Lakes run dry from too much water extraction and climate change

Posted on January 8, 2019 by

Source: Hannah Osborne. Feb 8, 2016. Bolivia’s vanishing Lake Poopó: ESA images show fully evaporated lake from space. International Business Times.

Preface.   I think that declining oil will be the main cause of civilization to collapse, since it is the energy that makes all other activities possible, but there are so many other contenders I wonder if scholars in the future will argue over what was the main coup de grace.

Such as loss of water leading to less food production, mass migrations, and more. Abbott (2023) states that the Great Salt Lake could evaporate within 5 years unless water is conserved.  But hello, what about limiting development, immigration, and taxing families with more than two children? It would seem capitalism has squelched all discussion of birth control, limits to growth, and overshoot.

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

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Abbott BW et al (2023) Emergency measures needed to rescue Great Salt Lake from ongoing collapse. https://pws.byu.edu/GSL%20report%202023

Great Salt Lake is facing unprecedented danger. Without a dramatic increase in water flow to the lake in 2023 and 2024, its disappearance could cause immense damage to Utah’s public health, environment, and economy.

1. Great Salt Lake is a keystone ecosystem in the Western Hemisphere. The lake and its wetlands provide minerals for Utah’s industries, thousands of local jobs, and habitat for 10 million migratory birds. Fertilizer and brine shrimp from the lake feed millions of people worldwide. The lake provides $2.5 billion in direct economic activity yearly, as well as increasing precipitation, suppressing toxic dust, and supporting 80% of Utah’s wetlands.

2. Excessive water use is destroying Great Salt Lake. At 19 feet below its average natural level since 1850, the lake is in uncharted territory. It has lost 73% of its water and 60% of its surface area. Our unsustainable water use is desiccating habitat, exposing toxic dust, and driving salinity to levels incompatible with the lake’s food webs. The lake’s drop has accelerated since 2020, with an average deficit of 1.2 million acre-feet per year. If this loss rate continues, the lake as we know it is on track to disappear in five years.

3. We are underestimating the consequences of losing the lake. Examples from around the world show that saline lake loss triggers a long-term cycle of environmental, health, and economic suffering. Without a coordinated rescue, we can expect widespread air and water pollution, numerous Endangered Species Act listings, and declines in agriculture, industry, and overall quality of life.

4. The lake needs an additional million acre-feet per year to reverse its decline. This would increase average streamflow to ~2.5 million acre-feet per year, beginning a gradual refilling. Depending on future weather conditions, achieving this level of flow will require cutting consumptive water use in the Great Salt Lake watershed by a third to a half. Recent efforts have returned less than 0.1 million acre-feet per year to the lake, with most conserved water held in reservoirs or delivered to other users rather than released to the lake.

The lake is a vital link in the Pacific Flyway, providing food and habitat for more than 10 million migratory birds and wildlife throughout the Wasatch Front. Almost 350 bird species depend on Great Salt Lake habitats. The lake’s diverse wetland, island, and open-water environments are becoming even more crucial as habitat is lost or degraded throughout the western US.

Great Salt Lake also provides numerous ecosystem services, including protection of air quality, removal of water pollution, and moderation of local weather. Its dramatic vistas have inspired countless scientists, pioneers, artists, writers, photographers, and recreationists.

Over the last three years, the lake has received less than a third of its natural streamflow because of excessive water diversions.

The depletion of water is even more severe than it appears because groundwater is not included in these estimates. Approximately 26 million acre-feet have been lost from the lake itself, but twice that amount may have been lost from the aquifers around the lake due to water table drop. These empty aquifers could slow the rate of rebound after runoff is increased.

Agriculture consumes most of the water, as well as mining (9%), cities & industry (9%). Climate change warming has contributed about 9% of the lakes decline.

Irrigated agriculture is destroying saline lakes on every continent except Antarctica. The loss of a saline lake sets off a sequence of environmental and economic damage that is extremely difficult to reverse, such as air and water pollution, collapse of food production, economic depression, lower property values, mass migration, social conflict from loss of jobs and quality of life, loss of industry, and devastation of lake and wetland ecosystems.

Lakebed sediments are already being exposed that are laden with pollutants such as arsenic, cadmium, mercury, nickel, chromium, lead, copper, selenium, organic contaminants, and cyanotoxins. The dust in turn causes health effects such as reproductive disfunction, developmental defects, cognitive impairment, cardiovascular damage, and cancer. Plus damage agricultural crops, degrade soil fertility, and cause premature snowmelt when deposited on snowpack.

Ecologically food webs are disrupted or destroyed. The climate can experience extreme temperature swings, desertification, and more. The salinity of the main body of the lake has climbed to ~19%. At this level, the brine flies and brine shrimp cannot maintain their populations because of decreased primary productivity (i.e., loss of their food sources) and direct inhibition of their life cycles. These invertebrates feed migratory birds and support much of the lake’s industry.

Kate Ravilious. 4 March 2016. Many of world’s lakes are vanishing and some may be gone forever. NewScientist.

Bolivia’s second largest lake has vanished into thin air. In December, Lake Poopó became a dry salt pan and its largest lake – Lake Titicaca – is heading towards trouble, too. The combination of silting up and irrigation withdrawal from the Desaguadero River, which feeds Poopó, together with climate change and the extra warmth from current El Niño, were enough to finish this lake off.

Recent research and new data suggest that lakes in other parts of the world may also be on their way out.

“Considering the size of the lake – 2700 square kilometers (1042 square miles) – this is quite an astounding event, with slim prospects of recovery,” says Dirk Hoffmann from the Bolivia Mountain Institute. “This event should serve as a real warning. Eventually, we can expect Lake Titicaca to go the same way.”

Air temperature has risen by around 0.7 °C in the Andes over the past 70 years and lakes are being evaporated faster than they are replenished. Lake Titicaca is close to a tipping point. Just 1 to 2 °C of atmospheric warming – which is expected by 2050 – could be enough to evaporate the top few meters, which would shut down the Desaguadero River and dry up all the water bodies that this river feeds. Such an outcome would be catastrophic for the 3 million inhabitants of Bolivia’s highlands, including the city of La Paz.

“If Titicaca stops supplying the Desaguadero River then the region will enter a new climate regime and the entire Andean Plateau will change from a benign agricultural area to an arid inhospitable area,” says Mark Bush, biologist at Florida Institute of Technology. “This happened during two prior interglacials and each time the dry event lasted for thousands of years.”

It’s not just Andean lakes that are in trouble. Evidence from around the world suggests that lakes are warming, shrinking or disappearing, with huge impacts on ecosystems.

Warming lakes

The surface waters of the world’s lakes have warmed on average by 0.34 °C per decade since 1985. Sweden’s Lake Fracksjön is the fastest warming lake in the world, increasing 1.35 °C per decade, outpacing the rise in air temperature around it. Close behind is Lake Superior, one of North America’s Great Lakes. “The combination of cleaner skies, increasing air temperature and a shorter period of winter ice cover is behind this rapid warming,” says Catherine O’Reilly from Illinois State University.

This rapid warming is disrupting lake ecosystems. In European lakes, cold-loving fish such as Arctic charr decline while populations of warm-water fish such as carp increase. The latter feed on zooplankton, leaving fewer zooplankton to control damaging algal blooms.

Rapid surface warming also separates the deep cold water from the warm surface water, reducing transfer of nutrients and oxygen, potentially stressing organisms that cannot travel across the two layers. Tropical lakes are vulnerable to strengthening stratification because they don’t have the cold winter season to help the lake layers equilibrate.

Lake Tanganyika in East Africa is one example of this happening. “We think this has contributed to declining fish yields,” says James Russell, from Brown University, Rhode Island – a worrying prospect given that fish are a major source of protein for people living in the four countries bordering the lake, and that the fisheries provide employment for around 1 million people.

The disappearance of lakes across southern Europe, the Middle East and central Asia has been blamed on a rise in water extraction to meet the needs of agriculture and a growing and increasingly water-thirsty population. Climate change has compounded the problem.

“This region is experiencing a drier climate now, which is also driving increased water extraction,” says Erik Jeppesen, a freshwater ecologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. The eastern Mediterranean has just gone through its worst drought in 900 years.

As a result, lakes on the Central Anatolian Plateau lost around half of their surface area between 2003 and 2010, says Meryem Beklioğlu, a freshwater ecologist at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Lake Akşehir has dried up completely, she says, resulting in the extinction of one species of fish, Alburnus nasreddini, and endangering two other endemic fish species, Gobio gobio intermedius and Leuciscus anatolicus.

Beklioğlu’s models predict that, at current rate of water extraction, one of the largest lakes in this region – Lake Beysehir – will be gone by 2040. “This water is critical for irrigation and for the local economy, but right now we are cutting off the branch we are sitting on,” she says.

Many of Turkey’s lakes are shallow and this makes them particularly vulnerable. As they shrink, salt levels skyrocket. “It happens really fast – just four or five years – and has caused water-rationing in the past,” Beklioğlu says. The smaller volume of water also concentrates nutrients and encourages algal blooms that can be toxic.

“Ultimately, the drying of the lakes along with the loss of groundwater and salinisation, will make the land less viable for agriculture in this region,” says Jeppesen. “This will put significant pressure on northern countries to produce more food, leading to deteriorating water quality in northern lakes due to increased fertiliser run-off entering lakes.”

Further east, changing rainfall patterns coupled with a mining boom and agricultural irrigation have caused more than a quarter of the lakes in Mongolia to dry up by since the 1980s.

Similarly, lakes in south-east Australia have shrunk during recent droughts, with one of the largest lakes – Lake Alexandrina – losing over two-thirds of its volume and experiencing a fivefold increase in salinity in 2009. Heavy water usage by farms coupled with climate change are thought to have been to blame. “This caused localised extinctions of native fish species,” says Kane Aldridge, a limnologist at The University of Adelaide. “Droughts are a natural part of the climate here, but they are expected to become more common under climate change.”

Arctic ponds

One place that is warming especially rapidly is the Arctic. Viewed from above, it is dotted with millions of ponds – but far fewer than a few decades ago. A 2015 study in northern Alaska shows that over the last 60 years the surface area of ponds has diminished by nearly a third, and nearly a fifth of the ponds have vanished.

This is largely due to the permafrost thawing. When frozen soil thaws, the water can drain, bursting out sideways or disappearing underground. “It is like pulling the plug from a bathtub,” says Guido Grosse from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam, who has used satellite and aerial photos to document this loss. And once they start to drain they can disappear fast. In July 2014, an Arctic lake with the volume of around 350 Olympic swimming pools emptied in just 36 hours.

“These ponds are the baby lakes, and if they disappear then we will have no Arctic lakes in the long term,” says Christian Andresen from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. This will be bad news for fish like salmon, and migratory birds who depend on these lakes, says Grosse.

What to do?

Despite the trend, most of the world’s lakes are unlikely to disappear any time soon. And in some areas, such as the Tibetan plateau, the number of lakes is expanding. Rapid glacier melting is cooling existing lakes and creating new lakes there: 1099 in total between 1990 and 2010, representing a 23 per cent increase in surface area.

In the regions that are losing lakes, though, wiser water management could help slow down shrinking, says Beklioğlu.

And for warming lakes, says Jeppesen, reducing the input of nutrients could help to maintain the ecosystem balance. Hard engineering – dredging channels and building dams – can be a last resort.

But as the ill-fated Aral Sea in central Asia that went from being the world’s fourth largest lake to all but vanishing in less than a century shows, once a lake is lost it is very hard to recover. “Closed lake basins and shallow lakes are the most vulnerable to drying,” says Lisa Borre from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York. “Climate change is a major issue and we will see more Aral Seas and Lake Poopós in the future.”

Posted in Air, Drought & Collapse, Overpopulation, Peak Water, Water Infrastructure | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Lakes run dry from too much water extraction and climate change

Deep-sea trawling harms biodiversity and carbon storage

Posted on January 5, 2019 by

Source: October 2017. Bottom Trawling. https://www.2thepoint.in/bottom-trawling/

Preface. Overfishing has eliminated 90% of the world’s large predatory fishes and is devastating marine ecosystems.

Bottom trawling is one of the most devastating ways our oceans are being overfished, degraded and biodiversity destroyed .  This industry tossed 437 million tonnes of unwanted fish in just the past 65 years, a huge waste  (Cashion 2018). About 20 pounds of bykill are caught for every pound of desired species.

There are tens of thousands of trawlers dragging an area equivalent to twice the lower 48 states every year to catch shrimp and fin fishes.

Trawling is done by large industrial fishing vessels dragging large nets along the sea floor, often pulling up unwanted fish, and generating the most waste of any fishing method because the unwanted catch is dumped back into the ocean.  This has been going on since the Middle Ages, but the damage is orders of magnitude greater now with motorized fishing fleets, powered by government subsidies, using heavier nets to get at fish in much deeper water that are further offshore.

Satellite images show that spreading clouds of mud remain suspended in the sea long after the trawler has passed. But what satellites can see is only the “tip of the iceberg,” because most trawling happens in waters too deep to detect sediment plumes at the surface.

In addition to bottom trawling that’s every more widespread and goes deeper, oceans are also threatened by sea-mining and oil drilling.

Trawling in the news:

Einhorn C (2021) Trawling for Fish May Unleash as Much Carbon as Air Travel. New York Times.  Currently, 7% of the ocean is protected, and less than 3% highly protected. Bottom trawlers scrape an estimated 1.9 million square miles of the sea floor. If undisturbed, the carbon stored there can remain for tens of thousands of years. It’s wiping out biodiversity, it’s wiping out things like deep sea corals that take hundreds of years to grow. Journal article: 2021 Protecting the global ocean for biodiversity, food and climate. Nature.

Cashion, T., et al. 2018. Reconstructing global marine fishing gear use: Catches and landed values by gear type and sector. Fisheries Research 206: 57

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

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Pusceddu, A., et al. June 17, 2014. Chronic and intensive bottom trawling impairs deep-sea biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 24: 8861-8866

Abstract. Bottom trawling has many impacts on marine ecosystems, including seafood stock impoverishment, benthos mortality, and sediment resuspension. Historical records of this fishing practice date back to the mid-1300s. Trawling became a widespread practice in the late 19th century, and it is now progressively expanding to greater depths, with the concerns about its sustainability that emerged during the first half of the 20th century now increasing. We show here that compared with untrawled areas, chronically trawled sediments along the continental slope of the north-western Mediterranean Sea are characterized by significant decreases in organic matter content (up to 52%), slower organic carbon turnover (ca. 37%), and reduced meiofauna abundance (80%), biodiversity (50%), and nematode species richness (25%). We estimate that the organic carbon removed daily by trawling in the region under scrutiny represents as much as 60–100% of the input flux. We anticipate that such an impact is causing the degradation of deep-sea sedimentary habitats and an infaunal depauperation. With deep-sea trawling currently conducted along most continental margins, we conclude that trawling represents a major threat to the deep seafloor ecosystem at the global scale.

Trawling represents one of the most common fishing practices along the coastal oceans of the world. However, it can have a plethora of impacts on the sea bottom, including stock impoverishment, alterations to the sea-bottom morphology, sediment resuspension, and increased bottom-water turbidity, epibenthos mortality, altered nutrient cycles, and alteration of the benthic biodiversity (1).

Historical records of this fishing practice date back to the mid-1300s, and it became widely practiced with the industrialization of fisheries in the late 19th century (2–4). Because shallow coastal water resources have steeply declined in the last 50 years (5, 6), fisheries are expanding offshore and trawling is being carried out at progressively increasing depths (7, 8).

In contrast to what was believed up to a few decades ago, deep-sea habitats (>200 m in depth) are rich in biodiversity, and they host many endemic and commercially important species (9, 10). Compared with shallow-water areas, the impact of trawling on deep-sea benthic ecosystems is deemed more severe and long-lasting, because of their lower resilience and higher vulnerability (10). However, our knowledge of the impact of trawling on deep-sea ecosystems has remained limited and has mainly focused on hard-bottom systems, such as seamounts and cold-water coral reefs (11, 12).

Sedimentary environments (i.e., the soft sea bottom) represent the greatest area of the deep-sea floor and host a vast fauna biodiversity (10). In these environments, the metazoan fauna (i.e., multicellular organisms) include almost all of the 35 modern animal Phyla. The smaller components of this fauna, the meiofauna, are characterized by relatively short life cycles, high turnover rates, and a lack of larval dispersion. For all oceanic seafloors, nematodes account for >90% of meiofauna abundance in the deep sea (13) and are characterized by very high species richness and recognizable feeding types and life strategies (14, 15). In this sense, nematodes have been recently used as a model to demonstrate that any loss in deep-sea fauna biodiversity is associated with an exponential decrease in ecosystem functioning (16).

Recent investigations carried out in the north-western Mediterranean Sea have revealed that the continuous stirring, mixing, and resuspension of surface sediments by intensive and chronic trawling activities has caused changes to the present-day sediment dynamics and has permanently smoothed the seafloor morphology of the continental slope over large spatial scales (17–19). In this region, deep-sea trawled grounds are subjected to levels of sediment disturbance whose effects are larger than the changes in sediment properties associated with seasonal variability (20). Smoothed trawling grounds are also exposed to a reduced habitat heterogeneity. Because high habitat heterogeneity is crucial to preserve high biodiversity levels (21, 22), trawling activities might represent a major threat to the integrity of deep-sea ecosystems (12, 18).

References

  1. Thrush SF, Dayton PK (2002) Disturbance to marine benthic habitats by trawling and dredging: Implications for marine biodiversity. Annu Rev Ecol Syst 33:449–473.
  2. Roberts C (2007) The Unnatural History of the Sea (Island Press, Chicago, IL).
  3. Graham M (1938) The trawl fisheries: A scientific and national problem. Nature 142(3609):1143–1146.
  4. Myers RA, Worm B (2003) Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities. Nature 423(6937):280–283.
  5. Thurstan RH, Brockington S, Roberts CM (2010) The effects of 118 years of industrial fishing on UK bottom trawl fisheries. Nat Commun 1:15.
  6. Worm B, Tittensor DP (2011) Range contraction in large pelagic predators. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 108(29):11942–11947.
  7. Roberts CM (2002) Deep impact: The rising toll of fishing in the deep sea. Trends Ecol Evol 17(5):242–245.
  8. Morato T, Watson R, Pitcher TJ, Pauly D (2006) Fishing down the deep. Fish Fish 7(1):24–34.
  9. Costello MJ, et al. (2010) A census of marine biodiversity knowledge, resources, and future challenges. PLoS ONE 5(8):e12110.
  10. Rex MA, Etter RJ (2010) Deep-Sea Biodiversity: Pattern and Scale (Harvard Univ Press, Cambridge, MA).
  11. Norse EA, et al. (2012) Sustainability of deep-sea fisheries. Mar Policy 36(2):307–320.
  12. Althaus F, et al. (2009) Impacts of bottom trawling on deep-coral ecosystems of seamounts are long-lasting. Mar Ecol Prog Ser 397:279–294.
  13. Giere O (2009) Meiobenthology. The Microscopic Motile Fauna of Aquatic Sediments (Springer, Berlin).
  14. Lambshead PJD (2004) Marine nematode biodiversity. Nematology: Advances and Perspectives: Nematode Morphology, Physiology and Ecology, Tsinghua University Press (TUP) Book Series, eds Chen ZX, Chen SY, Dickson DW (CABI Publishing, Wallingford, UK), Vol 1, pp. 436–467.
  15. Heip C, Vincx M, Vranken G (1985) The ecology of marine nematodes. Oceanogr Mar Biol 23:399–489.
  16. Danovaro R, et al. (2008) Exponential decline of deep-sea ecosystem functioning linked to benthic biodiversity loss. Curr Biol 18(1):1–8.
  17. Palanques A, et al. (2006) Evidence of sediment gravity flows induced by trawling in the Palamós (Fonera) submarine canyon (northwestern Mediterranean) Deep-Sea Res 5:201–214.
  18. Puig P, et al. (2012) Ploughing the deep sea floor. Nature 489(7415):286–289.
  19. Martín J, Puig P, Palanques A, Ribó M (2014) Trawling-induced daily sediment resuspension in the flank of a Mediterranean submarine canyon. Deep Sea Res Part 2 Top Stud Oceanogr doi:10.1016/j.dsr2.2013.05.036.
  20. Sañé E, Martín J, Puig P, Palanques A (2013) Organic biomarkers in deep-sea regions affected by bottom trawling: Pigments, fatty acids, amino acids and carbohydrates in surface sediments from the La Fonera (Palamós) Canyon, NW Mediterranean Sea. Biogeosciences 10:8093–8108.
  21. Levin LA, Dayton PK (2009) Ecological theory and continental margins: Where shallow meets deep. Trends Ecol Evol 24(11):606–617.
  22. McClain CR, Barry JP (2010) Habitat heterogeneity, disturbance, and productivity work in concert to regulate biodiversity in deep submarine canyons. Ecology 91(4):964–976.

 

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, Fisheries, Fishery destruction, Peak Food | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Deep-sea trawling harms biodiversity and carbon storage

What collapse is like: Guadalajara Mexico

Posted on December 30, 2018 by

Preface.  Collapse can be local rather than national. There are 5 states within Mexico the State Department warns not to travel to: Colima,Guerrero, Michoacán, Sinaloa, and Tamaulipas because violent crime, such as homicide, kidnapping, carjacking, and robbery, are widespread. There are 11 more states the state department says you should reconsider travel due to violent crime and gang activity being widespread: Chihuaua, Coahulla, Durango, Estado de Mexico, Jalisco, Morelos, Nayrit, Nuevo Leon, San Luis Potosi, Sonora, Zacatecas.

There are patterns to what happens in a collapsing city or state or nation that are common to all places and all times. If you’re curious how things will go down in the U.S. at some point during the Great Simplification, this article will give you an idea of what to expect.  Though given the extremely high level of gun ownership in the U.S., it could be worse…

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

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William Finnegan. July 2, 2012.  The Kingpins. The fight for Guadalajara. The New Yorker.

At the Guadalajara International Book Fair, Enrique Peña Nieto, who is forty-five, boyishly handsome, and generally expected to be the next President of Mexico, was asked to name three books that had influenced him. He mentioned the Bible, or, at least, “some parts” (unspecified), and “The Eagle’s Throne,” a Carlos Fuentes novel (though he named the historian Enrique Krauze as the author). And, for a few excruciating minutes, that was all he could come up with. The crowd laughed wickedly. Peña Nieto’s wife, a former soap-opera star, squirmed in the front row. His teen-age daughter didn’t help matters when, in a tweet, she scorned “all of the idiots who form part of the proletariat and only criticize those they envy.”

That debacle was in December. It did nothing to slow Peña Nieto’s well-financed march toward the election, which will take place on July 1st, but it did provide a welcome distraction for Guadalajarans, who are justly proud of their annual book fair. It is the second largest in Latin America, drawing more than half a million visitors, nearly two thousand publishers, and hundreds of authors, including, over the years, Nadine Gordimer, William Styron, and Toni Morrison. Guadalajarans sometimes offer it up as Exhibit A for the case that the city is a civilized place where life goes on unmarked by the violence that disfigures large parts of Mexico.

By late 2011, that argument was hard to make. Two days before the fair opened, twenty-six corpses were dumped under the Millennium Arches, a downtown landmark. Near the bodies, which bore signs of torture, was a message—what is known as a narcomanta—signed by the Zetas, the most feared organized-crime group in Mexico. The message taunted the Sinaloa cartel, the country’s biggest crime group, and its leader, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo (Shorty). Sinaloa has controlled Guadalajara, which is the capital of the western state of Jalisco, for decades. “We’re in Jalisco and we are not leaving,” the Zetas announced. “This is proof that we are deep inside the kitchen.” Most narcomantas(which appear virtually every day somewhere in Mexico) are disinformation, their assertions dubious, their true authorship unknowable. But the Zetas have been pushing westward from their strongholds on the Gulf Coast, and they had already taken the neighboring state of Zacatecas, so there was no reason to doubt that they coveted Jalisco, a rich prize, or that this was indeed their atrocity and their message to Guadalajara.

In Mexico, it is often impossible to know who is behind something—a massacre, a candidacy, an assassination, the capture of a crime boss, a “discovery” of high-level corruption. Either the truth is too fluid and complex to define or it remains opaque to anyone not directly involved in manipulating events. This may help to explain how a city widely understood to be under the control of a leading international crime group—the U.S. Treasury Department recently labelled Guzmán, who is fifty-five, “the world’s most powerful drug trafficker”—can regard itself as a jacaranda-shaded refuge of high culture and legitimate commercial vitality. Both descriptions are true, and both realities are under siege. When Mexicans discuss the news, they talk often about pantallas—screens, illusions, behind which are more screens, all created to obscure the facts. Peña Nieto is depicted, in cartoons, as a carnival mask behind which laughs Carlos Salinas de Gortari, a former President, who is still regarded as enormously powerful. I can’t count the number of times I have asked someone about a news story and been told, “Pantalla.”

This is a problem for journalism. You fish for facts and instead pull up boatloads of speculation, some of it well informed, much of it trailing tangled agendas. You end up reporting not so much what happened as what people think or imagine or say happened. Then there is the entirely justified fear of speaking to the press, particularly to foreign journalists. I have had to offer anonymity, pseudonyms, and extraordinary assurances to many sources for this account. The reprisals that people are trying to avoid would come not only from crime groups but, in many cases, from factions within the Mexican government.

The six-year Presidency of Felipe Calderón is coming to an end, and this election can fairly be seen as a referendum on his military-led offensive against drug traffickers, which has cost some fifty thousand lives and left the country psychologically battered. Calderón’s National Action Party (pan) is far behind in the polls. Its Presidential candidate, Josefina Vázquez Mota, campaigns under the slogan “Josefina diferente,” hoping to distance herself from Calderón, but she served in his Cabinet, and her proposals for restoring security are not notably different from current policies. Peña Nieto’s security platform is nothing special, either. He might eventually return the Army to its barracks and, like virtually every recent President, revamp the federal police. His slogan is “Tú me conoces”—“You know me”—which many people find amusing, since they don’t know him at all. He was the governor of Mexico State, a populous but small horseshoe around Mexico City, and his time as a national politician has been short and heavily stage-managed, with limited press access (and no more literacy tests). Mexicans do know his party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (pri), which ruled the country from 1929 until 2000. Throwing out the corrupt, authoritarian pri, in 2000, was a great moment for democracy in Latin America. Now it seems that Mexican voters are poised to bring the Party back.

The PAN is often described as center-right, the PRI as center-left, and the country’s third party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (P.R.D.), as left-wing. But these labels carry little weight in Mexico today. “The parties have no ideology,” a magazine editor in Mexico City told me. “That aspect is meaningless. Power here is about money.” The P.R.D. candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a popular former mayor of Mexico City, who nearly won the Presidency in 2006, has moved toward the center this year, dropping his confrontational rhetoric. Indeed, in 2010 the P.R.D. and the purportedly rightist pan combined forces successfully, backing the same candidates for governor in three state elections. The pan and the pri are both avidly pro-business. But it was the pri that presided over the privatization of more than a thousand state companies during the nineteen-eighties and nineties. Carlos Salinas, during his sexenio, privatized hundreds of companies, as well as Mexico’s banking system, turning a lucky circle of his friends into billionaires. This creation of a new economic élite, with effective monopolies in fields such as transportation, mining, and telecommunications, resembles the creation, around the same time, of the new crony-capitalist oligarchy in Russia. And in Mexico nearly all its beneficiaries owe their fortunes to the pri, not the pan.

Calderón began his military assault on the cartels immediately after he took office, in December, 2006. He had narrowly won that year’s election. López Obrador, in a rancorous aftermath, had refused to concede, and many people believed that Calderón started his “war” in order to change the subject—to try to consolidate his legitimacy in office. A career pan functionary (his father co-founded the Party), Calderón is not a particularly colorful or forceful character, and his sudden assumption of the role of wartime leader was also seen by critics as overcompensation. Once engaged, he found himself regularly accused of going easy on the Sinaloa cartel. A zero-sum analysis of an anti-crime strategy is, understandably, the default view in Mexico: any government assault on one cartel must be at the behest of its rivals. And Sinaloa did seem underrepresented among the casualties and captured narcos as those numbers spiralled up. Reasons advanced for this alleged softness included Chapo Guzmán’s web of informers inside the government and a secret Calderón strategy to weaken Sinaloa’s rivals in order to produce a single, credible interlocutor for organized crime with whom the government could strike deals.

In yet more overcompensation, Calderón has seemed to be pounding extra hard on Sinaloa in recent times. His Hail Mary pass to keep his party in power has been a highly publicized effort to capture or kill Guzmán. In February, federal police missed getting him, they claimed, by a matter of minutes at a rented beachfront mansion in Cabo San Lucas. Afterward, in Mexico City, Janet Napolitano, the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, predicted that Guzmán would be caught, citing the successful manhunt for Osama bin Laden. But bin Laden didn’t have the Pentagon on his payroll; Guzmán’s bribe network inside Mexico’s security forces is formidable.

Calderón has pursued a “kingpin strategy,” like the “deck of cards” that the United States used in post-Saddam Iraq. In 2009, Mexican authorities listed the thirty-seven drug capos they most wanted. They have so far caught or killed twenty-two, and some cartels seem to have withered after losing their leaders. But organized crime controls more resources today, and sows more terror, than ever. The most common fallout from the kingpin strategy has been the fragmentation of narco-trafficking into smaller, warring, ultraviolent factions. This cops-and-robbers version of the drug war cannot, in any case, be taken at face value. The idea of a unified state that is furiously pursuing bad guys is pure pantalla. The low-grade civil war in Mexico takes place on the ground, among factions with shifting loyalties, in cities and villages with tangled histories. The “government” has innumerable faces—it has more than two thousand police agencies, for a start—and its corruption controls are too weak to counter the power of narco billions. Every local commander, every official, and every community must work out an accommodation with organized crime.

Metropolitan Guadalajara, population four and a half million, sprawls across a sunny, mile-high plateau. It’s been the administrative center of western Mexico since the sixteenth century—the older parts of town are filled with imposing churches, plazas, and public buildings—and it’s still a financial, industrial, and educational hub. Electronics and software are booming fields—people call it the Silicon Valley of Mexico. The University of Guadalajara has more than two hundred thousand students. The city has good restaurants and music, great old neighborhoods, shiny new malls, and a flourishing methamphetamine trade.

The Mexican meth trade got a big boost in the nineteen-nineties, when American law enforcement started to crack down on U.S. meth labs and production moved south. For the Mexican cartels, meth has many advantages. With cocaine, they are middlemen, dependent on producers in South America and obliged to move the product, first, across Central America. Marijuana and heroin require cropland, rainfall, harvesting, and, in the case of heroin, processing. Meth, like other synthetic drugs, is produced indoors. It has, by some estimates, the highest profit margin of all the major illegal drugs. Whether smoked, snorted, injected, or swallowed as a pill, it is extremely addictive. Worldwide consumption has been rising for decades. According to a recent United Nations report, amphetamines have passed cocaine and opiates to become the second most used illegal type of drug, after marijuana. In 2010, a hundred and sixty-six meth labs were busted in Iran; the Czech Republic shuts down some four hundred labs a year. Mexico, with the U.S. market next door, is believed to have become the world’s largest meth producer. The cartels, particularly Sinaloa, cook meth on an industrial scale that would not be possible in the U.S.

In a 2008 report (later WikiLeaked), titled “Chemical City,” the U.S. consulate in Guadalajara listed the factors that made Jalisco a major center of crystal-meth production: “geography, availability of materials, adequate infrastructure, and brain power.” The Sinaloa cartel, which got its start growing and smuggling marijuana and heroin, and then became extremely rich transshipping cocaine from Colombia to the United States, branched into the meth business sometime in the nineteen-nineties.

Its Guadalajara chieftain, Ignacio (Nacho) Coronel Villarreal, became known as the King of Crystal. He lived in the city’s wealthiest neighborhood but ran his operations without flamboyance. The profits were apparently fabulous. Then, in July, 2010, Coronel was killed in an Army raid on his home. Speculation was rife. Armchair warriors wondered if El Chapo had set up his old friend Nacho, out of concern that his Jalisco kingdom was becoming too independently powerful. In any event, everyone said that taking Coronel alive was out of the question. The “gentleman narco,” as I heard him called in Guadalajara, knew who in the Army was on whose payroll. That was why the Army sent a hundred soldiers to attack the house where he had lived, more or less openly, for many years.

“That was when things changed in Jalisco,” a bookstore clerk on Avenida Chapultepec told me. “That was the end of the peace.” The Zetas, who reportedly know nothing about cooking meth but are old hands at the hostile takeover of going concerns, started making more aggressive alliances with disaffected local gangsters.

“Heating up the plaza” is the term of art for what’s happening in Guadalajara, mainly in the poor barrios and in the badlands on the outskirts, the places absorbing the city’s wild recent growth. Tlajomulco de Zuñiga, a big, shapeless municipio (the rough equivalent of a county) on the city’s southern edge, has seen its population quadruple in a decade, to almost half a million. The pri’s candidate for governor recently described the area as “a dumping ground for corpses.” Bad guys dropped their victims in local ditches. The Army conducted raids on local meth labs. In February, the Army announced that it had seized, in a “historic” bust, in Tlajomulco, fifteen tons of methamphetamine. The street value of that much meth was, by the Army’s figuring, some four billion dollars. If true, that would indeed make it the largest meth bust in history. But was it true?

Víctor Hugo Ornelas is never without his camera. It’s a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT, which he carries on a shoulder strap and swings silently into focus on garbage piles, flooded roads, bad potholes. He’s a tireless blogger (he is also a stringer for Milenio, a national daily), and these shots go up with notas (short articles) about derelictions, hazards, and other small outrages around Tlajomulco. Most will make it into La Verdad (The Truth), a weekly paper for which he covers politics, writes a column, and does investigations. He photographs corpses, too, and writes those notas. Unlike many papers, La Verdad doesn’t publish blood and gore, but Hugo’s laptop contains a stomach-turning archive of headless torsos, hacked-off limbs, heads on poles with narcomantas attached.

“The bodies are messages,” he told me. “If it’s missing a finger, it means you pointed to somebody. Missing legs means you changed groups. Missing the tongue means you said something you shouldn’t have. A hand cut off means it was a thief.”

We were driving around western Tlajomulco, a sunbaked miscellany of ranches, factories, subdivisions, and rough hills. I parked in a patch of shade. Hugo wanted to check out a scruffy warehouse that had caught his eye. This was on the main highway running south from Guadalajara. An old couple appeared. They lived next to the warehouse, and told us that stinking water ran out of the building. They didn’t know the name of the company that used it, but they thought it produced condiments. “They burn their trash, and we breathe the nasty smoke,” the woman said. It was hard to hear her over the roar of trucks. Hugo leaned in, took notes. He wore a dress shirt, jeans, and boots. He had beaded leather bracelets on both wrists. He is slender, thirty, with a severe face—high cheekbones, wide-set eyes. We watched him hobble off to snap pictures of the warehouse. He has used a cane since February, when he suffered a severe fracture of his left leg playing league soccer. “They pasted me,” he said.

Many people would like to paste Hugo. He was once studying a strange-looking house, figuring that it was a meth lab, when a pickup truck suddenly wheeled out of the driveway and blocked his path. Four armed men jumped out. They threw him and a female companion on the ground. With a boot on his neck and a gun at his head, Hugo played the fool. He babbled about how he admired the federal agents known as afis (the Federal Investigation Agency was a squad created to fight corruption and organized crime), pretending that he thought the narcos were afis. The ruse seemed to confuse the gunmen. Hugo allowed himself a faint smile when he told me this story. The narcos did not spot his camera, which he had quickly hidden in the car. That, he thought, probably saved their lives.

“But I fear the government more,” he said. He meant officials, police, and soldiers—those he usually offended with his investigations. Yet, he said, “You have to confront them, or they will just come more and more. I wrote a nota about corruption in the municipal police. They were taking wrecked cars and selling off the good parts. I named names, gave a lot of details. One of the cops came to my office, armed, in uniform. I told him that City Hall was down the street, if he wanted to make a complaint. I told him he shouldn’t come threatening me, and I picked up my camera. He turned and ran. I got a good picture of him running.”

Most confrontations don’t end so merrily. Anyway, if someone wants to do you real harm, he can just hire a sicario—an assassin. “It’s only a thousand pesos,” Hugo told me—less than eighty dollars. “And that’s not just in Tlajomulco. It’s everywhere.” The day before his leg was broken in the soccer game, two men accosted him. They were waiting outside his house, in the rain. “They were very aggressive. One guy asked me, ‘How low do your balls hang?’ That’s a rude question. I was sarcastic. I asked them if that was supposed to scare me. I still don’t know who sent them.”

Was there a connection to his soccer injury?

Hugo looked at his cane. “They weren’t going for the ball,” he said. He was blindsided, and never knew who hit him. The game was stopped. Nobody from the other team spoke to him. His teammates, perhaps doing him a favor, said they did not see who had pasted him. He kept writing notas from his hospital bed. I had noticed, on his Twitter page, a photograph of him out cold, awaiting surgery. It was probably best to stay in the public eye—to try to seem cheerful, unintimidated. Hugo heard that a young man who worked at City Hall said that they should have broken both his legs.

Hugo likes to go undercover. He recently posed as a building inspector, to get a look at the paperwork for a new banquet hall. The permits were bogus, as he suspected. Developers normally get their way in Tlajomulco. They have thrown up a large number of spectacularly shabby subdivisions, not bothering with even basic services. Some of these places have now been without water for years. Five thousand houses in the new subdivisions are already abandoned. The owner of the illegal banquet hall went ballistic over Hugo’s article. He cornered him in a parking lot, letting him know that he had crossed the wrong guy. Unfortunately, that could be true.

Could the police be of any help?

“The corruption is so deep,” Hugo said. “No.”

The Army?

“The soldiers here don’t speak. They don’t investigate. They don’t know who anyone is. They wear masks. They just follow orders and attack. Then they go back to their bases.

“Some cops I trust,” Hugo went on. “I even help them with things. They call me to help them find a certain place. They don’t know all the fraccionamientos”—the dirt-poor new tracts. We were passing through one, called Santa Fe. The tiny row houses, the gray cinder-block walls, seemed to stretch for miles. Gang graffiti and newly painted pri propaganda competed for wall space. We crossed a culvert. “They have dumped bodies there,” Hugo said. He directed me to a modest police substation, where there was an officer who might speak to me.

“Call me José,” the officer said. It was clearly not his name.

José said that there were two hundred and forty thousand residents in his sector, and a total of ninety cops. The worst problems were gang violence and robbery. The Army blew through occasionally but did not communicate with police. There was little point in arresting people, because there were so few prosecutions. A local capo, known as El Puerco (the Hog), who worked for a cartel called La Resistencia, which had thrown in its lot with the Zetas, had been arrested, José said, for drug dealing, robbery, and multiple homicides. Three days later, José said, he was released. The Sinaloa cartel kept a lower profile. Its local affiliate was called the Jalisco Cartel New Generation. Meth addiction was one of the ways the cartels recruited. Kids got into drugs and gangs and, if they survived, were allowed to join the cartel.

José’s men kept strolling into the room where we talked, checking me out. They wore bulletproof vests and carried assault rifles. I knew that José would not have agreed to talk to me if I had not arrived with Hugo. “This is not the U.S.,” he said. “But things have to change, or we’ll go the way of Afghanistan. The next President has an obligation to change things.”

Local security had deteriorated since the arrival of the Zetas: “Now you don’t know who is connected with whom, or where the threats are coming from.”

Two years before, José had been ambushed. “I was on patrol,” he said. He pulled his shirt up to reveal huge, frightening scars. “They never caught the shooter.”

Hugo later said, “He’s a good guy. I trust him. But he’s been scared since he got shot.”

There are reportedly three capture/kill squads working full time for Felipe Calderón’s government on Chapo Guzmán. The Drug Enforcement Administration and other U.S. security agencies are said to feed the Mexican military intelligence information on Guzmán’s movements, and are frustrated by the Mexicans’ failure to kill or capture him. After the near-miss in February, an American official told ABC News, “Every time he gets away, they tell us, ‘He got out the back door.’ ” The Americans had started joking that “there is no word for ‘surround’ in Spanish.” Press reports put Guzmán in Argentina, Guatemala, England, Honduras, or, most often, simply back home in the state of Sinaloa, in the rugged Sierra Madre range where he grew up.

Last October, President Calderón suggested, bizarrely, that Guzmán was living in the United States. He seemed to be referring to the news that Guzmán’s wife, Emma Coronel, had recently travelled to California, where, in August, she gave birth to twins in a hospital in Los Angeles County. But Coronel had returned to Mexico. U.S. law enforcement had tracked her back as far as the border.

The fact that Guzmán’s freedom has been embarrassing the Mexican President for years reflects a fundamental power shift between the Mexican state under the pan and Mexican organized crime. Before 2000, under the pri, crime groups prospered, but the national government ultimately called the shots. There were well-understood lines that the cartels could not cross. One of those was crossed in 1993, when the Archbishop of Guadalajara was gunned down at the Guadalajara airport. This was unacceptable. The circumstances of the murder were murky, but someone had to pay, and Chapo Guzmán was arrested sixteen days later—in Guatemala, despite, according to Malcolm Beith’s book “The Last Narco,” having paid a local military commander more than a million dollars for protection. Guzmán did not deny having been at the airport when the archbishop was killed, but he claimed that he was the intended victim: the assassins, rival narcos, had fired into the wrong car. This became the government’s theory of the case—there are many others—and the homicide charge was eventually dropped. He was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to twenty years.

In 2001, just after Vicente Fox became the pan’s first President, and just before Guzmán was expected to be extradited to the United States, he escaped from a maximum-security prison. He is said to have rolled out in the bottom of a laundry cart, his exit smoothed by bribes. Other versions have him coming and going freely for years, and finally leaving for good dressed as a guard. Under the pan, Guzmán has reportedly become a billionaire, making the Forbes list of the world’s most powerful people in each of the past two years.

N

o one believes that the government is calling the shots today in Mexico. It isn’t even clear that capturing or killing Guzmán would bring the Calderón administration a popularity windfall, let alone help the pan make up the ground it needs in order to win the now imminent Presidential election. In Guadalajara, there was a large-scale Army raid, with helicopters, near the city center in March. The military tried to seal off the target neighborhood. The narcos responded by hijacking twenty-five trucks and municipal buses, setting them on fire, and blocking the city’s main roads. The Army, ever-secretive and rightly mistrustful of other government agencies, had not informed the governor, the mayor, the state police, the municipal police, or the federal police of its plans, so Guadalajarans huddled in their homes and workplaces, phoning and e-mailing one another, waiting in vain for advisories or information from the government as the sky filled with black smoke and the city rang with sirens. A young man I met spent the afternoon of the narcobloqueowatching TV news with a local family. One of their great fears that day, he said, was that the Army might be killing or capturing Chapo Guzmán. These were middle-class Guadalajarans, painfully aware of what organized crime is doing to Mexico—not fans of El Chapo by any stretch—but they feared that, if Guzmán were no longer running the Sinaloa cartel, all hell would break loose in Guadalajara. This is a widespread view, based on hard national experience of the fallout from Calderón’s kingpin strategy.

The Army captured a lesser capo that day, one Erick Valencia Salazar, a.k.a. El 85, whom authorities described as the leader of the Jalisco Cartel New Generation (C.J.N.G.). A more important leader, according to security experts, and the real target of the raid—a gangster known as El Mencho—had eluded troops. The C.J.N.G. plastered the city with narcomantas apologizing to the public for the narcobloqueo. It had been an emotional outburst, the mantas said, in reaction to the loss of El 85. The narcos were sorry about the day’s events (which included the death of a bus driver who was inadvertently burned alive), and would now return to their main mission, which was keeping Guadalajara safe from the Zetas. Some amateur scholars of the drug trade speculated that Chapo Guzmán might have tried to set up El Mencho, whose ambitions were said to be trumping his loyalty to Sinaloa. The experts I interviewed all said that the narcobloqueo had actually been a tactical maneuver, meant to distract the Army and law enforcement, so that narcos more important than Valencia could leave the city undetected. Inevitably, Chapo Guzmán was rumored to have been among them.

How can Guadalajarans continue to see their town as a haven? The most tenacious local myth is that powerful narcos want it peaceful because their families live there. This idea may once have had validity. A crackdown in the late seventies on traffickers in Sinaloa, fuelled largely by U.S. demands, drove many narcos from that state, and some of the top dogs did settle in Guadalajara. The money laundering was excellent, and they bought hotels, restaurants, night clubs. They married into some of the best old families, sent their children to good schools. Their wealth drove a local mini-boom.

Chapo Guzmán, too, lived in Guadalajara, rising within an organization disrupted by U.S.-driven arrests to form the Sinaloa cartel. Although he had only a third-grade education, his aptitude for international smuggling was high. He cultivated cocaine sources in South America, secured routes through Central America and western Mexico, and built elaborate tunnels under the U.S. border. He could be ruthless. The story was that he built his tunnels with slave labor and, in the interests of secrecy, killed the workers when they were finished. He gave no quarter in battles over plazas that he considered valuable. At the same time, he gained a reputation as a reasonable business partner, and built alliances across the globe. This was particularly important in the meth trade, where production relies on chemicals manufactured primarily in Asia. In Mexico, it is estimated that Guzmán employs, directly or indirectly, a hundred and fifty thousand people. His influence, even his popularity, runs especially deep in Sinaloa. Local joke: How can you tell when times are tough in Sinaloa? El Chapo had to lay off ten judges.

The prison that he escaped from, known as Puente Grande, is on the outskirts of Guadalajara. His elusiveness, at least some of which must be put down to luck, only burnishes his legend. He is the subject of many narcocorridos, the popular ballads that celebrate outlaw exploits. Emma Coronel is his fourth wife. She caught his eye while Guzmán was hiding out in her village, in Durango. He helped see that she won a local beauty contest, where she was named Miss Coffee and Guava. Their wedding, on her eighteenth birthday, in 2007, was, from all reports, a great blowout. The Army showed up a day late. Emma Coronel is the niece of Nacho Coronel. Frequent reports that Guzmán travels with a uniformed, heavily armed security detail of up to three hundred men were belied by the government’s version of the bungled raid in Cabo San Lucas in February. Guzmán appeared to be staying in the rented mansion with a retinue of four, one of them a local prostitute, whom the police interrogated extensively.

Few seem to believe that Guzmán’s capture or demise would put a noticeable dent in the Mexican drug trade. A succession plan is undoubtedly in place. Some analysts think that Guzmán is not even the chief executive in the Sinaloa cartel. “Chapo is a brand,” a Guadalajara academic told me. “He does not make major decisions. His fate will be decided for him, just as his ‘escape’ from Puente Grande was the result of a deal.” Intellectuals who discount Guzmán’s agency in the multi-decade telenovela of his life see him as a mere manager of narco-trafficking, a distraction from Mexico’s problems of corruption, poverty, impunity, and bad government. For both Calderón and the country, chasing him is avoiding the hard work of building a more transparent, modern democracy.

But the power of organized crime in Mexico now holds hostage large areas of the country, including major cities, such as Monterrey, and terrorizes the rest with performances of stupefying violence. Calderón’s deployment of the Army, first justified by the military’s relatively clean reputation, has only besmirched that reputation, as soldiers commit a rising number of crimes against civilians, and fail to resist financial temptation. Four senior commanders, including three generals, one of them Calderón’s former No. 2 at the defense ministry, were arrested in May on suspicion of working for organized crime. (No formal charges have been filed.) More than fifty-six thousand troops have deserted under Calderón.

Some Guadalajarans find cold comfort by looking north, to Monterrey, where security has been in free fall for the past two years. It is Mexico’s third-largest city, and its wealthiest. But the police have lost control of the streets. Kidnapping, extortion, robbery, and murder are commonplace. The number of killings there tripled between 2009 and 2010, then nearly doubled again in 2011. Army checkpoints now lace the city. Guadalajara has experienced nothing close to Monterrey’s nightmare. What happened there? The Zetas and the Gulf cartel started a war. The local police reportedly went to work en masse for the cartels. Now the Zetas are pillaging the city.

The Zetas are unlike other Mexican crime groups. Their founders were deserters from the Mexican military’s élite special forces, recruited in the late nineteen-nineties as bodyguards and enforcers for the leader of the then formidable Gulf cartel. The cartel paid many times what the military did. The Zetas’ numbers grew. Trained as paratroopers and intelligence operatives, they introduced a paramilitary element to narco-trafficking, outgunning police units. They ambushed the Army. They seized plazas and drug routes from other cartels, with an efficiency and a brutality not seen before. Beheadings became their signature, along with castrations with genitals stuffed in mouths and corpses with a “Z” carved into the flesh. Their ranks swelled with infusions from a notorious Guatemalan counter-insurgency unit, the Kaibiles.

Traditional crime groups like Sinaloa were family-based, often deeply tied to a region. The Zetas were military. Their mission was to kill and destroy. When they outgrew their role as enforcers, they turned on their employers. They beat the Gulf cartel down to insignificance. Their only real rival now is Sinaloa. The Zetas, who are estimated to have more than ten thousand fighters, control virtually the entire east coast of Mexico, and have laid claim to several of the busiest cargo crossing points on the U.S. border, including Matamoros, Reynosa, and Nuevo Laredo. It is believed that they are pushing west because they want to open a corridor to a major Pacific port, such as Manzanillo, just south of Guadalajara.

The Zetas approach a town, a city, or a state as a shakedown opportunity. They fight for the right to terrorize a community, and bleed it dry. They also threaten the central government. One of their mantas, hung from a bridge in Monterrey in February, said, “The government must make a pact with us because if not we will have to overthrow it and take power by force.” A recent government study found that the Zetas are now active in seventeen of Mexico’s thirty-two states. (The same study found that Sinaloa is active in sixteen.) They have even moved into the state of Sinaloa, where they are reportedly fighting ferociously, village by village, for control of Chapo Guzmán’s home turf.

The Zetas traffic drugs, but their specialties are kidnapping, extortion, murder, robbery, human smuggling, and product piracy. Their punishments for failure to pay protection money are extravagant and meant to be cautionary. Last August, they firebombed a casino in Monterrey whose owner had not paid, killing at least fifty-two customers. They kidnap migrant workers, mainly from Central America, and demand ransom from their impoverished families. Some of their massacres make no obvious sense. In 2010, seventy-two migrants were found dead at a ranch near the U.S. border. In 2011, a mass grave with the remains of a hundred and ninety-three people, presumably migrants, was discovered in the desert in Tamaulipas. Migrants are now crossing further west, in Sonora, hoping to avoid the Zetas. Mexico’s state-owned oil company, Pemex, says that the Zetas have begun tapping its pipelines, stealing millions of barrels of crude oil a year.

The Zetas’ esprit is remarkable. When Zetas are captured, other Zetas break them out of prison. There have been dozens of attacks, riots, escapes. In December, 2010, a hundred and fifty-one Zetas broke out of jail in Nuevo Laredo. This February, twenty-nine escaped from a prison in Monterrey, but not before stabbing and bludgeoning to death forty-four incarcerated members of the Gulf cartel. Given the group’s reputation for steely invincibility, it is not surprising that gangbangers across Mexico want to be Zetas. Simply dropping the name does wonders, reportedly, for the success rate of extortion schemes. But fake Zetas risk retribution from real Zetas. And the Zetas’ torture methods, including decapitation, are always available for review on the Internet.

Rival cartels have often been just as bad. La Familia Michoacana nearly matched the Zetas beheading for beheading during a struggle for supremacy in the west-coast state of Michoacán, a struggle that La Familia won. (Afterward, La Familia splintered.) And, when the Zetas began to threaten Jalisco, the Jalisco Cartel New Generation formed a squad called the Mata Zetas (Zeta Killers)—said to be led by El 85, and subsidized by Chapo Guzmán—which carried the fight into the Zetas’ heartland. The Mata Zetas released a strikingly composed, politically tinged video announcing their plans to annihilate their degenerate foes, and in September, 2011, the Jalisco group dumped thirty-five bodies on a busy avenue in Veracruz at rush hour. Two weeks later, thirty-two more bodies were found in three safe houses around the city. Veracruz is Zetas territory. It is also the main seaport on the east coast of Mexico, and therefore interesting to Chapo Guzmán—useful, clearly, for cocaine moving northward, and for meth chemicals arriving from overseas. More immediately, though, the Mata Zetas’ plan was simply to open a rearguard path to try to slow the Zetas’ advance on Jalisco. The corpses thrown under the Millennium Arches in November were a retaliation.

Mexican election campaigns are short—ninety days for the Presidential contest, and usually less for state and local contests. Enrique Peña Nieto bravely launched his campaign in Guadalajara, historically a pan stronghold. By mid-April, the city was saturated with political advertising. Every taxi was festooned, every wall and billboard. Television and radio often seemed like a solid wave of slogans, jingles, appeals, attacks. By far the most numerous “spots” were the pri’s. The pri candidate for the governorship of Jalisco, Aristóteles Sandoval Díaz, is the current mayor of Guadalajara. He looks like a provincial version of Peña Nieto—young, guapo, prone to platitudes. Sandoval began the year by declaring that he would “armor” his campaign against infiltration by organized crime. In his previous campaigns, he reportedly received financial backing from several Sinaloa cartel mobsters, among them Ignacio Loya Alatorre, identified by federal prosecutors as Nacho Coronel’s money manager, who was assassinated in 2005, and Tony Duarte, who was a car thief before he became a prominent Guadalajara businessman and alleged Sinaloa bagman (he was assassinated, in Puerto Vallarta, in 2011). Sandoval’s declaration may have been reassuring to voters: he is far ahead in the polls.

Does organized crime favor one party? Or do particular cartels back particular parties? Not notably. Each of the major parties has had corruption scandals. The pri’s pre-2000 dominance meant that most, if not all, of the agreements, known as acuerdos, between organized crime and officialdom during that period involved the pri. But that was when the pri was the only game in town. Even López Obrador, the P.R.D. candidate, originally made his name as a prileader. With the rise of other parties, new acuerdoswere made. The narcos are most concerned with local politicians and police and military units. They want to be able to land this load at this airfield. Their acuerdos tend to be with individuals. If they prefer to work with one candidate for mayor, or governor, they may intimidate or, in the case of the Zetas, even kill his opponent. But the party affiliation of politicians, let alone Army or police commanders, is irrelevant.

Joanna Jablonska Bayro is a sociology student. For her doctoral dissertation, she has been interviewing twenty Guadalajarans about how they perceive their city and their security—where and why they feel unsafe, how they protect themselves from risks.

“People fight hard to maintain the fantasy that Guadalajara is an oasis of tranquillity,” she told me. “With the corpse dumping at the Millennium Arches, there was a lot of effort by the authorities to show that the dead were all narcos. Then the news came out that the victims were ordinary people. That’s when people here panicked. Then, about a month later, the authorities announced that they had caught the killers, and that, no, the victims were all narcos. They were trying to reëstablish some equilibrium, some sense of safety in the city. But who knows what’s true?”

Nobody, rich or poor, in Jablonska’s study feels completely confident that the government will tell them the truth. And everyone is mortally afraid of the Zetas. “After this recent narcobloqueo, all the mantas that went up were about protecting the people from the Zetas. The Zetas are the incarnation of the threat.”

Attitudes toward the security forces break down along class lines. The upper and middle classes are still enthusiastic about the Army, the poor far less so. As for the local police, people with more resources regard their corruption as only a nuisance, while the poor find them dangerous: “They’ll put drugs on me, and cause me a lot of problems.” Everyone in Jablonska’s study feels that Mexican social and political institutions, including the state itself, are weakening. “Some of this institutional weakness comes from the post-pri fragmentation of power,” Jablonska said. Everyone has lost confidence in the rule of law. Nearly anyone who can afford it, including the lower middle class, now lives in a gated community, with private security. “People in more precarious neighborhoods must build their own networks of protection. They rely on pit bulls, family networks, and, of course, organized crime. They never call the police.”

Ninety-eight per cent of serious crimes in Mexico go unpunished, according to a recent report by the Monterrey Institute of Technology. For kidnapping, which is rarely reported, the figure might be even higher. Kidnapping is the horror lapping at the edge of nearly everyone’s mind, and it’s known that kidnapping is one of the Zetas’ favorite crimes. Corrupt police are often involved—one of the reasons it’s rarely reported. Private security companies seek to capitalize on the public’s panic. When you read a crime story online, the advertisement blinking alongside the text is often an offer of private protection for you and your family against secuestro—kidnapping. If someone disappears and no ransom call comes, should it even be called kidnapping? Human-rights groups estimate that more than five thousand people have disappeared in Mexico in the past five years.

Mexican TV provides a P.R. forum for the police and the military. “People love these big drug busts, these acts of bravery,” Jablonska said. “They have real value.” The police and the Army play to that taste, with a constant stream of handcuffed ruffians presented to TV cameras. Behind the captured narcos stand black military helicopters. Drugs and cash and weapons, some gold-plated, are laid out on banquet tables. The government even produces YouTube-ready videos with dramatic musical intros, graphics, and sleek institutional logos. (And now: the Confession of La Barbie!)

Weary of pantallas, I tried to get to the bottom of a single bust—the “historic” meth-lab raid in Tlajomulco that confiscated some four billion dollars’ worth of drugs. Were the drugs seized really worth that much? Well, no. The more experts I consulted, the lower the number sank. Maybe it was a billion, if the meth was pure. Then was it really fifteen tons of “pure meth,” as widely reported? Well, no. There had been some confusion. There were precursor chemicals. A lot of equipment—gas tanks, reactors. Maybe it was eleven pounds of pure meth. Eleven pounds? Nobody wanted to speak on the record, but the spokesman for the federal prosecutor’s office in Guadalajara, a young man named Ulises Enríquez Camacho, finally said, “Yes, five kilos.” Eleven pounds. The fifteen tons had been methamphetamine ready for packing, according to the Army. But it was not “a finished product,” and there had been only five kilos of crystal. In the U.S., where meth is often sold by the gram, that amount might be worth five hundred thousand dollars. So the reported value had been inflated by a factor of eight thousand?

I wanted to get the Army’s side of the story, so I went to the headquarters of the Fifteenth Military Zone, whose troops had carried out the raid. The base is in Zapopan, northwest of Guadalajara. The chief of staff, General Gerardo Wolburg Redondo, said he would need permission to speak to me. He later phoned. Permission denied, he said, by Mexico City, because of Article 41, a provision of the Mexican constitution that forbids the diffusion of government propaganda during an election-campaign period.

Article 41 had suddenly become a popular law in government offices, I found. Sorry, love to chat, but—Article 41. People were happy to talk off the record, however, about the Army’s operations in Jalisco. It had been raiding meth labs at a torrid rate—sixty-three in the past year, by the Army’s count, with many of those in Tlajomulco. Arrests almost never happened, though. Why not? Ulises Enríquez explained that it was difficult for troops to arrive at a meth-lab site without neighbors seeing them approach and warning the narcos to flee. Why, I asked, would the neighbors do that? They were paid lookouts, he said. How did the Army know where the labs were? Different neighbors, made suspicious by high traffic or strong chemical odors, called—or, more often, e-mailed—the police or the Army. Anonymous denunciations.

This scenario was derided by most of the people I consulted, in law enforcement and elsewhere. Narcos ratted out rival narcos—that was normally how the authorities learned things. Or the narcos and certain authorities came to an agreement. What civilian would drop a dime on a cartel? That could be suicidal. There was no way to know who would be on the other end of that call or e-mail. Anyway, labs that were up to date on their protection payments usually had nothing to fear. Meth labs operated in networks, moving materials and personnel between facilities to maximize production and minimize risk. Losses from seizures were a cost of doing business, and rarely catastrophic. The networks in Jalisco were very big now. Sinaloa had recently ramped up production. The remnants of La Familia Michoacana had moved labs here, getting them out of strife-torn southern Michoacán. But the commander of the Fifth Military Region, General Fausto Lozano Espinosa, was on a rampage. He wanted meth labs. The Army had almost no field intelligence, but the government needed dramatic busts, headlines, and so an acuerdo had seemingly been reached. The locations of some labs would be disclosed, and they would be busted, but there would be no one there—no guards, and certainly no chemists or cooks, who were highly valued employees.

The Army’s version of the great February bust was doubted by U.S. officials, too. One told me that it had actually happened two weeks before the announcement claimed. The press release went out to the wider world before the drugs were properly tested, along with photographs of masked soldiers standing among blue barrels filled with yellow powder. According to this official, the Army often told no one, certainly not the police, and sometimes not even the federal prosecutor’s office, about its raids—not even afterward—until it had a reason, usually political, to do so. It was all about the credit. Evidence collection and preservation were not part of the Army’s mission—that was the federal prosecutor’s job. No one seemed to be in a position to question the wisdom of smashing up places, learning nothing, carrying off drugs, and calling it a blow against organized crime.

The great bust took place near a village called Buena Vista, at a “ranch” called Rancho Villarreal. Although the Army had closed its investigation almost immediately, Ulises Enríquez said that the federal prosecutor still had an investigation open. So I asked him who owned Rancho Villarreal. He said that it was difficult to determine. It was a party venue, really, with a swimming pool, a bar, cabanas. It was for weddings, quinceañeras, company picnics. But the owner of a property couldn’t be held responsible for everything that tenants did there. When I asked around about the disposition of the drugs seized at Rancho Villarreal, someone close to the case told me that he believed the product had been quietly returned to its owners, for an unknown price.

Víctor Hugo Ornelas and I went to Buena Vista. I had been there a couple of times before, checking out Rancho Villarreal, but the villagers had been reluctant to talk. They claimed not to remember the Army raid, let alone the narcolaboratorio. I believed I was endangering them just by lingering. Hugo, however, knew people there. A young guy I’ll call Ramón took us out on the back roads of Buena Vista in his 4 x 4. “Some of the kids around here really look up to the narcos,” Ramón said. “The girls, especially. It’s too bad. They go to their parties, enjoy the narcocorridos, get pregnant. One pregnant girl’s boyfriend disappeared. We assume he’s dead. But the other pregnant girls are still happy. They want the babies. The guys are from Sinaloa and Michoacán. Some from Jalisco. They all have money, nice trucks, nice ranchos.

“The priest likes having the narcos here,” Ramón went on. “Some are quite religious. They fixed up his church. They get their kids baptized there.”

We were bumping down a deeply rutted road. It was rough, open country—plenty of room for clandestinity. “Those ranchos with the big walls, the heavy gates?” Ramón said, pointing out homesteads visible here and there. “Those are all narquitos. They have watchdogs, fighting cocks. You can tell. Palm trees.”

“Yeah, palm trees,” Hugo said. “What is it with narcos and palm trees?”

“I don’t know. They just have to have them.” They laughed.

We stopped and gazed down a very long driveway at a huge new house. The driveway looked practically impassable, even for a 4 x 4. “They can afford to improve the roads,” Ramón said. “But sometimes they prefer an ugly road. It lets them see their enemies coming.”

Were the cartels fighting?

“No. Not right now. It seems like La Familia Michoacana is dominant around here at the moment. But most of the labs belong to the Jalisco cartel. They employ a lot of lookouts.”

We passed a small airstrip. “That’s for model planes,” Ramón said. “Hobbyists. Soldiers.”

He and Hugo exchanged a look. “Incredible,” Hugo said.

We regained the paved road where we had left my car. Two sedans with big, brightly painted, carefully hand-built model airplanes lashed to their roofs were turning off the road onto the dirt track.

Hugo and I went to Rancho Villarreal. It was at the end of a long, twisting, unpaved road. The brick outer walls were ten feet high. The gate was padlocked, with a warning posted that the property had been sealed by the federal prosecutor. “Who would want to have a wedding out here?” Hugo said. “These places are for money laundering.” He poked in the grass with his cane, spearing a cardboard box, which he lifted for inspection. The box had contained a “Respirator—Full Facepiece,” made by 3M. Respirators were essential meth-lab gear. Hugo stabbed in the grass again. “Military,” he said, lifting a pair of wool khaki gloves with no fingertips. He turned and walked into a log-walled guard hut that I had not noticed before. “Family,” he said, from inside. “Woman”—he lifted, from the trash-strewn floor, a sanitary napkin on the tip of his cane. “Child”—he lifted a tiny pink child’s backpack. “Man”—he lifted a work boot. He bent and picked up a golf ball, and pointed to a set of numbers stamped on it. “We could find out who bought this, possibly, and where,” he said, dropping the ball in his bag.

Back outside, Hugo stared at the high walls of Rancho Villarreal. Palm trees rose against the sky from inside the compound. At the far end of the front wall, also inside the compound, was a narrow, two-story outbuilding. “That’s a watchtower,” Hugo said. He pointed to a pile of bricks and tile in a corner where two high walls met. “That pile was for jumping over,” he said. “For getting away fast.”

While driving back toward the village, Hugo asked me to stop the car. We parked next to a white-walled farm of some kind, surrounded by fields. Hugo hiked down to look at a pair of hoses. They came out of the farm, passed under the road, and emptied into a field. He smelled the hoses. He shook his head. He pointed to a set of pipes and wires running through the bottom of the white walls. “Those, yes,” he said quietly. He looked down at the hoses. “These, no.” That was when I noticed that this place, too, had a tall, narrow outbuilding in the corner of the compound, affording a view over the high walls. “Watchtower,” Hugo said. “Palm trees. Not a farm.” He got back in the car. But he did not touch his camera.

On May 9th, Guadalajarans woke up to a new Zetas atrocity—eighteen headless, dismembered bodies left in two vehicles parked near a popular restaurant out past the airport. Then the police found some more body parts in a safe house in Chapala, a lakeside community that is popular with retired Americans and Canadians, about an hour south of the city. Half of the dead were soon identified. They were local people who had recently gone missing. Ordinary citizens, not narcos, kidnapped and murdered. Four were said to have been students at the University of Guadalajara.

That turned out to be only part of the story. It seemed that the Zetas had planned to kidnap and kill fifty people, and to distribute the dismembered corpses around Guadalajara on Mother’s Day. The details of this plan emerged after a kidnapper on guard duty, Laura Rosales Sánchez, fell asleep and a dozen victims, seizing their chance, escaped. It was too late to save the eighteen—and two boys under Laura Rosales’s guard who failed to flee were also killed—but the police managed to arrest four of the kidnappers, who, under interrogation, revealed the grand plan to kill fifty. The kidnappings, their leader confirmed, had been done at random. They just grabbed whomever they could—waiters, a construction worker, a dance teacher in a primary school.

The purpose behind all this carnage? To “cause terror,” the arrested leader, who is twenty-seven, said. He seemed vaguely bored at his perp-show press event, where he nonetheless tried to answer every reporter’s question. He was just following orders, he said, from a Zeta named Fernando, who remained at large. Laura Rosales, who is twenty-five, said that she had been mainly helping her brother, Angel, who also remained at large, and that the Zetas were responding, with this massacre, to the killing, up north, of twenty-three Zetas by Chapo Guzmán’s forces.

After the Mother’s Day massacre, thirty thousand people, led by University of Guadalajara students and dressed in white, marched silently through the city, protesting the ever-rising tide of violence and the government’s apparent helplessness before it.

Around the same time, tens of thousands of students marched in Mexico City in a sudden revolt, launched just weeks before the election, against the constantly reported inevitability of a Peña Nieto victory. Acuerdos between the pri and the country’s biggest broadcasters, including alleged payoffs exposed by the Guardian, were making this a self-fulfilling prophecy, according to the protesters. There were more marches in June, but the student movement seemed unlikely to stop the return of the pri.

The federal prosecutor’s office announced that it had incinerated the entire haul of drugs from the super-lab in Buena Vista within ten days of the seizure. I asked Ulises Enríquez where this massive chemical fire had taken place. At the Club Canada shooting range in Tonalá, he said, out toward Puente Grande. They burned narcotics there each month. In the open air? Of course. His office oversaw the destruction.

I went to the shooting range for the next bonfire. There was a compact-car-size mound of drugs already piled beyond the first target berm. It contained, I was told, just under a ton of marijuana, six hundred grams of cocaine, forty grams of ephedrine, just over a thousand tabs of synthetic drugs (Ecstasy, meth), and slightly more than thirty pounds of crystal. Six men from the Tonalá fire department torched the hillock of dope, and the heat got worse. A federal narcotics agent I’ll call Rodríguez was in charge.

Rodríguez was dressed in baggy shorts, boots, a gray T-shirt, and a little blue cowboy hat. He had a Beretta 9-mm. pistol in his waistband, and he seemed to be enjoying himself. He accused the firefighters of deliberately staying downwind of the fire, from which pungent black smoke billowed. “Look at those crazy firemen,” he called. “Watch, they’ll start dancing.” In fact, the firefighters were staggering around in heavy protective gear, including masks and helmets. There were a dozen workers from the federal prosecutor’s office in attendance, but they stayed back in the shooter’s pavilion, far from the fire, drinking Coke. The handful of us out in the field retreated to a patch of shade, where Rodríguez regaled us with tales of street drug seizures.

“I like to come up to the pinche dealers like I’m dying for a fix,” he said. He was startlingly good in the role of a desperate addict. Then he was just as good playing a gruff, paranoid dealer—funny, convincing. Then he whirled from a dope-snorting crouch, whipping out his pistol, knocking the dealer to the ground, cackling triumphantly as himself, the undercover cop. “And now, pendejo?” He had his boot on the dealer’s neck. The dealer was crying for his wife. Rodríguez, grinning wildly, was, for a moment, God. Should he arrest the guy? Rip him off? Beat him up? All of the above?

I asked Rodríguez whom he worked for. “afis,” he said, straightening up, sticking his gun back in his shorts. (The afis had actually been disbanded, but everybody still calls their replacement, the Federal Ministerial Police, by that name.) “They commissioned me from the municipal police.”

Rodríguez struck me as a man living at the coal face of Mexican life, right where legality and illegality clash and overlap. As other people drifted away, he told me that he had made twelve hundred arrests, maybe more. He had been a cop for twenty-two years. He was forty-four. Before that, he worked in Alabama, planting trees. That was great money—three hundred dollars a week. He demonstrated his tree-planting technique, making it look quick, precise, gruelling, and comical.

How did he get to Alabama?

“I was wet,” he said—illegal.

Rodríguez turned and shouted at the firefighters. They weren’t stoking the blaze correctly. He ran out, grabbed a pitchfork, and started throwing flaming bales of pot in the air, until the fire was roaring again. His energy was maniacal. He was also weirdly loose-limbed. When my cell phone rang, he started dancing to the ringtone.

How was his pay as a cop?

Bad, he said. The afis picked up some of his expenses, but he had to work a second full-time job, as a stonemason.

He changed the subject, to politics. “If the pri wins, everything’s going to change,” he said. “Everybody will start getting paid again. They know how to do it.” He pantomimed a paymaster, counting out cash to a circle of people. “The media, too,” he said, mock paying me.

It was true: the pri, when in power, paid some journalists extravagantly, and supported many newspapers and other media in return for coverage that suited its purposes.

“There will be just one big group,” Rodríguez said. “Maybe it will be El Chapo. But there will be peace.”

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Jacob Tanenbaum: Creation, Evolution and Indisputable facts

Posted on December 27, 2018 by

Preface. And you wonder why Trump got elected?  Evangelists are 25% of voters, and 80% of them voted for Trump. Clearly they can’t think clearly.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

***

Jacob Tanenbaum. January 1, 2013. Creation, Evolution and Indisputable facts. A science teacher asks if scientists and biblical literalists can get along. Scientific American.

As a science teacher, I am always curious about people’s attitudes toward what I teach. Since more than 40 percent of U.S. adults believe literally what is written in the Book of Genesis—that Earth and the universe were created in six days about 6,000 years ago—and since I was in the neighborhood recently, I decided to visit the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., run by the Answers in Genesis (AiG) Ministry.

The museum has a brand-new planetarium and 70,000 square feet of exhibits claiming that the story of Genesis happened exactly as written. In the main lobby, a large display depicts life just after creation. Richly detailed with plants and rocks, it features a small boy playing, while two dinosaurs graze nearby. According to the exhibits, the stars are younger than Earth (they were created on Day 4), and Noah saved all animal species that we see today from the Flood. Earth had its one and only ice age, lasting a few hundred years.

What disturbed me most about my time spent at the museum was the theme, repeated from one exhibit to the next, that the differences between biblical literalists and mainstream scientists are minor. They are not minor; they are poles apart. This is not to say that science and religion are incompatible; many scientists believe in some kind of higher power, and many religious people accept the idea of evolution. Still, a literal interpretation of Genesis cannot be reconciled with modern science. Advertisement

Scientists tell us we live in a remote corner of a vast universe that existed billions of years before humans arrived. The universe and Earth could continue just fine without us. We are one species of many on a little planet with an ancient fossil record that shows that more than 99% of the species that once lived are now extinct. This speaks to a tenuousness of our existence as a species—an existence we need to protect vigorously.

AiG’s biblical literalists, on the other hand, hold that we are God’s favorites. We live at the universe’s center on a planet God made and maintains for us to use. Earth’s resources are here for us to exploit. God protects us and promised he would not destroy Earth again until the end of days. In that scenario, we have little reason to safeguard our existence.

Creationists begin with answers and work to prove that those answers are right. This is antithetical to the scientific process. Scientists who formed the idea of human evolution did not invent the idea and go looking for fossils. Well before Charles Darwin published his treatise in 1859 and well before workers in a limestone quarry in 1856 found strange bones that would later be called Neanderthal, scientists struggled to explain what they saw in the natural world and in the fossil record. The theory of evolution was the product of that analysis. That is how science works.

The danger is that 40% of the American electorate seems to have forgotten what science is. Considering that our nation put a man on the moon and invented the airplane and the Internet, this development is extraordinary. Yet when much of the electorate faces the complex scientific questions of our day, they do not reject science wholesale, they cherry-pick it. Few if any of them live without the benefits of fossil fuels and electricity. Most are happy to fly in airplanes, take hot showers, heat their homes, drive their cars, watch their televisions and text their friends. They reject science only if it conflicts with their beliefs or asks them to change their way of life.

When Americans selectively reject science, it handicaps us, as a nation, in a knowledge-based global economy. We need to be open when scientific discoveries tell us our actions have consequences, raise doubts about our future and ask us to change. So I’ll keep teaching science, not belief. Because if students do not understand how science works, we can destroy our country’s future or even threaten our existence on this old Earth. Advertisement

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New Yorker review of Eric Schlosser’s “Command and Control”

Posted on December 23, 2018 by

Preface.  This book has been on my reading list for several years now, but I have to admit I am lazy, lazy – the 656 pages is twice the length of most books.  And it would be hard to write a better review than this…

It is sheer luck that WWIII or nuclear explosins haven’t happened yet by accident, by miscalculation of the other side’s intentions,  bombs dripped by mistake, bombers crashing, or computers miscalculating.  There were 1200 nuclear weapons alone between 1950 and 1968 involved in significant accidents.

I heard McNamara speak at U.C. Berkeley after the movie “Fog of War” by Errol Morris was shown.  He said it’s up to us to do what we can to stop nuclear proliferation, and indeed it seems as important as any other cause you might choose to get involved in, and especially since it has more potential than climate change to drive humans and other life extinct.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

***

Louis Menand. September 30, 2013. Nukes of Hazard. Eric Schlosser’s “Command and Control. the New Yorker.

On January 25, 1995, at 9:28 a.m.Moscow time, an aide handed a briefcase to Boris Yeltsin, the President of Russia. A small light near the handle was on, and inside was a screen displaying information indicating that a missile had been launched four minutes earlier from somewhere in the vicinity of the Norwegian Sea, and that it appeared to be headed toward Moscow. Below the screen was a row of buttons. This was the Russian “nuclear football.” By pressing the buttons, Yeltsin could launch an immediate nuclear strike against targets around the world. Russian nuclear missiles, submarines, and bombers were on full alert. Yeltsin had forty-seven hundred nuclear warheads ready to go.

The Chief of the General Staff, General Mikhail Kolesnikov, had a football, too, and he was monitoring the flight of the missile. Radar showed that stages of the rocket were falling away as it ascended, which suggested that it was an intermediate-range missile similar to the Pershing II, the missile deployed by NATO across Western Europe. The launch site was also in the most likely corridor for an attack on Moscow by American submarines. Kolesnikov was put on a hot line with Yeltsin, whose prerogative it was to launch a nuclear response. Yeltsin had less than six minutes to make a decision.

The Cold War had been over for four years. Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned on December 25, 1991, and had handed over the football and the launch codes to Yeltsin. The next day, the Soviet Union voted itself out of existence. By 1995, though, Yeltsin’s popularity in the West was in decline; there was tension over plans to expand NATO; and Russia was bogged down in a war in Chechnya. In the context of nuclear war, these were minor troubles, but there was also the fact, very much alive in Russian memory, that seven and a half years earlier, in May, 1987, a slightly kooky eighteen-year-old German named Mathias Rust had flown a rented Cessna, an airplane about the size of a Piper Cub, from Helsinki to Moscow and landed it a hundred yards from Red Square. The humiliation had led to a mini-purge of the air-defense leadership. Those people did not want to get burned twice.

After tracking the flight for several minutes, the Russians concluded that its trajectory would not take the missile into Russian territory. The briefcases were closed. It turned out that Yeltsin and his generals had been watching a weather rocket launched from Norway to study the aurora borealis. Peter Pry, who reported the story in his book “War Scare” (1999), called it “the single most dangerous moment of the nuclear missile age.” Whether it was the most dangerous moment or not, the weather-rocket scare was one of hundreds of incidents after 1945 when accident, miscommunication, human error, mechanical malfunction, or some combination of glitches nearly resulted in the detonation of nuclear weapons.

During the Cold War, there were a few occasions, such as the Cuban missile crisis, in 1962, when one side or the other was close to a decision that was likely to start a nuclear war. There were also some threats to go nuclear, though they were rarely taken completely seriously. In 1948, during a dispute with the Soviets over control of Berlin, Harry Truman sent B-29s to England, where they would be in range of Moscow. They were not armed with atomic bombs, but they were intended as a signal that the United States would use atomic weapons to defend Western Europe.

In 1956, during the Suez crisis, Nikita Khrushchev threatened to attack London and Paris with missiles if Britain and France did not withdraw their forces from Egypt. And, in 1969, Richard Nixon ordered B-52s armed with hydrogen bombs to fly routes up and down the coast of the Soviet Union—part of his “madman theory,” a strategy intended to get the North Vietnamese to believe that he was capable of anything, and to negotiate for peace. (The madman strategy was no more effective than anything else the United States tried, short of withdrawal, in the hope of bringing an end to the Vietnam War.)

But most of the danger that human beings faced from nuclear weapons after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had to do with inadvertence—with bombs dropped by mistake, bombers catching on fire or crashing, missiles exploding, and computers miscalculating and people jumping to the wrong conclusion. On most days, the probability of a nuclear explosion happening by accident was far greater than the probability that someone would deliberately start a war.

In the early years of the Cold War, many of these accidents involved airplanes. In 1958, for example, a B-47 bomber carrying a Mark 36 hydrogen bomb, one of the most powerful weapons in the American arsenal, caught fire while taxiing on a runway at an airbase in Morocco. The plane split in two, the base was evacuated, and the fire burned for two and a half hours. But the explosives in the warhead didn’t detonate; that would have set off a chain reaction. Although the King of Morocco was informed, the accident was otherwise kept a secret.

Six weeks later, a Mark 6 landed in the back yard of a house in Mars Bluff, South Carolina. It had fallen when a crewman mistakenly grabbed the manual bomb-release lever. The nuclear core had not been inserted, but the explosives detonated, killing a lot of chickens, sending members of the family to the hospital, and leaving a thirty-five-foot crater. Although it was impossible to keep that event a secret, the Strategic Air Command (sac), which controlled the airborne nuclear arsenal, informed the public that the incident was the first of its kind. In fact, the previous year, a hydrogen bomb, also without a core, had been accidentally released near Albuquerque and exploded on impact.

Soon after the successful Soviet launch of Sputnik, in 1957, missiles became the preferred delivery vehicle for nuclear warheads, but scary things kept happening. In 1960, the computer at the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) in Colorado Springs warned, with 99.9-per-cent certainty, that the Soviets had just launched a full-scale missile attack against North America. The warheads would land within minutes. When it was learned that Khrushchev was in New York City, at the United Nations, and when no missiles landed, officials concluded that the warning was a false alarm. They later discovered that the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System at Thule Airbase, in Greenland, had interpreted the moon rising over Norway as a missile attack from Siberia.

In 1979, NORAD’s computer again warned of an all-out Soviet attack. Bombers were manned, missiles were placed on alert, and air-traffic controllers notified commercial aircraft that they might soon be ordered to land. An investigation revealed that a technician had mistakenly put a war-games tape, intended as part of a training exercise, into the computer. A year later, it happened a third time: Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national-security adviser, was called at home at two-thirty in the morning and informed that two hundred and twenty missiles were on their way toward the United States. That false alarm was the fault of a defective computer chip that cost forty-six cents.

A study run by Sandia National Laboratories, which oversees the production and security of American nuclear-weapons systems, discovered that between 1950 and 1968 at least twelve hundred nuclear weapons had been involved in “significant” accidents. Even bombs that worked didn’t work quite as planned. In Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, only 1.38 per cent of the nuclear core, less than a kilogram* of uranium, fissioned (although the bomb killed eighty thousand people). The bomb dropped on Nagasaki, three days later, was a mile off target (and killed forty thousand people). A test of the hydrogen bomb in the Bikini atoll, in 1954, produced a yield of fifteen megatons, three times as great as scientists had predicted, and spread lethal radioactive fallout over hundreds of square miles in the Pacific, some of it affecting American observers miles away from the blast site.

These stories, and many more, can be found in Eric Schlosser’s “Command and Control” (Penguin), an excellent journalistic investigation of the efforts made since the first atomic bomb was exploded, outside Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, to put some kind of harness on nuclear weaponry. By a miracle of information management, Schlosser has synthesized a huge archive of material, including government reports, scientific papers, and a substantial historical and polemical literature on nukes, and transformed it into a crisp narrative covering more than fifty years of scientific and political change. And he has interwoven that narrative with a hair-raising, minute-by-minute account of an accident at a Titan II missile silo in Arkansas, in 1980, which he renders in the manner of a techno-thriller:

Plumb watched the nine-pound socket slip through the narrow gap between the platform and the missile, fall about seventy feet, hit the thrust mount, and then ricochet off the Titan II. It seemed to happen in slow motion. A moment later, fuel sprayed from a hole in the missile like water from a garden hose.

“Oh man,” Plumb thought. “This is not good.”

“Command and Control” is how nonfiction should be written.

Schlosser is known for two popular books, “Fast Food Nation,” published in 2001, and “Reefer Madness,” an investigative report on black markets in marijuana, pornography, and illegal immigrants that came out in 2003. Readers of those books, and of Schlosser’s occasional writings in The Nation, are likely to associate him with progressive politics. They may be surprised to learn that, insofar as “Command and Control” has any heroes, those heroes are Curtis LeMay, Robert McNamara, and Ronald Reagan (plus an Air Force sergeant named Jeff Kennedy, who was involved in responding to the wounded missile in the Arkansas silo). Those men understood the risks of just having these things on the planet, and they tried to keep them from blowing up in our faces.

Until the late nineteen-sixties, nuclear rhetoric was far ahead of nuclear reality. In 1947, two years after the war in Europe ended, the United States had a hundred thousand troops stationed in Germany, and the Soviet Union had 1.2 million. Truman saw the atomic bomb as a great equalizer (the Soviets had not yet developed one), and he allowed Stalin to understand that the United States would use it to stop Soviet aggression in Western Europe. Truman was subsequently startled to find out from the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, David Lilienthal, that the United States had exactly one atomic bomb in its stockpile. The bomb was unassembled, but Lilienthal thought that it could probably be made operative.

It was during the Eisenhower Administration that nuclear weapons became the centerpiece of American military planning. Eisenhower thought that the defense budget was out of control, and building nuclear bombs is cheaper than maintaining a large conventional armed force. His Administration also believed that the doctrine of “massive retaliation”—the promise to meet Soviet aggression with an overwhelming nuclear response—was a deterrent that would keep the peace.

When John F. Kennedy ran for President, in 1960, he charged the Eisenhower Administration with having permitted a “missile gap” to develop between the United States and the Soviet Union—an issue that may have helped Kennedy win a very close election. But, as Eisenhower knew from spy-plane reconnaissance, there was no missile gap in the Soviets’ favor. In 1960, the Soviet Union had just four confirmed intercontinental ballistic missiles. And although Air Force intelligence informed Kennedy, after he took office, that the Soviets might have a thousand ICBMs by the middle of 1961, by the end of that year they had sixteen. In 1962, the Soviet Union had about thirty-three hundred nuclear weapons in its arsenal, and the United States had more than twenty-seven thousand. The Soviets had 36 ICBMs; the Americans had 203.

Soviet nuclear capability was regularly exaggerated by American intelligence in the 1950s, and it was in the interest of the armed services, and particularly the Air Force (not a hero in Schlosser’s story), not to correct the record. For more than ten years, the American government poured money into the manufacture of nuclear weapons, the American public was regularly frightened by warnings about the dangers of a nuclear attack that was always made to appear imminent, and defense intellectuals produced papers and books in which they thought about the unthinkable—how to prepare for, how to avoid, and how to survive a nuclear war.

The threat was largely, although not completely, imaginary. The Soviets didn’t have the capability that nuclear-war scenarios assumed, and there was no good reason to believe that anyone’s nuclear weapons would work the way they were designed to. The Kennedy Administration estimated that seventy-five per cent of the warheads on Polaris missiles (the missiles carried in submarines) would not detonate.

Even the war plans were flawed. An atomic explosion kills by shock waves, by radioactive fallout, and by fire. But, as Lynn Eden explained in “Whole World on Fire” (2004), American military planners never took fire into account when they made estimates of bomb damage. They therefore systematically underestimated the projected effects of nuclear bombing, and that led to the production of far more warheads than anyone needed.

But the threat, even though partly imagined, permitted the military to compile an arsenal that forced the Soviets to compile an arsenal to match it—and thereby to make the threat real. By the early 1970s, the Soviet Union had more long-range missiles than the United States did. By then, the public was no longer transfixed by the spectacle of imminent nuclear war, but the world was a far more dangerous place than it had been in the years of civil-defense exercises and back-yard fallout shelters.

Schlosser’s story brings out the pas-de-deux character of Cold War relations, the habit each side had of copying whatever move the other side had just made. Every strategic advantage was answered with its double. The reason the United States wanted nuclear superiority was not to knock out the Soviet Union but to keep the peace: it wanted the Soviet Union to know that if it ever started a nuclear war it would lose. The Soviets, unsurprisingly, saw the matter differently, so, every time the United States did something that gave it an edge, the Soviets responded, and the edge vanished. The search for stability was inherently destabilizing.

When the United States, in the 1950s, cut back on conventional forces in order to rely on nukes, for example, the Soviets did the same. The Warsaw Pact was the Soviet version of NATO. After the United States created the Strategic Air Command and made it the spearhead of the country’s military power, the Soviets created the Strategic Rocket Forces. When the United States developed the capacity to survive a first strike, the Soviets did the same. The monkeys chased each other up the tree.

The pattern was true even of Cold War domestic policy. In 1947, Truman created, by executive order, a loyalty program for federal employees. A week later, the Central Committee of the Communist Party established the Soviet honor courts, charged with investigating Western influences on Soviet life. The House Un-American Activities Committee began investigating Communists in Hollywood at the same time that Stalin and his cultural commissar, Andrei Zhdanov, started cracking down on artists and writers.

Every move intended to prevent a deliberate nuclear war therefore ended up increasing the risk of an accidental one. Schlosser’s point is not that there was some better way to run a Cold War. It is that the more extensive, elaborate, and fine-tuned the nuclear-weapons system became, the greater its exposure to the effects of an accident. For the system to work—for the warnings to be timely, communications to be transparent, missiles to launch, explosives inside the warheads to detonate, and nuclear cores to fission—everything has to be virtually perfect. The margin for error is tiny. And nothing is perfect.

Schlosser cites Charles Perrow’s “Normal Accidents” (1984) as an inspiration for his book. Perrow argued that in systems characterized by complex interactions and by what he called “tight coupling”—that is, processes that cannot readily be modified or turned off—accidents are normal. They can be expected. And they don’t lend themselves to very satisfying postmortems, since it is often difficult to explain just what stage it was in the cascade of bad events that made them irreversible.

Who was at fault in the Norwegian weather-rocket scare? The Norwegians had, in fact, notified the Russians several weeks in advance of the launch. They hadn’t specified a day, because the launch would depend on weather conditions. Either that notice was sent to the wrong parties in Russia or (which seems more likely) whoever received the notice didn’t grasp the implications or simply forgot to forward it to military authorities.

A mis-sent message is one of the most common errors in the world. Schlosser reminds us that during the Cuban missile crisis messages to Moscow from the Soviet Ambassador in Washington were written by hand and given to a Western Union messenger on a bicycle. “We at the Embassy could only pray,” the Ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, later said, “that he would take it to the Western Union office without delay and not stop to chat on the way with some girl.” (It was because of this that, after the crisis was over, the hot line linking the White House and the Kremlin was installed.)

And so, for six minutes in 1995, the future of the species hung in the balance because a mid-level Russian official left work early, or neglected to find a proper procedure for dealing with a message that someone was sending up a rocket, at an unspecified time, to look at the northern lights. It’s like the 46-cent computer chip. There was no redundancy built into the system. If one piece failed, the whole system was imperiled.

The Arkansas incident, in 1980, is well chosen as an illustration of Schlosser’s point. Objects fall inside silos all the time, he says. The chance that a falling socket would puncture the skin of a Titan II missile was extremely remote—but not impossible. When it happened, it triggered a set of mechanical and human responses that quickly led to a nightmare of confusion and misdirection. Once enough oxidizer leaked out and the air pressure inside the tank dropped, the missile would collapse, the remaining oxidizer would come into contact with the rocket fuel, and the missile would explode. Because a nineteen-year-old airman performing regular maintenance accidentally let a socket slip out of his wrench, a Titan II missile became a time bomb, and there was no way to turn off the timer.

And the missile was armed. Schlosser says that the explosive force of the warhead on a Titan II is nine megatons, which is three times the force of all the bombs dropped in the Second World War, including the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If it had detonated, most of the state of Arkansas would have been wiped out.

Few systems are more tightly coupled than the arsenal controlled by the nuclear football. Once the launch codes are entered, a chain of events is set in motion that is almost impossible to interrupt. The “Dr. Strangelove” scenario is quite realistic. The American nuclear-war plan, known as the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), provided for only one kind of response to an attack: full-scale nuclear war. It was assumed that tens of millions of people would die. There were no post-attack plans. For forty years, this was the American nuclear option. No doubt, the Soviets’ was identical.

Henry Kissinger called the SIOP a “horror strategy.” Even Nixon was appalled by it. Schlosser says that when General George Butler became the head of the Strategic Air Command, in 1991, and read the SIOP he was stunned. “This was the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life,” he told Schlosser. “I came to fully appreciate the truth. . . . We escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.”

The dangerous people in Schlosser’s story are the people who try to enhance the readiness of nuclear weaponry by reducing the controls on its use. The good people are not the anti-nuke activists. Schlosser is quite dismissive of them, especially the Western Europeans who protested against the Pershing IIs intended to protect them but not against the Soviet missiles right across the border that were aimed at them night and day.

Schlosser’s good people bring order to the system of nuclear armaments or try to find means of limiting its potential effects. When Curtis LeMay became the head of sac, in 1948, the United States was already committed to an announced policy of resisting Communist aggression anywhere in the world—the Truman Doctrine—and to using the threat of atomic weapons as a deterrent. But LeMay found sac to be a lax, undisciplined, and underequipped organization. Training was poor and security measures were almost nonexistent.

LeMay had commanded a bomber group in the Second World War, flying in the lead plane, and his toughness was legendary. He thought the term “limited war” was an oxymoron. His theory of war was that if you kill enough people on the other side they will stop fighting. He fired the top officers at sac and instituted a rigid system of rules and procedures, checklists and practice runs, and turned sac into a model of efficiency. Schlosser suggests that these reforms saved many lives.

Schlosser notes with some regret that LeMay became a symbol of military buffoonery after George C. Scott portrayed him as General Buck Turgidson, in “Dr. Strangelove,” and that he then made a mistake by running for Vice-President, in 1968, on a ticket with the segregationist George Wallace. At a press conference, LeMay declined to rule out the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam. This position was consistent with his view that war must always be all-out, and, a year later, Nixon sent a signal that he was willing to use hydrogen bombs against the North Vietnamese. But Americans had lost their tolerance for nuclear brinkmanship. This was Strangelove talk.

Schlosser thinks that although Robert McNamara, too, had become one of the most despised figures in American politics by the time he resigned as Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of Defense, in 1968, he had worked hard to limit the use of nuclear weapons. He had improved American early-warning systems; he had tried, with minimal success, to revise the siop; and he worked to have the Soviets understand that the United States would attack only military targets, encouraging them to do the same. But Vietnam brought him down.

Schlosser is careful not to give Ronald Reagan too much credit for defusing the arms race. He thinks that Reagan’s offer to eliminate all nuclear weapons during his famous summit meeting with Gorbachev in Reykjavik, in 1986, was partly a response to changes in American public opinion regarding nukes. But he also thinks that, although Reagan’s offer went nowhere (because he refused to cancel the Strategic Defense Initiative, the anti-missile system known as Star Wars), Reykjavik was “a turning point in the Cold War.” It convinced Gorbachev that the United States would not attack the Soviet Union, which enabled him to pursue his reform agenda, and eventually led to the removal of all intermediate-range missiles from Western Europe.

David Holloway, a historian of the period, once raised the question whether the nuclear arms race was a product of the Cold War or a cause. The bomb is inextricable from Cold War history because it was present at the very start. Truman’s principal reason for deciding to drop the bomb on Japan was to bring the war in the Pacific to a quick end, but his secondary one was to erect a psychological obstacle to any Soviet plans for postwar expansion. He wanted the Soviets to understand that the United States had no qualms about answering aggression with atomic weapons. (Ending the war quickly was itself a way to prevent the Soviets from acquiring territory in the Pacific while fighting was under way there, and then colonizing it, as they did in Eastern Europe.)

Cold wars are historically common events. They are just ways of gaining geopolitical advantage without military battles. In the seventeenth century, Louis XIV fought cold wars with his European neighbors and with the papacy. What made the American Cold War different was not the bomb itself but the idea of the bomb, the bomb as the symbol of ultimate commitment. That idea is what locked the East-West antagonism into place, and raised the stakes in every disagreement. The bomb may have prevented military conflict between the superpowers; it did not prevent the many superpower proxy wars—in Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Afghanistan—in which millions of people died. In the end, the Soviet Union gave up, something that no one had predicted. But today many smaller powers have nuclear weapons, and even in the unlikely event that no leader of one of those nations ever decides to use them, out of fear or anger, there is always the possibility—in the long run, there is the inevitability—of an accident.

Posted in Nuclear Books, Nuclear War | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

What on earth is exergy?

Posted on December 10, 2018 by

Preface. This is one of the best explanations of exergy I’ve been able to find.  This paper makes the case that exergy ought to be considered by just about every industry and government to achieve greater energy efficiency, and makes the case that in many ways exergy is a more valuable measure than energy use when combined with mineral depletion.

My favorite example was:

“The need to take the quality of energy into account can be shown with a simple everyday example.  Take an office space and a car battery. The energy contained in the movement of air molecules in a 68 degree 20 cubic meter office is more than the energy stored in three standard 12 volt car batteries. But you can only use the energy in the air to keep yourself warm, while the energy in the batteries will start your car, cook your lunch, and run your computer.  The reason is that even if their quantities are the same, the quality – or usefulness – of the energy in the air and in the battery is different. In the air, the energy is randomly distributed, not readily accessible, and not easily used for anything other than keeping you warm.  But the electric battery energy is concentrated, controllable, and available for all sorts of uses. This difference is taken into account by exergy.”

But you really ought to go to the original source: https://www.scienceeurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/SE_Exergy_Brochure.pdf since I’ve left out the explanatory charts, graphs, and about a quarter of the information, especially the pages of how exergy should be used in policy-making, which those of you who are trying to slow down or lessen the impact of the Great Simplification might find the most interesting.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

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Brockway, P., et al. 2016. In a resource-constrained world: Think Exergy, not energy. Science Europe.

Exergy

It’s necessary to measure improved energy and resource efficiencies, but how? Of course, the amount of energy and raw materials that go into making something, or that go into services such as heating, communication, or transport, can be easily measured.  However, that does not consider the quality of the energy nor the rarity of the materials used. In order to account for the quality and not just the quantity of energy, as well as factoring in the raw materials used, we need to measure exergy.

Exergy can be considered to be useful energy, or the ability of energy to do work. Exergy can be measured not only for individual processes, but also for entire industries, and even for whole national economies. It provides a firm basis from which to judge the effect of policy measures taken to improve energy and resource efficiency, and to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Exergy as a Measure of Energy Quality

The need to take the quality of energy into account can be shown with a simple everyday example.  Take an office space and a car battery. The energy contained in the movement of air molecules in a 68 degree 20 cubic meter office is more than the energy stored in three standard 12 volt car batteries. But you can only use the energy in the air to keep yourself warm, while the energy in the batteries will start your car, cook your lunch, and run your computer.  The reason is that even if their quantities are the same, the quality – or usefulness – of the energy in the air and in the battery is different. In the air, the energy is randomly distributed, not readily accessible, and not easily used for anything other than keeping you warm.  But the electric battery energy is concentrated, controllable, and available for all sorts of uses. This difference is taken into account by exergy.

Thermodynamics is the Science of Energy

The concept of exergy is inextricably contained within the basic physical laws governing energy and resources, called thermodynamics.  These laws cannot be ignored: they are fundamental . Two of the basic laws in thermodynamics need to be considered:

First – Energy is conserved.

Second – heat cannot be fully converted into useful energy.  This second law concerns the concept of exergy. Every energy-conversion process destroys exergy. Take for example a conventional fossil fuel power station. Such a station transforms the chemical energy stored in coal to produce steam in a boiler, which is then converted by a turbine into mechanical energy and finally by a generator into electricity. in this process, only 30–35% of the chemical energy contained in the coal is converted into electrical energy; the remaining 65–70% is lost in the form of heat. Exergy analysis of this power generation plant identifies the boiler and turbine as the major sources of exergy loss. In order to improve the exergy efficiency, the boiler and turbine systems need to be altered through technical design and operational changes.

Exergy as a Measure of Resource Quality

Exergy can also be applied in order to take the quality of resources into account. A diluted resource is much more difficult to use than a concentrated one, as it first has to be collected or refined. The measure to take the concentration of a resource into account is its chemical potential (or chemical exergy).  The chemical potential of pure iron is much higher than the chemical potential of an iron ore diluted by other rocks.

An exergy consideration of any process takes into account the chemical potential of the resources used in the process. The problem with chemical potentials, however, is that it is only possible to measure their difference. In order to study the chemical potential of a specific resource, a reference point is needed. An interesting proposal as a reference point for natural minerals is the concept of ‘thanatia’, a hypothetical version of our planet where all mineral deposits have been exploited and their materials have been dispersed throughout the crust. Using thanatia as a model, it is possible to determine the exergy content of the Earth’s resources. By adding up all exergy expenditures, the rarity of resources and their products can be assessed.

Exergy Destruction in the Process Industry

Industry is a large user of both material and energy resources. Typically, an industrial production process needs the input of materials and of energy to transform those materials into products. Much of these inputs end up being discarded: in the case of materials as waste, and in the case of energy as heat. This is exergy destruction, since – recalling the Second Law of thermodynamics – not all inputs can be fully recovered as useful energy.

Methanol, for example, is a primary liquid petrochemical manufactured from natural gas. It is a key component of hundreds of chemicals that are integral parts of our daily lives such as plastics, synthetic fibers, adhesives, insulation, paints, pigments, and dyes. Before methanol production even begins, 10% of the natural gas is used to warm the chemical reactor. Subsequently, during production further reactor losses amount to 50%. This contributes to the exergy destruction footprint of methanol production and of all its products.

How can we Increase the Energy Efficiency of Production?

While exergy destruction for any process is never zero, it can be minimized. Every process has a characteristic exergy-destruction footprint. Knowledge of this footprint can be used to rationalize resource choices before production begins and to monitor the use of energy and resources during production. In a full life-cycle approach, it can be used to consider the total energy and resource ‘cost’ of a product: essentially its exergy-destruction footprint.

An example of a process where reducing exergy destruction can increase energy efficiency is distillation. Distillation is the most commonly applied separation technology in the world, responsible for up to 50% of both capital and operating costs in industrial processes. It is a process used to separate the different substances from a liquid mixture by selective evaporation and condensation. Commercially, distillation has many applications; in the previous example of methanol production, it is used to purify the methanol by removing reaction byproducts from it, such as water. The conventional separation of chemicals by distillation occurs in a column that is heated from below by a boiler, with the desired product (referred to as the condensate) produced from a condenser at the top. The exergy efficiency of this distillation setup is about 30%.

The obvious question is whether the same distillation results can be achieved with a higher exergy efficiency by operating the column differently. The answer to that question is yes, as there are better ways to add heat to the column than by a boiler. The boiler and condenser can be replaced by a series of heat exchangers along the column, producing a more exergy-efficient heating pattern. This arrangement minimizes the exergy destruction in the system, reducing the exergy footprint of the process. In this way, the same product can be obtained with only 60% of the original exergy loss.  This of course requires investment in replacing or retrofitting the technology, but in the long run such costs are compensated by lower operating costs.  Financial benefits aside, the potential impact of technological development driven by exergy analysis on the energy  and material efficiency of industry,  is enormous.

The Exergy Destruction Footprint – Developing More Environmental friendly Technologies

When exergy analysis is performed on a process, the exergy losses can be identified and the exergy-destruction footprint can be minimized. In the fossil fuel industry, single- and two-stage crude oil distillation are used to obtain materials from crude oil for fuels and for chemical feedstocks.

A single-stage system consists of a single heating furnace and a distillation column; a two-stage system adds another furnace (to heat the product of the first unit) and a second column.  Tests have shown that the two stage system has a much higher efficiency – 31.5% versus 14 for a single stage process.  This is because the two stage system can be better controlled than the one-stage system.  Adding more stages gives even better control.

It is important to keep in mind that there is no production without an exergy destruction footprint. 

A Large-scale Problem Needs a Common-scale Solution

In 2013, industry accounted for 25% of the EU’s total final energy consumption, making it the third-largest end-user after buildings and transport. Over 50% of industry’s total final energy consumption is attributed to just three sectors: iron and steel, chemical and pharmaceutical, and petroleum and refineries.

Between 2001 and 2011, EU industry reduced its energy intensity by 19%. However, significant efficiency potential remains. As previous examples of several industrial processes have shown, exergy analysis offers a guide to the development of more energy-efficient technologies and provides an objective basis for the comparison of sustainable alternatives. Energy analysis explains that electric and thermal energy are equivalent according to the First Law of thermodynamics, and that heating by an electric resistance heater can be 100% efficient. Exergy analysis, however, explains that heating by an electric heater wastes useful energy. When we know about this kind of waste, we can start to reduce it by minimizing exergy destruction. While the given examples have focused on industrial processes, exergy analysis can also tackle the energy and resource efficiency of larger consumers of energy, such as the buildings and transport sectors. It is important to highlight that exergy analysis can be used not only to quantify the historical resource use, efficiency and environmental performance, but also to explore future transport pathways, building structures and industrial processes.

As explained in the Opinion Paper “A common Scale for Our common Future: Exergy, a thermodynamic metric for Energy”, a major roadblock for implementing – or even finding – solutions to our societal challenges is the fact that energy and resource efficiency are commonly defined in economic, environmental, physical, and even political terms. Exergy is the resource of value, and considering it as such requires a cultural shift to the thermodynamic-metric approach of energy analysis. Exergy provides an apolitical scale to guide our judgement on the road to sustainability. Exergy is first step to a common-scale solution  to our large-scale problems.

ADOPTING EXERGY EFFICIENCY AS THE COMMON NATIONAL ENERGY-EFFICIENCY METRIC

Energy Efficiency as a Key Climate Policy: the Need to Measure Progress with Exergy

Improving the efficiency of energy use and transitioning to renewable energy are the two main climate policies aimed at meeting global carbon-reduction targets. The 2009 renewable Energy Directive mandates that 20% of energy consumed in the EU should be renewable by 2020.  At the same time, the EU’s 2012 Energy Efficiency Directive sets a 20% reduction target for energy use. Progress towards the renewable-energy target is straightforward to measure, since national energy use by renewable sources is collected and readily available. Indeed, for many citizens, the proportion of domestic electrical energy generated from renewable sources appears clearly defined on their electricity bills. In contrast, national-scale energy efficiency remains unclear and a qualitative comparison of renewable sources is lacking. A central problem is that there is no single, universal definition of national energy efficiency. In this void, a wide range of metrics is inconsistently adopted, based on economic activity, physical intensity or hybrid economic– physical indicators.

None of these methods are based on thermodynamics, however, making them inherently incapable of measuring energy efficiency in a meaningful way. As such, they are unable to contribute to evidence-based policy making or to measure progress towards energy efficiency targets. The EU is not alone, there is currently no national-scale thermodynamic based reporting of energy efficiency by any country in the world. Second-law thermodynamic efficiency – in other words, exergy efficiency – stands alone in offering a common scale for national, economy-wide energy efficiency measurement, applicable at all scales and across all sectors.

NATURAL RESOURCE CONSUMPTION

From Gaia to Thanatia: How to Assess the Loss of Natural Resources

As technology today uses an increasing number of elements from the periodic table, the demand for raw materials profoundly impacts on the mining sector. As ever lower grades of ore are being extracted from the earth, the use of energy, water and waste rock per unit of extracted material increases, resulting in greater environmental and social impact. Globally, the metal sector requires about 10% of the total primary energy consumption, mostly provided by fossil fuels. By 2050, the demand for many minerals, including gold, silver, indium, nickel, tin, copper, zinc, lead, and antimony, is predicted to be greater than their current reserves. Regrettably, many rare elements are profusely used, with limited recycling.

The loss of natural resources cannot be expressed in money, which is a volatile unit of measurement that is too far removed from the objective reality of physical loss. Neither can it be expressed in tonnage or energy alone, as these do not capture quality and value. Exergy can solve such shortcomings and be applied to resource consumption through the idea of ‘exergy cost’: the embodied exergy of any material, which takes the concentration of resources into account measured with reference to the ‘dead state’ of thanatia.

Thanatia – from the greek  personification of  Death – is a hypothetical dead state of the anthroposphere, conceiving an ultimate landfill where all mineral resources are irreversibly lost and dispersed, or in other words, at an evenly distributed crustal composition. If our society is squandering the natural resources that the Sun and geological evolution of the Earth have stored, we are converting their chemical exergy into a degraded environment that progressively becomes less able to support usual economic activities and eventually will fail to sustain life itself. The end state would be thanatia, a possible end to the ‘anthropocene’ period. It does not represent the end of life on our planet, but it does imply that mineral resources are no longer available in a concentrated form.

An Essential approach to making better use of our mineral resources: the application of mineral exergy rarity

The exergy of a mineral resource as calculated with thanatia as a reference can be measured as the minimum energy that could be used to extract that resource from bare rocks, instead of from its current mineral deposit. This is an essential approach, since the European commission’s communication ‘towards a circular Economy: a Zero Waste Programme for Europe’, states that “valuable materials are leaking from our economies” and that “pressure on resources is causing greater environmental degradation and fragility, Europe can benefit economically and environmentally from making better use of those resources.” Applied to minerals we can define a ‘mineral Exergy rarity’ (in kWh) as “the amount of exergy resources needed to obtain a mineral commodity from bare  rocks, using prevailing technologies”. Tthe ‘exergy rarity’ concept is thus able to quantify the rate of mineral capital depletion, taking a completely resource exhausted planet as a reference. This rarity assessment allows for a complete vision of mineral resources via a cradle-to-grave analysis. Exergy rarity is, in fact, a measure of the exergy-destruction footprint of a mineral, taking thanatia as a reference.

Given a certain state of technology, the exergy rarity is an identifying property of any commodity incorporating metals. Hence, exergy rarity (in kWh/kg) may be assessed for all mineral resources and artefacts thereof, from raw materials and chemical substances to electric and electronic appliances, renewable energies, and new materials. Especially those made with critical raw materials, whose recycling and recovery technologies should further enhance. Such thinking is a step towards “a better preservation of the Earth’s resources endowment and the use of the Laws of Thermodynamics for the assessment of energy and material resources as well as the planet’s dissipation of useful energy”. More than ever, the issue of dwindling resources needs an integrated global approach. Issues such as assessing exhaustion, dispersal, or scarcity are absent from economic considerations. An annual exergy content account of not only production, but of the depletion and dispersion of raw materials would enable a sound management of our material resources. Unfortunately, similar to the problem of inconsistent national energy-efficiency measurement, there is also a lack of consistency in natural-resource assessment, which is necessary for effective policy making.

It is time to charge for exergy use rather than for energy use. in the future, consumers should be informed about products and services in terms of their exergy content and destruction footprints in much the same way as they are about carbon emissions, and pay the price accordingly. that gives a scientific basis for charging for loss of valuable resources.

The energy and exergy used in production, operation and destruction must be paid back during life time in order to be sustainable. LCEA shows that solar thermal plants have much longer exergy payback time than energy payback time, 15.4 and 3.5 years respectively. Energy based analysis may lead to false assumptions in the evaluation of the sustainability of renewable energy systems.

References

  1. Science Europe Scientific committee for the Physical, chemical and mathematical Sciences, “a common Scale for Our common Future: Exergy, a thermodynamic metric for Energy, http://scieur.org/op-exergy
  2. a. valero capilla and a. valero Delgado, “thanatia: the Destiny of the Earth’s mineral resources, a thermodynamic cradle-to-cradle assessment”, World Scientific Publishing: Singapore, 2014.
  3. S. Kjelstrup, D. bedeaux, E. Johannessen, J. gross, “non-Equilibrium thermodynamics for Engineers”, World Scientific, 2010, see chapter 10 and references therein.
  4. h. al-muslim, i. Dincer and S.m. Zubair, “Exergy analysis of Single- and two-Stage crude Oil Distillation units”, Journal of Energy resources technology 125(3), 199–207, 2003. 5. SEt-Plan Secretariat, SEt-Plan actiOn n°6, DraFt iSSuES PaPEr, “continue efforts to make Eu industry less energy intensive and more competitive”, 25/01/2016,    https://setis.ec.europa.eu/system/files/issues_paper_action6_ee_industry.pdf
  5. European Parliament. Directive 2009/28/Ec of the European Parliament and of the council of 23 april 2009. Official Journal of the European union L140/16, 23.04.2009, pp. 16–62.
  6. European Parliament. Directive 2012/27/Eu of the European Parliament and of the council of 25 October 2012 on energy efficiency. Official Journal of the European union L315/1, 25.10.2012.
  7. P.E. brockway, J.r. barrett, t.J.  Foxon, and J.K.  Steinberger, “Divergence of trends in   uS and uK aggregate exergy efficiencies 1960–2010”, Environmental Science and   technology 48, 9874–9881, 2014.
  8. P.E. brockway, J.K. Steinberger, J.r. barrett, and t.J. Foxon, “understanding china’s past and future energy demand: an exergy efficiency and decomposition analysis”, applied Energy 155, 892– 903, 2015.
  9. Presentation of the “World Energy Outlook – 2015 Special report on Energy and climate”, presented by the international Energy agency’s Executive Director Fatih birol at the Eu Sustainable Energy Week, 2015.
  10. C.J. Koroneos, E.a. nanaki and g.a. xydis, “Sustainability indicators for the use of resources –the Exergy approach”, Sustainability 4, 1867–1878, 2012.
  11. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/En/txt/?uri=cELEx%3a52014Dc0398 13. appeal to un and Eu by researchers who attended the 12th biannual Joint European thermodynamics conference, held in brescia, italy, from July 1, international Journal of thermodynamics 16(3), 2013.
  12. Federal nonnuclear energy research and development act of 1974,Public Law 93–577, http://legcounsel.house.gov/comps/Federal%20nonnuclear%20 Energy%20research%20and%20Development%20act%20Of%201974.pdf
  13. D. Favrat, F. marechal and O. Epelly, “the challenge of introducing an exergy indicator in a local law on energy”, Energy, 33, 130–136, 2008.
Posted in Exergy | 2 Comments

Solar PV requires too much land to replace fossils

Posted on December 4, 2018 by

Preface. This is a brief summary of the Capellan-Perez paper that calculates the land needed to use solar to replace electricity as well as the land needed if solar were to replace all of societies use of energy (i.e. transportation, manufacturing, industry, heating of homes and buildings, and so on).  The land needed in 40 different nations was estimated for each of these cases.

Another study I stumbled on looking for more insight into this paper estimates that 16 of 48 states in the U.S. have insufficient land for solar power to replace fossil fuels (Li 2018).

The authors estimates of the land needed, while five to ten times higher than other researchers, is still quite generous.  They don’t subtract land total unsuitable for solar farms, which require:  level ground, preferably south-facing, near high transmission capacity lines, within a power grid that can handle the excess capacity produced, not in a sensitive or protected area, and able to overcome all opposition such as military objections, NIMBY, and financially feasible, since often in areas with several solar farms speculators drive up land prices. So whatever their land estimates, the actual suitable land is probably much less.

Here is the press release from Universidad de Valladolid that does a good job of summarizing the paper which I found at the last minute:

“While fossil fuels represent concentrated underground deposits of energy, renewable energy sources are spread and dispersed along the territory. Hence, the transition to renewable energies will intensify the global competition for land. In this analysis, we have estimated the land-use requirements to supply all currently consumed electricity and final energy with domestic solar energy for 40 countries (27 member states of the European Union (EU-27), and 13 non-EU countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Turkey, and the USA). We focus on solar since it has the highest power density and biophysical potential among renewables.

The results show that for many advanced capitalist economies the land requirements to cover their current electricity consumption would be substantial, the situation being especially challenging for those located in northern latitudes with high population densities and high electricity consumption per capita. Replication of the exercise to explore the land-use requirements associated with a transition to a 100% solar powered economy indicates this transition may be physically unfeasible for countries such as Japan and most of the EU-27 member states. Their vulnerability is aggravated when accounting for the electricity and final energy footprint, i.e., the net embodied energy in international trade. If current dynamics continue, emerging countries such as India might reach a similar situation in the future.

Overall, our results indicate that the transition to renewable energies maintaining the current levels of energy consumption has the potential to create new vulnerabilities and/or reinforce existing ones in terms of energy, food security and biodiversity conservation.”

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

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Capellan-Perez, I., et al. 2017. Assessing vulnerabilities and limits in the transition to renewable energies: Land requirements under 100% solar energy scenarios. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 77: 760-782 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316643762_Assessing_vulnerabilities_and_limits_in_the_transition_to_renewable_energies_Land_requirements_under_100_solar_energy_scenarios

The transition to renewable energies will intensify the global competition for land because wind and solar energy are highly dispersed and need large areas to capture this energy.  Yet most analyses have concluded that land will not pose a problem.  We focus on solar alone because it has a higher power density than wind, hydro, or biomass.

In this paper we estimate the land-use requirements to supply all currently consumed electricity and final energy with domestic solar energy for 40 countries considering two key issues that are usually not taken into account: (1) the need to cope with the variability of the solar resource from the highs of summer to the lows of winter, and (2) a realistic estimate of the land solar technologies will occupy.

Our results show that for many advanced capitalist economies the land requirements to cover their current electricity consumption would be substantial, the situation being especially challenging for those located in northern latitudes with high populations and electricity consumption per capita.

Assessing the implications in terms of land availability (i.e., land not already used for human activities), to generate electricity only, the EU-27 requires half of its available land.

If solar power were to supply all energy used, not just electricity – in other words, the energy contained in oil, coal, and natural gas used for transportation, industry, chemicals, cement, steel, mining, and myriad other endeavors, there isn’t enough land in Japan and most of the EU-27 states.

Why?  Because the power density of solar is such a tiny fraction of what fossils provide us now. Fossils are very concentrated energy that can be consumed at high power rates of up to 11,000 electric averaged watts per square meter  (We/m2).  But the net power density of solar power plants is just 2–10 We/m2) which is 1,100 to 5,500 times less than fossils.   Wind requires even more space than solar at 0.5–2 We/m2, and hydropower as well with 0.5–7 We/m2, with biomass coming in dead last ~0.1 We/m2 at over one hundred thousand times less energy per square meter.

Solar power is intermittent and has high seasonal variability, so a redundant capacity as well as storage capacity is essential.  So for redundant capacity, if one megawatt of solar is produced on 6-8 acres of land, at least three times more land would be needed to gather solar power for the majority of the day (in the united states solar availability is on average 4.8 hours/day) when there’s little or no sun and during winter.  Additional land would be also be needed for energy storage, especially for the only commercial solution that exists, hydroelectric and pumped hydro storage, whose reservoirs take up a great deal of land.  For these reasons and many others, the authors estimate that a realistic land area is five to ten times higher than what other scientists have estimated.

The authors also note that their calculations are very conservative since they don’t take into account the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimate that world electricity demand will grow 2.1% per year on average between 2012 and 2040 (i.e., +80% cumulative growth in the period). In that case the amount of land needed is much higher than our estimate for current electricity consumption.

Another disadvantage of solar PV farms is that they compete with agriculture for land, both of which need level land, and solar can also reduce biodiversity where ever it’s placed.

When the authors say “available land”, that means solar farms are competing for all the other uses we have for land, to build homes, infrastructure, grow fiber, food, and so on.

Conclusion

Solar to replace all electricity generation only

Our findings show that the land needed is substantial, especially for those in northern latitudes with high population densities and high electricity consumption per capita such as the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, Luxembourg, South Korea, Germany, Finland, Taiwan, Denmark and Japan (10–50% of available land). Moreover, accounting for the electricity footprint, i.e., for the net energy embodied in international trade (the energy used in China and India would need to come back to these 40 nations to provide power in a world fueled only by solar power), which increases the amount of land to 11 to 60%.

Solar to replace all energy used by societ

This is not possible for many nations within their own borders, especially the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, the UK, Denmark, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Finland, Japan, Ireland, Czech Republic, Sweden, Poland, Estonia and Italy.

End note: I had some trouble understanding this paper, partly because of the English used, and the academic language nearly all papers are written in, which is always a battle to translate.  I’m sure I missed a lot of good stuff because of it, so read the paper if this interests you.

Reference

Li, Y., et al. 2018. Land availability, utilization, and intensification for a solar powered economy. Proceedings of the 13th international symposioum on process systems engineering.

 

 

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75% of Earth’s land is degraded threatening 3.2 billion people

Posted on December 1, 2018 by

Source: United Nations University

 

Preface. By 2050 95% of Earth’s land could be degraded and reducing or even preventing food production, forcing hundreds of millions to migrate.

More than 75% of our planet has been altered by humans, a figure that will likely rise to more than 90% by 2050, according to the first comprehensive assessment of land degradation and its impacts. The report, released this week by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, was prepared by more than 100 experts from around the world. Crops and livestock affect the greatest area—a third of all land—by contributing to soil erosion and water pollution. Wetlands are among the most impacted of ecosystems; 87% have been destroyed over the past 3 centuries (Science 2018).  An even longer and more detailed report than that in the National Geographic below is here.

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

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Leahy S (2018) 75% of Earth’s Land Areas Are Degraded. A new report warns that environmental damage threatens the well-being of 3.2 billion people.  National Geographic.

MEDELLIN, COLOMBIA More than 75% of Earth’s land areas are substantially degraded, undermining the well-being of 3.2 billion people, according to the world’s first comprehensive, evidence-based assessment. These lands that have either become deserts, are polluted, or have been deforested and converted to agricultural production and are also the main causes of species extinctions.

If this trend continues, 95% of the Earth’s land areas could become degraded by 2050. That would potentially force hundreds of millions of people to migrate, as food production collapses in many places, the report warns. (Learn more about biodiversity under threat.)

“Land degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change are three different faces of the same central challenge: the increasingly dangerous impact of our choices on the health of our natural environment,” said Sir Robert Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which produced the report (launched Monday in Medellin, Colombia).

IPBES is the “IPCC for biodiversity”—a scientific assessment of the status of non-human life that makes up the Earth’s life-support system. The land degradation assessment took three years and more than 100 leading experts from 45 countries.

Rapid expansion and unsustainable management of croplands and grazing lands is the main driver of land degradation, causing significant loss of biodiversity and impacting food security, water purification, the provision of energy, and other contributions of nature essential to people. This has reached “critical levels” in many parts of the world, Watson said in an interview.

Underlying Causes

Wetlands have been hit hardest, with 87% lost globally in the last 300 years. Some 54% have been lost since 1900. Wetlands continue to be destroyed in Southeast Asia and the Congo region of Africa, mainly to plant oil palm.

Underlying drivers of land degradation, says the report, are the high-consumption lifestyles in the most developed economies, combined with rising consumption in developing and emerging economies. High and rising per capita consumption, amplified by continued population growth in many parts of the world, are driving unsustainable levels of agricultural expansion, natural resource and mineral extraction, and urbanization.

Land degradation is rarely considered an urgent issue by most governments. Ending land degradation and restoring degraded land would get humanity one third of the way to keeping global warming below 2°C, the target climate scientists say we need to avoid the most devastating impacts. Deforestation alone accounts for 10 percent of all human-induced emissions.

Reference

News at a Glance. 2018. Alarm over land degradation. Science 359: 1444.

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One less worry: the magnetic field flipping between north and south poles is not the end of the world

Posted on November 28, 2018 by

Preface.  The geomagnetic field reversal of polarity has occurred thousands of times in the geological past. We are overdue for another. Indeed, Earth’s dipole has decreased in strength by nearly 10% since it was first measured in 1840. It could happen within the next 2,000 years.

If the magnetic poles flip, it is likely solar radiation storms will crash power grids, satellites, and electronic communications for 10,000 years based on what we know of past reversals.

But not to worry, by 2100 there won’t be an electric grid, satellites, and electronic communications because there won’t be enough oil, coal, and natural gas left to run them.  Or wind and solar power, which also depend on fossils every single step of their life cycle.

By the time the poles flip, we’ll be back to horse drawn carriages, so not having GPS won’t be a big deal.   In a world that’s gone back to wood as the main energy and infrastructure resource, as in all past civilizations before fossils, no one is likely to even even notice the magnetic field is weak. Though we should feel sorry for migrating birds, it might throw them for a loop.

Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman once tried to describe what a magnetic field looked like: “Is it any different from trying to imagine a room full of invisible angels? No, it’s not like imagining invisible angels. It requires a much higher degree of imagination to understand the electromagnetic field than to understand invisible angels.”

Perhaps Feynman would have a better idea of what a magnetic field looks like if he’d gone to the arctic circle in the winter — auroras are electromagnetic fields shimmering and dancing across the night sky.

Though Feynman’s superstitious image is apt because the study of magnetism used to be part of religion, magic and natural philosophy. If the author had written this book a few hundred years ago, she might have been burned at the stake for her heresy.

Sure, if the poles flipped within the next 50 years, it would be a real disaster, just see my posts on an electromagnetic pulse here for details.  But the odds are good your great grandchild won’t even know it’s happened.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

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Buffett, B. 2018. A candid portrait of the scientists studying Earth’s declining magnetism warns of potential peril if the poles swap places. Science.

A book review of Alanna Mitchel, 2018, “The Spinning Magnet: The Electromagnetic Force That Created the Modern World–and Could Destroy It”, Dutton.

Earth’s magnetic field protects the environment from the harsh conditions of space and its strength has been declining since Carl Friedrich Gauss measured this in the 1830s. The decline suggests that the magnetic field may flip in less than 2,000 years.  The last time this happened was 780,000 years ago.

The outcome would be a substantial lowering of our protective shield.Should that happen again, the weak magnetic field would wreak havoc on our power grids and other infrastructure.

Recent examples of failures in this protective barrier (Kappenman 1997) serve to highlight the problem. A large solar storm in March 1989 sent high levels of charged particles streaming toward Earth. These particles impinged on the magnetic field and induced electric currents through power grids in Quebec, Canada. The ensuing blackout affected 6 million customers. A reduction in the field strength would allow charged particles to penetrate deeper into the Earth system, causing greater damage with even modest solar storms. A substantial and sustained collapse of the magnetic field during a reversal would likely end our present system of power distribution.

Throughout the book, there is a clear and effective attempt to cast a spotlight on the individuals who have contributed to our understanding of Earth’s magnetic field. Mitchell has a sharp eye for mannerisms and a vivid way of bringing personalities to the page. Her explanations are aimed at a nontechnical audience, and the analogies she uses to describe complex scientific ideas are always entertaining. For example, a crowded washroom at a “beer-soaked” sporting event serves as the starting point for an illustration of Pauli’s exclusion principle. Her enthusiasm for the book’s subject matter shines throughout.

There is little doubt that the magnetic field will reverse again. In the meantime, The Spinning Magnet gives readers a nontechnical description of electromagnetism and a measured assessment of the possible consequences for our modern world if it does so in the near future.

Reference

Kappenman, J. G., et al. 1997. Space weather from a user’s perspective: Geomagnetic storm forecasts and the power industry. American Geophysics Union 78: 37-45

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Crash alert: China’s resource crisis could be the trigger

Posted on November 25, 2018 by

Preface.  Way to go Nafeez Ahmed, your second home run of reality based reporting on the energy crisis this week.  There are countless economists within the mainstream media predicting an economic crisis worse than in 2008, but they totally ignore energy. How refreshing to see an article where energy is front and center in explaining why there may be an economic crash in the future.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

Nafeez Ahmed. September 12, 2018. The next financial crash is imminent, and China’s resource crisis could be the trigger. Over three decades, the value of energy China extracts from its domestic oil, gas and coal supplies has plummeted by half. Medium.com

China’s economic slowdown could be a key trigger of the coming global financial crisis, but one of its core drivers — China’s dwindling supplies of cheap domestic energy — is little understood by mainstream economists.

All eyes are on China as the world braces itself for what a growing number of financial analysts warn could be another global economic recession.

In a BBC interview to mark the 10th anniversary of the global financial crisis, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney described China as “one of the bigger risks” to global financial stability.

The Chinese “financial sector has developed very rapidly, and it has many of the same assumptions that were made in the run-up to the last financial crisis,” he warned:

“Could something like this happen again?… Could there be a trigger for a crisis — if we’re complacent, of course it could.”

Since 2007, China’s debts have quadrupled. According to the IMF, its total debt is now about 234 percent of gross GDP, which could rise to 300 percent by 2022. British financial journalist Harvey Jones catalogues a range of observations from several economists essentially warning that official data might not reflect how bad China’s economy is actually decelerating.

The great hope is that all this is merely a temporary blip as China transitions from a focus on manufacturing and exports toward domestic consumption and services.

Meanwhile, China’s annual rate of growth continues to decline. The British Foreign Office (FCO) has been monitoring China’s economic woes closely, and in a recent spate of monthly briefings this year has charted what appears to be its inevitable decline.

Last month, the FCO’s China Economics Network based out of the British Embassy in Beijing documented that China’s economy had “further softened… with indicators weakening across the board”.

The report found that: “Investment, industrial production, and retail sales all weakened, despite easing measures”; and noted that high-level Chinese measures to sustain economic growth were running out of steam.

China’s economic slowdown, moreover, coincides with brewing expectations that Wall Street’s longest running stock market bull run could be about to end soon.

One analysis of this sort came from Wall Street veteran Mark Newton, former Chief Technical Analyst at multi-billion dollar hedge fund Greywolf Capital, and prior to that a Morgan Stanley technical strategist.

Newton predicts that US stocks are close to peaking out, leading to a massive 40–50 percent plunge starting in the spring of 2019 or by 2020 at the latest. He explained that:

“Technically there have started to be warning signs with regards to negative momentum divergence (an indicator that can signal a pending trend reversal), which have appeared prior to most major market tops, including 2000 and 2007.”

Newton’s forecast is similar to a prediction made by US economist Professor Robert Aliber of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Earlier this year, INSURGE reported exclusively on Aliber’s forecast of a 40-50 percent stock market crash (in or shortly after 2018), based on examining the dynamic of previous banking crises.

The vulnerability of both the US and Chinese economies — not to mention the string of other vulnerabilities in numerous other countries from Brexit to Turkey to Italy — demonstrates that whatever the actual trigger might be, the resulting impact is likely to have a domino effect across multiple interconnected vulnerabilities.

This could well lead to a global financial crash scenario far worse than what began in 2008.

But financial analysts have completely missed a deeper biophysical driver of China’s economic descent: energy.

Last October, INSURGE drew attention to new scientific study led by the China University of Petroleum in Beijing, which found that China is about to experience a peak in its total oil production as early as 2018.

Without finding an alternative source of “new abundant energy resources”, the study warned, the 2018 peak in China’s combined conventional and unconventional oil will undermine continuing economic growth and “challenge the sustainable development of Chinese society.”

These conclusions have been corroborated by a new paper published this February in the journal Energy, once again led by a team at the China University of Petroleum.

The study applies the measure of Energy Return On Investment (EROI), a simple but powerful ratio to calculate how much energy is being invested to extract a particular quantity of energy.

The team attempted a more refined EROI calculation, noting that standard calculations look at energy obtained at the wellhead compared to what is used to extract it; whereas a more precise measure would look at energy available at ‘point of use’ (so, after extraction from the wellhead, processing and transportation until it is actually used for something tangible in society).

Using this approach to EROI, the study finds that over a period of around three decades (between 1987 and 2012), the value of the energy extracted from China’s domestic fossil fuel base declined by more than half from 11:1 to 5:1.

This means that more and more energy is being expended to extract a decreasing amount of energy: a process that is gradually undermining the rate of economic growth.

A similar finding extends to China’s coal consumption:

“In 1987, the energy production sectors consumed 1 ton standard coal equivalent (TCE) energy inputs for every 10.01 TCE of produce net energy. However, in 2012, this number declined to 4.25.”

The study uses this data to simulate the impact on China’s GDP, and concludes that China’s declining GDP is directly related to the declining EROI or energy value of its domestic hydrocarbon resource base.

But it isn’t just China experiencing an EROI decline. This is a global phenomenon, one that was recently noted by a scientific report to the United Nations that I covered for VICE, which warned that the global economy as a whole is shifting to a new era of declining resource quality.

This doesn’t mean we are ‘running out’ of fossil fuels — but it means that as the resource quality of those fuels decline, we increase the costs on our environment and systems of production, all of which increasingly impact on the health of the global economy.

As long as mainstream economic institutions remain blind to the fundamental biophysical basis of economics, as masterfully articulated by Charles Hall and Kent Klitgaard in their seminal book, Energy and the Wealth of Nations: An Introduction to BioPhysical Economics, they will remain in the dark about the core structural reasons why the current configuration of global capitalism is so prone to recurrent crisis and collapse.

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is the founding editor of INSURGE intelligence. Nafeez is a 17-year investigative journalist, formerly of The Guardian where he reported on the geopolitics of social, economic and environmental crises. Nafeez reports on ‘global system change’ for VICE’s Motherboard, and on regional geopolitics for Middle East Eye. He has bylines in The Independent on Sunday, The Independent, The Scotsman, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, New York Observer, The New Statesman, Prospect, Le Monde diplomatique, among other places. He has twice won the Project Censored Award for his investigative reporting; twice been featured in the Evening Standard’s top 1,000 list of most influential Londoners; and won the Naples Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary award created by the President of the Republic. Nafeez is also a widely-published and cited interdisciplinary academic applying complex systems analysis to ecological and political violence.

 

 

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