The Big 5 Personality Traits – psychobabble or science?

Posted on April 14, 2013 by energyskeptic

Alice Friedemann’s review of :

Daniel Nettle. 2008. “Personality, What makes you the way you are”. Oxford University Press.

Scientists have considered psychology to be a very soft science at best and quackery or psychobabble at worst. But psychology is finally making scientific strides with the testable theories generated by evolutionary biology, brain imaging equipment, being able to measure genetic variation between people, and animal studies – critters also exhibit what in humans we call personality traits.

Daniel Nettle has written a book for the public explaining the latest scientific research on personality. He explains how it’s measured, what the measures mean or predict, and why we vary in personality traits.

He defines personality as:

Consistent patterns in our lives across love, career, and friendships, often repeating the same sorts of triumphs or mistakes.
Even smaller, less significant patterns in everyday life tend to have patterns – how we dress, whether we talk to strangers, etc
Basically, everyone’s nervous system is wired up differently.

Nearly all psychologists agree on a Big Five model of personality dimensions, consolidating decades of research. Before this, different researchers used different varying traits. For example, 4 main types (thinking, feeling, sensing, or intuiting), or just reward vs harm avoidance. Each study had results that appeared to have no relationship to each other.

The five factor model created order out of this mess, all previous studies can be fit into this framework because they either measured one of the big five or a sub-part of one of them, or perhaps a mix of several.

Okay, it’s not science entirely yet – to do that, this new approach needs to prove these traits are neurobiologically real, but this framework gives personality psychologists testable hypotheses. Until now, much of it sounded like psychobabble to me, and I do cringe at lumping people into categories.

What makes the big 5 more plausible to me is that we all have all five traits to varying degrees, and we change over time depending on our genetics and our life experiences (which is why twins, even though totally the same genetically, can be quite different).

Here’s the list of the Big 5:

Dimension High Scorers are Low Scorers are

Extraversion Outgoing, enthusiastic Aloof, quiet

Neuroticism Prone to stress & worry Emotionally stable

Conscientiousness Organized, self-directed Spontaneous, careless

Agreeableness Trusting, empathetic Uncooperative, hostile

Openness Creative, imaginative Practical, conventional

About half of your score is out of your control – genetics is responsible.

These traits have important consequences in life. High neuroticism in either partner is more likely to lead to divorce or an unhappy marriage. Divorce is also likely if the male is low in conscientiousness. Extraverts are the least likely to stay in an unhappy marriage.

Other consequences, such as low agreeableness, have less dire consequences, but will nevertheless affect how a person gets along in the world. These folks are more likely to snap at others and be irritated easily, leading to less satisfying personal relationships and career advancement.

Situations make a difference, extraverts have more casual sex than introverts, probably because introverts are at home and extraverts are at parties, meeting potential partners.

A recurring theme of the book is that while you might think that there’s some optimum level of any trait to have, this doesn’t appear to be the case or natural selection would make us much more similar. For example, high scoring neurotics are more worried than other people. Why not just be happy all the time?

Nettle says that animals vary in what we could call neuroticism too – some guppies hide if there’s a predatory fish in the tank because they come from a stream with predators, and other guppies are fearless because they live in a place with no predatory fish. The fearful guppies outlive the fearless guppies by far if you introduce a predator.

But creatures who spend too much time looking for predators won’t get enough to eat and be as healthy as their more relaxed brethren – so there’s a constant balancing act going on in nature across neuroticism and all of the other traits. In one situation a trait might be good, in another bad, and so there is never an optimal balance of a particular trait that nature settles on (in evolutionary theory this is called fluctuating selection).

Extraversion

Extraverts are high in sociability but that doesn’t mean they have good social relationships – that’s predicted by agreeableness. Shyness isn’t usually due to low extraversion, but to high neuroticism and anxiety. Someone low on extraversion can do without much social activity and not mind it, often seeming aloof.

Extravert traits: enjoy sex, romance, tend to be ambitious, work hard for fame or money, like active sports, travel, and novelty. They have a lot of positive emotion, with more joy, desire, enthusiasm, and excitement than low scorers. This acts as an incentive, so they’re more willing to go the extra mile to a party, event, or date after an exhausting day at work. This doesn’t mean low scorers on the extrovert scale are negative or sad, they’re just emotionally flatter, which makes them less likely to get out and about, because there’s less reward in it for them.

Extraverts brains even operate differently – with higher responsiveness in several brain areas than low scorers.

Nettle speculates at the end of each chapter about the advantages and disadvantages of each trait. So who wouldn’t want to be an extrovert? Nettle says that perhaps their predilection for dangerous sports leads to earlier deaths, and more breakups of marriages from affairs, which puts their children at risk with step-parents.

Within a marriage, if your partner is a higher scorer than you, they’ll want to do things that seem pointless and expensive whether it’s buying a sports car, wanting to go to far more parties than you do, or taking up a wild new hobby. If you score higher, then you’ll feel disappointed (s)he doesn’t want to do as much as you do or get enthusiastic about your latest passion. Nettle concludes “Don’t worry. It’s just how they are wired up”.

Neurotics

Scoring high means being more affected by the tribulations of everyday life, feeling more fear, anxiety, shame, guilt and sadness than most people. Neurotics are more likely to have depression, anxiety, eating, personality, and obsessive-compulsive disorders, phobias, PTSD, schizophrenia, insomnia, and headaches.

Sadness may be useful — to the extent it slows us down enough to re-think our plans if they’ve failed, and make better plans for the future, and signal to others we need support and comfort.

Why on earth would such an unhappy trait be selected for? We’re probably all wired to look for dangerous predators, loss of social position, or the risk of social ostracism – death sentences for most of our ancestors. But Nettle says that neurotics are like overly sensitive smoke detectors, spending a lot of time looking for dangers. Chances are the ancestors of neurotics worried a lot, but in the end, were less likely to make a fatal error than their happier brethren, and avoided being eaten or making the leaders of the tribe angry and being expelled from the group.

High scorers tend to direct their negative emotions towards themselves, leading to low self-esteem. Neurotics think ‘it was my fault’, everybody hates me’, or ’I will never succeed’ in reaction to bad events. A high scorer is constantly wondering if (s)he did the right thing and often changes their identity and goals throughout life.

High scorers fear dangers faced in the past – rejection, illness, open spaces, strangers, and unspoken negative intentions of others. In the long run they have a slightly increased risk for heart disease, gastric disorders, and hypertension. They have less satisfactory marriages and work lives. Their negative emotions can bring about the very result they fear, such as a wife who worries and nags her husband due to her fear he’ll leave may give him reason to do just that.

Nettle posits this trait is selected for to protect us, and the threshold of what’s appropriate to worry about is constantly changing depending on what sort of world we’re born into. Perhaps those who score low have a higher mortality rate because they’re not worried enough.

Although this trait usually harms careers, a neurotic open person might write as a form of therapy. Their fear of failing motivates them to strive (as long as they aren’t too disorganized or feel too awful to function). Nettle writes that neurotics “see the problems of the world starkly, in all their equivocal complexity”.

He concludes “High scorers should not just wish their worry away, but, just like any other trait, understand the strength, sensitivity, striving, and insight that it may give them. There are niches in the world where these are very valuable. They do come at a cost of often awful suffering through many days of their lives. The art is to manage these costs, to live with them, and to limit them so they do not become overwhelming”.

Controllers

High scorers are conscientious and high scores predict better than any other trait occupational success in any kind of work, as well as living longer – up to 30% more than someone who scores low.

Low scorers have impulse control problems and are more likely to succumb to one or more of gambling, drug dependencies, irresponsible behavior, law breaking, and antisocial personality disorder. They’re more impulsive, spontaneous, and have weak wills. A low score in this trait is the most likely predictor of addiction problems.

Addictions happen when a person can’t stop a once-rewarding behavior. There may be no euphoria involved, because their brains have become so used to the addictive substance. They just can’t stop their habit.

Agreeableness

Agreeable people can sort out complex descriptions of how people are feeling. Nettle gives these two examples:

Tom hoped that Jim would believe that Susan thought that Edward wanted to marry Jenny (4^th level nested description).

John though that Penny thought that Tom wanted Penny to find out whether Sheila believed that John knew what Susan wanted to do (5^th level nested description).

It turns out that people who do best at understanding the last sentence tend to have a larger network of friends than those who don’t do well. Young children with this skill are perceived by their teachers as getting along well with other kids.

Empathizers pay more attention to the mental states of others and tend to be helpful, social, warm trusting behavior. They tend to have good relationships, good social support, and rarely fall out with or insult others. They’re quick to forgive, and slow to anger even with people who deserve it. Often they end up in careers as counselors, social workers, or volunteer work.

Those who score low are less likely to trust or help others, can be cold or antagonistic, have less harmonious relationships, and at the very bottom, psychopathy.

Psychopaths are egocentric, dishonest, feel no remorse, can’t love, and tend to use others for their own ends. They have no qualms about being aggressive. Of the three traits, empathy for others is the most important in preventing psychopathy.

But to be a full-blown monster, you’d also need to score low on conscientiousness and anxiety. Without empathy, the person still might not do harm because they’re not impulsive and will realize the likely consequences of their actions. If he’s also low in neuroticism, he’ll feel no fear – now all the barriers are down and this can result in some very bad people. Fortunately it’s rare for someone to be very low across all three traits.

Autistics are not psychopaths. Although they have trouble with social relationships, and struggle to understand the mental state of others, they tend to be helpful to others in distress. Psychopaths can predict others mental states just fine and use that knowledge to manipulate and deceive.

Nettle speculates that being a good group member is a very important trait – being ostracized from the group in the past could be a death sentence.

He doesn’t discuss why psychopathy would exist, but I’ve read elsewhere that psychopaths are the only people unafraid in battle, and our history is one of constant skirmishes, so this trait would be useful throughout most of history if these people were channeled into the military.

Being too agreeable tends to lessen success a bit, since you’re spending more time than average maintaining a wide network of relationships, which takes time away from work, or lessens the ambition to rise in a career since that isn’t as important as friendships. Nettle refers to two studies that showed nice guys finish last. Some ruthlessness is required to reach the highest positions in corporations perhaps.

Which brings up the conundrum of finding an ideal partner – women would like someone who’s kind and empathic, but also someone successful – and these traits don’t usually coincide. As Nettle puts it “the kind of person who could give you a glittering lifestyle is quite likely not the kind of person you would wish to share such a life with”.

One of the most documented and proven differences between men and women score higher in Agreeableness than men – the average man scores lower than 70% of women. When women are given testosterone, it reduces their empathetic behavior.

Openness

High scorers are more likely to read books, and go to art galleries, theater, and music events than the average person. This trait is correlated with intelligence, but it’s not the same as intelligence. People who score high tend to be imaginative and pursue artistic endeavors.

In several pages of writing about Ginsberg’s poem “Howl”, Nettle conveys the trait of openness with a bit of poetry himself. He thinks that those who score high in openness have fewer, more permeable filters that allow broader associations. Those high in openness are more likely to challenge social norms, try out many different jobs, philosophies, and lifestyles. They also have a strong sense of spirituality, or even supernatural belief.

Often they have a schizotype personality – they’re of sound mind but more psychotic than the rest of the population. They might hear voices, have perceptual disturbances where everything seems strange or significant, magical ideas (supernatural forces, feelings of telepathy). Or they might have unusual experiences and aberrant thoughts and even some beliefs similar to those of schizophrenics, but not have other aspects of schizophrenia like emotional flatness or social withdrawal and lack of motivation. High-scorers are more likely to have psychosis-like experiences. They tend to be politically liberal and avoid orthodox institutions, with strong idiosyncratic supernatural or spiritual beliefs. They’re more likely to experiment with exotic religions or creeds, New Age ideas, or believe in the paranormal. They’re more likely to have beliefs that run against the mores of their time and less governed by taboos or social acceptability. They’re relatively susceptible to hypnosis.

Advantages: “Geoffrey Miller argued in his book, “The Mating Mind”, that verbal creativity became a potent mate-selection trait. …Individuals would tend to select mates displaying the quality of their brains through unusually complex verbal and symbolic” ways of writing or speaking, driving up general intelligence in the population, as well as openness.

How we come to have our personalities

Except for genetics, studies with identical twins, fraternal twins, and siblings have shown that parents have very little effect on our personalities. In normal households that is, clearly an abusive or violent upbringing might have lasting effects.

“This is a stunning finding, and it has caused quite a stir. It is probably the most important discovery in psychology in recent decades, not least because it is counter-intuitive and overturns many entrenched beliefs. Out must go all simple notions about how cold mothers or absent fathers or large families or farm living shape our personalities”.

Then he knocks out birth order and prenatal effects.

The main thing that seems to make a difference is your own traits:

“The extent to which one should be neurotic about sources of harm depends in part on how fleet of foot one is, how good one’s immune system is, etc. Whether one should pursue risky rewards depends a lot on whether one is strong and attractive. The former makes one able to cope if things go wrong, whilst the latter is a big determinant of success if the rewards pursued are social or sexual ones. Whether one needs to be very conscientious in working hard at problems depends in part how smart one is; very quick-witted people can probably prepare on the fly. Basically, it makes a lot of sense that evolution would have built into us a capacity to modulate our personalities in response to our health, intelligence, size, and attractiveness”.

There is some evidence for this – extraverts are more symmetrical, implying fewer mutations or environmental stressors during development, and they’re perceived as being more attractive. Men increase in extraversion when they’re tall, though this isn’t the case with women. Large men also seem to be slightly less nice, on average, perhaps because large men can get away wit breaking rules.

Conclusion

All of us vary in each of the 5 dimensions, just like we do with weight, height, or intelligence. Nettle posits that if we could measure people with ten distinct points along each of the five personality scales, there’d be 105, or 100,000 possible personalities. So even though life would be much simpler if we could wedge everyone into a few categories, we’d be wearing blinders to the true complexity of our fellow human beings.

If you took the 100,000 personalities literally, there’d be 1,500 other women just like me in the USA. But they won’t be like me.

Nettle speculates that though they’ll have more similar lives and relationships than a random sample, their lives will be very different because they’ve all found different ways of expressing the traits they have. There are many ways of expressing extroversion.

Even more importantly, there’s the level of one’s subjective life story. We all tell our story of who we are, what we’re doing, and why differently in our personal stories. This unique narration has a considerable effect on identity. Nettle gives the examples of someone who never married could either tell this story as a tragedy or a comedy. Another who was never successful in a career, but had great varied experiences could either tell their story as one of failure or how they’d escaped the rat race and had a much better time.

Which brings up the topic of change – what if we don’t want to be shy worried irresponsible hostile conformists?

Luckily, as we age, all of us tend to get slightly more agreeable and conscientious, and slightly less open, extroverted, and neurotic. We have the power to change ourselves, to stop destructive or dangerous behaviors.

It’s easier when the changes we try to make go along with our nature, like an extrovert switching from riding a motorcycle to driving a sports car. But even an introverted person can change themselves against the grain, by finding work or social activities that involve being around lots of people.

And above all, we can spin our own personal stories to see our lives in a better light.

Alas, Nettle says, those who most need to do this – those high in neuroticism — have the hardest time seeing their lives in anything but a negative light (though they’re more realistic than low scorers). Those most likely to be unhappy about their personalities tend to neurotics who infuse everything with suffering. He recommends neurotics try meditation, exercise, yoga, cognitive behavior therapy, and medications to work around their fears and anxieties.

Nettle concludes by reminding the reader that no one should regret the constellation of personality traits they have – all have their advantages and disadvantages, which he has illustrated throughout the book. Though these speculations about why a trait might be good or bad given different environments is the least scientific part of the book – but then there’s still much to be learned, and we can hope this new grouping of traits will lead to better testing.

I was not able to tell from reading the book if this new “big 5” concept was a major revolutionary shift within the personality field and adopted by the vast majority of researchers. Wikipedia says that “The model is considered to be the most comprehensive empirical or data-driven enquiry into personality”.

Wikipedia gives these main criticisms:

1) This is not a theory, just data-driven descriptions of traits

2) Not all traits are included (i.e. Religiosity, Honesty, Thriftiness, Conservativeness, Sense of humor, etc)

3) There are 3, or 18, or 7 factors, not 5

So it looks like personality research has a long way to go to reach more scientific credibility.

But overall, this book was useful and fun to read. Nettle describes quite well what it’s like to be weak or strong in these dimensions, and I recognized myself and so many others in the descriptions – it’s somehow satisfying to know that I share these traits, both good and bad, with so many others, and to have another tool to understand others with.

I also liked Nettle strongly emphasizing throughout the book that there is no best profile to have, not even being average in all of them. Your best bet is to make the best of the hand you’ve been dealt – maximize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. Your basic dispositions are a resource, not a curse.

Posted in Evolution | Comments Off

Renewable Energy can’t supply more than 30% of electricity without revolutionary battery breakthrough

Posted on April 13, 2013 by energyskeptic

Wind and solar are too intermittent to comprise much of electric grid power now, according to Steven Chu, former US energy secretary. In 2010, Chu said, “Without technological breakthroughs in efficient, large-scale energy storage, it will be difficult to rely on intermittent renewables for much more than 20-30% of electricity.”

Unless a major breakthrough in batteries happens, we will continue to require natural gas fueled power plants to ramp up and down quickly to cope with intermittent sources of power. “When you ramp power plants up and down they lose efficiency” according to Haresh Kamath of the Electric Power Research Institute in Washington DC.

Some batteries cannot survive deep discharge cycles

An inability to withstand deep discharge cycles means, in effect, that additional capacity needs to be installed in order to provide effective capacity. Thus, if a technology were deployed that were limited to 50 percent discharge, it would be necessary to provide twice the capacity of a technology of one that had no such limit. Thus, a storage system with a 50 percent limit would in effect need 12,000 MWh of storage where the study had determined that a 3,000 MW, 2-hour unit was required (CEC).

And keep in mind, for the long run, these batteries need to have a positive EROEI over their entire life cycle from mining and crushing of rocks for metals to fabrication to delivery. If they require more energy to construct across the life cycle than they more energy to create than at least 5 times the energy stored and discharged, our way of life can’t continue.

In addition, batteries must be composed of cheap and abundant materials. Platinum, lithium, and many other metals are scarce and take too much energy to extract.

Without energy storage, conventional power generation plants are harmed

Without the use of storage, ramping of combustion turbine generators and hydro?electric generation is likely to increase. This may likely have detrimental effects on equipment maintenance costs and life of the equipment, and greenhouse gas emissions because the resources will be asked to generate more often at less than optimal production ranges as well as to remain committed-that is, on?line-in anticipation of ramping needs The 3,000 to 4,000 MW of storage which could be used to address renewables management requires a ramp rate capacity of 5 to 10 MW/second, or 0 to full power charging / discharging in 5 minutes. This equals or exceeds the ramping capabilities of most conventional generating units, and particularly the larger combustion turbines. Smaller combustion turbines in the California ISO database can meet this ramp rate requirement, but there are insufficient quantities of such units to provide the required 3,000 to 4,000 MW of fast ramping (CEC).

Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) storage

Existing molten salt thermal storage is both expensive and operationally challenging. New technologies are needed now before the large solar plants are all designed and built.

References

CEC. June 2010. Research evaluation of wind generation, solar generation, and storage impact on the California Grid. Prepared by KEMA, Inc for the California Energy Commission.

Hal Hodson. 2 Feb 2013. Greening the Grid. NewScientist.

Posted in Alternative Energy, Batteries | 1 Comment

Noam Chomsky: If Nuclear War Doesn’t Get Us, Climate Change Will

Posted on March 31, 2013 by energyskeptic

The growing threats of nuclear war and environmental catastrophe make it hard to bet on the survival of our species.

Watch the video at:

http://www.thenation.com/video/173205/noam-chomsky-if-nuclear-war-doesnt-get-us-climate-change-will#

Posted in Extinction Experts | Comments Off

Financial Monsters — Bigger Crashes than 2008 are yet to come

Posted on March 31, 2013 by energyskeptic

by Alice Friedemann October 12, 2007

The monsters are still there. Sure, quantitative easing fed them enough money to keep them away for a while, but cheap money can’t be doled out to bankrupt banksters and Wall Street forever. Meanwhile it’s 2014 and there haven’t been meaningful reforms in derivatives ($600 trillion), leveraged debt, private equity and hedge funds are still unregulated, the distribution of wealth is getting worse, enormous debt at all levels (personal, corporate, government) continues to grow, the unemployment rate is certainly over 10% as documented at shadowstats.com, medicare obligations loom large as boomers retire, pension funds are underfunded, corporate and wall street fraud and insider trading continue as usual, while yet unknown Black Swans circle overhead.

Original article from 2007:

We are entering the Money / Energy transition (a term coined by Tom Robertson at listserve energyresources). This is when people will realize they can’t fuel their cars with dollar bills — that money is meaningless and all that really matters is energy. Hubbert proposed an energy currency half a century ago so that people would understand how critical a role it plays in our survival, but it isn’t practical to carry tanks of gas or bits of uranium around in your pocket.

So we spent our energy foolishly, plundering and poisoning the planet for a blip-in-time of pleasure, and now the “Limits to Growth” boas of peak oil, climate change, and natural resource shortages are tightening around us.

But most people don’t see the world ecologically. Nearly everyone is brainwashed to see the world through economic and political filters. As we sink into a never-ending depression, brought on by increasing population, pollution, and decreasing energy and natural resources, most people will blame politicians, the Federal Reserve, and evil foreign governments for our woes. It will take a while before people realize that it’s too many people and declining resources, not an economic crash, that’s the root of the problem. So we should recognize our own financial monsters, listed and described herein.

It appears the United States is succumbing to what all governments have been tempted to do over time: run the money printing presses overtime to pay for wars, debts, and corporate welfare. But in a credit/debit system where there’s an estimated quadrillion in debt, these bits of electronic currency vanish into the black hole of debt and end up in the pockets of the wealthy, who spin the fake money into new bubbles for the middle class to spend their remaining dollars on, while the “smart money” gets out just before the bubble pops, fleecing the Middle class of even more wealth. Sooner or later, you’ve got to pay to the piper, and the BRIC nations aren’t going to allow American dollars to be the world’s reserve currency forever.

In anticipation of completely worthless money, we ought to at least design with much better pictures and colors – we have the most boring currency in the world, and doing so would allow us to make great wallpaper or origami animals once it’s worthless. Though again, unless you drop the money out of helicopters, it will keep ending up in the hands of those who need it least, the top 1%, and they can already afford decent wallpaper.

The subprime market is just the first Tremblor bursting out of the ground to suck the life-blood out of your bank account and ‘disappear’ your job.

Other Economic Monsters

Derivatives. Originally used to hedge risks, then as leverage, i.e. “swaps”, derivatives allowed hedge funds to get around the leveraged limits the SEC instituted after the 1929 crash.

Warren Buffet has been warning for years that derivatives are endangering the financial system. He believes that the widespread use of swaps makes the leverage that preceded the 1929 crash “look like a Sunday school picnic.” (Smith 2007). He warns that derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction (BBC 2003):

An explosion in derivatives contracts could create serious systemic risks – that derivatives are time bombs waiting to explode the economic system. Large amounts of risk have become concentrated in the hands of relatively few derivatives dealers.
Outstanding derivatives contracts – excluding those traded on exchanges such as the International Petroleum Exchange – are worth close to $85 trillion.
Some derivatives contracts appear to have been devised by “madmen”. He warns that derivatives can push companies onto a “spiral that can lead to a corporate meltdown”, like the demise of the notorious hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998.
Derivatives also pose a dangerous incentive for false accounting. The profits and losses from derivatives deals are booked straight away, even though no actual money changes hand. In many cases the real costs hit companies many years later. This can result in nasty accounting errors. Some of them spring from “honest” optimism. But others are the result of “huge-scale fraud”, for example, the US energy market, which relied for most of its deals on derivatives trading and resulted in the collapse of Enron.

Many derivatives don’t trade often, making it hard to value them accurately. Institutions don’t trust each other because no one knows who’s got the most skeletons to hide. It’s hard to make financial instruments like leveraged loans transparent if the asset has never traded, or no one’s buying. Institutions tend to put as much gloss on their numbers as possible, and investors, lenders, and shareholders are very suspicious. (Davies 2007)

If hedge funds ever have to put an accurate price on what they own, the outcome could be scary – that’s why the Bear Stearns subprime debacle caused such concern, because it could start a chain reaction of other hedge funds forced to truly discover their asset values and adjust them sharply downward. Banks have about 375 billion dollars in leveraged loans. Bank, private equity, brokerages, & hedge fund failures are likely as assets continue to decline in value. Hedge funds have used derivatives to dampen volatility, and act like shock absorbers against market risk. But if the real value of derivatives has been exaggerated, then when these “shock absorbers” break down, there could be a hard landing (Patterson 2007).

The Great Unwind: Leveraged Debt. Not since the Great Depression has there been so much leverage in the stock market. Hedge funds, private equity firms, and Wall Street have found ways to work around the legal limits of leverage via derivatives and other complex financial instruments. Part of the reason we got into this mess was that banks, which are regulated and transparent, don’t control credit or money anymore.

Hedge funds and private equity firms are not regulated. If there’s a serious market downturn, leverage can create a snowball effect, as stocks are dumped to raise cash, spiraling prices ever downwards. Wall Street analysts call this “The Great Unwind”. The Wall Street Journal summarized this risk by saying “No one is sure what will happen with this complex web of borrowing and derivatives in the event of a serious market downturn”.

Larry Fink of BlackRock, says that lenders to highly indebted companies are making the same mistake as the subprime mortgage market, and will become “tomorrow’s problem” as leveraged buy-out and junk-rated lending grows. The Bank of England also warned that cheap corporate lending with loose credit standards “has increased the vulnerability of the global financial system”, and cautioned against weak standards of risk assessment for repackaged bank loans that are sold to the rest of the financial system (Beales 2007).

In the Economist magazine (June 21, 2007), Daniel Arbess, of Xerion Capital Partners, said that “perhaps the most worrying thing for financial institutions holding mortgage-backed paper is not the subprime market, but the unnerving parallels with an even bigger one to which they are also exposed: leveraged loans to companies”. Subprime might well be “a dress rehearsal for something bigger and scarier.”

Private Equity & Hedge Funds. These financial devices are not subject to regulation, so the risk they’re adding to the financial system is unknown. Worse yet, they’re given special tax rates of less than 10% (which amounts to a public subsidy), and that, combined with investor money, is used for leveraged buyouts. Then, these companies are stripped of assets and the employees outsourced. Jobs are lost and established companies destroyed. The big winners are the managers who engineer the buyout, who can earn billions in just one year (Monks 2007).

The time horizon of asset-stripping is short – just 3 to 4 years – and ignores the long-term interests of investors, employees, customers, and suppliers. The Chairman of Germany’s Social Democratic party in 2005, Franz Munterfering, described private equity groups as “swarms of locusts” (Gordon 2007).

After asset stripping and outsourcing, these companies are laden with debt, which will be a serious problem when borrowing costs rise and an economic downturn occurs.

Distribution of Wealth. The gap between rich and poor has never been as great as it is now. The top 1% of households in the USA received 8% of national income in 1980 and 16% in 2004. During that period, the tax burden on the top 1% decreased from 44.4% to 30.4%, increasing their income even further. Wealthy individuals and corporations know how to hide their wealth offshore, or put money in questionable tax shelters, so the gap is even wider than what Piketty has been able to glean from tax records (Piketty 2007).

The Pew and Brookings Institutions have done research which shows that men in their 30s earn 12% less than their fathers did in 1974 adjusting for inflation (Guha 2007).

Such huge and fundamental unfairness often leads to social chaos, civil war, or revolution eventually.

Federal Debt. The long-term economic health of the United States is threatened by $53 trillion in government debts and liabilities that start to come due when baby boomers begin to retire. Many leading economists say that even the world’s most prosperous economy cannot fulfill these promises without a crushing increase in taxes — and perhaps not even then – as each household has an obligation of about $475,000 (Cauchon 2004).

Public Debt. The average American household in 2004 was $85,000 in debt from the $9.5 trillion owed on mortgages, cars, credit cards and other personal debt. The average American has negative savings.

Energy Costs. McMansions and sprawling suburbia will force families to dedicate dollars to heating their homes and driving that they would have rather spent eating out, and on vacations, electronic toys, and so on.

Job Loss: Offshoring. Check out the U.S. Department of Labor “Occupational Outlook Handbook” at http://www.bls.gov/search/ooh.asp?ct=OOH which lists job categories and statistics in America. A large percent of these have been or can be outsourced overseas to the billions willing to work for less money than Americans in clerical, administrative, accounting, actuaries, analysts, bookkeeping, etc. Up to 40 million jobs are potentially offshorable (Wessel 2007). Work that must be done here often goes to illegal immigrants.

Job Loss: Real Estate. Nationally, real-estate-related industries accounted for 74 percent of new jobs over the past five years (Irwin 2005). In 2004, there were 460,000 real estate brokers, 1 million construction laborers, plus millions of other jobs dependent on real estate in furnishings, lumber, and other industries.

As the subprime meltdown expands, millions will earn less or lose their jobs. David Richards, in Barron’s, estimates that the housing industry accounts for 6% of the US economy. Others, using wider boundaries, estimate it’s more like 10% of the US economy. This many people spending less will affect everyone else in the economy; it’s already happening in Florida and other hard hit states

Job Loss: Automobile Industry. The Aug 2, 2007 issue of the L.A. Times article “Imports now lead car sales in the U.S.” reports that for the first time, Americans bought more imported cars than those made here. That will reverberate through the economy as well, since the supply chain for autos represents such a large part of the economy, at one time, one out of every six jobs.

Medicare/Social Security. Medicare is running out of money, and may be in worse shape than SS (Alonso-Zaldivar).

Underfunded Pension Funds (Schwanhausser 2002). Bad investments in pension funds will unwind, and as auto companies and other large companies decline or fail, their pension insurance is vastly under funded by hundreds of billions of dollars – most people aren’t going to collect what was promised.

Sudden drop in value of the dollar. What if foreigners decide to stop buying our treasury bills? As the Fed keeps printing more and more money, foreigners won’t want to be inflationary dupes. Currently, foreigners own $3 trillion of our assets — equal to about a third of U.S. GDP. Middle East countries have been plowing their winnings into treasury bills, but they may prefer to get more of a return on their money in China and India to buy off their increasingly angry citizens. China and India will spend their increasingly valuable currency on importing food, energy, and other resources, so Americans are going to continually be experiencing a lower standard of living. It will be hard to cut back because there is such a sprawling infrastructure, petrochemical-agriculture, and minimal rail and mass transit.

Food prices. Food prices are going to rise dramatically as we continue to lose cropland to pavement and development, topsoil losses, extreme weather from climate change, increasing population, and aquifer depletion. BUT THIS IS NOT INFLATIONARY. The worst part about a deflation is that no one has money, yet prices for absolutely essential goods like food and energy keep going up.

As the energy used to fertilize, plant, douse with petroleum insecticides, harvest, process, distribute, and cook food grows more expensive, food prices will rise even further. Grain will be exported to the highest bidder, countries like China with huge cash surpluses. Food is now 11% of the average household budget. In 1900 it was 40%, at a time when over a quarter of Americans still lived on farms and had much larger yards to grow some of their own food. Growing crops to make ethanol and transporting ethanol by truck and train from the Midwest to the coasts will increase food costs as well.

California grows a third of the nation’s food, but as global warming shortens the growing season by depriving farms of much-needed snowmelt water in the summer, is entering a potential long-term drought, and the cost of energy to electrically pump water for irrigation (25% of on-farm energy), everyone in America will feel California’s pain in their pocketbooks.

Corporate Fraud & Ecological Destruction. As Bakan points out in “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power”, corporate charters state that the corporation must do whatever will benefit the stockholder. So even if the CEO wants to save the environment, he can’t do it if it will cost the shareholders more money than destruction. Unless we can enact the reforms Bakan recommends, we can’t make the necessary U-turn back to sustainability, and corporations will continue to strip-mine the earth at an exponential rate to the point that many scientists believe will drive us extinct (if it isn’t too late already).

Massive Illegal Trade. Moises Naim, former editor of “Foreign Policy”, makes the case in “Illicit” that illegal trade may comprise 10% of the world economy now. It’s gotten so sophisticated that small groups don’t specialize – they’ll run drugs, people, weapons – whatever pays best. This trade isn’t taxed, leads to immense corruption, and makes it much easier for terrorists to potentially smuggle nuclear weapons.

Your Money Market Fund may lose money. Money funds hold subprime too (Richardson 2007). Worse yet, according to Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of Housing-Federal Housing Commissioner in the first Bush Administration, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not in good shape (Fitts 2004), and these federal agencies are NOT insured. Most money market funds own bonds in Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac.

Glass-Steagall Act no longer in effect. After the 1929 market crash, the Glass-Steagall Act was enacted to keep banks doing the business of banks, and not getting into the stock market or insurance business. This act has slowly been eroded to the point where it’s non-existent. Now you have banks doing everything, including gambling with energy derivatives.

Deflation, Inflation, or Both? Because of oil shocks, runaway debt, massive amounts of money “printed” by the Feds and other governments, and other liquidity in the market, there’s been a debate for at least 5 years about whether there’ll be deflation, inflation, hyper-inflation, or a mix of all three when the financial system crashes. Bill Bonner (Bonner 2007) argues for deflation. He thinks the Fed is wrong about the risk of inflation, and here’s how he sees the crisis evolving: Liquidity dries up, and then lenders don’t want to lend and spenders don’t want to spend, they want to hang onto what they have. And it’s a downward spiral, the more prices fall, the more consumers are reluctant to spend because they might get a better deal if they wait. Basically, they turn Japanese and hoard money. Takeovers and leveraged buyouts came to a stop.

Bonner asks “What can the feds do?” Sure they can print more money, but how are they going to get it into the hands of people who will spread it around? Once deflation kicks in, people won’t borrow because they’re not sure they can pay it back. Prices fall, so money paid back on a loan is more valuable than the borrowed money.

Bonner quotes Ben Bernacke, who is fully aware of the dangers but says the Feds can get around it with “a technology…called a printing press…”, and if need be can drop dollars from helicopters to get money into circulation (if you start subscribing to thedailyreckoning.com, that’s why he’s called “Helicopter” Ben). Of course Bonner says, Ben was being fanciful, the Fed won’t actually do this or the dollar would inflate faster than in Zimbabwe, where inflation is over 5,000% a year.

Basically, the Fed would prefer inflation – they’re already printing too much money. But they won’t be able to inflate their way out of the economic crisis, because the Feds won’t be able to get the money into the hands of the people who need it most, so we’ll eventually end up with deflation.

When Japan’s real estate and stock bubbles popped, everyone had a lot of savings, the country had a huge trade surplus, and there was no subprime lending problem. But in America the average person is in debt. Bonner asks “Can America afford a liquidity crunch…a credit contraction…a deflation? We don’t know…but if we were Ben Bernanke, we might want to make sure the printing presses and helicopters were in good running order.”

Real Estate Bubble. The sub-prime debacle has only just begun and is likely to widen to other sectors of the economy.

Japan’s equivalent of our baby boom generation began retiring and selling their homes in the late 1980’s, which burst their real estate bubble. By 1989 Japanese real estate and the stock market had gone down by 60%. Our baby boomers begin turning 65 in three years.

Alan Greenspan pointed out the market has a lot further to fall, due to a very large inventory of unsold, shoddy new homes that are deteriorating rapidly, which puts pressure on builders to sell them quickly, which could lead to far bigger price declines (Greenspan).

The last time the housing market nose-dived in the early 90’s. Americans had half as much debt as they do now and owned 70% of their homes – now their equity is down to 52%.

Insurance Rates Rising. Insurance companies have stopped insuring, or greatly increased the rates for hurricane, fire, health, etc to the point where some people are going with inadequate or no coverage.

Other Bubbles the past 35 years (Saxena 2006):

1970’s: sugar went up 45 times, oil 30, and gold and silver went up 24 times

1980’s: NIKKEI went up eight times

1980’s – 1990’s: NASDAQ went up 50 times, the DOW went up 14 times

Black Swans. Taleb, in his book “The Black Swan”, warns that the world is not the nice, predictable place we see it as. Rather, it’s full of awful and wonderful surprises that are likely to hit us over the head from out of nowhere. So to protect yourself against a financial Black Swan, you should invest 90% of it very conservatively, so you don’t lose it all. Some of the Black Swans potentially on the horizon are World War III over the remaining energy resources, a sudden decline in the value of the dollar, energy shocks, terrorists blowing up supertankers in the straits of Hormuz (which would prevent nearly half the world’s oil supplies from being delivered), a large earthquake in Tokyo or San Francisco, hurricanes knocking down refineries and oil platforms in the Gulf, any sort of major disruption in global trade since we’re so dependent on “just-in-time” delivery, a revolution in an oil state (i.e. Saudia Arabia, Nigeria), the collapse of Mexico (see theoildrum website’s “Mexico: A nation-state dissolves?” by Jeff Vail), a major nuclear disaster, etc.

In addition, China is in a massive speculation bubble, growing exponentially at rates of over 9% per year that can’t possibly be sustained. China’s history is one of cataclysmic paroxysms, so when, not if, they explode, let’s hope it’s inward and not outward.

Dailyreckoning.com has been writing about these issues in highly entertaining and intelligent prose for over a decade – they foresaw the dot com and housing bubble busts, and explain derivatives, CDO’s and other lurking financial monsters far better than I do. If you want to weather the coming storms financially, then subscribe to their email newsletter, and read anything Bill Bonner has ever written, especially “Financial Reckoning Day” and “Empire of Debt”.

Only recently have the mainstream papers begun to sound the alarm – the Wall Street Journal started to warn their readers about a year ago that “benign conditions will one day come undone. But for now, nobody can see how or why” (Sender 2007), “Eventually this confidence game will end” (Murry 2007), and “The longer the credit cycle lasts, the worse it will be when it ends” (Conway 2007).

Wall Street has always been Win-Lose, with the rich raking in the chips at the end of the game at the expense of the middle class suckers, who play with stocks for years, lulled by steady gains in the DOW. They stop paying attention, too distracted by TV, working overtime, and are brainwashed by conventional financial propaganda spouted by the few remaining news conglomerates. Then Bam! Wall Street swoops in on 401K and pension nest eggs, smashing them apart.

The Bottom Line: Any investments outside of commodities will vaporize, any job that can be offshored will be, and the culture is about to change – like it or not!

2013 note: back in 2007 I didn’t fully understand the deflationary side of the inflation/deflation debate, now I am convinced that Nicole Foss (aka Stoneleigh) at the http://theautomaticearth.com/ has the best grasp of what’s going on and how to cope with it. My 2007 recommendation of commodities is not a good one, it will “cost” so much money (energy) to get the remaining oil, coal, and natural gas out of the ground that profits will be slim to eventually non-existent.

References FT = Financial Times WSJ = Wall Street Journal

Alonso-Zaldiver, R. Dec 20, 2004. “Medicare’s Troubles May Be Sleeping Giant.The program could run out of funds two decades before Social Security is forecast to, experts say”. Los Angeles Times.

BBC News. Mar 4, 2003. Buffett warns on investment ‘time bomb’.

Beales, R. Apr 26, 2007 “Fink warns of fallout from leveraged loans”. FT.

Bonner, Bill. Aug 6, 2007. thedailyreckoning.com

Brown, Ellen. 29 March 2013. It Can Happen Here: The Confiscation Scheme Planned for US and UK Depositors. The Web of Debt.

Cauchon, D. Oct 3, 2004. “Part I: The looming national benefit crisis”. USA TODAY. www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-10-03-debt-cover_x.htm

Conway, William. April 24, 2007. “Secretive sector steps into the glare of publicity”. FT

Davies, P. Sep 13, 2007. “So what’s it worth when there’s no regular market?” FT.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/51f80dfe-6192-11dc-bf25-0000779fd2ac.html

Fitts, Catherine Austin. May 27, 2004. “America’s Black Budget & Manipulation of Markets”. Financial Sense NewsHour. http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0405/S00268.htm

Gordon, M. Feb 16, 2007. “Do we condemn or cheer the flight to private equity?” FT.

Greenspan, Alan. Sep 17, 2007. “Greenspan’s Dismay Extends Both Ways”. WSJ.

Guha, K. Jun 5, 2007. Graduates in US not immune to earnings inequality. Research will fuel middle class unease. Bargaining power of workers reduced. FT.

Irwin, N. Apr 5, 2006. Is Reliance on Real Estate a Crack in the Foundation? Washington Post.

Monks, J. June 4, 2007. Europe should not give in to casino capitalists. FT.

Murry, Alan. Jan 2007. Alan Murry. “Money Is Everywhere, but for how long?” WSJ

Saxena, P. Apr 21, 2006. “Cash is Trash”. http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/saxena/2006/0421.html

Schwanhausser, Mark. Sep. 29, 2002. ‘Accounting Gimmick’ Based on Pensions Needs Rethinking, Analysts Say. Knight Ridder/Tribune.

Sender, Henry. Jan 2007. “Investors Riding the ‘Cash’ Rapids”. WSJ.

Patterson, S. July 2, 2007. Subprime Flu Sheds a Light on Derivatives. WSJ.

Piketty, T. Jan 11, 2007. “How the Income Share of the top 1% of Families has Increased Dramatically”. WSJ.

Richardson, K; Reilly, D. Aug 13, 2007. “Money funds may hold subprime, too”. WSJ

Smith, R. Apr 20, 2007. “As Funds Leverage Up, Fears of Reckoning Rise. Fed & SEC Question Wall Street on Policies; ‘A Mockery’ of Margin”. WSJ.

Wessel, D. Mar 30, 2007. “Pain From Free Trade Spurs Second Thoughts”. WSJ

Posted in Crash Coming Soon, Economic Instability | Tagged derivateves, distribution of wealth, hedge funds, leveraged debt, pensions, unemployment | Comments Off

We are over the edge of the Energy Cliff

Posted on March 29, 2013 by energyskeptic

Figure 1. Conventional Oil Production vs. Conventional Oil Discoveries. NOTE: These conventional oil reserves DO NOT include Heavy oil or Oil Sands.

Preface. I don’t know who wrote what follows, I was on the end of a chain of many forwarded emails. It appears to be a summary of the newsletter “Steve Angelo, SRSrocco in Energy, Silver Members on November 23, 2022″. Interesting if true…

Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 & 278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts

I will show THREE CHARTS on why the Peak in Conventional Oil Production is the ENERGY CLIFF.

The Global Economy has grown on the back of high-quality, high EROI, conventional oil production. While we have added a significant amount of U.S. shale oil and Alberta oil sands, this low-quality unconventional oil supply cannot sustain our High-Tech Global Economy that needs a much higher EROI of Oil to pay for everything. Thus, there is no coincidence that world debt has doubled from $150 trillion in 2008 to over $303 trillion in 2021 to bring on this lower-quality oil.

Let’s start with Cumulative Oil Discoveries vs. Cumulative Crude Oil & Condensate Production. You will notice a troubling sign. The Graph of Cumulative Conventional Oil Discoveries has been leveling off in the past decade while production (consumption) continues higher. So, if we look at conventional oil production vs. conventional oil discoveries… We have already PAST THE POINT OF NO RETURN (figure 1). The chart above shows that conventional oil discoveries are not moving up in the same trend as cumulative oil production. Thus, the world is devouring its past conventional oil discoveries (remaining reserves) much faster than it’s replacing them. In a nutshell, the world is EATING ITS SEED CORN of oil. GOOD GRIEF…

The data from the following two charts came from Jean Laherrère. I started using data from Rystad, but Jean let me know the figures Rystad puts out are likely INFLATED. Furthermore, these charts are based upon my analysis and may differ slightly from Jean regarding remaining reserves, but not by much. Again, this analysis is to provide a Fundamental View of the Conventional Oil Energy Cliff.

The following chart (figure 2) shows cumulative conventional oil production vs. remaining oil reserves… and this is very important to understand. If we subtract the cumulative oil production from cumulative discoveries, we get the REMAINING OIL RESERVES. This is not a pretty picture.

Of course, we will continue to discover more conventional oil reserves, but this won’t be much compared to the past. Again, that is why the cumulative oil discovery trend in the first chart, figure 1, is PLATEAUING.

Returning to figure 2, you will notice that the HALFWAY Mark for the Remaining Reserves and Cumulative Oil Production was met in 2003. Thus, it’s no coincidence that the oil price began to surge after that period as the world peaked in conventional oil production (Shown in figure 3 below).

According to Jean’s data, my analysis shows the HALFWAY mark at 958 billion barrels (Gb). With Cumulative oil production at 1,444 Gb and with only 683 Gb of Remaining Reserves, we have reached the CONVENTIONAL OIL ENERGY CLIFF. We are now really devouring conventional oil reserves at a breakneck speed.

Since 2003, the world has been consuming more of its remaining oil reserves than it has been discovering. This picked up speed, especially after 2011, shown in the WHITE DOTTED LINE… and where the oil price averaged over $100 a barrel for the next three years.

Figure 2. Conventional oil production versus remaining oil reserves

The last chart (figure 3) shows there is a relationship between the fundamental factors of Conventional Oil Production vs. Discoveries and Remaining Reserves to the Brent Crude Oil Price.Figure 3 Annual Brent Crude oil price from 1987-2020

We can see that the average annual Brent Crude Oil price began to surge after 2003 when the world reached the HALFWAY Mark as we reached peak conventional oil production. As the world continued to consume more of its reserves than it was being replaced, the price jumped to over $100 and stayed there for three years until U.S. shale oil production came on in a BIG WAY.

So, with the world being saved by U.S. Shale oil and Canadian Oil Sands, the Brent Crude Oil price declined to allow BUSINESS AS USUAL to continue. Unfortunately, U.S. shale oil production has likely peaked or will peak shortly, and will collapse by 2030.

This is why I continue to stick with my forecast of the ENERGY CLIFF beginning circa 2025.

PS. I wrote this in 2013, so you can’t say I didn’t warn you!

Here we are at the energy cliff, approaching the time we warned everyone about. Wiley coyote is over the edge, legs wheeling in the air.

In California it’s warm and sunny, home prices are going up, Silicon Valley is booming again. Almost impossible to believe it won’t continue this way! Not even after having studied this more than the average person.

I don’t dare talk about peak oil and resource depletion in my social circles. At this point I’m told point blank no one wants to venture into my dark world, and I think some are hoping I’ll apologize about being wrong now that fracking has brought us energy independence (NOT).

What’s coming is so much bigger than any tragedy in history, than any war, epidemic — a 6th extinction event that may nail us as well.

So you could consider peak fossil fuels a blessing, a chance at not going extinct, since the remaining fossil fuels that are left are hard to get at, often stranded, and will take so much time and energy to extract that society will have to stop growing and start to contract, bringing on wars and social unrest, preventing us from getting every last bit of what’s left.

I often wonder how many people are watching ecological collapse approach. A wild guess, given the membership at peakoil.com of 33000, America2point0 550, energyresources 2700, runningonempty2 7400, and another 60,000 in theoildrum, ASPO, transition towns, universities, non-english speaking forums I don’t know about, and local peak oil forums, minus a large overlap in membership, and further subtracting a third of the people on these forums who don’t get that solar, wind, nuclear, biofuels and so on won’t save us from a liquid fuels crisis, gives me a rough guess of about 50,000 actively watching the cliff approach.

Since Hubbert’s curve isn’t a symmetric bell curve, but rather a cliff because of net energy loss, is there any town, ranch, or farm in the world that won’t feel the repercussions?

Since the collapse will be seen as a financial crash by most people, and blamed on the government, Wall Street, and corporations – not carrying capacity hitting the wall of oil and resource depletion — it would be a shame if no one understood what really happened.

So with the coming collapse in mind I try to travel and see friends and family more often. What my friends consider my “dark place” has its virtues. I’m keenly aware of how lucky I am to live at the peak of human civilization, to be closer to a Goddess than a Queen flying 40,000 feet above the earth in an airplane, zooming at 80 miles and hour through Utah salt flats with thousands of energy slaves at my service (Buckminster Fuller).

When I volunteer to take 4th and 5th graders on hikes at a nature preserve, I start by asking them to open their eyes and try to see everything, cup their hands around their ears to hear every sound better, to smell the aromas of flowers and the scents of the damp earth, to let all sensations flow in. I give them hardware store paint samples with many colors of green and ask them to match one of these colors exactly with a leaf so they notice how many shades of green there are, which leads them to notice the textures and shapes of leaves as well.

The bright side of Post Carbon is not such a dark place, I expect that many of us share a more vivid appreciation of the beauty around us, the freedom to travel where we please, can even be more patient in traffic jams knowing we might be nostalgic about them ten years from now.

Perhaps our role is to be among the few witnesses who weren’t fooled by Business As Usual, and watched the approaching tsunami with eyes wide open.

Alice Friedemann

Buckminster Fuller: “Energy slave unit = average output of a man doing 150,000 foot-pounds of work per day, 250 days per year. In low-energy societies, non-human energy slaves are horses, oxen, windmills, riverboats. Now, the average American has more than 8,000 energy-slaves at his or her disposal, and these slaves can work under extreme conditions: no sleep, 5,000° F, at 400,000 pounds per square inch pressure, etc”

Posted in Peak Oil | Tagged energy cliff, peak oil | 1 Comment

A Huge Solar Plant Opens, Facing Doubts About Its Future

Posted on March 23, 2013 by energyskeptic

A Huge Solar Plant Opens, Facing Doubts About Its Future

By DIANE CARDWELL and MATTHEW L. WALD FEB. 13, 2014. New York Times.

The Ivanpah solar power plant:

Cost $2.2 billion dollars to build
Can energize 140,000 homes ($15,714 per home). There are at least 12 million homes in California, so you’d need to build at least 86 more plants for almost $190 billion dollars
Stretches over more than 5 square miles of the Mojave Desert.
350,000 mirrors the size of garage doors tilt toward the sun
The plant, which took almost 4 years and thousands of workers assembling millions of parts to complete, officially opened on Thursday, the first electric generator of its kind. It could also be the last.
solar thermal technology only works at large scale and in certain locations.
Ivanpah could stabilize voltage but has little storage,
Ivanpah needs to have a natural gas backup.

Since the project began, the price of rival technologies has plummeted, incentives have begun to disappear and the appetite among investors for mammoth solar farms has waned. Although several large, new projects have been coming online in recent months — many in the last quarter of 2013 — experts say fewer are beginning construction and not all of those under development will be completed.

“I don’t think that we’re going to see large-scale solar thermal plants popping up, five at a time, every year in the U.S. in the long-term — it’s just not the way it’s going to work,” said Matthew Feinstein, a senior analyst at Lux Research. Photo Ernest Moniz, the energy secretary, touring the plant, which received a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee.

Posted in Concentrated Solar Power | Comments Off

Oakland Depletion Protocol

Posted on March 18, 2013 by energyskeptic

Oakland, California: Local Depletion Protocol

By Alice Friedemann

Latest revision February 21, 2006

Note: I’ve been adding to this as time permits since April 2005, as I read about the history of agriculture, transportation, etc. This was first posted July 22, 2005 in yahoo group energyresources. Clearly engineers, organic farmers, and others with detailed knowledge in infrastructure and farming need to be brought in to the discussion as soon as possible.

We’re at or near the peak of global oil production. Fossil fuels like oil, natural gas, and coal make everything we depend on possible – growing and distributing food, clean water, electricity, transportation, manufacturing, and so on. From now on, the cost of energy will inexorably rise. It’s not clear how an economic system based on endless growth the past two centuries will handle a shrinking economy, where debts can’t be counted on to be repaid.

There are no substitutes for fossil fuels ready to step in. Even if Robert Hirsch’s stopgap measures were constructed, it would take decades to implement.[1] Long-term, the only possible energy source that could replace fossil fuels is fusion, and that is not ready now and probably never will be.[2]

The time to prepare is now, while times are good, while there is still cheap energy available, and we still have highly-educated engineers who can design the infrastructure we’ll need as we descend from oil, natural gas, and coal back to the age of wood.

A protocol for fossil fuel depletion has been written at a global level.[3] This protocol asks each country to reduce its imports of fossil fuels to match the current World Depletion Rate. The stakes are very high — if every nation follows these guidelines, we may be able to avoid a world war over the remaining oil fields.

But such a protocol must actually be implemented at local levels. Oakland needs to consider how it might be done here.

The basic needs that need to be met are food, clean water, shelter, garbage and sewage disposal, and a heat source to cook with (and purify water).

Food

One possibility is to have Oakland residents grow their own food, because it will become very expensive as the costs of growing and transporting it continue to rise. Plus it will be unavailable in grocery stores at times when shelves are emptied when events like oil shocks, pandemics, or earthquakes strike.

Oakland has 425,000 people in 60.25 square miles, or 38,560 acres, giving each person 3,950 square feet of land if every road, building, driveway, parking lot, and sidewalk were scraped off the land. The flatlands of Oakland used to consist of farms, but as you can see below, the average residential area is very built up and has little land available.

The land that’s still open may have one or more of these additional problems:

1) Industrial land is often polluted with heavy metals and chemicals. This makes it difficult and even impossible for plants to grow, and potentially toxic. Homeowners use even more chemicals on their gardens and lawns than industrial agriculture.

2) Land that’s too steep, because such land has thin topsoil which is quickly eroded.

3) Land too forested or rocky to grow anything.

4) Land near a freeway may have dangerous levels of lead.

5) A large percentage of Oakland residents live in apartments with no yards. Land that could be turned into community gardens and orchards often isn’t within walking distance.

6) There’s no summer rain, and potential winter droughts.

7) Crops need sunshine, much of the land available is shaded by buildings or trees.

8) There’s not enough public or private water storage, and pumping can’t be counted on since this is very energy intensive. Nor would it make sense to deliver the enormous amounts of water agriculture requires here rather than the fertile Central Valley.

9) The cemeteries in Oakland take up about 400 acres of land, but much of it is not level, and embalming chemicals might make it an unsafe place to grow food.

10) Although some people may have roofs strong enough for roof top gardens, most are too steep or weak to support heavy soils. Use of vermiculite and peat moss would lighten the soil load, but these are both expensive and energy intensive.

The largest areas appropriate areas available are golf courses, the land around Lake Merritt, and school yards. Over time, perhaps some of the brown fields could be reclaimed by heaping green waste on top, and letting it break down into compost, but it would take many years. It would be best to remediate these areas now.

The method of farming requiring the least amount of land is John Jeavons “Bio-intensive Mini-farming”,[4] which requires an average of 4,000 square feet per person (more if the soil quality is poor or there is less than 20 inches of rainfall). It takes ten years to learn how to farm this way, because it requires a variety of skills: detailed planning to always have a wide variety of crops in the ground (to prevent erosion and organic pest control); composting, seed harvesting, knowing what grows well in the local micro-climate, and so on. Also, it takes years to double-dig the soil two feet deep, add organic matter, and to build up proper soil structure.

Around 90% of the land in Oakland is not available to grow food, leaving an average of 500 square feet per resident, and it’s likely only a very small percent of this land consists of deep level soils with the nutrients and structure for growing crops.

What can be done

The best hope for Oakland is planting as many fruit and nut trees as possible, which would provide more high-quality calories per square foot than any other crop. There are many groups in the Bay Area that can help choose which kinds would work best in this climate, such as the California Rare Fruit Growers, the University of California, the Merritt Landscaping department, Master Gardeners, Permaculturists, etc. These experts might also be able to estimate what percent of Oakland’s food needs could be met, how to prevent droughts from killing orchard trees, how to use integrated pest management to minimize bugs and disease, the best ways to keep squirrels and birds from taking most of the crop, provide cuttings to graft multiple varieties onto trees to spread fruit crops out over time, calculate how much water would be required, etc.

Community, school, and home gardens should be encouraged. High quality soil can be brought in now, and continually enriched with compost. The compost can come from yard trimmings, leaves, kitchen scraps, and so on, which is currently taken over sixty miles to be composted. Garbage collection has always been a huge problem for cities to solve, so as energy declines, it will become critical to find ways to recycle waste locally as much as possible, and at least the “green waste” can be used to build up existing soil. Parking lots should be depaved as soon as possible to give the soil time to recover from compaction and enriched with green waste and compost to improve soil structure and nutrition.

Hills residents will be eager to own goats, not only for their milk, but to keep the fire hazard down. Anyone who can afford to feed chickens and ducks should be encouraged to do so.

Food from the Central Valley

The central valley provides over a third of the food for the United States.

Ten calories of fossil fuels are used to grow one calorie of food now, so as energy declines, growing and distributing food will cost more. Part of this energy is due to nitrogen-based fertilizers, which use natural gas as a feedstock and energy source to make. Natural gas has peaked in North America and is a more immediate challenge than the depletion of oil.

Nitrogen fertilizers do tremendous damage to the environment – they poison drinking ground water and have made bodies of water, like the Gulf of Mexico “dead via eutrophication — areas become so deprived of oxygen that fish can’t survive. But these fertilizers have also allowed us to grow up to five times as much food, and not have to grow food on marginal land that would quickly erode if used for agriculture.

The food that can be produced in the Central Valley is going to further decline because all of the models for global warming show less water being available to grow crops in the future. This will result in a shorter growing season, and the increased heat will make crops transpire more, requiring even more water.

One of the reasons there will be less water is due to early snow melt in the Sierras. Now the snow melts over a long period, continually releasing water to reservoirs that feed agriculture so crops can be grown in some places year round, and everywhere there is a longer growing season. But if the snow all melts suddenly in January and February, we don’t have, and can’t build, the reservoirs to contain this water, so it will have to be released.

But even if water is released during the winter as snow melts months earlier than usual, there will be years of extreme rainfall and snow melt which could cause massive flooding beyond anything we’ve ever experienced, and take out some of the levee system in the San Joaquin delta. This would harm the drinking water for 18 million Californians.[5] It would also take away four percent of the crops grown in the state. The levees will be taken out one way or another, if not by winter flooding, then by rising sea levels.

When the levees go, this will be devastating for Oakland, because historically farmers in the delta region floated produce to Bay Area cities[6]. This region grows more variety of crops than any other region in California, and has the richest soils. More food can be floated out on the tides and currents than could be done with trains and trucks.

California has a Mediterranean climate – rain does not fall in the summer when crops need water most. So irrigation water is used, which requires pumping water. That is a very energy intensive process, so as energy declines, there will be areas that won’t be able to be farmed anymore.

Irrigation also salinizes the soil. There are already areas in the central valley that can’t be farmed because they’ve become too salty.

Recently, ice cores drilled in Greenland, the Himalayas, and other glaciers have revealed that the past ten thousand years have had the most stable weather in the past 150,000 years. This is what may have even allowed us to develop agriculture and civilization. Before then, what prevailed was extreme weather – droughts, flooding, early and late frosts, violent storms – problems that made reliable harvests impossible. As food production becomes increasingly local, and the effects of global warming induce more extreme weather, bad harvests will have greater impacts.

Oakland is a city with a port, so it’s possible for food to be imported, because ships, especially sailing vessels, will continue to be able to ply the sea. But the current infrastructure is built for container ships. As we stair-step downward, there will be a need for engineers to anticipate the next leg down, and to have built two-mile long piers jutting out into the bay to receive thousands of sailing vessels, sloops, barges, and smaller, non-containerized ships. At some point it will be a good idea to take an acetylene torch to container ships and recycle them into smaller boats.

There was a time when California’s rivers were navigable by steamboats far into the central valley, for example, as far as Redding on the Sacramento river. But during the gold mining era, sediment clogged the rivers and to this day they remain non-navigable by larger ships. And even in the 19^th century, there were times when the rivers ran too low for steamship travel.

The first steamships to ply the delta to Sacramento and Stockton burned wood cut down by farmers to grow crops, typically 40 cords of wood per day. When the wood ran out, coal imported from Australia was burned. Although California has some coal deposits, it is of such poor quality that it can’t be used to power steamships and trains. And we certainly don’t have enough wood to ever power steamships or trains again.

As we lurch backward through time, it behooves engineers now to be thinking about how ships and trains could burn coal without emitting greenhouse gases, and how to even get coal here in the first place. Australia is still probably the best bet, because 40% of trains are currently hauling coal to power plants and are not able to keep up with the demand. These trains never climb more than a 2% grade, so getting coal to California overland is probably more expensive than shipping it from Australia. If there’s any coal to ship – China may decide that they want Australian coal all to themselves, and we’ve provided China with enough scrap metal to build warships for them to enforce that edict.

Because coal is also a finite fossil fuel, which will deplete within fifty years of less if turned to as an alternative to oil, planners need to be preparing for the next step down the energy ladder way ahead of time.

Clearly at some point horses, oxen, and other large animals will be required, not only to haul freight but for the nitrogen in their manure. Since they each require an average of six acres of land to be fed, and it takes a team of ten horses or mules to haul up to 9 tons of cargo five miles a day on level ground (ref 6), a great deal of land and beasts will be required if we resort to animal power. A truck can haul 30 tons of cargo 500 miles a day. If the 6 million residents of the Bay area eat three pounds of food a day, that’s 18 million pounds of food, or 9,000 tons that needs to be delivered. Which would take 10,000 horses (1,000 teams of ten horses) for each five mile segment required to haul farm produce to the nearest train or port. And at each five mile stop, there needs to be food and water for the animals and drivers.

The alternative of course, is that humans become the beasts of burden, quite likely since there isn’t enough land to feed both animals and people. The website www.bikesatwork.com has a calculator for how much cargo a bicyclist can haul. When I plugged some numbers in, I found that a 200 lb person with no grade and steady output could haul 437 lbs at 5 mph (for how far in a day I don’t know). If they can haul 437 pounds to a train or port in a day, you’d need 41,000 bicyclists.

Even in the past when there were a lot fewer people, mile-long horse jams would occur at ports and other loading places, so someone needs to consider how that could be prevented with our need to haul orders of magnitude more food to more people.

Continuing to use our road systems requires rubber wheels, iron wheels would quickly rip up the roadways.[7] Roads require a great deal of energy to construct and often are constructed with oil as a feedstock (the bitumen in asphalt).

If we bring the people to the food, do we build skyscrapers so as to minimize the land taken up? How high could you build them given that people would be going up stairs and not using elevators?

There are several problems that could interfere with such a food delivery system in the future:

1) Problem: Failure of the San Joaquin levee system from many causes: earthquake, massive floods from early snow pack melting, sea level rise, act of terrorism, or even beavers (e.g. Jones Tract Levee in 2004), which would not only destroy some of the best farmland in the nation.

Solution(s): diversify food supply by getting produce from farms along the coast and imported food (container ships are as fuel-efficient as trains). The city of Oakland should own a mix of sail and shallow draft boats that can navigate the Delta water ways regardless of whether the levees are standing to be in a position of delivering food to its citizens. Strengthen the infrastructure delivering water from the Mokelumne watershed so that levee failure doesn’t impact our drinking water.

2) Problem: There are millions of people living in the Central valley who are much closer to farms than Oakland is, so much of the produce might be sold before getting here.

Solution(s): trade seafood and internationally imported products for food from the central valley.

3) Problem: As automated harvesting equipment lies idle during energy shortages, an even larger agricultural workforce will need to come in to harvest the crops, and they will need to eat, which will cut back the amount of food that can be shipped out. Since transportation will be a large problem in the future, these workers will tend to live locally and be far less mobile than today’s farm workers.

Solution(s): Oakland owned farms that Oakland residents can seasonally reside at during planting and harvesting seasons. Which would help solve the massive unemployment and bread line problems.

4) From two to five times as much food is grown with fossil fuel based fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides as could otherwise be grown otherwise, so as fossil fuels decline, so too will food production decline.

Solution(s): start training and requiring central valley farmers to use organic bio-intensive methods, which can produce as much food as industrial agriculture does now for most crops. These special methods will allow the soil to last for thousands of years, instead of the hundreds or less of the current destructive methods. This style of farming is very labor intensive, but since there will be so many hungry, unemployed people, this could be seen as a blessing rather than a problem.

5) California provides nearly all of America’s almonds and enormous percentages of other fruit and nut crops.[8] Fruit and nut trees are particularly vulnerable to pests because there are so many species that prey on them, brought in from all over the world.[9] Therefore, fruit will be difficult to grow organically. Also, fruit crops tend to ripen all at once, depend on refrigeration, and need to be extremely well-coordinated in their shipping and distribution to arrive before rotting. In a world with less energy, fruit will no longer be able to be shipped across the United States as it is now, and as energy declines, it will be difficult to deliver it even to California cities in time.

Solution(s): The university system needs to receive more grant money to study Integrated Pest Management, how to create healthy soils, and so on to fight off pests naturally. More grain, and less produce, will need to be grown in the future.

6) If an adequate amount of produce does make it to Oakland, more people will move here from regions of the United States with little food or extremely hot and cold weather, which at some point will make it difficult to buy food again here.

Solution(s): extremely high taxes on anyone with more than one child, no more development, lowered immigration numbers into the United States, limit the population of Oakland to 400,000 people, and as people leave or die, try to bring the population down to a more sustainable one of 100,000 or less.[10] [11]

7) To the extent that thieves, pirates, and other brigands attempt to steal produce before it reaches Oakland, supplies will even be further diminished. This sort of crime will discourage farmers from even trying to market their produce this far away.

Solution(s): Make food distribution as fair as possible to minimize the need for extra security forces. Try to get some regional planning going by giving more power to the regional agencies to enforce civil order throughout the state.

8) The rest of the United States and the world will be offering more money for California food than many Oakland residents will be able to pay. There may be a policy of the federal government to sell food for oil and natural gas, and China has enough of a surplus trade with the USA at this point that they could afford to buy all of our grain.

Solution(s): What’s the point of having a government if it doesn’t protect its citizens? Try to enact laws that only surplus produce can be sold.

Farmers should be at the pinnacle of society and rewarded far more than they are now. There also need to be more farms and more farmers. The history of California has been one of very large farms worked by armies of poorly housed and fed temporary laborers, the opposite of the Jeffersonian ideal. Anything that could be done to break large farms into smaller acreages where people could grow their own food would greatly lessen the suffering in the future.

The vast majority of money spent on food finds its way to middlemen who sell unhealthy, life-shortening products to us at ten times the cost of the natural ingredients. For example, most products with flour are not whole grain, but flour that’s had the vitamins, minerals, protein, healthy fats, and fiber stripped out.

By having consumers trade with farmers as directly as possible, we will all be healthier, and the inflationary pressures that rising energy costs will bring can be lowered, because now all the excessive processing, packaging, advertising, and distribution costs can be eliminated or minimized.

There are huge issues with making the transition from growing food with industrial methods to sustainable organic practices. There won’t be natural gas based fertilizer at some point. Since agriculture is a closed cycle, the manure from the cities needs to be returned to the land in the country. California grows food in monoculture, but needs to grow as many crops as possible locally in the future, not only because food needs to be grown locally. Crop diversity is also one of the ways that farmers can wean themselves from oil-based pesticides since this will make Integrated Pest management far easier. Farmers also depend on hybrid seeds and varieties of genetically engineered plants that can handle the herbicides dumped on them to destroy weeds, but they need to switch ASAP to non-hybrid seeds of as many varieties as possible.

Then there is the bigger picture – California provides one-third of the nations food. California needs to encourage other states to pass tax laws that encourage small family farms as soon as possible. If that is impossible in many places due to acid rain having acidified the soil too much to grow crops, then amending the soil to raise the pH is a top priority. Since we are likely to turn to coal in desperation, it becomes critical that only “clean coal” plants with CO2 sequestration and pollution control are built and existing plants retrofitted, whatever the energy and monetary cost.

Water and Sewage

A great deal of the water used in Oakland flows by gravity from the Sierras. But EBMUD will still need energy to:

Pump water and sewage
Purify water
Maintain pipes, storage systems, and other water delivery infrastructure
Maintain sewer pipes and sewage treatment plant
Treat wastewater

All of the global warming predictions for California show higher temperatures and less water availability due to early snowmelt and possibly less rainfall, so water harvesting and storage at a state, city, and homeowner level is essential.

Currently, water distribution and sewage use 7% of our energy.

Violence

Oakland has much higher than the average national rates of murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, Burglary, larceny, and car theft. There are a large number of violent gangs.

If there is great hardship at some point, even ordinary people will find themselves getting unreasonably cranky, angry and hot-tempered as they become afraid, hungry, tired, or cold. There will be a great need for arbitrators and for people to learn these skills themselves.

Unfortunately, maintaining civil order will probably consume a large amount of the dwindling energy resources.

Wood and Coal

People will need to cook their food, and the wealthy will burn wood and coal to keep warm in the winter.

What can be done

1) Allowance of gray water systems at residences.

2) Some sewage treatment via wetlands as is done in Arcata.

3) Add more rail lines in the central valley to transport food and people.

4) Set up city granaries and water storage. As fuel becomes scarce and intermittently available, being able to move large quantities of grain into local storage when possible would smooth distribution bumps.

5) The city of Oakland could contract to buy food directly from farmers.

6) If it’s legal, the city could even buy farms. There will be a great deal of unemployment as businesses collapse from high fuel prices and shortages.[12] [13] [14] This would provide a valuable jobs program for Oakland.

7) The city should have a fleet of sailboats and other water craft to navigate the delta and coast to bring food back to the city. This will also provide jobs.

8) Residents should be encouraged to store their own food and water. The city should provide, at cost, water and food-safe containers and manual grain grinders.

9) The city of Oakland should also provide solar ovens at cost. Not only can food be cooked in these over the course of a day, water can also be pasteurized. For days when the sun isn’t shining, and the natural gas isn’t flowing, there are cooking devices that need mere twigs to cook food, and passive highly-insulated boxes that continue to cook heated food without additional heat.

10) California has one of the most extensive irrigation systems in the world. There are hundreds of miles of irrigation canals. Water transportation is the most energy efficient form of transport — we need to investigate whether the major canals can be made navigable. “Gondoliers” could pole produce down the larger canals and rivers.

11) We should also do research to see if it would be feasible to cover the irrigation canals to limit evaporation and sedimentation. This would also limit the growth of weeds, algae, and invasive water plants, which clog canals and provide habitat for mosquitoes, snails and other pests. Or allow invasive water plants to grow, but harvest them to make compost. We won’t have the energy to fight invasive species anymore, so we need to come up with low-energy strategies.

12) Bicyclists and horses could deliver the produce to the canal network. The cargo in the gondolas would be trans-loaded to sailboats and larger barges in the delta, where river craft would take advantage of the tides, wind, and currents to make their way to the Bay Area.

13) We should restore the Bay Area estuary and wetlands to bring back the fisheries and waterfowl that once made this one of the most productive estuaries on earth. That way the sailboats returning to the central valley can take back seafood from the Bay Area (and other products too: tools, medicine, books, etc).

14) Oakland could start punching holes in parking lots now to let the soil begin recovering, eventually de-paving as cars disappear. Over time, the soils can be restored and turned into community gardens and orchards.

15) There should be a moratorium on all development, except along train lines and major transportation corridors.

16) The city should create tax incentives for tearing down buildings and converting land that’s already open space into community gardens. It’s been seven years since Berkeley gave permission to a neighborhood to start a community orchard, and it is only now finally happening. These projects take time, because there are many issues to resolve. Time is running out, this needs to be done now.

17) Food should be delivered to neighborhood centers within walking distance of homes rather than the current system, where everyone drives to stores. This will mean redistricting to more mixed business and residential, perhaps even tearing down homes and replacing them with businesses.

18) The hills are well suited to goats that could provide dairy products to sell. Goats will also be essential for fire protection.

19) Encourage people to have chickens, eggs are a very good source of protein.

If nothing is done, we’re headed for a much scarier sequel of “Grapes of Wrath, as millions migrate from the cities and the rest of the nation into the central valley to find farm worker jobs. A new class of large landowners will rule – we’ll have feudalism instead of a Jeffersonian nation of small farmers.

Since at least three out of ten people must go back to the land (until the coal-driven industrial revolution, it was nine out of ten), it would be better for everyone if the government or groups of individuals bought farm land and built energy efficient housing there as soon as possible. Each family would own a section of the surrounding land.

Oakland staff and city council members should set up meetings with all of the neighborhood associations to educate the local people on the challenges ahead. Our neighborhood has pooled our resources to buy several sets of firefighting hoses, a similar approach could be taken to buy water purification, water and food storage containers, and so on, that neighbors could pool their money to buy at cost from the city as compost bins are now. Car sharing and other programs can be set up to be implemented as needed ahead of time.

Given the average American’s lack of ecological and scientific literacy, magical thinking, and a retreat from reality caused by watching television several hours a day, this will be quite a challenge.

Bay Area Carrying Capacity

The residents of San Francisco Bay Area cities rely on an area nearly the size of California and Oregon combined so sustain themselves (146 million acres), about 21 acres per person. If everyone on earth lived at the same standard of living, we’d need more than 4.5 earths.[15] Localization and living a simpler lifestyle needs to start now.

Conclusion

You could look at Peak Oil as a logistical battle looming ahead: how to ship goods, water, and so on, with less energy, from agricultural areas that are often far from cities. And how to grow the same amount of food organically, how to pump water from depleted water tables with minimal energy use (windmills can only bring water up from 20 feet or less), how to get “armies” of people from cities to farms to harvest crops in a short window of time, etc. Many of the cities in Calfornia are built on top of the best farm land, so stopping further development is an important step to take as soon as possible.

Basically it’s a retreat – how do we fall back in time? Clearly we are falling back to the Age of Wood, kicking and screaming all the way. If we planned for this transition now, we could build more rugged non-rusting aluminum sailboats and wagons than we will be able to build later, especially with wood being so scarce now that we’ve cut down so many of our trees. What we don’t cut will likely burn as the climate warms and forest fires become more frequent.

The longer we wait, the more difficult it will be, because now we have the material and energy to prepare. Once energy declines, the ability to adapt will be much harder, even impossible at times, because what energy remains will be totally devoted to keeping as much running as possible.

Since there are no energy replacements for oil except for fusion, which isn’t available now or possible ever, the only rational thing to do is to figure out how to re-architect society to cause the least harm possible.

History textbooks are famous for talking about how horse carriage makers went out of business when Henry Ford started making cars, now it’s time to talk about how to get autoworkers to make horse carriages again.

We need to stop building on farmland now. As it is, many major cities are sitting on top of what used to be the best prime farm land.

We need to move more people back to more farms (there are 1.9 million farms now, in 1935 there were 7 million farms). Do we start breeding mules and horses like mad for transport, or would they require too much land for hay? Do we try to move people back to the land, and get 50 million small farms going (using Jeavons or other biointensive methods)?

This sounds awfully wacky, I know we won’t go from the 21st century to 13th overnight, but it will be awfully fast because of factors beyond oil depletion (i.e. politics, economics, acts of terrorism, the possibility of WW III over the remaining resources, pandemics, extreme weather, lower standards of living driving the crime rate up, etc), and most of all, not having prepared for what we knew was coming ahead of time.

To prevent chaos and suffering, we need to look at the impact Peak Oil will have on the basics: food and water. Food production is heavily dependent on oil and natural gas, so the amount of food that can be produced and distributed will decline at the rate of fossil fuel depletion.[16] [17]

People will travel far less often as rationing, shortages, and the prices of oil increases.

Agriculture and water agencies will be given the lions’ share of energy.[18] As infrastructure breaks down and costs more to repair over time, delivery of food to the Bay Area will become less reliable.

Many think that ethanol and bio-fuels will propel vehicles in the future, but there is a great deal of evidence to show that these products require more fossil fuel energy to make than is delivered in the final product.[19] [20] Topsoil is our greatest possession. Land used to grow ethanol and bio-fuels would also decrease the amount of land available for food, deplete the fertility of the soil, and increase soil erosion.

Population must go down in step with the depletion of fossil fuels. It can be done by limiting immigration, making abortion and birth control free and easily accessible, taxing families with more than one child, etc. And there is a huge incentive. If we don’t do it, Mother Nature will, and with a Malthusian vengeance through starvation, disease, violence and chaos.

Government is going to have to reinvent itself to make decisions based on ecology. The “endless growth on a finite planet” point of view was born from the discovery of the Americas, “empty” continents with unexploited resources, and then the discovery of oil, which has given us the delusion we could increase productivity and grow forever.

References

[1] Robert L. Hirsch 2005 Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management. http://www.hilltoplancers.org/stories/hirsch0502.pdf

[2] M. Hoffert, et al. November 1, 2002. Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet. Science, 298: 981-987.

[3] The Uppsala Protocol http://www.peakoil.net/uhdsg/UppsalaProtocol.html

[4] John Jeavons 2002. How to Grow More Vegetables: And Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine Ten Speed Press

[5] Bettina Boxall. September 19, 2005. California’s Levees Are in Sorry Shape. Los Angeles Times.

http://velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us/pipermail/env-trinity/2005/000630.html

[6] Richard Street. 2004. Beasts of the Field: A History of California Farm Workers, 1769-1913. Stanford University Press.

[7] Brian Hayes. 2005. Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape. W. W. Norton.

[8] California Department of Food and Agriculture

[9] Steven Stoll. 1998. The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California. University of California Press.

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

[11] Roy Beck & Leon Kolankiewicz. The Environmental Movement’s Retreat From Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization (1970-1998). www.population.org.au/pressrm/pub/RetreatfromStabilization.pdf

[12] Jul 02, 2004 Oil prices raising costs of offshoots By Associated Press

http://www.tdn.com/articles/2004/07/02/biz/news03.prt

[13] May 24, 2004 Soaring energy prices dog rosy U.S. farm economy

http://www.forbes.com/business/newswire/2004/05/24/rtr1382512.html

[14] March 17, 2004 Chemical Industry in Crisis: Natural Gas Prices Are Up, Factories

Are Closing, And Jobs Are Vanishing

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64579-2004Mar16.html

[15] Regionalprogress.org, an organization that studies the ecological footprint and

        regional sustainability of regions in the United States.

    http://www.regionalprogress.org/county_ca_bayarea.html

        For more on ecological footprint and carrying capacity from a global perspective,

        see Global Footprint Network, created by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees at

       http://www.footprintnetwork.org/   Other first-rate scientists associated with this

   organization are: E. O. Wilson, David T. Suzuki, Lester Brown, Herman E. Daly, etc

[16] John Gever. 1991 Beyond Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decade. University Press of Colorado

[17] David & Marshall Fisher April 2001. The Nitrogen Bomb. Discover magazine

[18] Standby Gasoline Rationing Plan. 1980. U.S. Department of Energy Economic Regulatory Administration http://ntl.bts.gov/lib/12000/12200/12291/12291.pdf

[19] Tad Patzek, David Pimentel . 2005. Thermodynamics of Energy Production from Biomass. Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences

[20] Pimentel, D and Patzek, T. March 2005. Ethanol Production Using Corn, Switchgrass, and Wood; Biodiesel Production Using Soybean and Sunflower. Natural Resources Research, Vol. 14, No. 1

Posted in What to do | Comments Off

Oil Production Fueled Population Growth and Food Production

Posted on March 15, 2013 by energyskeptic

As oil exponentially declines, so will population and food.

1994. Elaine M. Murphy. World Population: Toward the Next Century, © 1994 by the Population Reference Bureau, 1875 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Suite 520, Washington, DC, 20009. Property of Population Reference Bureau, Inc.

2 Feb 2013. Paul Chefurka. How Tight is the Link Between Oil, Food and Population?
Food Shortages, Population, peak oil.

17 Nov 2003. Dale Allen Pfeiffer. Drawing Lessons from Experience; The Agricultural Crises in North Korea and Cuba — Part 1. From the wilderness

So what happens to an industrialized country practicing modern agriculture when it loses its fossil fuel energy base? There are two countries where it has already happened: North Korea and Cuba. Both countries have little or no oil resources of their own, both relied upon the Soviet Union for their oil imports, and both experienced a swift and severe drop in their oil imports following the demise of the Soviet empire.

Posted in Exponential Growth | Comments Off

Oil Statistics

Posted on March 15, 2013 by energyskeptic

Source: 6 Aug 2012. Lou Gagliardi. Energy Stock for the Short Term. Cabot Wealth Advisory.

Major oilfields in decline Around 70,000 oil fields are currently in production, according to the UK’s Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security (ITPOES). Yet the vast majority of these produce oil in small and negligible volumes: 120 fields account for half of global production, and there are just 4 fields that produce – at least until recently – more than one million barrels a day: Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, which accounts for five per cent of daily world production; Cantarell in Mexico; Burgan in Kuwait and Da Qing in China. The concern of the ITPOES report, The Oil Crunch, is that they are quite old, at or near the peak of their production, and no new finds of similar size have been reported for a long time.

The primacy of Oil. Global primary energy by fuel. IEA Renewables Data 2009.

34% oil
27% Nuclear
21% Natural Gas
12% Renewable
6% Nuclear

Where the 85 million barrels of oil go

Transportation: 50% road, 8% air, 8% Sea
Heat & Power: 18%
Non-Fuel 16%

World energy 2011 (Source: Energy Information Agency. http://www.eia.doe.gov) we’re still very dependent on fossil fuels and always will be:

Posted in Oil | Comments Off

Humanity will need 27 planet Earths by 2050, a new study estimates.

Posted on March 13, 2013 by energyskeptic

Stephen Leahy. 3 Aug 2011. Data Shows All of Earth’s Systems in Rapid Decline. Inter Press Service.

Overpopulation is causing huge losses in biodiversity, and ‘protected areas’ such as national parks aren’t working.

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jul 29 (IPS) – Protecting bits of nature here and there will not prevent humanity from losing our life support system. Even if areas dedicated to conserving plants, animals, and other species that provide Earth’s life support system increased tenfold, it would not be enough without dealing with the big issues of the 21st century: population, over-consumption and inefficient resource use.

Without dealing with those big issues, humanity will need 27 planet Earths by 2050, a new study estimates.

The size and number of protected areas on land and sea has increased dramatically since the 1980s, now totaling over 100,000 in number and covering 17 million square kilometres of land and two million square kilometres of oceans, a new study reported Thursday.

But impressive as those numbers look, all indicators reveal species going extinct faster than ever before, despite all the additions of new parks, reserves and other conservation measures, according to the study published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.

“It is amazing to me that we haven’t dealt with this failure of protected areas to slow biodiversity losses,” said lead author Camilo Mora of University of Hawaii at Manoa. “We were surprised the evidence from the past 30 years was so clear.”

The ability of protected areas to address the problem of biodiversity loss – the decline in diversity and numbers of all living species – has long been overestimated, the study reported. The reality is that most protected areas are not truly protected. Many are “paper parks”, protected in name only. Up to 70 percent of marine protected areas are paper parks, Mora said.

The study shows global expenditures on protected areas today are estimated at six billion dollars per year, and many areas are insufficiently funded for effective management. Effectively managing existing protected areas requires an estimated 24 billion dollars per year – four times the current expenditure.

“Ongoing biodiversity loss and its consequences for humanity’s welfare are of great concern and have prompted strong calls for expanding the use of protected areas as a remedy,” said co-author Peter Sale, a marine biologist and assistant director of the United Nations University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health.

“Protected areas are a false hope in terms of preventing the loss of biodiversity, ” Sale told IPS.

The authors based their study on existing literature and global data on human threats and biodiversity loss.

When asked about the 2010 global biodiversity protection agreement in Nagoya, Japan to put 17 percent of land and 10 percent of oceans on the planet under protection by 2020, Sale said it was “very unlikely those targets will be reached” due to conflicts between growing needs for food and other resources.

“Even if those targets were achieved, it is not going to stop the decline in biodiversity, ” he said.

One reason for this is “leakage”. Fence off one forest and the logging pressure increases in another. Make one coral reef off limits to fishing and the fishing boats go the next reef.

Another reason protected areas aren’t the answer is that fences or patrol boats can’t keep out the impacts of pollution or climate change.

Finally, the pressures on the planet’s resources are escalating so quickly that “the problem is running away from the solution”, he said.

The loss of biodiversity is a major issue because it is humanity’s only life-support system, delivering everything from food, to clean water and air, to recreation and tourism, to novel chemicals that drive our advanced civilization, said Mora. Right now the dominant strategy to halt the loss of biodiversity is with protected areas.

“That’s putting all our eggs in one basket,” he said. “A major shift is needed to deal with the roots of the problem.”

The ever-expanding footprint of humanity is the primary cause of global biodiversity loss. When the world’s population was five billion people in 1985, the amount of nature’s resources being used or impacted became more than the planet could sustain indefinitely according to many estimates, said Mora.

The world population, currently at seven billion, is well beyond Earth’s ability to sustain. By 2050, with a projected population of 10 billion people and without a change in consumption patterns, the cumulative use of natural resources will amount to the productivity of up to 27 planet Earths, the study found.

Sustaining the current seven billion people on the planet requires a major shift in resource use. At present, the average U.S. citizen’s ecological footprint is about 10 hectares, while a Haitian’s is less than one. The planet could sustain us if everyone’s footprint averaged two ha, Mora said.

If there are more people, then there are simply fewer resources available for everyone, so population control will be needed along the lines of “one child per woman”, he said.

“I’m from Colombia, it blows my mind that some governments in the developing world pay women to have more children,” he added.

Hardly anyone is focused on the pressing need for a major shift, said Sale.

“The awareness of the public about this is shockingly low,” he noted. What is needed is for humanity as a mass to change direction, he said.

“But can we find the hook, the lever that’s needed to make that happen?” Sale asked.

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