Preface. Humans are destroying the wilderness so quickly there it could mostly disappear in less than a century. Since 1993 the world lost an area twice the size of Alaska.
So kiss biodiversity, carbon sequestration, ecology, and a stable climate goodbye. To the extent this land was mined or otherwise developed, it won’t be available for the coming extra 3 billion people to grow food on either.
The Amazon accounted for nearly a third of the “catastrophic” loss,
showing huge tracts of pristine rainforest are still being disrupted
despite the Brazilian government slowing deforestation rates in recent years. A further 14% disappeared in central Africa, home to thousands of species including forest elephants and chimpanzees.
The loss of the world’s last untouched refuges would not just be
disastrous for endangered species but for climate change efforts, the
authors said, because some of the forests store enormous amounts of
carbon.
“Without any policies to protect these areas, they are falling victim to widespread development.
The team counted areas as no longer wilderness if they scored on eight measures of humanity’s footprint, including roads, lights at night and agriculture.
Watson said unique ecosystems were being lost, and there was no turning
back. “What is critical about this paper is when you erode these
wildernesses, they don’t come back, you can’t restore them. They will
come back as something else, but you can’t restore them,” he said.
Preface. Below are excerpts of articles about the costs and challenges of dismantling nuclear power plants. This is at the top of my “Energy Descent To Do List” given the consequences for future generations for up to a million years, and has to be done while there is still lots of cheap fossil energy to do it. Other decommissioning news:
2018: Clearing the Radioactive Rubble Heap That Was Fukushima Daiichi, 7 Years On. The water is tainted, the wreckage is dangerous, and disposing of it will be a prolonged, complex and costly process. The Japan Center for Economic Research, a private think tank, said the cleanup costs could mount to some $470 billion to $660 billion and take far longer than the initial 30-40 year estimate.
Barnard M (2020) US Nuclear Site Cleanup Underfunded By Up To $70 Billion. Cleantechnica.
Members of Parliament have stated that the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority doesn’t have a handle on the 17 sites, their costs, or the vendors chosen for cleanup. They project a $177 billion and 120 year time-frame for complete decommissioning at well over $1 billion per site. Some of this is due to botched procurement, with two different cleanup vendors stripped of their contracts.
The US has collected a bunch of money from operating reactors into a cleanup fund that they acknowledge is underfunded to the tune of billions already. But the industry estimates show that they are collecting under half of what it will actually take to decommission the sites.
There are about 100 reactors in the United States. Assuming they collect the $320 million per reactor (they won’t, as reactors are closing prematurely), they would have a fund of $32 billion. At a cleanup cost of a billion each, as has been the case in Europe and Slovakia, they need an additional $70 billion.
When you add in graft, the costs are higher still.
A new era is approaching ‒ the era of nuclear decommissioning, which will entail:
A decline in the number of operating reactors.
An increasingly unreliable and accident-prone reactor fleet as ageing sets in.
Countless battles over lifespan extensions for ageing reactors.
An internationalization of anti-nuclear opposition as neighboring countries object to the continued operation of ageing reactors (international opposition to Belgium’s ageing reactors is a case in point ‒ and there are numerous other examples).
Battles over and problems with decommissioning projects (e.g. the UK government’s £100+ million settlement over a botched decommissioning tendering process).
Battles over taxpayer bailout proposals for companies and utilities that haven’t set aside adequate funds for decommissioning and nuclear waste management and disposal. (According to Nuclear Energy Insider, European nuclear utilities face “significant and urgent challenges” with over a third of the continent’s nuclear plants to be shut down by 2025, and utilities facing a €118 billion shortfall in decommissioning and waste management funds.)
Battles over proposals to impose nuclear waste repositories and stores on unwilling or divided communities.
There will likely be an average of 8‒11 permanent reactor shutdowns annually over the next few decades. This will add up to about 200 reactor shutdowns between 2014 and 2040.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) anticipates 320 gigawatts (GW) of retirements from 2017 to 2050, which is about 80% of the current worldwide reactor fleet.
Other estimates are 140 to 200 reactors closing by 2035.
That won’t be made up for by the 41 reactors expected to begin operating by 2022. Worldwide 49 reactors are under construction. What growth exists is mainly due to China, but their enthusiasm seems to have ended in 2016 since now new commercial construction sites have existed since then, nor is India or other Asian states likely to build reactors.
Generation IV fantasies are as fantastical as ever. David Elliot ‒ author of the 2017 book Nuclear Power: Past, Present and Future ‒ notes that many Generation IV concepts “are in fact old ideas that were looked at in the early days and mostly abandoned. There were certainly problems with some of these early experimental reactors, some of them quite dramatic.” One example of the gap between Generation IV rhetoric and reality was Transatomic Power’s decision to give up on its molten salt reactor R&D project in the US in September 2018.
Nor do these smaller reactors appear to be economically viable. Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in July 2018, argues that no US advanced reactor design will be commercialized before mid-century. They also investigated how a domestic market could develop to support a small modular reactor industry in the US over the next few decades ‒ including using them to back up wind and solar, desalinate water, produce heat for industrial processes, or serve military bases ‒ and were unable to make a convincing case.
The era of nuclear decommissioning will be characterized by escalating battles (and escalating sticker shock) over reactor lifespan extensions, decommissioning and nuclear waste management. In those circumstances, it will become even more difficult than it currently is for the industry to pursue new reactor projects. A feedback loop could take hold and then the nuclear industry will be well and truly in crisis, if it isn’t already.
Europe faces a €253bn bill for nuclear waste management and plant decommissioning: €123bn of that to decommission old reactors and €130bn for the management of spent fuel, radioactive waste and deep geological disposal processes. Some 90% of the continent’s nuclear plants are set to shut by 2050 – almost half within the next decade.
At present, nuclear reactors make up 27% of Europe’s energy capacity and produce less carbon over their lifetime than fossil fuels such as gas, coal or oil. But no solution has yet been found for the long-term storage of radioactive waste.
The commission’s experts considered closed fuel recycling of plutonium and uranium in ‘fast breeder reactors’ so long-term and uncertain a prospect that they did not forecast possible scenarios for its becoming available this century.
By the start of 2012, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, 138 commercial power reactors had been permanently shut down with at least 80 expected to join the queue for decommissioning in the coming decade – more if other governments join Germany in deciding to phase out nuclear power following the Fukushima disaster in Japan last year.
And yet, so far, only 17 of these have been dismantled and made permanently safe. That’s because decommissioning is difficult, time-consuming and expensive.
A standard American or French-designed pressurised water reactor (PWR) – the most common reactor design now in operation – will produce more than 100,000 tonnes of waste, about a tenth of it significantly radioactive, including the steel reactor vessel, control rods, piping and pumps. Decommissioning just a single one generally costs up to half a billion dollars.
Decommissioning Germany’s Soviet-designed power plant at Greifswald produced more than half a million tonnes of radioactive waste. The UK’s 26 gas-cooled Magnox reactors produce similar amounts and will eventually cost up to a billion dollars each to decommission. That’s because they weren’t designed with decommissioning in mind.
The many variations also mean that there is no agreed-upon standard for how to go about the process. If you want to decommission a nuclear power plant, you have three options. The first is the fastest: remove the fuel, then take the reactor apart as swiftly as possible, storing the radioactive material somewhere safe to await a final burial place. The second approach is to remove the fuel but lock up the reactor, letting its troublesome radioactive isotopes decay, which makes dismantling easier – much later. The third option is to simply entomb the reactor where it is.
Even when the reactor can be dismantled, where do you put the radioactive waste? Even the least contaminated material – old overalls, steel heat exchangers and toilets – must be carefully separated and sent to specially licensed landfill sites. Not every country has such designated facilities. Intermediate-level waste, contrary to its name, is even more of a problem because it may require deep ground burial alongside the high-level spent fuel.
In 1976, a British Royal Commission said no more nuclear power plants should be built until the waste disposal problems were resolved. Thirty-five years on, nothing much has changed.
Preface. This is a summary of Herman Pontzer’s 2019 “Humans evolved to exercise. Unlike our ape cousins, humans require high levels of physical activity to be healthy” in Scientific American. As fossils decline, it’s almost guaranteed you’ll use more muscle power, so get in shape now…
Also, your personality as measured by the Big Five Personality traits will be better if you exercise. Couch potatoes are less conscientious, open, agreeable, and extroverted. The link with exercise was relatively strong. Physical activity predicted personality better than disease burden did (Stephan 2018).
Apes are a lot like us, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos share over 97% of our DNA. But the differences are interesting. Our bodies changed dramatically over the past two million years with a larger brain, invented tools, language, hunted and gathered, and our survival depended on lots of physical activity.
We couldn’t just sit around like chimpanzees and eat fruit all morning, nap, groom, then gorge on figs, hang out with friends, group, another nap, and more fruit and some leaves. Likewise, oranguatans and gorillas are also idle and sedentary, spending 8 to 10 hours resting and then 9 or 10 sleeping, walk about 1.8 miles a day and climb about 330 feet, equal to another mile of walking.
Humans who try to slack off this much risk serious health problems. Without at least 10,000 steps a day, the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and metabolic disease increases. Sitting at a desk or in front of a TV for long times ias also associated with an increased risk of illness and a shorter life span. Basically, physical inactivity is on par with smoking as a health risk.
Yet our ape cousins can get away with lolling around. their blood pressure doesn’t go up, diabetes is rare, and their arteries don’t harden and clog with cholesterol.
Diet is destiny. About 1.8 million years ago our ancestors began to evolve to hunting and gathering, which required a great deal more walking to find animals and edible plants. Today hunter-gatherers get roughly have of their calories from plants, and cover 5.6 miles (12,000 steps) to 8.7 (18,000 steps) in search of food, traveling 3 to 5 times farther every day than any of the great apes. Before we invented the bow and arrow, humans may have had to be even more active.
On top of that, we evolved to run prey to exhaustion (Bramble 2004).
Although we’ve long known exercise is good for us, it appears that it’s good for every organ system even down to the cellular level. Our brains hae evolved to reward prolonged physical activity with endocannabinoids which is where the so-called runner’s high comes from. Many have argued that exercise helped enable the massive expansion of the human brain to the point where we require physical activity for normal brain development. Exercise releases molecules that promote neurogenesis and brain growth, as well as improve memory and stave off cognitive decline in old age.
Our maximum sustained power output (VO2max) is at least four times higher than the great apes due mainly to our leg muscles which afe 50% larger with a much greater proportion of slow-twitch fatigue resistant fibers than the legs of other apes. We have more red blood cells to carr oxygen to working muscles. Exercise accelerates the rate at which our cells function and calories are burned.
Exercise has been sold as a way to lose weight. But it isn’t optional, and weight loss is probably the one health benefit it often fails to deliver. Unfortunately, exercise doesn’t increase energy expenditure, it just makes our bodies work better. This is why those hunter gatherers walking almost 9 miles a day don’t expend much more energy than sedentary Westerners.
Here are some of the ways we do know exercise benefits us. It reduces chronic inflammation which can lead to heart disease. It lowers levels of reproductive hormones (i.e. testosterone, extrogen) which reduces the rate of reproductive cancers. It probably blunts the morning rise in the stress hormone cortisol. It reduces insulin insensitivity, the immediate cause behind type 2 diabetes, and shuttles glucose into muscles instead of fat. Exercise also improves the immune system, and produces enzymes that help clear fat from circulating blood.
References
Bramble D. M., Lieberman D. E.. 2004. Endurance running and the evolution of Homo. Nature 432.
Pontzer, H. 2017. The crown joules: energetics, ecology, and evolution in humans and other primates. Evolutionary anthropology 26:12-24.
Pontzer, H. 2017. Economy and endurance in human evolution. current biology 27.
A graphic showing how sea level rise lifts freshwater, causing groundwater inundation in low-lying areas. Credit: UHM Coastal Geology Group
Preface. In coastal areas flooding is likely to be caused from groundwater rise because as sea levels rise, they won’t only move inland, flooding low-lying land near the shore; but also push water up from the saltwater water table, on top of which is a layer of lighter fresh water. As the salt water rises with rising seas, it will push this fresh water upward. In low-lying areas, that water may emerge from the ground.
The consequences are that water will leach inside homes through basement cracks. Toilets may become chronically backed up. Raw sewage may seep through manholes. Brackish water will corrode sewer and water pipes and inundate building foundations. And most hazardous of all, water percolating upward may flow through contaminants buried in the soil, spreading them underground and eventually releasing them into people’s homes. The coup de grace will be the earthquakes, which, when they strike, may liquefy the entire toxic mess, pushing it toward the surface.
The result will be that in places like Oakland, flooding will occur not just at the shoreline, but inland in areas once considered safe from sea level rise. The threat it poses can’t be neutralized with the usual strategy: physical structures that keep the sea at bay. No matter how many seawalls we build, many experts say, groundwater can still gurgle up from below, potentially turning large swaths of the densely populated shoreline around the Bay into unwanted, unplanned, possibly toxic wetlands.
Grace Mitchell Tada. March 25, 2019. The Sea Beneath Us Sea level rise has a gotcha-from- behind twin: rising groundwater. It’s already here. And some experts maintain, we’re not ready for it. Bay Nature
In East Oakland, on a residential street in front of a small park, Kristina Hill stopped and got out of her vehicle. She walked to the center of the street as a gaggle of graduate students emerged from their cars and gathered around her. It was midday, early September, the bright, hot sun directly overhead. Hill, a professor of urban and environmental design at UC Berkeley, had chosen the spot because when it rains heavily, water gushes up from storm drains here, forming filthy brown ponds. “That will happen more and more,” Hill said. Then she proceeded to describe a peculiar, almost apocalyptic future.
Water will leach inside homes, she said, through basement cracks. Toilets may become chronically backed up. Raw sewage may seep through manholes. Brackish water will corrode sewer and water pipes and inundate building foundations. And most hazardous of all, water percolating upward may flow through contaminants buried in the soil, spreading them underground and eventually releasing them into people’s homes. The coup de grace will be the earthquakes, which, when they strike, may liquefy the entire toxic mess, pushing it toward the surface.
The future Hill described is caused by a phenomenon called groundwater rise. In a nutshell, as a warming climate raises sea levels, the sea won’t only move inland, flooding low-lying land near the shore; it may also push water up from beneath our feet. That’s because for those of us living near the shore, a sea lurks in the ground—a saltwater water table. On top of that salt water floats a layer of lighter fresh water. As the salt water rises with rising seas, Hill and others think, it will push the fresh water upward. In low-lying areas, that water may emerge from the ground.
The result, Hill explained, will be that in places like Oakland, flooding will occur not just at the shoreline, but inland in areas once considered safe from sea level rise, including the Oakland Coliseum and Jones Avenue, where Hill and her students now stood, more than a mile from San Leandro Bay. In fact, she added, rising groundwater menaces nearly the entire band of low-lying land around San Francisco Bay, as well as many other coastal parts of the U.S.
The threat it poses can’t be neutralized with the usual strategy: physical structures that keep the sea at bay. No matter how many seawalls we build, many experts say, groundwater can still gurgle up from below, potentially turning large swaths of the densely populated shoreline around the Bay into unwanted, unplanned, possibly toxic wetlands. The issue is barely on the radar of Bay Area planners and decision-makers; it’s been mostly overlooked until recently. The public has hardly heard of it. Hill is trying to change all that. She’s on a mission to increase awareness of sea level rise’s gotcha-from-behind twin—groundwater rise.
When we think of the water table, we probably imagine a hard line that runs parallel to the earth’s surface some distance below us and, beneath that line, a big blob-like lake that we call groundwater. But it’s not really lake-like. Groundwater exists within permeable layers of rock, called aquifers, classified as either confined or unconfined. Water fills the space between rock particles. Confined aquifers are usually tucked deep in the earth, pressurized between less permeable layers of rock. Unconfined aquifers, like the one Hill described beneath Oakland, commonly exist in coastal areas and at river mouths. These aquifers often sit close to the surface, and they swell when, for instance, it rains. Only recently have scientists come to understand how sea level rise can affect coastal groundwater.
Around the Bay, most development has occurred on wetlands filled with sand, mud, and building rubble from 19th-century construction efforts, as well as alluvium, the material that washes down from surrounding watersheds.
This will be a disaster in earthquakes, which can exacerbate the problems posed by rising groundwater as it did Christchurch, New Zealand where 80% of the city’s underground infrastructure was obliterated, and thousands of buildings were leveled. Why? The city was built on a sand-and-gravel plain with a high water table. When the earthquake struck, the soil acted like a liquid, partly swallowing vehicles and cracking and tilting buildings. It is a problem shared by and well-known in the Bay Area.
The USGS has liquefaction susceptibility maps for the Bay Area, but these don’t account for sea level rise. Municipalities needed to incorporate the risk posed by rising water tables into their climate adaptation plans. As sea levels gradually rise in the decades to come, water might push up through storm drains or directly through the ground, damaging infrastructure and building foundations. Freeways and airports near the sea (and there are many, SFO and Oakland International Airport included) would likely become soggy messes. Inundation at wastewater treatment facilities, often sited on low-lying land, could trigger leaks of untreated water. Rising salt water might corrode urban drainage systems, which would stop functioning properly as their pipes filled permanently with groundwater. Brackish pools of water could become regular features of the urban environment.
More worrisome, rising groundwater might carry toward the surface hazardous material trapped in the soil. Around the rim of the Bay, once a center of heavy industry, we could see arsenic, lead, benzene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, PCBs, even possibly radioactive waste.
Another effect of climate change is that rainfall is predicted to become more intense. Flooding would likely become more frequent, bringing to the surface various buried toxic substances, such as the vinyl chloride and TCA of concern in the groundwater beneath the nearby tool and die machine shop, or the gasoline in the groundwater around the neighborhood’s former and existing gas stations.
Even if the water table recedes after the rainy season and the summer dry season sets in, some contaminants could become airborne in buildings. People may inhale them. “Even an event where it’s a seasonal thing for a few days could have really important long-term effects,” Hill told me.
East Oakland is already among the top five percent of polluted California zip codes. The mostly low-income, primarily nonwhite residents who live there have relatively high rates of chronic disease. Life expectancy for African Americans in the Oakland “flats” can be up to 14 years less than in the hills. And now these already beleaguered communities face the prospect of contaminants welling up from beneath their feet.
Rising groundwater is “a whole new game-changer, particularly when
you’re talking about sites that are contaminated with industrial
solvents,” says Grant Cope, the deputy secretary for environmental
policy at the California Environmental Protection Agency. What can be
done? Contaminated groundwater could be pumped out of the ground,
treated, cleaned, and reinjected into the aquifer, Cope says. Otherwise,
it remains unclear whether caps meant to keep pollutants buried—a
strategy used at remediated sites in recent decades—would continue to
work if groundwater rises. The caps were not designed for this purpose,
Cope says.
Judging by what the federal EPA has learned from its experience with hurricanes in other parts of the country, the most acute risk posed by groundwater rise are infections from pathogens in wastewater, according to John Blue, Cal EPA’s manager of climate programs. (Hill disagrees, saying, “I would take a bath in wastewater before I would have any skin contact with benzene”—one of the pollutants she worries about in Oakland. “There’s no safe exposure” level.) And how would affected wastewater be dealt with? Blue pauses. “These are very difficult questions,” he says. “That’s the eight-hundred-million-dollar question. That remains to be seen.”
There are important caveats to the wet, bleak future scenario Hill and Plane’s report describes. Their maps, which have been submitted for publication but haven’t appeared in a peer-reviewed journal yet, are approximate and don’t account for subtleties in the landscape—for instance, streams and valley-like topography that might allow rising groundwater to flow downhill and away, preventing water from pooling. Hill and Plane’s conclusions assume that water tables will rise linearly with sea level rise, which, judging from patterns in local geography, may or may not be true. The report’s data is based on the highest water table levels recorded in the past 20-odd years, which may present an exaggerated picture of what’s likely to happen, says Kevin Befus, assistant professor at the University of Wyoming’s College of Engineering and Applied Science. Tina Low of SFRWQCB maintains that, in conjunction with monitoring, current remediation standards for buried pollutants are sufficient to prevent leaching, even if groundwater rises. (Older sites that don’t adhere to these standards may need to be studied to assess the risk they pose, she adds.)
Still, many planners I queried around the Bay found the study both credible and worrisome. “It’s a really nice data-driven approach that leverages this incredible data set [from] wells to look at where the water table actually is,” says Patrick Barnard of the USGS. Abby Mohan, a marine geographer at Silvestrum Climate Associates, who is working with Hill and Plane to further refine their research, emphasizes that this is pioneering, groundbreaking work. “Ellen and Kristina did something really interesting and great,” she says.
Steve Goldbeck, chief deputy director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, says the commission had been aware of the groundwater issue in a general sense before, but with Plane and Hill’s work, “now we know it’s going to be a problem” in the Bay Area.
Thus far in recent history, the three general responses to sea level rise have been to armor, to retreat, or to adapt in place. Around the Bay, many municipalities are considering the least radical strategy: armor. San Francisco aims to rebuild its seawall, a more than $2 billion project that won’t address groundwater issues (though it does, importantly, address seismic hazards). Moreover, as the sea rises, seawall construction could actually increase water levels in the Bay, says Mark Stacey, an environmental engineer at UC Berkeley who has modeled such scenarios. If, for example, Foster City, San Mateo, Redwood City, and Menlo Park all erect seawalls, those barriers together could alter tidal amplification enough to raise water levels in the Bay, potentially worsening flooding in other areas.
Planners elsewhere are taking bold actions to address groundwater
rise. Miami envisions using urban green space as a sponge to draw out
and absorb groundwater. Boston recently unveiled a plan for its harbor
that uses barrier walls to keep the sea out as well as tidal marshes and
parks to absorb emergent groundwater. (The Bay Area has restored tens
of thousands of acres of wetlands, but unlike in Boston or Miami’s
plans, they’re not tightly integrated into the urban landscape. So it’s
not clear that they can serve the same “release valve” function, drawing
groundwater away from infrastructure.) And in New Zealand, after the
devastation of the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, the government
purchased and then razed more than 7,000 homes on land at risk of
further liquefaction, essentially an admission that some areas of the
city’s plain were too dangerous to inhabit in the short term without
greater fortification.
Things have moved more slowly in the Bay Area. That’s partly because
the Bay’s geology is more complex than along the Eastern Seaboard and
scientists don’t yet have all the data, and partly because Bay Area
decision-makers want greater certainty on what to plan for. “We’re ready
to apply [the information] as soon as we really understand the risk,”
says San Mateo County climate adaptation manager Hilary Papendick. Phil
Bobel, Palo Alto’s manager of public works engineering, echoes that
view, saying the city leadership now assumes it will have to deal with
groundwater rise eventually but wants more research first.
Bay Area planners eagerly await USGS models in development that will
allow them to predict, with greater accuracy than Hill and Plane’s maps,
how the coastal water table will respond to sea level rise. The models,
which use Hill and Plane’s data set for validation, are slated for
public release later this year. With them in hand, “we’ll incorporate
that understanding into our broader adaptation planning,” Alex Westhoff,
a planner at the Marin County Community Development Agency, says.
But even with these models available, next steps aren’t necessarily
clear because the problem is so new. Replacing and shoring up
infrastructure and implementing other adaptation strategies will be
expensive, so the biggest hurdle may be funding. “It’s a
multibillion-dollar area, and we struggle in the millions to try to do
shoreline restoration,” Paul Detjens of Contra Costa County Flood
Control and Water Conservation District says. “We’re talking a whole
’nother order of magnitude.” In 2016, Bay Area voters passed Measure AA
to fund wetland restoration, so there is reason to think that as they
become aware of the issue, voters might support adaptation initiatives
that address groundwater rise.
Hill has her own bold ideas for how the Bay Area can prepare. She,
Kevin Befus at the University of Wyoming, and Chip Fletcher at the
University of Hawaii think that learning to live with water, rather than
trying to keep it out, is the best way forward. “If you wage war with
water you will lose,” Fletcher says, paraphrasing a Dutch expression.
Hill imagines floating cities in ponds, or neighborhoods linked by
canals—a Californian Amsterdam. The idea is to manage emergent
groundwater by opening space for it in the cityscape. Canal systems
installed in flood-prone areas of East Oakland, for example, would help
existing structures remain in place a bit longer; elevating and
retrofitting for seismic risks is too expensive, she says. Over time, as
groundwater rises, neighborhoods could become what she and her
colleagues call “tidal cities.” Homes, apartment buildings, and
businesses could rest atop floating pontoons connected to land.
Those ideas may sound far-fetched, but planners welcome them. “We’ll
need creative solutions for design and planning,” Westhoff says.
Rohin Saleh, a civil engineer at Alameda County Flood Control who has
watched the water table rise over the past 15 years, says Hill’s vision
may not be feasible everywhere, but “is a really great component of the
type of solution that we need to have in our backpack.”
Many questions remain unanswered. Who will pay for urban adaptation,
cleaning and remediation? How will the many municipalities around the
Bay come together to manage what is, by definition, a regional problem
that no one area can solve alone? And what, for that matter, does a
floating apartment building look like? Whatever the answers to these
questions, one thing is certain. As Lindy Lowe, the Port of San
Francisco’s resilience program director, says, at least people are
thinking and talking about groundwater rise now—which they weren’t doing
eight to ten years ago. That, she notes, is already a triumph.
Preface. Ahmed is one of the best writers on the energy crisis and other biophysical calamities. He’s written about why many states are failing now in part due to peak oil, but also drought and other biophysical factors in his book “Failing States, Collapsing Systems BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence“. Below is his take on Venezula, where peak oil production occurred in 1997.
What happened there may be how events unfold in the United States as well, so it is worth reading how collapsing states like Venezuela fail if you’re curious about your own future.And Mexico may be the next to collapse, as you can read here.
For some, the crisis in Venezuela is all about the endemic corruption of Nicolás Maduro, continuing the broken legacy of Chavez’s ideological experiment in socialism under the mounting insidious influence of Putin. For others, it’s all about the ongoing counter-democratic meddling of the United States, which has for years wanted to bring Venezuela — with its huge oil reserves — back into the orbit of American power, and is now interfering again to undermine a democratically elected leader in Latin America.
Neither side truly understands the real driving force behind the collapse of Venezuela: we have moved into the twilight of the Age of Oil.
So how does a country like Venezuela with the largest reserves of crude oil in the world end up incapable of developing them? While various elements of socialism, corruption and neoliberal capitalism are all implicated in various ways, what no one’s talking about — especially the global oil industry — is that over the last decade, we’ve shifted into a new era. The world has moved from largely extracting cheap, easy crude, to becoming increasingly dependent on unconventional forms of oil and gas that are much more difficult and expensive to produce.
Oil isn’t running out, in fact, it’s everywhere — we’ve more than enough to fry the planet. But as the easy, cheap stuff has plateaued, production costs have soared. And as a consequence the most expensive oil to produce has become increasingly unprofitable.
In a country like Venezuela, emerging from a history of US interference, plagued by internal economic mismanagement, combined with external intensifying pressure from US sanctions, this decline in profitability has became fatal.
Since Hugo Chavez’s election in 1999, the US has continued to explore numerous ways to interfere in and undermine his socialist government. This is consistent with the track record of US overt and covert interventionism across Latin America, which has sought to overthrow democratically elected governments which undermine US interests in the region, supported right-wing autocratic regimes, and funded, trained and armed far-right death squads complicit in wantonly massacring hundreds of thousands of people.
For all the triumphant moralizing in parts of the Western media about the failures of Venezuela’s socialist experiment, there has been little reflection on the role of this horrific counter-democratic US foreign policy in paving the way for a populist hunger for nationalist and independent alternatives to US-backed cronyism.
Before Chavez
Venezuela used to be a dream US ally, model free-market economy, and a major oil producer. With the largest reserves of crude oil in the world, the conventional narrative is that its current implosion can only be due to colossal mismanagement of its domestic resources.
Described back in 1990 by the New York Times as “one of Latin America’s oldest and most stable democracies”, the newspaper of record predicted that, thanks to the geopolitical volatility of the Middle East, Venezuela “is poised to play a newly prominent role in the United States energy scene well into the 1990’s”. At the time, Venezuelan oil production was helping to “offset the shortage caused by the embargo of oil from Iraq and Kuwait” amidst higher oil prices triggered by the simmering conflict.
But the NYT had camouflaged a deepening economic crisis. As noted by leading expert on Latin America, Javier Corrales, in ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, Venezuela had never recovered from currency and debt crises it had experienced in the 1980s. Economic chaos continued well into the 1990s, just as the Times had celebrated the market economy’s friendship with the US, explained Corrales: “Inflation remained indomitable and among the highest in the region, economic growth continued to be volatile and oil-dependent, growth per capita stagnated, unemployment rates surged, and public sector deficits endured despite continuous spending cutbacks.”
Prior to the ascension of Chavez, the entrenched party-political system so applauded by the US, and courted by international institutions like the IMF, was essentially crumbling. “According to a recent report by Data Information Resources to the Venezuelan-American Chamber of Commerce, in the last 25 years the share of household income spent on food has shot up to 72%, from 28%,” lamented the New York Times in 1996. “The middle class has shrunk by a third. An estimated 53 percent of jobs are now classified as ‘informal’ — in the underground economy — as compared with 33% in the late 1970’s”.
The NYT piece cynically put all the blame for the deepening crisis on “government largesse” and interventionism in the economy. But even here, within the subtext the paper acknowledged a historical backdrop of consistent IMF-backed austerity measures. According to the NYT, even the ostensibly anti-austerity president Rafael Caldera — who had promised more “state-financed populism” as an antidote to years of IMF-wrought austerity — ended up “negotiating for a $3 billion loan from the IMF” along with “a second loan of undisclosed size to ease the social impact of any hardships imposed by an IMF agreement.”
So it is convenient that today’s loud and self-righteous moral denunciations of Maduro ignore the instrumental role played by US efforts to impose market fundamentalism in wreaking economic and social havoc across Venezuelan society. Of course, outside the fanatical echo chambers of the Trump White House and the likes of the New York Times, the devastating impact of US-backed World Bank and IMF austerity measures is well-documented among serious economists.
In a paper for the London School of Economics, development economist Professor Jonathan DiJohn of the UN Research Institute for Social Development found that US-backed economic “liberalization not only failed to revive private investment and economic growth, but also contributed to a worsening of the factorial distribution of income, which contributed to growing polarisation of politics.”
Neoliberal reforms further compounded already existing centralized nepotistic political structures vulnerable to corruption. Far from strengthening the state, they led to a collapse in the state’s regulative power. Analysts who hark back to a Venezuelan free market golden age ignore the fact that far from reducing corruption, “financial deregulation, large-scale privatizations, and private monopolies create[d] large rents, and thus rent-seeking/corruption opportunities.”
Instead of leading to meaningful economic reforms, neoliberalisation stymied genuine reform and entrenched elite power. And this is precisely how the West helped create the Chavez it loves to hate. In the words of Corrales in the Harvard Review: “economic collapse and party system collapse—are intimately related. Venezuela’s repeated failure to reform its economy made existing politicians increasingly unpopular, who in turn responded by privileging populist policies over real reforms. The result was a vicious cycle of economic and political party decay, ultimately paving the way for the rise of Chavez.”
Dead oil
While it is now fashionable to blame the collapse of the Venezuelan oil industry solely on Chavez’s socialism, Caldera’s privatization of the oil sector was unable to forestall the decline in oil production, which peaked in 1997 at around 3.5 million barrels a day. By 1999, Chavez’s first actual year in office, production had already dropped dramatically by around 30 percent.
A deeper look reveals that the causes of Venezuela’s oil problems are slightly more complicated than the ‘Chávez killed it’ meme. Since peaking around 1997, Venezuelan oil production has declined over the last two decades, but in recent years has experienced a precipitous fall. There can be little doubt that serious mismanagement in the oil industry has played a role in this decline. However, there is a fundamental driver other than mismanagement which the press has consistently ignored in reporting on Venezuala’s current crisis: the increasingly fraught economics of oil.
The vast bulk of Venezuela’s oil is not conventional crude, but unconventional “heavy oil”, a highly viscous liquid that requires unconventional techniques to extract and flow, often with heat from steam, and/or mixing it with lighter forms of crude in the refining process. Heavy oil thus has a higher cost of extraction than normal crude, and a lower market price due to the refining difficulties. In theory, heavy oil can be produced at below break-even prices to a profit, but greater investment is still needed to get to that point.
The higher costs of extraction and refining have played a key role in making Venezuela’s oil production efforts increasingly unprofitable and unsustainable. When oil prices were at their height between 2005 and 2008, Venezuela was able to weather the inefficiencies and mismanagement in its oil industry due to much higher profits thanks to prices between $100 and $150 a barrel. Global oil prices were spiking as global conventional crude oil production began to plateau, causing an increasing shift to unconventional sources.
That global shift did not mean that oil was running out, but that we were moving deeper into dependence on more difficult and expensive forms of unconventional oil and gas. The shift can be best understood through the concept of Energy Return on Investment (EROI), pioneered principally by the State University of New York environmental scientist Professor Charles Hall, a ratio which measures how much energy is used to extract a particular quantity of energy from any resource. Hall has shown that as we are consuming ever larger quantities of energy, we are using more and more energy to do so, leaving less ‘surplus energy’ at the end to underpin social and economic activity.
This creates a counter-intuitive dynamic — even as production soars, the quality of the energy we are producing declines, its costs are higher, industry profits are squeezed, and the surplus available to sustain continued economic growth dwindles. As the surplus energy available to sustain economic growth is squeezed, in real terms the biophysical capacity of the economy to continue buying the very oil being produced reduces. Economic recession (partly induced by the previous era of oil price spikes) interacts with the lack of affordability of oil, leading the market price to collapse.
That in turn renders the most expensive unconventional oil and gas projects potentially unprofitable, unless they can find ways to cover their losses through external subsidies of some kind, such as government grants or extended lines of credit. And this is the key difference between Venezuela and countries like the US and Canada, where extremely low EROI levels for production have been sustained largely through massive multi-billion dollar loans — fueling an energy boom that is likely to come to a catastrophic endwhen the debt-turkey comes home to roost.
“It’s all a bit reminiscent of the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, when internet companies were valued on the number of eyeballs they attracted, not on the profits they were likely to make,” wrote Bethany McLean recently (once again in the New York Times), a US journalist well-known for her work on the Enron collapse. “As long as investors were willing to believe that profits were coming, it all worked — until it didn’t.”
A number of scientists have previously estimated the EROI of heavy oil production to amount to around 9:1 (with room for variation up or down depending on how inputs are accounted for and calculated; the unfashionable but probably more accurate approach would be downwards, closer to 6:1 when both direct and indirect energy costs are considered). Compare this to the EROI of about 20:1 for conventional crude prior to 2000, which gives an indication of the challenge Venezuela faced — which unlike the US and Canada, had emerged into the Chavez era from a history of neoliberal devastation and debt-expansion that already made further investments or subsidies to Venezuela’s oil industry a difficult ask.
Venezuela, in that sense, was ill-prepared to adapt to the post-2014 oil price collapse, compared to its wealthier, Western competitors in other forms of unconventional oil and gas. To be sure, then, the collapse of Venezuela’s oil industry cannot be reduced to geological factors, though there can be little doubt that those factors and their economic ramifications tend to be underplayed in conventional explanations. Above-ground factors were clearly a major problem in terms of chronic inadequacy of investment and the resulting degradation of production infrastructure. A balanced picture thus has to acknowledge both that Venezuela’s vast reserves are far more expensive and difficult to bring to market than standard conventional oil; and that Venezuala’s very specific economic circumstances in the wake of decades of failed IMF-austerity put the country in an extremely weak position to keep its oil show on the road.
Since 2008, oil production has declined by more than 350,000 barrels per day, and more than 800,000 per day since its peak level in 1997. This has driven the collapse of net exports by over 1.1 million barrels per day since 1998. Meanwhile, to sustain refining of heavy oil, Venezuela has increasingly imported light oil to blend with heavy oil as well as for domestic consumption. Currently, only extra-heavy oil production in the Orinoco Oil Belt has been able to increase, while conventional oil production continues to rapidly decline. Despite significant proved conventional reserves, these still require more expensive enhanced recovery techniques and infrastructure investments — which are unavailable. But profit margins from exports of extra-heavy crude are much smaller due to the higher costs of blending, upgrading and transportation, and the heavy discounts in international refining markets. In summary, oil industry expert Professor Francisco Monaldi at the Center for Energy and the Environment at IESA in Venezuela concludes: “oil production in Venezuela is comprised of increasingly heavier oil and thus less profitable, PDVSA’s operated production is falling more rapidly, and the production that generates cash-flow is almost half of the total production. These trends were problematic enough at peak oil prices, but with prices falling they become much more acute.”
The folly of endless growth
Unfortunately, much like his predecessors, Chavez didn’t appreciate the complexities, let alone the biophysical economics, of the oil industry. Rather, he saw it simplistically through the short-term lens of his own ideological socialist experiment.
From 1998 until his death in 2013, Chavez’s application of what he called ‘socialism’ to the oil industry succeeded in reducing poverty from 55 to 34 percent, helped 1.5 million adults become literate, and delivered healthcare to 70% of the population with Cuban doctors. All this apparent progress was enabled by oil revenues. But it was an unsustainable pipe-dream.
Instead of investing oil revenues back into production, Chavez spent them away on his social programs during the heyday of the oil price spikes, with no thought to the industry he was drawing from — and in the mistaken belief that prices would stay high. By the time prices collapsed due to the global shift to difficult oil described earlier — reducing Venezuala’s state revenues (96 percent of which come from oil) — Chavez had no currency reserves to fall back on.
Chavez had thus dramatically compounded the legacy of problems he had been left with. He had mimicked the same mistake made by the West before 2008, pursuing a path of ‘progress’ based on an unsustainable consumption of resources, fueled by debt, and bound to come crashing down.
So when he ran out of oil money, he did what governments effectively did worldwide after the 2008 financial crash through quantitative easing: he simply printed money.
The immediate impact was to drive up inflation. He simultaneously fixed the exchange rate to dollars, hiked up the minimum wage, while forcing prices of staple goods like bread to stay low. This of course turned businesses selling such staple goods or involved at every chain in their production into unprofitable enterprises, which could no longer afford to pay their own employees due to hemorrhaging income levels. Meanwhile, he slashed subsidies to farmers and other industries, while imposing quotas on them to maintain production. Instead of producing the desired result, many businesses ended up selling their goods on the black market in an attempt to make a profit.
As the economic crisis escalated, and as oil production declined, Chavez pinned his hopes on the potential transformation that could be ushered in by massive state investment in a new type of economy based on nationalized, self or cooperatively managed industries. Those investments, too, had little results. Dr Asa Cusack, an expert on Venezuela at the London School of Economics, points out that “even though the number of cooperatives exploded, in practice they were often as inefficient, corrupt, nepotistic, and exploitative as the private sector that they were supposed to displace.”
Meanwhile, with its currency reserves depleted, the government has had to slash imports by over 65 percent since 2012, while simultaneously reducing social spending to even lower than it was under IMF austerity reforms in the 1990s. Chavistan crisis-driven ‘socialism’ began with unsustainable social spending and has now switched to catastrophic levels of austerity that make neoliberalism look timid.
In this context, the rise of the black market and organized crime, exploited by both the government and the opposition, became a way of life while the economy, food production, health-care and basic infrastructure collapsed with frightening speed and ferocity.
Climate wild cards
Amidst this perfect storm, the wild card of climate impacts pushed Venezuela over the edge, accelerating an already dizzying spiral of crises. In March 2018, on the back of hyperinflation and recession, the government enforced electricity rationing across six western states. In one state, San Cristobal, residents reported 14-hour stretches without power after water levels in reservoirs used for hydroelectric plants were reduced due to drought. A similar crisis had erupted two years earlier when water levels behind the Guri Dam, which provides well over half the country’s electricity, hit record lows.
Venezuela generates around 65% of its electricity from hydropower, with a view to leave as much oil available as possible for export. But this has made electricity supplies increasingly vulnerable to droughts induced by climate change impacts.
It is well known that the El-Nino Southern Oscillation, the biggest fluctuation in the earth’s climate system comprising a cycle of warm and cold sea-surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean, is increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change. A new study on the impact of climate change in Venezuela finds that between 1950 and 2004, 12 out of 15 El-Nino events coincided with years in which “mean annual flow” of water in the Caroni River basin, affecting the Guri reservoir and hydroelectric power, was “smaller than the historical mean.”
From 2013 to 2016, an intensified El-Nino cycle meant that there was little rain in Venezuela, culminating in a crippling deficit in 2015. It was the worst drought in almost half a century in the country, severely straining the country’s aging and poorly managed energy grid, resulting in rolling blackouts.
According to Professor Juan Carlos Sanchez, a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), these trends will dramatically deteriorate under a business as usual scenario. Large areas of Venezuelan states which are already water scarce, such as Falcon, Sucre, Lara and Zulia, including the north of the Guajira peninsula, will undergo desertification. Land degradation and decreased rainfall would devastate production of corn, black beans and plantains across much of the country. Sanchez predicts that some regions of the country will receive 25 percent less water than today. And that means even less electricity. By mid-century, climate models indicate an overall 18 percent decrease in rainfall in the Caroni River basin that leads to the Guri Dam.
Unfortunately, no Venezuelan government has ever taken seriously its climate pledges, preferring to escalate as much as possible its oil production, and even intensifying the CO2 intensive practice of gas flaring. Meanwhile, escalating climate change is set to exacerbate Venezuela’s electricity blackouts, infrastructure collapse and agricultural crisis.
Economic war
The crisis convergence unfolding in Venezuela gives us a window into what can happen when a post-oil future is foisted upon you. As domestic energy supplies dwindle, the state’s capacity to function recedes in unprecedented ways, opening the way for state-failure. As the state collapses, new smaller centers of power emerge, competing for control of diminishing resources.
In this context, reports of food-trafficking as a mechanism of ‘economic war’ are real, but they are not exclusive to either political side. All sides have become incentivized to horde products and sell them on the black market as a direct result of the collapsing economy, retrograde government price controls and wildly speculative prices.
Venezuelan state-owned media have pinpointed cases where private companies engaged in hoarding have close ties to the opposition. In response, the government has appropriated vast assets, farmland, bakeries, other businesses — but has failed to lift production.
On the other hand, Katiuska Rodriguez, a journalist investigating shortages at El Nacional, a pro-opposition newspaper, said that there is little clear evidence of hoarding being a result of an ‘economic war’ by capitalist business elites against the government. Although real, she explained, hoarding is driven largely by commercial interests in survival.
And yet, there is mounting evidence that the Maduro government is complicit in not just hoarding, but mass embezzlement of public funds. Sociologist Chris Carlson of the City University of New York Graduate Center points outthat a number of former senior Chavista government officials have come on record to confirm how powerful elites within the government have exploited the crisis to extract huge profits for themselves. “A gang was created that was only interested in getting their hands on the oil revenue,” said Hector Navarro, former Chavista minister and socialist party leader. Similarly, Chavez’s former finance minister, Jorge Giordani, estimated that some $300 billion was embezzled in this way.
And yet, the real economic war is not really going on inside Venezuela. It has been conducted by the US against Venezuela, through a draconian sanctions regime which has exacerbated the arc of collapse. Francisco Rodriguez, Chief Economist at Torino Economics in New York, points out that a major drop in Venezuela’s production numbers occurred precisely “at the time at which the United States decided to impose financial sanctions on Venezuela.”
He argues that: “Advocates of sanctions on Venezuela claim that these target the Maduro regime but do not affect the Venezuelan people. If the sanctions regime can be linked to the deterioration of the country’s export capacity and to its consequent import and growth collapse, then this claim is clearly wrong.” Rodriguez marshals a range of evidence suggesting this might well be the case.
Others with direct expertise have gone further. Former UN special rapporteur to Venezuela, Alfred de Zayas, who finished his term at the UN in March 2018, criticised the US for engaging in “economic warfare” against Venezuela. On his fact-finding mission to the country in late 2017, he confirmed the role of overdependence on oil, poor governance and corruption, but blamed the US, EU and Canadian sanctions for worsening the economic crisis and “killing” Venezuelans.
US goals are fairly transparent. In an interview with FOX News that has been completely ignored by the press, Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton explained the focus of US attention: “We’re looking at the oil assets. That’s the single most important income stream to the government of Venezuela. We’re looking at what to do to that.” He continued: “… we’re in conversation with major American companies now… I think we’re trying to get to the same end result here… It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.”
The coming oil crisis
It is not entirely surprising that Bolton is particularly eager at this time to extend US energy companies into Venezuela.
North American exploration and production companies have seen their net debt balloon from $50 billion in 2005 to nearly $200 billion by 2015. “[The fracking] industry doesn’t make money…. It’s on much shakier financial footing than most people realize,” said McLean, who has just authored the book, Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It’s Changing the World. Indeed, there is serious gulf between oil industry claims about opportunities for profit, and what is actually happening in those companies: “When you look at oil companies’ presentations, there’s something that doesn’t make sense because they show their investors these beautiful investor decks with gorgeous slides indicating that they will produce an 80% or 60% internal rate of return. And then you go to the corporate level and you see that the company isn’t making money, and you wonder what happened between point A and point B.”
In short, cheap debt-money has permitted the industry to grow — but how long that can continue is an open question. “Part of the point in writing my book was just to make people aware that as we trump at American energy independence, let’s think about some of the foundation of this [industry] and how insecure it actually is, so that we’re also planning for the future in different ways”, adds McLean.
Indeed, US shale oil and gas production is forecast to peak in around a decade — or in as little as four years. It’s not just the US. Europe as a continent is already well into the post-peak phase, and Russian oil ministry officials privately anticipate an imminent peak within the next few years. As China, India and other Asian powers experience further demand growth, everyone will be looking increasingly for a viable energy supply, whether from the Middle East or Latin America. But it won’t come cheap, or easy. And it won’t be healthy for the planet.
Whatever their ultimate causes, the horrifying collapse of Venezuela heralds insights into a possible future for today’s major oil producers — including the United States. The US is enjoying a revival in its oil industry but how long it will last and how sustainable it is are awkward questions that few pundits dare to ask — except a brave few, such as McLean.
This does not necessarily mean oil production will simply slowly grind to a halt. As production limits are reached using current techniques, new techniques might be brought into play to try to mine vast reserves of more difficult resources. However, whatever technological innovations emerge they are unlikely to be able to avert the trajectory of increasing costs of extraction, refining and processing before getting fossil fuels to market. And this means that the surplus energy available to devote to the delivery of public goods familiar to modern industrial consumerist societies will become smaller and smaller.
As we shift into a post-carbon era, we will have to adapt new economic thinking, and restructure our ways of life from the ground up.
Right now the Venezuelan people find themselves locked into a vicious cycle of ill-conceived human systems collapsing into violent in-fighting, in the face of the earth system crisis erupting beneath them. It is not yet too late for the rest of the world to learn a lesson. We can either be dragged into a world after oil kicking and screaming, or we can roll up our sleeves and walk there in a manner of our own choosing. It really is up to us. Venezuela should function as a warning sign as to what can happen when we bury our heads in the (oil) sands.
Preface. Climate change will impact California agriculture without the snow melt that allows for up to three crops to be grown a year, perhaps just one crop in the future. Not to mention the impact on the 40 million people living in California.
As far as a renewable future, hydropower is one of the only dispatchable forms of power besides natural gas, but there’ll be far less water behind dams to balance intermittent wind and solar, or provide power when neither is available. In California, it is the largest source of renewable electric power. Though as it is, it is often unavailable due to drought, low reservoirs, held back for agriculture and drinking water, for fisheries, river ecosystems and more.
Preface. When fossil fuels are gone, there aren’t many ways to balance the unreliable, intermittent, and often absent for weeks at a time power from wind and solar. Biofuels and burning biomass is one solution, it’s dispatchable and can kick in at any time to make up for lack of wind and solar, but there is far too little of it for power generation, let alone transportation fuels, soil nutrition and replacing the high heat of coal to make cement, iron, steel, and other blast furnace / kiln products.
There are 17 rare earth elements in the periodic table. About nine of those elements go into every iPhone sold… and if China were suddenly to disappear from a map tomorrow, Apple would lose about 90% of those elements. Source: Brownlee 2013.
Preface. This long post describes the rare metals and minerals phones, laptops, cars, microchips, and other essential high-tech products civilization depends on. Without them, there can’t be a transition to wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear energy, and so on.
Metals and minerals aren’t just physically limited, they can be economically limited by a financial collapse, which dries up credit and the ability to borrow for new projects to mine and crush ores. Economic collapse drives companies and even nations out of business, disrupting supply chains.
Supply chains can also be disrupted by energy shortages & natural disasters.
The more complex, the more minerals, metals, and other materials, machines, chemicals, a product depends on, the greater the odds of disruption.
Minerals and metals can also be politically limited. China controls over 90% of some critical elements, for example, just three mines in China produce all of the world’s cesium.
And of course, they’re energetically limited. Once oil begins to decline, so too will mining and all other manufacturing steps, which all depend on fossil energy.
The next war over resources is likely to be done via cyber-attacks that take down an opponent’s electric grid, which would affect nearly all of the other essential infrastructure such as agriculture; defense; energy; healthcare, banking, finance; drinking water and water treatment systems; commercial facilities; dams; emergency services; nuclear reactors, information technology; communications; postal and shipping; transportation and systems; government facilities; and critical manufacturing (NIPP).
Cars require over 76 elements, with self-charging hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles having twice the supply chain raw material cost risks of conventional models (Bhuwalka et al 2021).
As you can see below, we are running of time to make an energy transition, and this is an optimistic estimate, since conventional oil peaked in 2018, the tremendous amount of energy needed to mine, smelt, fabricate into parts, transport to assembly factories, and deliver will shorten all of these time spans tremendously.
iPhones (Stone 2019)
200 million of iPhones are sold a year, each of them with 75 of the 118 elements in the periodic table, many of them rare, many of them sourced only from China. The minerals mentioned in this article were tungsten, tantalum, copper, tin, gold, silver, palladium, aluminum, cobalt, neodymium, gallium, all of which produce toxic byproducts during their mining and the refining of metals.
And less than one percent of these metals are recycled, due to the how difficult it is to collect enough electronic devices to make recycling worthwhile and getting the extremely minute quantities of metals out of them.
Each element was extracted fromores using hands, shovels and hammers, heavy machinery, and explosives, then smelted and refined into metals before being molded, cut, screwed, glued, and soldered into products that are stuffed into packages and shipped worldwide for sale. Every step in this production process requires fossil fuel energy.
Recycling is very expensive, and iPhones would need to cost $5,000 to recover the extreme costs recycling would entail. And recycling also generates a lot of waste as acids and other chemicals are used to try to separate the various metals from each other. Recycling also takes energy, and today it’s basically impossible to extract all the metals that went into a phone.
Apple’s parts are soldered and glued into place before being fastened together with proprietary screws which makes basic repairs like swapping out a broken screen or replacing a dead battery a headache. Which makes it difficult for anyone lacking a half dozen robotic arms to tear apart an iPhone to recycle the components. This is why most e-waste recyclers still primarily mainly recycle CRT TVs and other bulky, pre-smartphone-era devices. They don’t have the precision equipment to take apart a phone or tablet which were made difficult to tear apart, and they can potentially explode during the process.
For Apple, this may be a feature rather than a bug: Documents obtained by Motherboard in 2017 revealed that the company requires its recycling partners to shred iPhones and MacBooks so that their components cannot be reused, further reducing the value recyclers can get out.
These are nearly as essential as fossil fuels to maintaining civilization, yet depend on 60 minerals & metals, chemicals, high-tech machines, etc., making them more vulnerable than any other product to supply chain and cascading failures.
While just 12 minerals were used to fabricate microchips initially, now over 60 different kinds of minerals are required (NMA 2017):
The U.S. is 100% dependent on imports for 19 different minerals and over 50% for another 43 minerals. These trends are unsustainable in a highly competitive world economy in which the demand for minerals continues to grow and supply stability is a growing concern.
Many of these minerals are both rare andpast peak production
Many of them come from only one country (single-source failure)
China is the sole source for many of these minerals, and other countries such as failed nations like the Democratic Republic of Congo are not a reliable source.
Laptops need 44 raw materials from 27 Countries (Ruffle 2010)
Laptop supply chain: Geographical
Cesium is entirely produced in China. Some of its uses include (Kennedy 2020):
strategic organic chemistry, including in x-ray radiation for cancer treatments.
catalyst promoters, glass amplifiers and photoelectric cell components, crystals in scintillation counters, and getters in vacuum tubes.
the oil and gas industry uses cesium formate brines in drilling fluids to prevent blow-outs in high-temperature, over-pressurized wells.
the “cesium standard” is how accurate commercially available atomic clocks measure time, and it’s vital for the data transmission infrastructure of mobile networks, GPS and the internet.
serious defense including in infrared detectors, optics, night vision goggles and much, much more.
References
Bhuwalka K et al (2021) Characterizing the Changes in Material Use due to Vehicle Electrification. Environmental Science & Technology 55: 10097
Toronto during the 2003 Northeast blackout, which required black-starting of generating stations. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start
Black starts
Large blackouts can be quite devastating and it isn’t easy to restart the electric grid again.
This is typically done by designated black start units of natural gas, coal, hydro, or nuclear power plants that can restart themselves using their own power with no help from the rest of the electrical grid. Not all power plants can restart themselves.
After a brief introduction to black starts, I have a recent example of one in Venezuela to give you an idea of how hard restarting a grid can be.
Clearly a renewable grid running mainly on wind and solar will crash a lot, and without hydropower or fossil fuels to restart the grid (which are finite and won’t be available at some point), the idea we can just do stuff when the grid is up and wait it out for when the grid is down isn’t going to work. This is a huge problem for a 100% renewable system that may not be solvable. Microgrids don’t solve anything, manufacturing and industry require mind-boggling amounts to electricity to stay in business.
In regions lucky enough to have hydropower (just 10 states have 80% of the hydropower in the U.S.) this is usually the designated black start source since a hydroelectric station needs very little initial power to start, and can put a large block of power on line very quickly to allow start-up of fossil-fuel or nuclear stations.
Wind turbines are not suitable for black start because wind may not be available when needed (Fox 2007) and likewise solar power plants suffer from the same problem.
The impact of a blackout exponentially increases with the duration of the blackout, and the duration of restoration decreases exponentially with the availability of initial sources of power. For several time-critical loads, quick restoration (minutes rather than hours or even days) is crucial. Blackstart generators, which can be started without any connection to the grid, are a key element in restoring service after a widespread outage. These initial sources of power include pump-storage hydropower, which can take 5-10 minutes to start, to certain types of combustion turbines, which take on the order of hours.
For a limited outage, restoration can be rapid, which will then allow sufficient time for repair to bring the system to full operability, although there may be a challenge for subsurface cables in metropolitan areas. On the other hand, in widespread outages, restoration itself may be a significant barrier, as was the case in the 1965 and 2003 Northeast blackouts. Natural disasters, however, can also lead to significant issues of repair—after Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, full repair of the electric power system took several years (NAS)
Restoring a system from a blackout required a very careful choreography of re-energizing transmission lines from generators that were still online inside the blacked-out area, from systems from outside the blacked-out area, restoring station power to off-line generating units so they could be restarted, synchronizing the generators to the interconnection, and then constantly balancing generation and demand as additional generating units and additional customer demands are restored to service.
Many may not realize it takes days to bring nuclear and coal fired power plants back on-line, so restoring power was done with gas-fired plants normally used for peak periods to cover baseload needs normally coal and nuclear-powered. The diversity of our energy systems proved invaluable (CR).
Restarting the grid after the 2003 power outage was especially difficult.
The blackout shutdown over 100 power plants, including 22 nuclear reactors, cutoff power for 50 million people in 8 states and Canada, including much of the Northeast corridor and the core of the American financial network, and showed just how vulnerable our tightly knit network of generators, transmission lines, and other critical infrastructure is.
The dependence of major infrastructural systems on the continued supply of electrical energy, and of oil and gas, is well recognized. Telecommunications, information technology, and the Internet, as well as food and water supplies, homes and worksites, are dependent on electricity; numerous commercial and transportation facilities are also dependent on natural gas and refined oil products.
Venezuela’s massive nationwide power outages, which began on Thursday, have so far resulted in at least 20 deaths, looting, and loss of access to food, water, fuel, and cash for many of the country’s 31 million residents. Late Monday, the United States said its diplomats would leave the US embassy in Caracas, citing deteriorating conditions. As the societal impacts intensify and Venezuela’s internal power struggle continues, the country is clearly struggling to restart its grid and meaningfully restore power—a problem exacerbated by its aging infrastructure.
Reenergizing a dead grid, a process known as a black start, is challenging under any circumstances.
Government statements and reports indicate that the blackout stems from a problem at the enormous Guri dam hydropower plant in eastern Venezuela, which generates 80 percent of the country’s electricity. And the already arduous process of restoring power seems hobbled by years of system neglect. It’s also unclear whether Venezuela has the specialists, workforce, and spare equipment available on the ground to triage the situation quickly.
“The challenge with black start is always just knowing specifically what happened,” says Nathan Wallace, director of cyber operations and a staff engineer at secure grid companies Cybirical and Ampirical Solutions. “It sounds like there may be lack of maintenance and some mismanagement. And typically if a system hasn’t been maintained, that means they really don’t have the visualization needed to understand the state of the system in real time. If the procedure for black start is not accurately representing the state of the system, there can be problems.”
A black start generally involves seeding power from an independent source—like small diesel generators or natural gas turbines—to restart power plants in an otherwise dead transmission network. This process is often called bootstrapping. Hydroelectric plants in particular can be designed to essentially black-start themselves. In these plants, water—often from a dam, as in the case of Guri—flows through a turbine, which spins it, powering an electric generator. Since it takes relatively little independent energy to open the water intake gates and potentially generate a lot of power very quickly, hydroelectric plants can work well for black start. It is unclear whether Venezuela’s Guri plant is designed with this scenario in mind.
What makes any black-start process especially complicated is the need to load balance a system, so that as power surges through, the supply from the generator matches the demand. Otherwise the generation plant will run too fast or be exhausted, causing the system to fail again.
It’s a large stepwise process to build up load, build up generation, build up more load, build up more generation until they’ve got enough reliability to go to the next element of the system. If a utility has issues with maintenance, or has a history of operational issues, or they don’t have a plan, or that plan is outdated, or if they don’t have a really good understanding of the limitations of the grid system, everything the utility is attempting to do becomes far more difficult.
Venezuela’s grid is based on a classic model of bulk power generation. From a centralized plant—in this case, Guri—substations transform electricity from low to high voltage so it can be transmitted all over the country and then converted back down to lower voltage for local distribution. This is fairly typical in small countries, though some prioritize adding diverse generation or connecting with neighboring grids to increase redundancy. Black-start researchers and practitioners say, though, that any model has pros and cons. While distributed systems don’t have a single point of generation failure, they can be more difficult to black start if they do go down, since more generation sites need to be bootstrapped and there are more loads to balance.
Regardless of the setup, the crucial component of all black starts is understanding what caused the outage, having the ability to fix it, and working with a system that can handle the power surges and fluctuations involved in bringing power back online. Without all of these elements in place, says Tim Yardley, a senior researcher at the University of Illinois focused on industrial control crisis simulations, black starts can be prohibitively difficult to execute.
“Reenergizing a grid in some ways is more of a shock to the system than it operating in its norm,” Yardley says. “If infrastructure is aging, and there’s a lack of maintenance and repairs, as you try to turn it back on and try to balance the loads you may have stuff that’s not going to come back up, infrastructure that’s been physically damaged or that was in such a bad state of repair that reenergizing it causes other problems.”
Crews attempting to deal with black-starting a frail and brittle grid also face major safety considerations, like explosions. “You have a maintenance issue and a manpower issue, because it’s extremely dangerous to reenergize a system if you have gear that hasn’t been maintained well,” Yardley notes.
Venezuela has faced years of power instability since about 2009, including two major blackouts in 2013 and a power and water crisis in 2016. At times the blackouts were caused in part by weather conditions like El Niño, but overall they have established a pattern of poor planning, mismanagement, and lack of investment on the part of the government. President Maduro has repeatedly overseen rationing efforts resulting in erratic power and has even set official national clocks back to put the country’s morning commute in daylight.
References
CR. September 4 & 23, 2003. Implications of power blackouts for the nation’s cybersecurity and critical infrastructure protection. Congressional Record, House of Representatives. Serial No. 108–23. Christopher Cox, California, Chairman select committee on homeland security
Fox, Brendan et al; Wind Power Integration – Connection and System Operational Aspects, Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2007 page 245
NAS. 2012. Terrorism and the Electric Power Delivery System. National Academy of Science
NAS. 2013. The Resilience of the Electric Power Delivery System in Response to Terrorism and Natural Disasters. National Academy of Science
I think that Ward & Brownlee’s 2000 book “Rare Earth: why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe” is one of the most profound books I’ve ever read. What if we are the only intelligent species in the galaxy, or even universe? There are dozens of reasons to think so. Bacteria on the other hand, are probably a dime a dozen, splattered over planets within a reasonable Goldilocks zone from their star.
But even the Goldilocks zone doesn’t guarantee life can exist. Mars is within this zone and almost certainly impossible to live on. Think again: “Escape to Mars after we’ve trashed the Earth?” And at the end of this post is a fiction story from the New Yorker, in which we can’t count on the Space Aliens to rescue us if they show up.
I think that the reason we haven’t detected other civilizations, the Fermi paradox, is because fossil fuels didn’t form on most planets in the universe. If they did, the odds are very high that intelligent life never evolved, as explained in this book review of Rare Earth (also see new science about why life may be rare in the universe here). Even if intelligent life evolved, it may have lacked the dexterity of an oppositional thumb. Or a history that led to inventing steam engines, and many more contingencies. Even if intelligent beings on other planets did discover coal, oil, and natural gas and build civilizations like ours, the distances between planets are too far apart, let alone stars or other galaxies, that they never went anywhere. And we didn’t detect them because like us, they exponentially consumed fossils until they went back to life before fossil fuels.
The Rare Earth hypothesis argues that the evolution of biological complexity requires a host of fortuitous circumstances, such as
a galactic habitable zone
a central star and planetary system having the requisite character
the circumstellar habitable zone
a right-sized terrestrial planet
the advantage of a gas giant guardian like Jupiter
a large natural satellite (the moon),
a magnetosphere and plate tectonics
the chemistry of the lithosphere, atmosphere, and oceans
the role of “evolutionary pumps” such as massive glaciation and rare bolide impacts
whatever led to the appearance of the eukaryote cell, sexual reproduction and the Cambrian explosion of animal, plant, and fungi phyla.
The evolution of human intelligence may have required yet further events, which are extremely unlikely to have happened were it not for the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago removing dinosaurs as the dominant terrestrial vertebrates.
In order for a small rocky planet to support complex life, Ward and Brownlee argue, the values of several variables must fall within narrow ranges. The universe is so vast that it could contain many Earth-like planets. But if such planets exist, they are likely to be separated from each other by many thousands of light years. Such distances may preclude communication among any intelligent species evolving on such planets, which would solve the Fermi paradox: “If extraterrestrial aliens are common, why aren’t they obvious?”
The right location in the right kind of galaxy
Rare Earth suggests that much of the known universe, including large parts of our galaxy, are “dead zones” unable to support complex life. Those parts of a galaxy where complex life is possible make up the galactic habitable zone, primarily characterized by distance from the Galactic Center. As that distance increases:
Star metallicity declines. Metals (which in astronomy means all elements other than hydrogen and helium) are necessary to the formation of terrestrial planets.
The X-ray and gamma ray radiation from the black hole at the galactic center, and from nearby neutron stars, becomes less intense. Thus the early universe, and present-day galactic regions where stellar density is high and supernovae are common, will be dead zones.
Gravitational perturbation of planets and planetesimals by nearby stars becomes less likely as the density of stars decreases. Hence the further a planet lies from the Galactic Center or a spiral arm, the less likely it is to be struck by a large bolide which could extinguish all complex life on a planet.
Item #1 rules out the outer reaches of a galaxy; #2 and #3 rule out galactic inner regions. Hence a galaxy’s habitable zone may be a ring sandwiched between its uninhabitable center and outer reaches.
Also, a habitable planetary system must maintain its favorable location long enough for complex life to evolve. A star with an eccentric (elliptic or hyperbolic) galactic orbit will pass through some spiral arms, unfavorable regions of high star density; thus a life-bearing star must have a galactic orbit that is nearly circular, with a close synchronization between the orbital velocity of the star and of the spiral arms. This further restricts the galactic habitable zone within a fairly narrow range of distances from the Galactic Center. Lineweaver et al. calculate this zone to be a ring 7 to 9 kiloparsecs in radius, including no more than 10% of the stars in the Milky Way, about 20 to 40 billion stars. Gonzalez, et al. would halve these numbers; they estimate that at most 5% of stars in the Milky Way fall in the galactic habitable zone.
Approximately 77% of observed galaxies are spiral, two-thirds of all spiral galaxies are barred, and more than half, like the Milky Way, exhibit multiple arms. According to Rare Earth, our own galaxy is unusually quiet and dim (see below), representing just 7% of its kind. Even so, this would still represent more than 200 billion galaxies in the known universe.
Our galaxy also appears unusually favorable in suffering fewer collisions with other galaxies over the last 10 billion years, which can cause more supernovae and other disturbances. Also, the Milky Way’s central black hole seems to have neither too much nor too little activity (Scharf 2012).
The orbit of the Sun around the center of the Milky Way is indeed almost perfectly circular, with a period of 226 Ma (million years), closely matching the rotational period of the galaxy. However, the majority of stars in barred spiral galaxies populate the spiral arms rather than the halo and tend to move in gravitationally aligned orbits, so there is little that is unusual about the Sun’s orbit. While the Rare Earth hypothesis predicts that the Sun should rarely, if ever, have passed through a spiral arm since its formation, astronomer Karen Masters has calculated that the orbit of the Sun takes it through a major spiral arm approximately every 100 million years. Some researchers have suggested that several mass extinctions do correspond with previous crossings of the spiral arms.
Orbiting at the right distance from the right type of star
According to the hypothesis, Earth has an improbable orbit in the very narrow habitable zone (dark green) around the Sun.
The terrestrial example suggests that complex life requires liquid water, requiring an orbital distance neither too close nor too far from the central star, another scale of habitable zone or Goldilocks Principle: The habitable zone varies with the star’s type and age.
For advanced life, the star must also be highly stable, which is typical of middle star life, about 4.6 billion years old. Proper metallicity and size are also important to stability. The Sun has a low 0.1% luminosity variation. To date no solar twin star, with an exact match of the sun’s luminosity variation, has been found, though some come close. The star must have no stellar companions, as in binary systems, which would disrupt the orbits of planets. Estimates suggest 50% or more of all star systems are binary. The habitable zone for a main sequence star very gradually moves out over its lifespan until it becomes a white dwarf and the habitable zone vanishes.
The liquid water and other gases available in the habitable zone bring the benefit of greenhouse warming. Even though the Earth’s atmosphere contains a water vapor concentration from 0% (in arid regions) to 4% (in rain forest and ocean regions) and – as of February 2018 – only 408.05 parts per million of CO2, these small amounts suffice to raise the average surface temperature by about 40 °C, with the dominant contribution being due to water vapor, which together with clouds makes up between 66% and 85% of Earth’s greenhouse effect, with CO2 contributing between 9% and 26% of the effect.
Rocky planets must orbit within the habitable zone for life to form. Although the habitable zone of such hot stars as Sirius or Vega is wide, hot stars also emit much more ultraviolet radiation that ionizes any planetary atmosphere. They may become red giants before advanced life evolves on their planets. These considerations rule out the massive and powerful stars of type F6 to O (see stellar classification) as homes to evolved metazoan life.
Small red dwarf stars, one of the most common kinds of stars in our galaxy, have small habitable zones wherein planets are in tidal lock, with one very hot side always facing the star and another very cold side; and they are also at increased risk of solar flares (see Aurelia), coronal mass ejections, sterilization from ionizing radiation, and atmospheric erosion since their habitable zone is so close to the star (Hunt 2020). Life therefore cannot arise in such systems. Rare Earth proponents claim that only stars from F7 to K1 types are hospitable. Such stars are rare: G type stars such as the Sun (between the hotter F and cooler K) comprise only 9% of the hydrogen-burning stars in the Milky Way.
Such aged stars as red giants and white dwarfs are also unlikely to support life. Red giants are common in globular clusters and elliptical galaxies. White dwarfs are mostly dying stars that have already completed their red giant phase. Stars that become red giants expand into or overheat the habitable zones of their youth and middle age (though theoretically planets at a much greater distance may become habitable).
An energy output that varies with the lifetime of the star will likely prevent life (e.g., as Cepheid variables). A sudden decrease, even if brief, may freeze the water of orbiting planets, and a significant increase may evaporate it and cause a greenhouse effect that prevents the oceans from reforming.
All known life requires the complex chemistry of metallic elements. The absorption spectrum of a star reveals the presence of metals within, and studies of stellar spectra reveal that many, perhaps most, stars are poor in metals. Because heavy metals originate in supernova explosions, metallicity increases in the universe over time. Low metallicity characterizes the early universe: globular clusters and other stars that formed when the universe was young, stars in most galaxies other than large spirals, and stars in the outer regions of all galaxies. Metal-rich central stars capable of supporting complex life are therefore believed to be most common in the quiet suburbs of the larger spiral galaxies—where radiation also happens to be weak.
With the right arrangement of planets
Rare Earth proponents argue that a planetary system capable of sustaining complex life must be structured more or less like the Solar System, with small and rocky inner planets and outer gas giants. Without the protection of ‘celestial vacuum cleaner’ planets with strong gravitational pull, a planet would be subject to more catastrophic asteroid collisions.
Observations of exo-planets have shown that arrangements of planets similar to our Solar System are rare. Most planetary systems have super Earths, several times larger than Earth, close to their star, whereas our Solar System’s inner region has only a few small rocky planets and none inside Mercury’s orbit. Only 10% of stars have giant planets similar to Jupiter and Saturn, and those few rarely have stable nearly circular orbits distant from their star. Konstantin Batygin and colleagues argue that these features can be explained if, early in the history of the Solar System, Jupiter and Saturn drifted towards the Sun, sending showers of planetesimals towards the super-Earths which sent them spiralling into the Sun, and ferrying icy building blocks into the terrestrial region of the Solar System which provided the building blocks for the rocky planets. The two giant planets then drifted out again to their present position. However, in the view of Batygin and his colleagues: “The concatenation of chance events required for this delicate choreography suggest that small, Earth-like rocky planets – and perhaps life itself – could be rare throughout the cosmos.”
A continuously stable orbit
Rare Earth argues that a gas giant must not be too close to a body where life is developing. Close placement of gas giant(s) could disrupt the orbit of a potential life-bearing planet, either directly or by drifting into the habitable zone.
The need for stable orbits rules out stars with systems of planets that contain large planets with orbits close to the host star (called “hot Jupiters“). It is believed that hot Jupiters have migrated inwards to their current orbits. In the process, they would have catastrophically disrupted the orbits of any planets in the habitable zone. To exacerbate matters, hot Jupiters are much more common orbiting F and G class stars.
A terrestrial planet of the right size
It is argued that life requires terrestrial planets like Earth and as gas giants lack such a surface, that complex life cannot arise there.
A planet that is too small cannot hold much atmosphere, making surface temperature low and variable and oceans impossible. A small planet will also tend to have a rough surface, with large mountains and deep canyons. The core will cool faster, and plate tectonics may be brief or entirely absent. A planet that is too large will retain too dense an atmosphere like Venus. Although Venus is similar in size and mass to Earth, its surface atmospheric pressure is 92 times that of Earth, and surface temperature of 735 K (462 °C; 863 °F). Earth had a similar early atmosphere to Venus, but may have lost it in the giant impact event.
Plate tectonics depend on the right chemical composition and a long-lasting source of heat from radioactive decay. Continents must be made of less dense felsic rocks that “float” on underlying denser mafic rock. Taylor emphasizes that tectonic subduction zones require the lubrication of oceans of water. Plate tectonics also provides a means of biochemical cycling.
Plate tectonics and as a result continental drift and the creation of separate land masses would create diversified ecosystems and biodiversity, one of the strongest defences against extinction. An example of species diversification and later competition on Earth’s continents is the Great American Interchange. North and Middle America drifted into South America at around 3.5 to 3 Ma. The fauna of South America evolved separately for about 30 million years, since Antarctica separated. Many species were subsequently wiped out in mainly South America by competing Northern American animals.
Diamonds: bad for life. The planets circling some stars may be too diamond-rich, as much as 50% pure diamond. Their mantle might consist of a hard, brittle diamond that is incapable of flowing. Whereas iron and silicon trap heat inside our planet, resulting in geothermal energy, diamonds transfer heat so readily that the planet’s interior would quickly freeze. Without geothermal energy, there couldn’t be any plate tectonics, magnetic field, or atmosphere. Panero describes these diamond super-earths as “very cold, dark” worlds (Wilkins 2011).
A large moon
The Moon is unusual because the other rocky planets in the Solar System either have no satellites (Mercury and Venus), or only tiny satellites which are probably captured asteroids (Mars).
The Giant-impact theory hypothesizes that the Moon resulted from the impact of a Mars-sized body, dubbed Theia, with the young Earth. This giant impact also gave the Earth its axial tilt (inclination) and velocity of rotation. Rapid rotation reduces the daily variation in temperature and makes photosynthesis viable. The Rare Earth hypothesis further argues that the axial tilt cannot be too large or too small (relative to the orbital plane). A planet with a large tilt will experience extreme seasonal variations in climate. A planet with little or no tilt will lack the stimulus to evolution that climate variation provides. In this view, the Earth’s tilt is “just right”. The gravity of a large satellite also stabilizes the planet’s tilt; without this effect the variation in tilt would be chaotic, probably making complex life forms on land impossible.
If the Earth had no Moon, the ocean tides resulting solely from the Sun’s gravity would be only half that of the lunar tides. A large satellite gives rise to tidal pools, which may be essential for the formation of complex life, though this is far from certain.
A large satellite also increases the likelihood of plate tectonics through the effect of tidal forces on the planet’s crust. The impact that formed the Moon may also have initiated plate tectonics, without which the continental crust would cover the entire planet, leaving no room for oceanic crust. It is possible that the large scale mantle convection needed to drive plate tectonics could not have emerged in the absence of crustal inhomogeneity. A further theory indicates that such a large moon may also contribute to maintaining a planet’s magnetic shield by continually acting upon a metallic planetary core as dynamo, thus protecting the surface of the planet from charged particles and cosmic rays, and helping to ensure the atmosphere is not stripped over time by solar winds.
Most planets have moons, but Earth’s moon is distinct in that it is large compared to the size of Earth; the moon’s radius is larger than a quarter of Earth’s radius, a much larger ratio than most moons to their planets. And it now appears that only certain types of planets can form moons that are large in respect to their host planets, planets that are less than six times the size of earth, because in a collision with another planet forming, the potential moon will be vaporized since these collisions are too energetic to form a large moon (Nakajima 2022).
Atmosphere
A terrestrial planet of the right size is needed to retain an atmosphere, like Earth and Venus. On Earth, once the giant impact of Theia thinned Earth’s atmosphere, other events were needed to make the atmosphere capable of sustaining life. The Late Heavy Bombardment reseeded Earth with water lost after the impact of Theia. The development of an ozone layer formed protection from ultraviolet (UV) sunlight. Nitrogen and carbon dioxide are needed in a correct ratio for life to form. Lightning is needed for nitrogen fixation. The carbon dioxide gas needed for life comes from sources such as volcanoes and geysers. Carbon dioxide is only needed at low levels] (currently at 400 ppm); at high levels it is poisonous. Precipitation is needed to have a stable water cycle. A proper atmosphere must reduce diurnal temperature variation.
One or more evolutionary triggers for complex life
Regardless of whether planets with similar physical attributes to the Earth are rare or not, some argue that life usually remains simple bacteria. Biochemist Nick Lane argues that simple cells (prokaryotes) emerged soon after Earth’s formation, but since almost half the planet’s life had passed before they evolved into complex ones (eukaryotes) all of whom share a common ancestor, this event can only have happened once. In some views, prokaryotes lack the cellular architecture to evolve into eukaryotes because a bacterium expanded up to eukaryotic proportions would have tens of thousands of times less energy available; two billion years ago, one simple cell incorporated itself into another, multiplied, and evolved into mitochondria that supplied the vast increase in available energy that enabled the evolution of complex life. If this incorporation occurred only once in four billion years or is otherwise unlikely, then life on most planets remains simple. An alternative view is that mitochondria evolution was environmentally triggered, and that mitochondria-containing organisms appeared soon after the first traces of atmospheric oxygen. Oxygen was needed for powering the process of aerobic respiration for both plants and animals.
The evolution and persistence of sexual reproduction is another mystery in biology. The purpose of sexual reproduction is unclear, as in many organisms it has a 50% cost (fitness disadvantage) in relation to asexual reproduction. Mating types (types of gametes, according to their compatibility) may have arisen as a result of anisogamy (gamete dimorphism), or the male and female genders may have evolved before anisogamy. It is also unknown why most sexual organisms use a binary mating system, and why some organisms have gamete dimorphism. Charles Darwin was the first to suggest that sexual selection drives speciation; without it, complex life would probably not have evolved.
The right time in evolution
While life on Earth is regarded to have spawned relatively early in the planet’s history, the evolution from multicellular to intelligent organisms took around 800 million years. Civilizations on Earth have existed for about 12,000 years and radio communication reaching space has existed for less than 100 years. Relative to the age of the Solar System (~4.57 Ga) this is a short time, in which extreme climatic variations, super volcanoes, and large meteorite impacts were absent. These events would severely harm intelligent life, as well as life in general. For example, the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, caused by widespread and continuous volcanic eruptions in an area the size of Western Europe, led to the extinction of 95% of known species around 251.2 Ma ago. About 65 million years ago, the Chicxulub impact at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (~65.5 Ma) on the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico led to a mass extinction of the most advanced species at that time.
If there were intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations able to make contact with distant Earth, they would have to live in the same 12Ka period of the 800Ma evolution of life.
Snowball Earth (Ward & Brownlee)
It is possible that the extreme conditions of snowball earth were required to force multicellular life to evolve 650 million years ago when the Earth’s surface became entirely or nearly frozen at least once.
Complex life evolved just once. All complex life is descended from a single common ancestor. Why? Nick Lane says that natural selection normally favors fast replication, keeping simple cells simple. Then a freak event occurred: an archaeon engulfed a bacterium and the 2 cells formed a symbiotic relationship. That transformed the dynamics of evolution, leading to a period of rapid change that produced innovations such as sex. The incorporated bacterium eventually evolved into mitochondria, the energy generators of complex cells. So there was nothing inevitable about the rise of the sophisticated organisms from which we evolved. “The unavoidable conclusion is that the universe should be full of bacteria, but more complex life will be rare” (NS 2010).
We are on our way to your planet. We will be there shortly. But in this, our first contact with you, our “headline” is: We do not want your gravel.
We are coming to Earth, first of all, just to see if we can actually do it. Second, we hope to learn about you and your culture(s). Third—if we end up having some free time—we wouldn’t mind taking a firsthand look at your almost ridiculously bountiful stores of gravel. But all we want to do is look.
You’re probably wondering if we mean you harm. Good question! So you’re going to like the answer, which is: We mean you no harm. Truth be told, there is a faction of us who want to completely annihilate you. But they’re not in power right now. And a significant majority of us find their views abhorrent and almost even barbaric.
But, thanks to the fact that our government operates on a system very similar to your Earth democracy, we have to tolerate the views of this “loyal opposition,” even while we hope that they never regain power, which they probably won’t (if the current poll tracking numbers hold up).
By the way, if we do take any of your gravel, it’s going to be such a small percentage of your massive gravel supply that you probably won’t even notice it’s gone.
You may be wondering how we know your language. We are aware that there’s a theory on your planet that we (or other alien species from the far reaches of the galaxy) have been able to learn your language from your television transmissions. This is not the case, because most of us don’t really watch TV. Most of our knowledge about your Earth TV comes from reading Zeitgeisty think pieces by our resident intellectuals, who watch it not for fun but for ideas for their print articles about how Earth TV holds a mirror up to Earth society, and so on. We mean, we’ll watch Earth TV sometimes—if it happens to be on already—but, generally, we prefer to read a good book or revive the lost art of conversation.
Sadly, Earth TV is like a vast wasteland, as the Earthling Newton Minow once said. But, for those of you who can understand things only in TV terms, just think of us as being very similar to Mork from Ork, in that he was a friendly, non-gravel-wanting alien who visited Earth just to find out what was there, and not to harvest gravel.
Speaking of a vast wasteland, you might want to start picking out and clearing off a place for our spacecraft to land. Our spacecraft, as you will see shortly, is huge. Do not be alarmed; this does not mean that each one of us is that much bigger than each one of you. It’s just that there were so many of us who wanted to come that we had to build a really huge spacecraft.
So, again, no cause for alarm.
(Full disclosure: each of us actually is much bigger than each of you, and there’s nothing we can do about it. So please don’t use any of your Earth-style discrimination against us. This is just how we are, and it’s not our fault.)
Anyway, re our spacecraft: it’s kind of gigantic. The deceleration thrusters alone are sort of, like . . . well, imagine four of your Vesuvius volcanoes (but bigger), turned upside down.
We don’t want to hurt anyone, so, if you could just clear off one continent, we think we can keep unintended fatalities to a minimum. Australia would probably work. (But don’t say Antarctica. Because we’d just melt it, and then you’d all end up underwater. Which would make it virtually impossible for us to learn about your hopes and your dreams, and your culture, and to harvest relatively small, sample-size amounts of your gravel, just for scientific study.)
A little bit about us: our males have two penises, while our females have only one. So, gender-wise, if you use simple math, we’re pretty much identical to you.
And, as far as protocol goes, we’re a pretty informal species. If you want to put together a welcoming ceremony with all your kings and queens and Presidents and Prime Ministers and leading gravel-owners, that’s fine. But please don’t feel like you have to.
Technically, it would be possible for us to share our space-travel technology with you, so that you could build a spacecraft and travel to our planet also. But, for right now, it just feels like it would be better if we came to your place.
Speaking of gravel, one thing we can’t tell from our monitoring of Earth is how your gravel tastes. It’s just something we’re curious about, for no real reason. Is it salty? It looks salty.
Maybe you could form a commission of scientists/gravel-tasters to look into this and let us know. Just have them collect all the gravel you have and put it in one big pile. (There are some pretty big empty parts of Utah, New Mexico, and Russia that might be good spots for such a large gravel pile, but that’s just an F.Y.I.)
Then, if you could have your top scientists/gravel-tasters go through this gravel pile, tasting each and every piece, that would be great. Also, if it’s not too much of a hassle, have them put all the saltier-tasting pieces in a separate pile.
Anyway, that about wraps up this transmission! Looking forward to seeing you very soon. (Sorry we couldn’t have given you more notice, but we didn’t want you Earth people going crazy and looting stuff and having sex in the streets out of panic about losing all your delicious gravel, which is something that is definitely not going to happen, because, when it comes down to it, what is gravel really but just a bunch of baby rocks?)
Our E.T.A. on Earth is sometime in the next 450 to 500 years, which we know is a blink of an eye in your Earth time, so start getting ready! Let’s have fun with this.
Yours,
A Species from a Galaxy You Haven’t Even Noticed Yet
P.S.—We saw that you sent some people to your moon recently. Good job! But, just to let you know, don’t waste your time with the moon. There’s no gravel there. We already checked.
References
Gribbin, J. 2018. Why we are probably the only intelligent life in the galaxy. Scientific American.
There are 17 rare earth elements in the periodic table. About nine of those elements go into every iPhone sold… and if China were suddenly to disappear from a map tomorrow, Apple would lose about 90% of those elements. Source: Brownlee 2013. 
