.”

The report echoes themes highlighted in a previous MoD global trends study, which warned in 2010: “Pressure on resources, climate change, population increases and the changing distribution of power are likely to result in increased instability and likelihood of armed conflict.”

If anything, this year’s DCDC study reveals not just the latest strategic thinking informing British security policy behind the scenes, but also the undoubtedly grim consequences of continuing business as usual.

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Relax! Solar energy can save us. Krugman says so. by Ted Trainer

Posted on June 9, 2013 by

Ted Trainer is the author of Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society and his “What to Do” can be found at The Simpler Way http://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/, in The Transition to a Sustainable and Just World, Envirobook, 2010, and the papers at Simplicity Institute http://simplicityinstitute.org

In a recent article in the New York Times Paul Krugman tells us that the fall in the price of PV panels means that “…we can look forward to decarbonising electricity”, because “…drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are now within fairly easy reach.”

There are a few things Paul seems to have overlooked.

The first is that PV cannot meet more than about 4% of world energy demand. It is generally understood that the limit for PV is around 20% of electricity demand. This is because PV modules can only produce during the equivalent of about 6 full-sun hours a day, so if they were to contribute 100% of electricity needed then during those hours it would have to be feeding in at a rate 4 times demand, meaning a) a vast amount of PV generating plant would sit idle for 18 hours a day, and b) a vast amount of other renewable plant would be needed to resort to during those 18 hours, and it most of it would all sit idle for those 6 hours. For this reason the practical limit to PV might be around 15% of the electricity required.

But only 18% of rich world energy use is in the form of electricity, so PV can’t be expected to meet more than about 20% of 18% = 4% of our energy demand.

But wait, what about storing the PV electricity to use at night? Forget it. Yes electricity can be stored, but it is very difficult and costly to do this in large quantity. Your best bet is by pumping water into dams, but even if all dams could be retrofitted for pumped storage the total generating capacity would be about 15% of demand.

Hydrogen? Round trip efficiency from PV panel to hydrogen to fuel cell or gas turbine power would be around 20%, and we would need huge quantities of energy intensive and dollar costly plant to generate, compress, store and reconvert hydrogen.

Well then, batteries? The world’s biggest grid storage battery system, at Fairbanks Alaska, can store 4 MWh, at a cost of $30 million. To store the output of a normal big power station for 24 hours would involve capacity to hold 24,000 MWh.   To store this via a Fairbanks system would cost 6 times as much as the power station.

Locate enough solar thermal plant in the Sahara to supply Europe? Estimate the cost of doing that. How about storing energy in the heat tanks solar thermal stations have? They are starting to build units capable of running for 17 hours on stored heat, but that is nowhere near enough. And the recently completed Spanish Gemasolar plant with 17 hour capacity cost around $40,000/kW. A coal-fired power station costs only about $3,100.

The capacity to store very large quantities of electricity is not on the horizon. In winter Europe can suffer one or two weeks of more or less continual freezing cold, calm, and cloudy conditions. How are they going to get through these periods on renewables?

The second major point Paul seems not to be aware of is that several recent studies have found that when all relevant factors are included the ratio of energy produced by a PV module in its lifetime to the energy needed to produce it is not 10/1 as is commonly thought, or 60/1 as some advocates have claimed, but probably between 4/1 and 2.4/1.

Krugman mistakenly thinks the price of PV is the crucial factor. What matters most is its Energy Return on Energy Invested. If a PV panel produces in its lifetime only enough energy to produce three panels it can’t sustain an energy-intensives society. Estimates in the literature are that the ratio must be at least 7/1 for a technology to be viable. The ER for corn-based ethanol is around 1.4. For coal it is around 20 (…but falling fast.)

A third question for Paul is, where is he going to get the other 82% of energy we use that is not in the form of electricity? The answer is not biomass; there is far too little available on the planet for that.

How about running as many functions as possible on electricity? A good idea, but that multiplies the problems involved in integrating highly variable solar and wind energy sources into grids, which means greatly increased costs for equipment, interconnectors, storage, redundant plant and dumped energy.

“But many experts are telling us it can all be done by renewables, and at negligible cost.” This is true, but there is a small but increasing number of energy researchers who think those arguments are flawed and that there is a weighty case that it cannot be done at an affordable cost, given the kinds of difficulties sketched above.

“Well let’s forget about renewables and just use nuclear reactors.” If you are going to provide present rich world living standards to 9 billion people you will need tens of thousands of fast breeders, all involving reprocessing of plutonium…and operated by humans who never ever press the wrong switch. You choose.

So, what is the answer? If the question was, how can we keep our energy-intensive, affluent, growth obsessed society going, then the answer is … you can’t. Paul Krugman, like almost all economists, politicians, journalists and business leaders, seems to be totally unaware of the now enormous literature showing that there are savage limits to growth, that we have gone through them, and that it is the over-production and over-consumption of growth and greed society that is generating the many global problems threatening to destroy us. The magnitude of the overshoot is clear in the common “footprint” figures; the average Australian or US person is using about ten times as much productive land as will be available per capita in 2050 if it is shared among all expected 9 billion people. The problems cannot be solved unless we in rich countries not only abandon the quest for economic growth but go right down to something like our fair share of world resource use.

For sixty years now increasing numbers have come to see that the pursuit of growth and affluence has been a terrible, probably fatal mistake and that global problems cannot be solved unless we achieve a historically unprecedented transition to what some of us label as The Simpler Way. This cannot be done unless some of the foundational structures, assumptions, ideas and values of Western culture are scrapped, including almost all of the current economic system, but, most problematically, also the culture of individualistic, competitive, acquisitiveness.

Paul is reinforcing the faith that we don’t have to think about such a transition, because renewable energy and other tech-fixes will make it possible for us to go on pursuing affluence and growth for ever. Well if by 2050 9 billion have risen to the living standards we will have given 3% growth, then world annual levels of production and consumption will be about fifteen times as high as they are now. No problem Paul?

A sustainable and just society would of course run entirely on renewable energy, but at far lower use rates than we have now. Small numbers of people in the Global Eco-village, Transition Towns, Permaculture, Voluntary Simplicity etc. movements are pioneering a “Simpler Way” alternative vision and we have no doubt that it could provide all people with a far higher quality of life than most people in the consumer rat race have now.

—-

 

Posted in Photovoltaic Solar | 2 Comments

EROI downward spiral

Posted on June 7, 2013 by

Stephen Leeb. June 2013. Dangerous times as energy sources get costlier to extract. Forbes.

Remember the term “peak oil”? With all the oil now available from oil shale, tar sands, and other new sources, many analysts assume that the old talk of peak oil has been proven dead wrong.

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.

Rather, 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 one barrel to extract 100 barrels from the ground. As more wells were drilled and producers added infrastructure, the EROI ratio dropped. New wells over time grew less productive, further decreasing EROI. In the early 1950s the EROI associated with refined oil products like gasoline was about 20.  Today, it takes about one barrel of conventional U.S. oil to produce the equivalent of nine barrels, or 378 gallons of gasoline.

Meanwhile, the EROI for nonconventional oil, that is, oil produced from shale and tar sands, stands even lower, at about four. For every barrel of oil used to drill, producers obtain only four barrels of nonconventional oil, or 168 gallons of gasoline.

The lower the EROI, the less energy can be made available for the economy. If EROI were one, 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 five to nine. Oil from tar sands and shale does not make that cut.

It’s telling that, 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.

What explains the significantly lower EROI of non-conventional energy sources? To understand, we must realize that all resources are inextricably interconnected, and also require energy to produce. We can’t overlook the reality that drilling apparatus and infrastructure needed to extract oil from shale also demand large quantities of steel, derived from iron ore, whose production and refinery in turn require energy.

Huge energy costs are also inherent in the 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.

These added costs appear on the balance sheets of banks, where oil and gas lending is the fastest-growing category. Indeed, according to Schlumberger SLB, the industry’s capital expenditures for oil and gas have grown by about 12% annually over the last decade. Oil and gas production grew less than 2% a year in the same period. Clearly the more money and resources needed to maintain adequate production of oil and gas, the less money and resources available for other endeavors.

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, however. EROI refers to how much energy is needed to produce more energy. The concept leaves out a lot of linkages among resources.

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

It would take me too far afield to focus on all these interrelationships, but an examination of the more general concept of resource return on investment, or RROI, would probably find the U.S. in a lot worse shape than as measured only by EROI, or the amount of energy required to get more energy.

Chris Nelder, in Watts Up, Vaclav? writes:

It takes just 35 rigs operating in conventional fields in Kuwait to produce 2 million barrels a day of oil, while in Texas, it now takes 800 rigs in the Eagle Ford to produce the same amount. The gradual shift to increasingly poor sources is also why domestic oil extraction used to return more than 100 kilojoules of energy per kilojoule invested in the 1930s, but only returns between 11 and 18 kilojoules today.

 

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World Resources Institute: Within 12 years food production will go down

Posted on June 7, 2013 by

For a variety of reasons, this report concludes that food production is likely to go down within the next 12 years, not up.

The World Resources Institute recently came out with a report that throws into doubt our ability to feed the 9.3 billion people expected by 2050.  To do that we would need to double food production over the next 40 years.

Industrial agriculture is responsible for 24% of greenhouse gas emissions (methane from livestock, fertilizers release nitrous oxide, machinery releases CO2, cutting down rainforests and draining wetlands increases CO2, and so on).  Trying to double agriculture would drastically increase climate change.

And already, climate change is reducing crop yields from drought, extreme storms, flooding, and lack of freshwater from over pumping nonrenewable ground water to grow food.  In the future, rising oceans will flood a great deal of highly productive farmland.

Agriculture also uses up 70% of fresh water, and the nutrient runoff from fertilizers creates dead zones that kills of all the fish, shrimp, shellfish, and so on, reducing food even further.  Yet meanwhile, growing populations will need more fresh water to survive.

In the Nafeez Ahmed Guardian’s article “Peak Soil: industrial civilisation is on the verge of eating itself: New research on land, oil, bees and climate change points to imminent global food crisis without urgent action” they cite additional reasons and suggest that food production might do down far sooner than the report mentioned above:

Over the past 40 years, about 2 billion hectares of soil – equivalent to 15% of the Earth’s land area (an area larger than the United States and Mexico combined) – have been degraded through human activities, and about 30% of the world’s cropland have become unproductive. But it takes on average a whole century just to generate a single millimetre of topsoil lost to erosion.

Soil is therefore, effectively, a non-renewable but rapidly depleting resource.

We are running out of time. Within just 12 years, the report says, conservative estimates suggest that high water stress will afflict all the main food basket regions in North and South America, west and east Africa, central Europe and Russia, as well as the Middle East, south and south-east Asia.

Unfortunately, though, the report overlooks another critical factor – the inextricable link between oil and food. Over the last decade, food and fuel prices have been heavily correlated. This is no accident.

Last week, a new World Bank report examining five different food commodities – corn, wheat, rice, soybean, and palm oil – confirmed that oil prices are the biggest contributor to rising food prices. The report, based on a logarithm designed to determine the impact of any given factor through regression analysis, concluded that oil prices were even more significant than the ratio of available world food stocks relative to consumption levels, or commodity speculation. The Bank thus recommends controlling oil price movements as a key to tempering food price inflation.

The oil-food price link comes as no surprise. A University of Michigan study points out that every major point in the industrial food system – chemical fertilisers, pesticides, farm machinery, food processing, packaging and transportation – is dependent on high oil and gas inputs. Indeed, 19% of the fossil fuels that prop up the American economy go to the food system, second only to cars.

But high oil prices are here to stay – and according to a UK Ministry of Defence assessment this year, could rise as high as $500 per barrel over the next 30 years.

All this points to a rapidly approaching convergence point between an increasingly self-defeating industrial food system, and an inexorably expanding global population.

But the point of convergence could come far sooner due to the wild card that is the catastrophic decline in honeybees.

 

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Only you can prevent wildfires: write FEMA by June 17, 2013

Posted on May 17, 2013 by

If you’d like to prevent another wildfire, I encourage you to write FEMA or go to the meeting tomorrow, May 18th at 10 am – see http://claremontcanyon.org/ for details on where to send a letter and meeting place.

A great deal is known about wildfires in the East Bay hills.

After every major fire (there have been 15 major wildfires between 1923 and 1992), a blue ribbon commission was appointed and produced excellent reports on what needed to be done.  We know from the 1982 and 1995 commission reports that the eucalyptus, pine, and acacia have to be removed, how to go about it, and which native species to replace them with.  Native oaks, redwoods, and other trees are far less fire-prone, and when they do burn, create far less catastrophic fires.

There has also been an extremely knowledgeable and hardworking wildfire prevention district since 1991.

The Claremont Canyon conservancy has an excellent website about the history of wildfire in our area and what needs to be done.  They’ve teamed up with professors and wildfire experts at the University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, and other institutions to try to prevent wildfires in the future:

Many of the people in my neighborhood now moved in after the 1991 wildfire that burned down 3500 homes.  Those of us who lived through it never want to see it happen again.  You will spend up to five years fighting the insurance company to get paid (see my book review of “Delay, Deny, Defend” for details at http://www.amazon.com/review/R2QU1EU62P2QXU), and at least two years to get your house rebuilt and furnished.

Back in 1991, dozens of us had gone through CORE training in the Rockridge Terrace area, many of us all the way through CORE IV, and so we knew we needed to get out.  Perhaps that’s one of the reasons no one died in our neighborhood.  But we lost 97 of 100 homes on Contra Costa Road, and many more homes on Buena Vista and Golden Gate avenue as well.

History of wildfires in East Bay Hills

Between 1923 and 1992, 15 major wildfires occurred in the East Bay Hills of Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, California.

• These 15 fires burned about 9,000 acres, destroyed more than 3,500 homes, and killed 26 people.

• Among these fires, the 1923 Berkeley Fire destroyed over 600 homes in an hour.

• The 1970 fire consumed over 200 acres and burned 37 homes.

• The 1991 Tunnel Fire killed 25 people, destroyed approximately 3,400 homes and did an estimated $1.5 billion in damages.

Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus trees are the largest problem.  They have oily bark and leaves which can aerodynamically spread fires one to six miles ahead of the main flame front, and as far as 18 miles ahead (Cheney 1981, McCaw, L. et al. 1992, Stretton 1939).

That’s why our homes burned down in 1991 – eucalyptus can easily jump 8 lanes of freeway plus Lake Temescal.

Eucalyptus are the most likely kind of tree to cause the worst possible kind of fire — a crown fire, which travels three to eight times as fast as a ground fire.  And crown fires cause the worst spotting, exploding with firebrands, as happened in the Oakland hills fire of 1991 where the “wide dispersal of firebrands contributed significantly to the rapid and extensive spread of the fire” (Bradley 1995).

Eucalyptus are especially prone to crown fire because their bark and leaves are imbued with flammable oils that ignite easily, and the shape of the tree — an open crown — creates updrafts which lift the fiery bark and ground litter up into the hanging branches (USDA Forest Service).

Another reason to get rid of eucalyptus is that they evolved to not only cope well with fire, but are so good at it, that after a fire, their range spreads.  They are the most adapted to fire of any tree in the world, that’s why Australia is covered with them.   Many species of trees in Australia can only exist where it’s too wet for wildfires or too cold for eucalyptus to survive.

 

Eucalyptus trees poison the soil with terpenes and phenolic acids that make it hard for other plants to grow.  There’s very little, if any, understory vegetation in eucalyptus stands in California (USDA). So even if you get rid of a eucalyptus tree, one is likely to come back in that spot.

I think a good monster movie could be made with eucalyptus as the villain.  They are awfully hard to kill.  They have four different ways of reproducing if burned or cut down: heat-resistant seed capsules, sprouting from the stump, sprouting from the lignotuber, or sprouting from the roots (USDA).

I’ve been a naturalist for 50 years, and volunteer to take inner city children on hikes at Audubon Canyon Ranch.  I’ve hiked thousands of miles of Bay Area trails.  One thing I’ve always noticed is how silent, dead, eucalyptus groves are.  Nothing moves and nothing lives there. This is because eucalyptus is not native, so very few of the local species can use them for food or homes (1995 Fire Hazard Mitigation Program).

Worse yet, eucalyptus can harm native species. Many birds are coated with a tarry pitch when they seek nectar.  In Australia, birds have evolved nostrils far away from their bills to cope, here bird nostrils can get clogged, killing the bird from suffocation, according to Rich Stallcup of PRBO conservation science.

In closing, I’d like to remind you that in Australia, eucalyptus has always been, and always will be a scourge.   In 1976, one in ten rural Australians was part of a volunteer bush fire brigade.

Let’s not let eucalyptus take over the ecology of California, or we’ll have fires like the Ash Wednesday fire in South Australia, 1983, that burned 1350 square miles and killed 71 people.  Fire tornadoes rose 410 yards into the air. Survivors described the sound of the fire burning as a “deafening metallic roar that was terrifying and disorienting”.  The smoke was so thick and the fire so fast, escape routes couldn’t be seen and were cut off.  Water pumps stopped working as the fire severed electric lines.

References

1982 “Report of the blue ribbon urban interface fire prevention committee”.

1995 “Fire Hazard Mitigation Program & Fuel Management Plan for the East Bay Hills”

Bradley, Gordon A. 1995. “Urban Forest Landscapes: Integrating Multidisciplinary Perspectives.”  University of Washington Press.

Cheney, N.P. 1981. Fire Behaviour. In “Fire and the Australian Biota.” Editors A.M. Gill, R.H. Groves & I.R. Noble. Australian Academy of Science. Canberra pp 151-176

FEMA project Fact Sheet. april 1, 2013. East Bay Hills Hazardous Fire Risk Reduction Environmental Impact Statement (EIS)

National Park Service.  september 2006. “Managing Eucalyptus”

U.S. Department of the Interior. Golden Gate National Recreation Area

McCaw, L. et al. 1992. Extreme wildfire behaviour in 3-year-old fuels in a Western Australian mixed Eucalyptus forest. Western Australian Dept. of Conservation and Land Management, Manjimup)

O’Brien, Bill.  2005. Ubiquitous Eucalyptus. “How an Aussie Got Naturalized”. Bay Nature

Pyne, Stephen J. 1991. “Burning Bush. A Fire History of Australia”. Henry Holt.

Stretton, Leonard. E. B.   Royal Commissioner Judge describing the 1939 “Black Friday” fire that consumed millions of acres in Australia

“The speed of the 1939 fire as apalling…lighting forests 6 or 7 miles in advance of the main fires…balls of crackling fire sped at a great pace in advance of the fires, consuming with a roaring, explosive noice, all that they touched.  Great pieces of burning bark were carried by the wind to set in raging flame regions not yet reached by the fires.

USDA FOREST SERVICE. Fire effects information page

http://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/tree/eucglo/all.html#BOTANICAL%20AND%20ECOLOGICAL%20CHARACTERISTICS

 

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Why we might not go extinct from fossil fuel emissions

Posted on May 3, 2013 by

Peak Fossils means Peak Emissions and the lowest to medium IPCC projections at worst

This is an overview, other posts in this category contain peer-reviewed papers that show why this is true.  The heart of the problem is that the IPCC uses old projections from 1998 and have not ever invited petroleum and coal geologists with more up-to-date data to the hearings.

Energy is the master resource that unlocks all the others.  Don’t have fresh water?  No problem, just use oil to drill down 1,000 feet and bring it up.  Can’t find any fish nearby? No problem, build a mega-factory boat and sail it to the ends of the earth where the remaining fish are.  And so on.  It’s allowing us to mine topsoil and grow crops for a few generations before the topsoil washes and blows off, or becomes too saline to grow crops anymore.

Plentiful oil allows us to make microchips, keep supply chains going, deliver food — there isn’t anything that does NOT depend on oil at some point in its life cycle.

Oil is a liquid fuel transportation problem.  Everything in your house, everything in stores got there on a truck at some point, if only for the last mile, and was probably on a ship and train as well.  In my new book “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, I show why transportation can’t be electrified, and that there is no renewable liquid fuel that scales up or has enough energy returned on invested to keep our billions of diesel engines in heavy-duty vehicles and equipment running. Therefore, when transportation goes below some minimal level, civilization as we know it fails, and carbon emissions from fossil fuels go to nearly zero.

Carbon emissions also go to zero from fast crashes due to EMPs, nuclear war, peak phosphorous, and too many other limits to growth and resources to list.

Burning fossil fuels is also the main reason we have climate change. And why 7+ billion people can survive off of this borrowed energy. Before fossil fuels powered society, there were 1 billion people.

The end of fossil fuels means we will stop emitting so much carbon dioxide. We won’t be able to manufacture as many chemicals as we are now that poison land, sea, and air. Nor will we won’t be able to feed 7 billion people whose consumption of every mineral, tree, animal, and plant is destroying the world.

The Permian extinction drove 90% of species extinct when volcanoes belched far more CO2 than fossil fuels are capable of emitting. Scientists found it unlikely that the die-off resulted from the CO2 (Kerr).

To stay under the 2 degrees Celsius limits some estimate we can only emit a further 275 Gt, about 34 more years of business-as-usual emissions, which the IPCC assumes will increase until 2100.  Yet in 2005 oil production reached a peak and has been on a plateau since then, slightly rising mainly due to fracked oil and canadian tar sands, both of which are likely to decline from now on. That means coal and natural gas will also decline, since oil is essential for their production, and do little to solve the transportation problem (Coal-to-Liquids will not solve the problem, nor will natural gas (read When Trucks Stop Running or posts at energyskeptic)

Declining fossil fuels means a lot less CO2 and methane emissions:

1. Carbon dioxide and methane will start to go down due to peak oil and peak coal (Hart, Heinberg, Höök, Nel, Patzek) and natural gas.  Because of this, Patzek and other scientists predict only the bottom 4 IPCC projections are likely to be reached.

2. In “The Ecological Indian: Myth and History” by Shepard Krech III you can see that people were very destructive in the past, but they couldn’t do much harm because there were so few of them — if they destroyed all the buffalo or burned down the forest they had to move on, and the buffalo and forest recovered.  It’s only with fossil fuels and the machines we built plus their emissions that we have been able to alter the planet so much.

3.  Gail Tverberg in Oil Limits and Climate Change: “My estimate of CO2 generation by fossil fuels in the 21st century is only about one-quarter of the amount (range midpoint) assumed in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report.”

4. Our ability to do any kind of harm to any resource will diminish drastically once oil and oil equivalent fuels diminish because so many large vehicles and any other equipment with combustion engines won’t operate any more:

  • farm tractors will no longer compress and erode topsoil (or grow enough food to feed 7+ billion people)
  • earth moving machines will no longer harvest coal and other minerals and metals
  • our roads, bridges, airports, and docks will last less than 100 years because we didn’t build anything with cement to last over a century (unlike Roman cement, which is still going strong). We won’t have the energy to rebuild or maintain most of our infrastructure
  • It will be much harder to chop down (rain)forests with roads crumbling and large trucks gone
  • There won’t be ships that can go to the ends of the earth to harvest the last schools of fish. Marine reserves have often restored fish populations faster than anyone expected.
  • due to lack of fuel, future world wars or world war on the scale of WWI & II will not be possible.  Wars will be far more local, more like pre-WWI.
  • Although biodiversity loss will probably increase initially as anyone with a gun goes out hunting, that’s likely to change because the people who live where hunters can get to on foot or bicycle will defend their territory.   The same goes for fishing and foraging.

5. The book “The Earth Without Us” shows that the earth recovers rather rapidly absent humans.  Human population and oil production curves are locked together in a death-grip. If oil declines, population declines too.

6. In 2075 when sea levels start to rise to the point of forcing migration, so many people will have already died off from the decline in fossil fuels that there will be plenty of room for coastal dwellers to move to

7. The loss of our ability to make microchips and breakdown in supply chains will be nearly as important as the loss of oil in rapidly changing civilization back to wood-based energy, and also increase the rate and numbers of people dying.

Climate change will still exist for many millenia, and drive population down even further than the end of oil from mosquito borne and other diseases, years of failures to grow crops and/or less crop production, and so on.

Even though even a small nuclear war would kill over 1 billion people (and a solar or nuclear EMP even more), the ozone would recover after 5 years, many people around the equator will be fine, others will have stockpiled enough food to get by.

All of the 9 planetary boundaries will diminish as human population declines from lack of fossil fuels.  Peak phosphorous will come even sooner without fossil-fuel driven vehicles and equipment to harvest and transport it.

This is too big a topic to list every factor and how it might turn out as you can see from the menu items in Decline and Collapse at energyskeptic.com.  Yes, extinction is a possibility if too many of these happen at once over just a few centuries.

But since both human population and energy resources are likely to decline exponentially rather quickly, we won’t be able to do the harm we are now, to the planet or ourselves, and that has a good chance of saving us from extinction.

Alice Friedemann

References

Hart, Phil. 15 Nov 2010. Oil Demand to Decline in the West, according to International Energy Agency.  http://anz.theoildrum.com/node/7114

Heinberg, R., Fridley, D. The end of cheap coal. New forecasts suggest that coal reserves will run out faster than many believe. Nature 468, 367-369 (18 November 2010) doi:10.1038/468367a

Höök, M., Sivertsson, A. & Aleklett, K. “Validity of the fossil fuel production outlooks in the IPCC Emission Scenarios” Natural Resources Research, 2010, Vol. 19, Issue 2: 63-81

Kerr, R.A. 2013. Mega-Eruptions Drove the Mother of Mass Extinctions. Science  20 Dec 2013: Vol. 342, # 6165, pp. 1424 DOI: 10.1126/science.342.6165.1424

Nel and Cooper (2009) Implications of fossil fuel constraints on economic growth and global warming, Energy Policy 37: 166-180.

Patzek, T, Croft, G. A global coal production forecast with multi-Hubbert cycle analysis.  Energy 35 (2010) 3109e3122

Posted in But not from climate change: Peak Fossil Fuels | 1 Comment

Oil can never be replaced with alternative energy

Posted on April 28, 2013 by

People who think that wind, solar, biofuels, hydrogen, batteries, and so on will save us simply don’t understand how much energy is contained in oil and other fossil fuels, how much we rely on it, how it is at the root of every aspect of our lives.

January 3, 2014 Few transportation fuels surpass the energy densities of gasoline and diesel

Graph of energy densities of different fuels, as explained in the article text

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, based on the National Defense University.

Energy density and the cost, weight, and size of onboard energy storage are important characteristics of fuels for transportation.

Fuels that require large, heavy, or expensive storage can reduce the space available to convey people and freight, weigh down a vehicle (making it operate less efficiently), or make it too costly to operate, even after taking account of cheaper fuels. Compared to gasoline and diesel, other options may have more energy per unit weight, but none have more energy per unit volume.

On an equivalent energy basis, motor gasoline was estimated to account for 99% of light-duty vehicle fuel consumption in 2012. Over half of the remaining 1% was from diesel; all other fuels combined for less than half of 1%. The widespread use of these fuels is largely explained by their energy density and ease of onboard storage, as no other fuels provide more energy within a given unit of volume.

The chart above compares energy densities (both per unit volume and per unit weight) for several transportation fuels that are available throughout the United States. The data points represent the energy content per unit volume or weight of the fuels themselves, not including the storage tanks or other equipment that the fuels require. For instance, compressed fuels require heavy storage tanks, while cooled fuels require equipment to maintain low temperatures (my comment: this is important because the heavier a vehicle, the fewer miles per gallon it can go).

Beyond gasoline and diesel, other fuels like compressed propane, ethanol, and methanol offer energy densities per unit volume that are less than gasoline and diesel, and energy densities per unit weight that are less than or equal to that of gasoline. Natural gas, either in liquefied form (LNG) or compressed (CNG), are lighter than gasoline but again have lower densities per unit volume. The same is true for hydrogen fuels, which must be either cooled (down to -253oC) or compressed (to 3,000 to 10,000 psi).

——————————-

More energy density tables:

Thousand
Btu per
cubic foot
1058      Diesel fuel
990        F-T Diesel
950        Biorenewable Diesel
922        Gasoline
683        Propane
635        LNG
594        Ethanol
488        Methanol
270        Liquid hydrogen
266        CNG @ 3626 psi
68          Compressed Hydrogen @ 3626 psi
16          NiMH Battery

ENERGY DENSITY OF FUELS NORMALIZED TO DIESEL FUEL
Percent of
Diesel Fuel
Energy Density
100.0 %      Diesel Fuel
93.6 %        F-T Diesel
89.8 %        Biorenewable Diesel
87.2 %        Gasoline
64.6 %        Propane
60.0 %        LNG
56.2 %        Ethanol
46.1 %        Methanol
25.5 %        Liquid Hydrogen
25.1 %        CNG  @ 3626 psi
6.4 %          Compressed Hydrogen @ 3626 psi
1.3 %          NiMH Battery

There are a lot of videos and movies about this, here’s some recent ones from national geographic.

Run out of oil

Aftermath: world without oil

Oil in your life today:

MMFTFF = Materials Mined, Fabricated, Transported with Fossil Fuels

MFO – Made from oil or natural gas — fossil fuels are a substance in over half a million products

EGNGC = Electricity Generated from Natural Gas or Coal, other power plants such as dams (hydroelectric) and Windmills were MMFTFF

Alarm went off: alarm was MMFTFF, likely powered by electricity generated from natural gas or coal (EGNGC). LThe plast

Brush teeth: toothbrush was MMFTFF and is made from fossil fuels (plastic has oil in int).  Medicines: MMFTFf and made from oil.

Shower – water pumped with EGNGC electricity, all materials MMFTFF

Your clothes?  All MMFTFF and all synthetics are made from oil.

Breakfast: eggs fried with natural gas, pan, plate, fork, knife, spoon MMFTFF.  All of the food was planted by a tractor that burned oil, harvested with oil, driven to the store with oil.

Drive or commute to work?  Oil.

 

Posted in Oil | Comments Off on Oil can never be replaced with alternative energy

Natural Gas and Trucking

Posted on April 26, 2013 by

What we are facing is a liquids fuels crisis, since 97% of transportation depends on oil (especially to plant, harvest, and distribute food, long-haul trucking, trains, etc).  To the extent that natural gas can fill in for oil, that will soften the impact of going over the energy cliff a little.

It’s likely we may be able to extend the life of natural gas in America by up to 20-25 years, but not 100 years like all the hype says (see post Shale Oil and Gas will not save us).

This buys us time if enough LNG stations, heavy trucks, and infrastructure are built within the next few years

But — to build a new fleet of trucks requires a lot of oil, costs nearly twice as much as conventional trucks, and by the time you’ve built such a fleet, LNG stations, etc., the natural gas boom will be over.

One of the reasons natural gas is attractive now is that it’s cheap, but that’s not likely to last, and that could slow down the conversion of local fleets to burning compressed NG and long-haul trucks from burning Liquified Natural Gas (LNG).

Some stats from the New York Times Cardwell article:

  • 8 million mid-to-heavy trucks consume 3 million barrels of oil a day, 15% of total consumption or 75% of what we import from OPEC nations.
  • 3 million 18-wheelers — the long distance haulers — consume two-thirds of all diesel fuel
  • 157,000 gasoline stations
  •         53 Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) stations in the USA now, two-thirds of them in California.

Large trucks need to run on LNG, local fleets can get by on compressed natural gas.  Many transit buses, refuse haulers, delivery trucks, and garbage trucks can, and are, running on compressed natural gas.

References

Diane Cardwell. 22 Apr 2013. Trucking Industry Is Set to Expand Its Use of Natural Gas. New York Times.

Posted in Natural Gas Vehicles | Comments Off on Natural Gas and Trucking

Peak Oil Acknowledged by Middle Eastern countries — they’re scared

Posted on April 16, 2013 by

Very interesting reflections on a peak oil conference in the Middle east of the countries that export oil.  I think it must mean we’re past peak, don’t believe “the near future”.

Peak Oil as seen through the eyes of Arab oil producers by Robert Hirsch, originally published by Fabius Maximus  | Apr 12, 2013

Reflections by the author of the “Hirsch Report” on the Conference “Peak Oil: Challenges and Opportunities for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Countries.”

I was fortunate to be among the few westerners invited to attend and speak at this first-of-its kind “peak oil” (PO) conference in a Middle East. The fact that a major Middle East oil exporter would hold such a conference on what has long been a verboten subject was quite remarkable and a dramatic change from decades of PO denial. The two and a half day meeting was well attended by people from the GCC as well as other regional countries.

The going-in assumption was that “peak oil” will occur in the near future. The timing of the impending onset of world oil decline was not an issue at the conference, rather the main focus was what the GCC countries should do soon to ensure a prosperous, long-term future. To many of us who have long suffered the vociferous denial of PO by Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and OPEC countries, this conference represented a major change. In the words of Kjell Aleklett (Professor of Physics at Uppsala University, Sweden), who summarized highlights of the conference, the meeting was “an historic event.”

While many PO aficionados have been focused on the impacts and the mitigation of “peak oil” in the importing countries, most attendees at this conference were concerned with the impact that finite oil and gas reserves will have on the long-term future of their own exporting countries. They see the depletion of their large-but-limited reserves as affording their countries a period of time in which they either develop their countries into sustainable entities able to continue into the long term future or they lapse back into the poor, nomadic circumstances that existed prior to the discovery of oil/gas. Accordingly, much of the conference focus was on how the GCC countries might use their current and near-term largesse to build sustainable economic and government futures.

A flavor of the conference can be gotten from the following loosely translated, random quotations:

About the Conference:

  • This is a groundbreaking conference.
  • The organizers were brave to organize this conference.

Peak Oil:

  • Peak oil provides an incentive to consider important national and regional issues. The GCC is currently working new problems with old solutions.
  • Oil revenue represents about 93% of the Saudi budget. Everything is now imported — foreign expertise and most labor. Saudi can’t continue on the current track, because it would lead to a “bad future.” We need radical change.
  • After peak oil, will there be great cities, or will Middle East cities end up like the gold mining ghost towns of the old U.S. west?
  • So far we have wasted our opportunity.
  • Shale oil in the U.S. is so much foolishness and does not invalidate peak oil. We definitely must worry about peak oil.

The Gulf States:

  • Political reforms have failed to properly address our lack of democracy and accountability.
  • When people are excluded from politics, they get unruly.
  • Citizens in the Middle East prefer public sector jobs because they pay better than private sector jobs.
  • Foreigners are the majority of our populations, typically 80%.
  • Schools are teaching children “old stuff.” Schools are a disaster.
  • The current culture is one of waste.
  • There are job vacancies in Saudi but local people are not prepared to fill them. Saudi’s go abroad to get advanced degrees but don’t qualify for Saudi jobs, so Saudi must import foreign labor. Aramco did a good job of training Saudi nationals.
  • The GCC must educate women and give them greater rights and equality.
  • In many countries absolute rulers get the incomes and revenues and not much is left for the people. A selfish dictator does not develop his country.
  • The Arab legal system is in bad shape and needs attention.
  • People read religious literature when they should be reading technical literature.
  • The region has wealthy, wealthy persons and poor, poor people.
  • Rulers must understand that the people must be part of the future.
  • Future generations must have rights.

About the world and peak oil:

  • Globalization is being broadly viewed more negatively now. When peak oil comes, it will be extremely difficult to maintain.
  • High oil prices will impact the world even before the onset of peak oil.
  • Peak oil is the most important question in this part of the world.

Robert Hirsch ran the US Fusion Program during the 1970′s, and went from there to become one of America’s top energy experts. Here is a brief biography. He was the lead author of one of the major papers about 21st century energy: “Peaking of World Production: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management“, commissioned by the Dept of Energy, published in 2005. Co-authors are the economists Roger Bezdek and Robert Wendling. They also wrote The Impending World Energy Mess: What It Is and What It Means to You (2010).

See Wikipedia for a list of his positions and publications. He has over 50 publications, plus 14 patents — including Farnsworth–Hirsch fusor (see Wikipedia).

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