Richard Heinberg: Systemic change driven by moral awakening is our only hope

Posted on June 6, 2018 by

[ Although this was written over a year ago on August 14, 2017 by Richard Heinberg on Ecowatch, it’s as true today as it was then, and worth republishing since people forget what they’ve read in the past

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 ]

Our core ecological problem is not climate change. It is overshoot, of which global warming is a symptom. Overshoot is a systemic issue. Over the past century-and-a-half, enormous amounts of cheap energy from fossil fuels enabled the rapid growth of resource extraction, manufacturing and consumption; and these in turn led to population increase, pollution and loss of natural habitat and hence biodiversity.

The human system expanded dramatically, overshooting Earth’s long-term carrying capacity for humans while upsetting the ecological systems we depend on for our survival. Until we understand and address this systemic imbalance, symptomatic treatment (doing what we can to reverse pollution dilemmas like climate change, trying to save threatened species and hoping to feed a burgeoning population with genetically modified crops) will constitute an endlessly frustrating round of stopgap measures that are ultimately destined to fail.

The ecology movement in the 1970s benefited from a strong infusion of systems thinking, which was in vogue at the time (ecology—the study of the relationships between organisms and their environments—is an inherently systemic discipline, as opposed to studies like chemistry that focus on reducing complex phenomena to their components). As a result, many of the best environmental writers of the era framed the modern human predicament in terms that revealed the deep linkages between environmental symptoms and the way human society operates. Limits to Growth (1972), an outgrowth of the systems research of Jay Forrester, investigated the interactions between population growth, industrial production, food production, resource depletion and pollution. Overshoot (1982), by William Catton, named our systemic problem and described its origins and development in a style any literate person could appreciate. Many more excellent books from the era could be cited.

However, in recent decades, as climate change has come to dominate environmental concerns, there has been a significant shift in the discussion. Today, most environmental reporting is focused laser-like on climate change, and systemic links between it and other worsening ecological dilemmas (such as overpopulation, species extinctions, water and air pollution, and loss of topsoil and fresh water) are seldom highlighted. It’s not that climate change isn’t a big deal. As a symptom, it’s a real doozy. There’s never been anything quite like it, and climate scientists and climate-response advocacy groups are right to ring the loudest of alarm bells. But our failure to see climate change in context may be our undoing.

Why have environmental writers and advocacy organizations succumbed to tunnel vision? Perhaps it’s simply that they assume systems thinking is beyond the capacity of policy makers. It’s true: If climate scientists were to approach world leaders with the message, “We have to change everything, including our entire economic system—and fast,” they might be shown the door rather rudely. A more acceptable message is, “We have identified a serious pollution problem, for which there are technical solutions.” Perhaps many of the scientists who did recognize the systemic nature of our ecological crisis concluded that if we can successfully address this one make-or-break environmental crisis, we’ll be able to buy time to deal with others waiting in the wings (overpopulation, species extinctions, resource depletion and on and on).

If climate change can be framed as an isolated problem for which there is a technological solution, the minds of economists and policy makers can continue to graze in familiar pastures. Technology—in this case, solar, wind and nuclear power generators, as well as batteries, electric cars, heat pumps and, if all else fails, solar radiation management via atmospheric aerosols—centers our thinking on subjects like financial investment and industrial production. Discussion participants don’t have to develop the ability to think systemically, nor do they need to understand the Earth system and how human systems fit into it. All they need trouble themselves with is the prospect of shifting some investments, setting tasks for engineers and managing the resulting industrial-economic transformation so as to ensure that new jobs in green industries compensate for jobs lost in coal mines.

The strategy of buying time with a techno-fix presumes either that we will be able to institute systemic change at some unspecified point in the future even though we can’t do it just now (a weak argument on its face), or that climate change and all of our other symptomatic crises will in fact be amenable to technological fixes. The latter thought-path is again a comfortable one for managers and investors. After all, everybody loves technology. It already does nearly everything for us. During the last century it solved a host of problems: it cured diseases, expanded food production, sped up transportation and provided us with information and entertainment in quantities and varieties no one could previously have imagined. Why shouldn’t it be able to solve climate change and all the rest of our problems?

Of course, ignoring the systemic nature of our dilemma just means that as soon as we get one symptom corralled, another is likely to break loose. But, crucially, is climate change, taken as an isolated problem, fully treatable with technology? Color me doubtful. I say this having spent many months poring over the relevant data with David Fridley of the energy analysis program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Our resulting book, Our Renewable Future, concluded that nuclear power is too expensive and risky; meanwhile, solar and wind power both suffer from intermittency, which (once these sources begin to provide a large percentage of total electrical power) will require a combination of three strategies on a grand scale: energy storage, redundant production capacity and demand adaptation. At the same time, we in industrial nations will have to adapt most of our current energy usage (which occurs in industrial processes, building heating and transportation) to electricity. Altogether, the energy transition promises to be an enormous undertaking, unprecedented in its requirements for investment and substitution. When David and I stepped back to assess the enormity of the task, we could see no way to maintain current quantities of global energy production during the transition, much less to increase energy supplies so as to power ongoing economic growth. The biggest transitional hurdle is scale: the world uses an enormous amount of energy currently; only if that quantity can be reduced significantly, especially in industrial nations, could we imagine a credible pathway toward a post-carbon future.

Downsizing the world’s energy supplies would, effectively, also downsize industrial processes of resource extraction, manufacturing, transportation, and waste management. That’s a systemic intervention, of exactly the kind called for by the ecologists of the 1970s who coined the mantra, “Reduce, reuse and recycle.” It gets to the heart of the overshoot dilemma—as does population stabilization and reduction, another necessary strategy. But it’s also a notion to which technocrats, industrialists, and investors are virulently allergic.

The ecological argument is, at its core, a moral one—as I explain in more detail in a just-released manifesto replete with sidebars and graphics (“There’s No App for That: Technology and Morality in the Age of Climate Change, Overpopulation, and Biodiversity Loss”). Any systems thinker who understands overshoot and prescribes powerdown as a treatment is effectively engaging in an intervention with an addictive behavior. Society is addicted to growth, and that’s having terrible consequences for the planet and, increasingly, for us as well. We have to change our collective and individual behavior and give up something we depend on—power over our environment. We must restrain ourselves, like an alcoholic foreswearing booze. That requires honesty and soul-searching.

In its early years the environmental movement made that moral argument, and it worked up to a point. Concern over rapid population growth led to family planning efforts around the world. Concern over biodiversity declines led to habitat protection. Concern over air and water pollution led to a slew of regulations. These efforts weren’t sufficient, but they showed that framing our systemic problem in moral terms could get at least some traction.

Why didn’t the environmental movement fully succeed? Some theorists now calling themselves “bright greens” or “eco-modernists” have abandoned the moral fight altogether. Their justification for doing so is that people want a vision of the future that’s cheery and that doesn’t require sacrifice. Now, they say, only a technological fix offers any hope. The essential point of this essay (and my manifesto) is simply that, even if the moral argument fails, a techno-fix won’t work either. A gargantuan investment in technology (whether next-generation nuclear power or solar radiation geo-engineering) is being billed as our last hope. But in reality it’s no hope at all.

The reason for the failure thus far of the environmental movement wasn’t that it appealed to humanity’s moral sentiments—that was in fact the movement’s great strength. The effort fell short because it wasn’t able to alter industrial society’s central organizing principle, which is also its fatal flaw: its dogged pursuit of growth at all cost. Now we’re at the point where we must finally either succeed in overcoming growthism or face the failure not just of the environmental movement, but of civilization itself.

The good news is that systemic change is fractal in nature: it implies, indeed it requires, action at every level of society. We can start with our own individual choices and behavior; we can work within our communities. We needn’t wait for a cathartic global or national sea change. And even if our efforts cannot “save” consumerist industrial civilization, they could still succeed in planting the seeds of a regenerative human culture worthy of survival.

There’s more good news: Once we humans choose to restrain our numbers and our rates of consumption, technology can assist our efforts. Machines can help us monitor our progress, and there are relatively simple technologies that can help deliver needed services with less energy usage and environmental damage. Some ways of deploying technology could even help us clean up the atmosphere and restore ecosystems.

But machines can’t make the key choices that will set us on a sustainable path. Systemic change driven by moral awakening: it’s not just our last hope; it’s the only real hope we’ve ever had.

Posted in Climate Change, Critical Thinking, Overpopulation, Overshoot, Population, Richard Heinberg | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

Mass migration: Africa

Posted on June 4, 2018 by

Sengupta, S. 2016-12-15. Heat, Hunger and War Force Africans Onto a ‘Road on Fire’. New York Times.

AGADEZ, Niger — The world dismisses them as economic migrants. The law treats them as criminals who show up at a nation’s borders uninvited. Prayers alone protect them on the journey across the merciless Sahara.

But peel back the layers of their stories and you find a complex bundle of trouble and want that prompts the men and boys of West Africa to leave home, endure beatings and bribes, board a smuggler’s pickup truck and try to make a living far, far away.

They do it because the rains have become so fickle, the days measurably hotter, the droughts more frequent and more fierce, making it impossible to grow enough food on their land. Some go to the cities first, only to find jobs are scarce. Some come from countries ruled by dictators, like Gambia, whose longtime ruler recently refused to accept the results of an election he lost. Others come from countries crawling with jihadists, like Mali.

In Agadez, a fabled gateway town of sand and hustle through which hundreds of thousands exit the Sahel on their way abroad, I met dozens of them. One was Bori Bokoum, 21, from a village in the Mopti region of Mali. Fighters for Al Qaeda clash with government forces in the area, one of many reasons making a living had become much harder than in his father’s time.

One bad harvest followed another, he said. Not enough rice and millet could be eked out of the soil. So, as a teenager, he ventured out to sell watches in the nearest market town for a while, then worked on a farm in neighboring Ivory Coast, saving up for this journey. Libya was his destination, then maybe across the Mediterranean Sea, to Italy.

“To try my luck,” was how Mr. Bokoum put it. “I know it’s difficult. But everyone goes. I also have to try.”

This journey has become a rite of passage for West Africans of his generation. The slow burn of climate change makes subsistence farming, already risky business in a hot, arid region, even more of a gamble. Pressures on land and water fuel clashes, big and small. Insurgencies simmer across the region, prompting United States counterterrorism forces to keep watch from a base on the outskirts of Agadez.

This year, more than 311,000 people have passed through Agadez on their way to either Algeria or Libya, and some onward to Europe, according to the International Organization for Migration. The largest numbers are from Niger and its West African neighbors, including Mr. Bokoum’s home, Mali.

Scholars of migration count people like Mr. Bokoum among the millions who could be displaced around the world in coming decades as rising seas, widening deserts and erratic weather threaten traditional livelihoods. For the men who pour through Agadez, these hardships are tangled up with intense economic, political and demographic pressures.

“Climate change on its own doesn’t force people to move but it amplifies pre-existing vulnerabilities,” said Jane McAdam, an Australian law professor who studies the trend. They move when they can no longer imagine a future living off their land — or as she said, “when life becomes increasingly intolerable.

But many of these people fall through the cracks of international law. The United Nations 1951 refugee convention applies only to those fleeing war and persecution, and even that treaty’s obligation to offer protection is increasingly flouted by many countries wary of foreigners.

In such a political climate, policy makers point out, the chances of expanding the law to include those displaced by environmental degradation are slim to none. It explains why the more than 100 countries that have ratified the Paris climate agreement this year acknowledged that environmental changes would spur the movement of people, but kicked the can down the road on what to do about them.

A Barren Outlook

Many migrants pass through Agadez from the villages around Zinder, a city roughly situated between the mouth of the Sahara and Niger’s border with Nigeria. Until 1926, Zinder was Niger’s capital. Then it ran low on water.

Early one gray-yellow morning, I set off from Zinder for a village called Chana, the home of one of the migrants I had met, Habibou Idi. Rows upon rows of millet grew on both sides of the two-lane national highway, punctuated occasionally by a spindly acacia. About an hour outside the city, some boys were raking the soil, yanking out weeds.

An older man sitting to the side said that back when he was a boy, the millet stood so high that you could hardly see workers in the fields. Midway through the growing season, it now barely reaches their knees.

An hour farther out of the city, we veered off the paved road and across a barren, rutted field.

In Chana, there was a steady thud of women pounding beans with wooden pestles. The beans grew along the ground, in the shade of the millet. They were the only crop ready for harvest. And so the people of Chana ate beans, morning and night: beans pounded, boiled, flavored with salt.

As Mr. Idi, 33, led me through his fields, he recalled hearing stories of what Chana looked like before a great drought swept across the Sahel in the 1970s and 1980s. The village was encircled by trees, he was told.

Back then, like most villagers, his father had a cow and plenty of sheep. Their droppings fertilized the land. Today, Mr. Idi said, not a single cow is left in Chana. They were sold to buy food.

Mr. Idi complained that the rains are now hard to predict. Sometimes they come in May, and he rushes out to plant his millet and beans, only to find the clouds closing up and his crops withering. Even when a good rain comes, it just floods. Most of the trees are gone, they were cut for firewood.

Living off the land is no longer an option, so unlike his father or grandfather before him, Mr. Idi has spent the last several years working across the border in Nigeria — hauling goods, watering gardens, whatever he could find.

This summer, for the first time, he boarded a bus to Agadez, and then a truck across the dunes to Algeria. There, he mostly begged.

He lasted only a few months.

The Algerian authorities rounded up hundreds of Nigeriens and deposited them back in Agadez.

That is where I met him, in a line for the bus back to Chana. Sand filled the breast pocket of his tunic. He was bringing home a blanket, a collection of secondhand clothes and 50,000 CFAs (the local currency, pronounced SAY-fas), worth about $100.

That did not last long, either. Mr. Idi arrived home to find that his family had taken out a loan of nearly the same amount in his absence. They had sold four of their five goats, too. There were many mouths to feed: his wife, their four children, plus his late brother’s seven.

Hotter Hots and Unpredictable Rains

Sub-Saharan Africa is in the throes of a population boom, which means that people have to grow more food precisely at a time when climate change is making it all the more difficult. Fertility rates remain higher than in other parts of the world, and Niger has the highest in the entire world: Women bear more than seven children on average.

Once every three years, according to scientists from the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, or FEWS Net, Niger faces food insecurity, or a lack of adequate food to eat. Hunger here is among the worst in the world: About 45 percent of Niger’s children under 5 suffer from chronic malnutrition.

Meanwhile, in what is already one of the hottest places on Earth, it has gotten steadily hotter: by 0.7 degrees Celsius since 1975, Fews Net has found. Other places in the world are warming faster, for sure. But this is the Sahel, where daytime highs often soar well above 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit) and growing food in sandy, inhospitable soil is already difficult.

Niger’s neighbors share many of those woes. In Mali, temperatures have gone up by 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1975. Summer rains have increased, but are not at the levels they were before the drought.

In Chad, temperatures have risen by 0.8 degrees Celsius in the same period, according to FEWS Net. The group, which is financed with United States assistance, has warned that cereal production could drop by 30 percent per capita by 2025.

Chad is where FEWS Net’s chief representative for the Sahel, a meteorologist named Alkhalil Adoum, was born in 1957. As a boy, he loved running through the blinding rains of summer, when you couldn’t even see what was ahead of you. He knew a good rain would fill the savanna with wild fruit, and the first green shoots of sorghum would taste as sweet as sugar cane. His family’s cows, once they ate new grass, would give more milk.

“You love the first rains,” Mr. Adoum said. “You know, as a kid, there’s better times ahead.

Those rains don’t come anymore, he said.

There are conflicting scientific models about the effects of climate change on precipitation: some say much of sub-Saharan Africa will be wetter; others drier. The main points of agreement is that the rainy season will be more unpredictable and more intense. On top of that, the hottest parts of the continent will get hotter.

Extreme heat can have grievous consequences on food and disease, the World Food Program found in a survey of scientific studies. Malaria-carrying mosquitoes thrive in it. Pests are more likely to attack crops. Corn and wheat yields decline.

A study, published in December by the International Monitoring Displacement Center, found that in 2015 alone, sudden-onset disaster displaced 1.1 million people in Africa from one part of their country to another.

And then there is the competition over water. Already, it sets off clashes between farmers and herders, often hardened by ethnic divisions. A growing body of research suggests that local droughts, especially in poor, vulnerable countries, heighten the risk of civil conflict.

Risk analysts, including at the London-based firm Verisk Maplecroft, conclude that climate change amplifies the risks of civil unrest across the entire midsection of sub-Saharan Africa, from Mali in the west to Ethiopia in the East.

A grisly example lies in full display just a few hours by road from Mr. Idi’s village. In the southeastern corner of the country, where Niger meets Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon, more than 270,000 people huddle for safety from the Boko Haram insurgency. Altogether, across the Lake Chad Basin, 2.4 million people have fled their homes, according to the United Nations.

A City of Dreams

Agadez is a city of mud-brick compounds with high walls and blazing bright metal doors. For centuries, it was filled with traders and nomads. In recent decades, it was a tourist magnet, until ethnic rebellions and then jihadist violence drove people away.

Today, migration is the main industry. Drivers, smugglers, money changers, sex workers, police officers — everyone lives off the men on the move. It is a city of dreams, both budding and broken. It is where the journey across the desert begins for so many young West African men, and it is where the journey ends, when they fail.

The smugglers’ den where I found Mr. Bokoum, the 21-year-old from Mali, was a set of two adjoining courtyards, with two concrete-floored rooms. Upside-down jerrycans served as stools, plastic mats as sofas.

He had been in Agadez for three months, waiting for his mother to send him money. It can cost 350,000 CFAs — about $600 — to get from Agadez to the Libyan border, on the back of a pickup truck.

The smugglers had also started out as migrants, and most of them worked for a while in Libya. Now, they make money off other men’s journeys. None would hint at how much.

Mohamed Diallo, a Senegalese manager of the compound, blamed Western countries for spewing carbon into the atmosphere, and he was skeptical of their leaders’ promises to curb emissions.

“The big powers are polluting and creating problems for us,” he said. He was appalled that Africans trying to go to Europe were treated like criminals, when Europeans in Africa were treated like kings.

Mr. Diallo’s compound, like others in Agadez, has a weekly rhythm.

He instructs those seeking to make the journey to Libya to be inside by Sunday night. Monday morning, he treats them to a feast before the long haul. He roasts a sheep, plays some music, turns on the ceiling fans for a couple of hours.

Just after sundown, a white Toyota pickup pulls up. Monday night is when Nigerien soldiers change shifts, heading out of Agadez and into a desert outpost. The Toyotas follow, stopping briefly at the police checkpoint at the edge of the city before speeding into the dunes. Those who fall off the trucks are left behind.

The journey to the Libyan border, 250 miles in all, takes three days. No one knows how many die along the way.

Those who venture a journey across the Mediterranean take a deadly gamble, too. Among the more than 4,700 people who have died trying to cross the Central Mediterranean so far in 2016, the vast majority cannot be identified. Of those who can, Africans make up the largest share.

“The migrant road,” Mr. Diallo said, “is a road on fire.”

‘I Will Be a Burden to Them’ Those who make it to Libya do not necessarily make it inside Libya. It is a lawless country where some migrants get thrown behind bars — and some, according to human rights groups, are raped and tortured by militias demanding money. Some run out of money, or heart, to continue the journey to Europe.

On the way back, they usually knock on the gates of the International Organization for Migration’s transit center at the edge of Agadez.

There were about 400 boys and men there the week I visited. They lounged on thin rose-print mattresses. They played cards and scrolled through their phones, calling home if they had any credit left. A few attended a class on how to start a business; others rested in the medical ward.

The mix of shame and boredom hung so heavy you could practically smell it. One young man walked around with an open wound on his elbow; he vaguely said he was injured in a brawl in Libya.

When the heat of the day broke, they roused themselves and played soccer.

The migrants from the countryside all had similar stories. Their fathers had never left the land — they all felt they had to. The harvest was not enough; their families had no tractors, just lazy donkeys. Work in nearby towns brought in a fraction of what they figured they could make abroad.

The lure of abroad, Algeria or Libya or beyond, was strong. Facebook posts from friends and neighbors made it seem like a cakewalk.

Ibrahim Diarra said that fickle rains made it too hard to grow peanuts and corn on the family farm in the Tambacounda region of Senegal. He watched the young men of his village leave, each pulled by the stories of those who went before. Then he followed.

Mr. Diarra made his way through Qaeda-riddled northern Mali, then worked construction for six months in Mauritania, before pushing on to Tamanrasset, in Algeria. If he could just get to Morocco, he had heard, he could climb over a fence and be in Spain.

“They told me it’s very easy,” he said.

It wasn’t. He lasted two months in Algeria. Then, he went back to Agadez and asked the migration organization for a bus ticket home. So far this year, 100,000 people have made the same reverse journey.

On a Thursday — departure night for those whose emigration dreams are dashed — bittersweet chaos erupted in the courtyard as two large buses pulled up.

The manager of the transit center, Azaoua Mahamen, sat on the porch with his laptop open, scrolling through the names of those who had been cleared to go home. Migrants need identity papers, and government permission. If they are children, Mr. Mahamen has to make sure they have a family to go back to; a few don’t.

Dozens of young men crowded around him, their eyes like headlights in the dark.

They shouted their names. They waved their identity cards, wrapped in plastic. One group complained that only Guineans were getting out that night. The Ivory Coast contingent started cheering when one of their compatriots was called.

Mr. Diarra listened for his name, though he wasn’t looking forward to facing his parents empty-handed.

“I’m supposed to support my family,” he explained. “Now I have no clothes, nothing. I will be a burden to them.

His father, especially, would be upset. “He’ll ask me how my friends got to Europe and I came back,” he said, shaking his head.

He said he would try the journey again. It would take him a few months to cobble together the money.

Posted in Drought & Collapse, Extreme Weather, Mass migrations | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Royal Society on peak oil and how much oil is left

Posted on June 1, 2018 by

[ This is a great introduction to the whole topic of oil, reserves, resources, and so on. It’s very long so I’ve only excerpted bits of it and reworded some of it.  I can’t say there’s anything new in here that’s not already in energyskeptic posts, but this article pulls it all together at one of the top scientific institutions in the world.  Yes, it’s from 2013, but I like publishing older articles long after to see how good their vision of the future was.

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 ]

Miller, R.G., Sorrell, S. R. 2 December 2013. The future of oil supply. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences.

 

Figure 2.

Figure 2. Classification of hydrocarbon liquids.

The core issue for future supply is the extent and the rate of depletion of conventional oil, since this currently provides around 95% of global all-liquids supply. Options for mitigating this depletion include:

  • substituting conventional oil with non-conventional oil;
  • substituting all-oil with other non-conventional liquids (gas-to-liquids, coal-to-liquids and biofuels); and
  • reducing demand for all-liquids (e.g. through improving end-use efficiency, substituting non-liquid energy carriers such as gas or electricity or reducing demand for the relevant energy services).

Both the extent and rate of depletion and the feasibility and cost of different mitigation options are the subject of intense debate.

Oil production: Global production of all-liquids averaged 85.7 million barrels per day (mb per day) in 2011, or 31.2 billion barrels per year (Gb per year). Global cumulative production amounted to approximately 1248 Gb, with half of this occurring since 1988.  Crude oil production is heavily concentrated in a small number of countries and a small number of giant fields, with approximately 100 fields producing one half of global supply, 25 producing one quarter and a single field (Ghawar in Saudi Arabia) producing approximately 7%. Most of these giant fields are relatively old, many are well past their peak of production, most of the rest seem likely to enter decline within the next decade or so and few new giant fields are expected to be found. Future global production is therefore heavily dependent on the future prospects of the giant fields.

PEAK OIL: Crude oil production grew at approximately 1.5% per year between 1995 and 2005, but then plateaued with more recent increases in liquids supply largely deriving from NGLs, oil sands and tight oil (my comment: but most of our oil is conventional and significantly cheaper and energy efficient than NGLs, oil sands, and tight oil).  On a per capita basis, annual all-oil production peaked at 5.5 barrels in 1979 and has remained around 4.5 barrels since the mid-1980s. Annual consumption averages approximately 2.5 barrels per person in non-Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (82% of the global population) and approximately 14 barrels per person in the OECD, with the USA an outlier at 25 barrels per person.

It’s the size of the tap, not the tank that matters

it is essential to recognize that large quantities of resources within the Earth’s crust provide no guarantee that these can be produced at particular rates and/or at reasonable cost. There are huge variations both within and between resource types in terms of size of accumulation, depth, accessibility, chemical composition, energy content, extraction cost, net energy yield (i.e. the energy obtained from the resource minus the energy required to find, extract and process it), local and global environmental impacts and, most importantly, the feasible rate of extraction—to say nothing of the geopolitics of access. Higher quality resources tend to be found and developed first, and as production shifts down the ‘resource pyramid’, increasing reliance must be placed upon less accessible, poorer quality and more expensive resources that have a progressively lower net energy yield and are increasingly difficult to produce at high rates. Compare, for example, the monetary and energy investment required to produce 100 kb per day from the giant oil fields of the Middle East to that required to achieve comparable rates of production from deep-water oil fields, subarctic resources or the Canadian oil sands. To quote a widely used phrase in this context, it is not so much the size of the tank that matters but the size of the tap.

This is not simply an issue of the steeply rising production costs of poorer quality resources because technical and net energy constraints may make some resources inaccessible and some production rates unachievable regardless of cost. Kerogen oil is especially constrained in rate and net energy terms and may never become economic to produce, yet it accounts for 19% of the IEA estimate of remaining recoverable resources. Hence, a critical evaluation of future supply prospects must go beyond appraisals of aggregate resource size and examine the technical, economic and political feasibility of accessing different resources at different rates over different periods of time.

The production of conventional oil must eventually decline to almost zero, because it is a finite resource.

Decline rates

From a sample of 77 post-peak UK fields, we estimate an average decline rate of approximately 12.5% per year, so the average rate of decline from post-peak fields is a critical determinant of  future oil supply. Recent studies of globally representative samples of post-peak crude oil fields find a production-weighted average decline rate of at least 6.5% per year. This is lower than the average decline rate, since larger fields tend to decline more slowly.

Offshore fields decline faster than onshore fields and that newer fields decline faster than older fields. If smaller, younger and offshore fields account for an increasing share of future global production, the average decline rate for conventional oil fields will increase prior to the peak. Greater reliance upon tight oil resources produced using hydraulic fracturing will exacerbate any rising trend in global average decline rates, since these wells have no plateau and decline extremely fast—for example, by 90% or more in the first 5 years.

The production cycle for tight oil resources is driven by a different set of mechanisms since this resource is located in continuous formations rather than discrete fields. Nevertheless, the outcome is similar to that for conventional oil. With exceptionally high decline rates for individual wells, regional tight oil production can only be maintained through the continuous drilling of closely spaced wells. But tight oil plays are heterogeneous, with much higher well productivity in the ‘sweet spots’ than elsewhere. So when the sweet spots become exhausted, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain regional production. Based upon these considerations, Hughes suggests that aggregate US tight oil production is likely to peak around 2.5 mb per day (compared to total US oil production of 6.9 mb per day in 2008) and is likely to decline very rapidly after 2017.

Based upon these considerations, the IEA anticipates crude oil production from existing fields falling from 68.5 mb per day in 2011 to only 26 mb per day in 2035, but hopes for 65.4 due to undiscovered oil fields and additional production from unconventional oil, with no peak before 2035.

This IEA estimate has received much criticism from scientists.  For example, Höök et al. argue that production from existing fields could decline more quickly than the IEA assumes, while Aleklett et al.argue that the projections rely upon implausible assumptions about the rate at which fallow and undiscovered fields can be developed and produced. Both studies imply more rapid decline of global crude oil production and hence more difficulty in maintaining aggregate global liquids supply. Furthermore, the IEA projection assumes adequate investment, no geopolitical interruptions and prices that do not significantly constrain global economic growth.

Far more important than predicting the exact date of global peak is how will we cope after it happens.  But although mitigation can be achieved through fuel substitution and demand reduction but both will prove challenging owing to the scale of investment required and the associated lead times. For example, a 2008 report for the US Department of Energy argued that large-scale mitigation programmes need to be initiated at least 20 years before a global peak if serious shortfalls in liquid fuels supply are to be avoided. While this report overlooked key options such as electric vehicles and tight oil, it also assumed a relatively modest rate of post-peak crude oil decline (2% per year) and ignored the environmental consequences of expanding the supply of non-conventional resources. Avoiding these would necessarily restrict the range of available options.

NGLS can’t fill in for crude oil: 33% less energy and only 33% can be made into transportation fuel

Many sources anticipate large-scale substitution of NGLs for crude production over the next two decades, owing to expanding gas supply (including shale gas) and/or increases in the average NGL content of that gas. While the IEA states that the latter is expected to remain constant, its projections imply a doubling. But even assuming production grows as anticipated, NGLs cannot fully substitute for crude oil since they contain about a third less energy per unit volume and only about one-third of that volume can be blended into transport fuels. NGLs can substitute for crude oil as a petrochemical feedstock and may partially compensate for increased heavy oil within the refinery input mix, but at some point a rising volume of NGLs will be unable to adequately make up for reduced crude supply.

Oil sands already make an important contribution to global liquids supply and most forecasts anticipate a significant expansion over the next 20 years. But according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers [68], the Canadian oil sands will deliver only 5 mb per day by 2030, which represents less than 6% of the IEA projection of all-liquids production by that date. Similarly, Söderbergh et al. [69] conclude that a ‘crash programme’ to develop the oil sands could only deliver a comparable amount. Also, this resource is significantly more energy- and carbon-intensive than conventional oil, and surface mining has massive impacts on local and regional environments.

Murphy examines the importance of the energy return on investment(EROI) for liquid fuels production and the implications of declining EROI for the global economy. From a review of the rather limited literature on this topic, Murphy concludes that: the EROI for global oil and gas production is roughly 15 and declining while that for the USA is 11 and declining; the EROI for unconventional oil and biofuels is generally less than 10; there is a negative exponential relationship between oil prices and aggregate EROI which may become nonlinear as the latter falls below 10; and the minimum oil price needed to increase oil supply is consistent with that which has historically triggered economic recessions. Murphy concludes that the declining EROI of liquid fuels will make it increasingly difficult to sustain global economic growth.

Posted in How Much Left | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Royal Society on peak oil and how much oil is left

Nobel prize economist Robert Shiller: market risk keeps him awake worrying

Posted on May 28, 2018 by

[ According to this article: “Shiller’s latest analysis shouldn’t be taken lightly. His forecasting skills were recognized in 2013 when he won the Nobel Prize in Economics. He’s known for predicting both the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble in his book “Irrational Exuberance.”  Though like 99% of economists, he doesn’t have a clue of the role energy plays in the system.

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 ]

Landsman, S. July 27, 2017.  The market risk that makes Nobel laureate Robert Shiller ‘lie awake worrying’. CNBC.

Yale University economics professor Robert Shiller has a warning for investors.  The Nobel laureate says low volatility paired with a questionable price-earnings ratio could wipe out a chunk of the stock market’s value.  “The price increase just went step-by-step with the earnings increase. I think it’s an overreaction to good earnings,” said Shiller on Wednesday’s “Trading Nation.”

His comments came as the S&P 500, Dow and Nasdaq were hitting fresh all-time highs and the CBOE Volatility Index dropped to a record low.

In a special note to CNBC, Shiller writes that low volatility could be “the quiet before the storm.” It’s a phenomenon which Shiller says is making him “lie awake worrying.” And that’s not the only issue he’s raising.

His Shiller PE Ratio, also known as CAPE, shows the price-earnings ratio based on average inflation-adjusted earnings from the last 10 years is over 30. The number carries significance because the only times it’s been higher was just before the Great Depression in 1929 and mid-1997 to mid-2001.

“I worry that historically earnings have been trend-reverting,” said Shiller. “Admittedly, we do have a president who’s going to ‘make America great again.’ So if he’s right, maybe then we’re launching out in a whole new path. But it would be the first time in American history.”

 

If Shiller is right and the stock market ultimately goes back to trend, it could create havoc.

“It would definitely be a negative for equities. It would be pretty big. We are at a high valuation. The only time we’ve had a higher valuation than where we are now was around 1929 and around 2000,” Shiller said.

“We could see a major correction,” he said. “This is not a forecast. It’s a worry.”

Posted in Crash Coming Soon | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

BBC: Fusion energy pushed back beyond 2050

Posted on May 25, 2018 by

Cartlidge, E. July 11, 2017. Fusion energy pushed back beyond 2050. BBC.

We will have to wait until the second half of the century for fusion reactors to start generating electricity, experts have announced.

A new version of a European “road map” lays out the technological hurdles to be overcome if the processes powering the Sun are to be harnessed on Earth.  The original 2012 version of the road map forecast that a demonstration fusion power plant could be operating in the early 2040s, in order to supply electricity to the grid by 2050. But now the demonstration will be delayed until 2054 caused largely by delays to ITER, a 20 billion Euro reactor being built in the south of France to prove that fusion energy is scientifically and technically feasible.

In fact, according to EUROfusion’s programme manager, nuclear physicist Tony Donné, DEMO’s schedule could slip further, depending on progress both with ITER and a facility to test materials for fusion power plants that has yet to be built.

“2054 is optimistic,” he says.

Fusion involves heating nuclei of light atoms – usually isotopes of hydrogen – to temperatures many times higher than that at the center of the Sun so that they can overcome their mutual repulsion and join together to form a heavier nucleus, giving off huge amounts of energy in the process.  In principle, this energy could provide low-carbon “baseload” electricity to the grid using very plentiful raw materials and generating relatively short-lived nuclear waste. But achieving fusion in the laboratory is a daunting task.

Doughnut-shaped reactors known as tokamaks use enormous magnetic fields to hold a hot plasma of nuclei and their dissociated electrons in place for long enough and at a high enough density to permit fusion.

ITER represents the culmination of 60 years of research. The world’s largest ever tokamak, it will weigh 23,000 tonnes and is designed to generate 10 times the power that it consumes.  But the project has been beset by delays and cost overruns. Originally foreseen to switch on in 2016 and cost around 5 billion Euros, its price has since roughly quadrupled and its start-up pushed back to 2025. Full-scale experiments are now not foreseen until at least 2035.

ITER is also complex politically, an international project with 7 partners: China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States. As host, Europe is paying the biggest share of the costs – about 45%.

The roadmap sees ITER as the single most important project in realizing fusion but not one that is designed to generate electricity.

DEMO, a tokamak adapted from the ITER design

This will also cost billions of euros, and is intended to produce several hundred megawatts of electricity for the grid. To do so, it must run continuously for hours, days or ideally years at a time, as opposed to ITER, which will operate in bursts lasting just a few minutes.  DEMO will also have to generate its own supply of tritium (the radioactive isotope of hydrogen which can help drive fusion) by using neutrons it produces to transform lithium (its other hydrogen isotope, deuterium, can instead be extracted from sea water).

Researchers are already starting to develop conceptual designs for DEMO. But because they need results from ITER to draw up a detailed engineering design, their progress is vulnerable to any further delays in France.

Federici argues it is vital to demonstrate electricity generation from fusion “not too far after the middle of the century”. Otherwise, he says, there may no longer be a nuclear industry able to build the commercial fusion plants that would follow, and the public may lose patience.  The subsequent loss of political support, he wrote in the DEMO design report, “would run the risk of delaying fusion electricity well into the 22nd century.”

 

Posted in Fusion | Tagged | 7 Comments

One of the biggest risks to the world’s financial system is the $3 trillion of debt owed by oil and gas firms

Posted on May 24, 2018 by

[ Yet another “crash coming soon” post, if it hasn’t happened already (I scheduled this article and others to appear a year or more later, since crashes always take longer to happen than you expect.

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 ]

Denning, L. March 30, 2016. The extend-and-pretend oil market. Bloomberg.com

In several recent reports, energy economist Phil Verleger has laid out the unsettling similarities between the U.S. residential construction bubble and the later surge in oil and gas drilling investment.

We’ll still be arguing decades from now about exactly why we collectively went crazy for Floridian sub-divisions and the like, but cheap and plentiful credit was clearly a big factor.

The same goes for the oil and gas boom.

The face value of energy debt as a proportion of the BofA Merrill Lynch High Yield Index has surged from 6% in 1997 to 16% today.

[ My comment: When oil and gas cause the next financial crash, it will not only be “dumb money” middle class Americans who are plowing their money into high-yield bonds and stocks to make back their money from 2008, but also foreign countries who’ve invested $450 billion in debt securities such as Brazil, China, Colombia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Qatar, Russia, UAE and Venezuela.

Just as the housing bubble relied on faith in U.S. house prices only going up, so investors’ willingness to buy the energy sector’s bonds (and stocks) rested on a couple of intoxicating assumptions: OPEC would backstop prices and China would never falter (so, about that…)

American exploration and production companies weren’t the only ones on a debt-and-drilling binge. Last month in London, Jaime Caruana of the Bank for International Settlements gave a speech on the interplay of “Credit, commodities, and currencies.” He noted that loans and bonds outstanding for the oil and gas industry had almost tripled between 2006 and 2014 to $3 trillion, including a large slug taken on by firms in emerging markets.

Just as the mortgage pile-up transformed the U.S. housing market, so the legacy of the energy sector’s credit craze will live on in several important — and conflicting — ways, for years to come.

One effect Caruana highlighted is how a high debt burden focuses the mind on generating cash flow to meet interest payments. This surely explains at least some of the sheer resilience of not just U.S. but global oil production in the face of low prices. While banks must eventually pull lines of credit from struggling oil producers, they are no doubt loath to take ownership of leases and rigs in a bankruptcy situation, putting off the day of reckoning.

If that prolongs the market’s pain today, though, it also offers some hope for tomorrow. Going back to Verleger’s chart above, he rightly shows that investment in new oil and gas prospects is set to plummet well below what the International Energy Agency says is needed.

Indeed, earlier this month, the IEA’s head of its Oil Industry and Markets division warned that today’s low oil prices are setting up a potential supply shock in the “not too distant future.”  Meanwhile, at Chevron’s analyst day earlier this month, the company essentially drew a line under the multi-billion dollar projects that have turned off shareholders in recent years while simultaneously talking up growth prospects in its Permian shale assets.

This re-balancing of the oil market is exactly what is being delayed by the effect of high debt and ultra-low interest rates. But any spike would have two edges.

The lesson of 2008’s spike for OPEC is that while it may want higher prices, what it really needs are stable prices that aren’t too high. On that basis, rather than hoping to destroy shale with its current policy, OPEC is likely counting on it to act as something like an automatic stabilizer for the oil price in future.

The other wild card here, though, is the Fed’s timing on raising rates further. When this happens eventually, it could have two very negative effects on the debt-laden oil market.

First, cheap financing is helping to keep bulging oil inventories in their tanks. Wednesday’s weekly report from the Energy Information Administration showed, yet again, that stocks are far above normal levels. When oil prices rally, though, this squeezes the profits that can be earned by buying oil and storing it to sell at a future date. The spread between the cash price and the six-month forward contract has more than halved since mid-February

You know what else squeezes a carry trade and could force those millions of barrels back onto the market? The cost of financing the trade going up.

The second impact of rising Fed rates goes back to Caruana’s speech. The explosion of borrowing in emerging markets, especially when denominated in U.S. dollars, is a ticking time bomb for the global economy. When rates start rising, pulling the value of the dollar up with them, the pressure on not just oil companies but all heavy borrowers in developing markets will intensify. And it just so happens that the developing world accounts for all of the projected growth in oil demand over the next five years, based on the IEA’s numbers.

Yellen’s caution, like OPEC’s freeze tease, bolsters the extend-and-pretend oil market. The debt always comes due at some point, though.

Cries of agony: energy’s bad debts.  Economist.

One of the biggest risks to the world’s financial system is the $2.5 trillion of debt owed by oil and gas firms. After a year from hell, prices of commodities, and the shares and bonds of the firms that produce them, have bounced in the past month. But the evidence of financial pain is all around. Last week Energy XXI, an explorer with $4 billion of debt, filed for bankruptcy in Houston. And JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America complained of rising energy-sector bad debts in their first-quarter results. Only 5% of global energy debt sits on the balance-sheets of America’s biggest three banks. A further 34% of global energy debt comes in the form of US-listed bonds. The majority of global exposure is hidden in smaller banks or beyond America’s borders. With a Saudi-led attempt to curb oil output ending in failure yesterday, expect more yelps.

Posted in Bond Market, Crash Coming Soon, Debt, Oil & Gas Fracked | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Steve St. Angelo: Prepare for asset price declines of 50 to 75%

Posted on May 22, 2018 by

Steve St. Angelo. July 4, 2017. Prepare for asset price declines of 50 to 75%. SRSRocco report.

What we have is a totally propped-up market based upon debt. Energy isn’t producing positive growth. So instead of having real economic growth, we have inflated economic growth and inflated asset values.

When growth starts to decline, I think we’re going to see the valuations of assets decline considerably. It’s anyone’s guess how quickly they can fall, but according to what I have been looking at, I think we are going to see a 50% decrease in real estate values right off the bat. I am not saying this will happen in a day, but the first wave will be a 30-50% decrease in real estate values when the markets really start to crack. They are already at the edge of the cliff — and I see prices falling down the cliff, struggling to recover, and then falling even further.

I predict within the next 5-10 years, we can easily see a 75% or more reduction in real estate values.

Unfortunately, most precious metals and resource analysts overlook energy.  Thus, their analysis is likely flawed because they view the future as a continuation of “business as usual”, once the debts and leverage are taken out of the system.  This is an incorrect assumption, because the debt and leverage actually have allowed our financial system and markets to continue to function well beyond its expiration date.  Getting rid of the debt and leverage would cause a collapse of the system… one that we will be unable to grow back out of.

I believe it is important to continue focusing on the information and data as it changes.  This will provide the investor-public with a guideline as to the timing of the upcoming disintegration of our highly leveraged debt based financial market.

Posted in Crash Coming Soon | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Power density of biomass, wind, & solar take too much land to replace fossil fuels

Posted on May 7, 2018 by

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Palmer-2020-energy-density.jpg

Volumetric versus specific energy density for selected energy carriers. Source: Palmer, G. 2020. Energy storage & civilization: a systems approach. Springer.

Preface. Vaclav Smil writes “The fact that wind, solar, and biomass have incredibly low energy density per square meter means that a fully renewable system to replace the 320 GW of fossil fueled electricity generation and 1.8 TW of coal, oil, and gas with biofuels would take up up to 50% of the America’s territory, 1.81 million square miles (250-470 Mha), since the average power density of biomass is just 0.45 W/m2 to produce liquid biofuels.”

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com Women in ecology  author of 2021 Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy best price here; 2015 When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Podcasts: Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity

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Smil V (2015) Power Density: A Key to Understanding Energy Sources and Uses.  MIT Press.

If we were to cultivate phytomass at 1 W/m2 to replace today’s 12.5 TW of fossil fuels would require 4,826,275 million square miles (12.5 million square kilometers), roughly the size of the U.S. and India.  If all of America’s gasoline demands were derived from ethanol, that would take an area 20% larger than the nation’s total arable land.  It would be worse elsewhere — the U.S. produces twice as much corn per acre than the rest of the world.

If the U.S. tried to generate 10% of electricity (405 Twh in 2012) it would require wood chips from forests growing in an area the size of Minnesota (84,950 square miles) since the power density is only 0.6 W/m2.

Currently the area used by fossil fuel production and extraction, hydro power, and nuclear generation takes up only 0.5% of the land (21,235 square miles, 5.5 Mha).  The low energy density of biofuels restricts facilities to small areas or the fossil fuel used to transport it to the biorefinery is more than the energy of what’s made (i.e. corn for ethanol needs to be less than 50 miles away)

Power density in watts per square meter

  • Rich middle eastern oil fields: > 10,000 W/m2
  • American oil fields: 1,000-2,000 W/m2
  • Natural gas 1,000 to 10,000 W/m2
  • Coal: 250-500 W/m2 (used to be much higher but the best coal mines were mined first, remaining mines have lower energy density coal) though it can be 1,000 to 10,000 W/m2 in bituminous thick coal seams
  • Fast growing trees in plantations: 1 W/m2 (arid) 1 W/m2 (temperate) 1.2 W/m2 tropical
  • Bioengineered trees that don’t exist yet: 2 W/m2 but not really, they’d be constrained by nutrients, fertilizer inputs, soil erosion, and 10 years or more between harvests
  • Harvesting mature virgin forests or coppiced beech or oak: 0.22-0.25 W/m2
  • Crop residues: 0.05 W/m2
  • ethanol: 0.25 W/m2
  • Biodiesel: 0.12 to 0.18 W/m2
  • Solar 2.7 W/m2 (Germany’s Waldpolenz)
  • Wind turbines: 2 to 10 W/m2.
  • hydropower: 3 W/m2 due to large reservoir size, Three gorges will be as high as 30 W/m2 though

Consumption.  Wind, solar, biomass take too much land to support today’s industries and cities, from 500 W/m2 to 1,000 W/m2 at industrial facilities (especially steel mills and refineries), downtown’s in northern cities in the winter, and high-rise buildings.

All About Power Density. A Comparison of Various Energy Sources in Horsepower (and Watts:

  • Nuclear: 56 Watts per square meter (W/m2). 300 Horsepower (HP)/acre (56 W/m2)
  • Average U.S. natural gas well @ 115,000 cubic feet per day: 53 W/m2. 287.5 hp/acre
  • Solar PV: 7 W/M2. 36 hp/acre
  • Wind turbines: 2 W/m2.  6.4 hp/acre
  • Biomass-fueled power plant: 4 W/M2. 2.1 hp/acre
  • Corn ethanol: 05 W/M2. 0.26 hp/acre
Posted in Alternative Energy, Biomass, Coal, Hydropower, Natural Gas, Oil | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

America’s energy security, jobs & climate challenges

Posted on May 4, 2018 by

Preface. In this 2010 House of Representatives hearing, General Wesley Clark foresaw in 1973 “that US military forces might have to become engaged to defend or protect oil-producer governments”.  Today “we can look back on the continuing failures of American government spanning the terms of seven Presidents, Republican and Democratic. Over this time we have been twisted and turned in our foreign policy by our pursuit of energy security, we have subsidized foreign governments inimical to our own interests, seen “petrodollars” diverted to corruption and terrorism, deployed hundreds of thousands of troops, and billions of dollars’ worth of materiel, fought the Gulf War, invaded Iraq, and remained engaged in a long term commitment in Afghanistan, at costs already exceeding a trillion dollars, all directly or indirectly due to our energy dependence.”

Vice Admiral Dennis M. McGinn notes that “Climate change has the potential to create more frequent, intense and widespread natural and humanitarian disasters due to typhoons, flooding, drought, disease, crop failure and the consequent migration of large populations [which will] magnify existing tensions in critical regions, overwhelm fragile political, economic and social structures, causing them to fracture and fail. Fragile governments will become failed states, and desperation will drive whole populations to be displaced on a scale far beyond what we see today. And into this turmoil and power vacuum will rush paramilitaries, organized crime, extremists producing a highly exportable brand of terrorism. The predictable result will be much greater frequency and intensity of regional conflict and direct threats to U.S. interests and national security. Population growth and projected per capita increase in energy consumption of the next 20 years will make fossil fuel supply and demand curves widely divergent.”

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

***

House 111-20. December 1, 2010. Not going away: America’s energy security, jobs and climate challenges. House of Representatives Hearing.  Committee on energy independence and global warming.

Edward J. Markey, Massachusetts.  In April of 2007, the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held its first hearing. At that inaugural gathering, we discussed the twin challenges of climate change and our dependence on foreign oil. Since that time, Congress passed new fuel economy standards. We made investments into renewable energy, advanced battery technology and efficiency measures that save families and small businesses money.

Our troops continue to fight bravely in Iraq and Afghanistan, where our energy interests remain entangled.

The Gulf of Mexico was sullied by BP’s oil spill, which became the worst environmental disaster in United States history.

Over the last few years, the politics of energy have changed and shifted more times than we can count, yet what has not changed are the problems we face as a Nation and as a planet. Today’s hearing is called ‘‘Not Going Away’’, a fitting title for issues that will be central to the health and survival of our planet and our economy for decades and centuries to follow. The national security challenges from our dependence on oil are not going away.

Today before our committee we have Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn, who was a witness at our very first hearing. He knows the price of our dependence on foreign oil borne out not in this rhetorical battlefield but in the theater of actual war where bullets and bombs are spent to defend or acquire barrels of oil.

The national security threats from climate change are not going away. During the first select committee hearing, we discussed the drought-influenced Somali conflict that led to Black Hawk down. A warming world exacerbated a military hotspot. This September, we hosted the Pakistani ambassador to discuss his country’s devastating floods. He discussed how his country diverted resources like helicopters away from fighting Al Qaeda to assist in the flood response. An increasingly destabilized climate will invariably lead to more of these destabilizing geopolitical events. The economic security threats stemming from America’s lack of an energy plan are not going away.

The pollution we emit today will still be in the atmosphere centuries from now. Every day that we wait to act to stem the tide of carbon emissions will be felt for decades and centuries to come as our planet warms and our weather patterns become less stable.

General Wesley Clark

In the summer of 1973, as an Army Captain on the faculty at West Point, I spent two months working the first sets of analyses of the “energy crisis” for the Pentagon. At a time when gasoline prices had quadrupled, and long lines extended into the streets at every service station, Americans seemed determined to take action. For my part, I analyzed the adverse consequences of our increasing dependence on foreign oil [and found] that it would distort American foreign policy, and that the funds expended might go to governments that were unstable or didn’t support our interests, and that ultimately, US military forces might have to become engaged to defend or protect oil-producer governments.

At a time when the US was ending its commitments in South East Asia, this was disturbing. After the Yom Kippur War, in October, 1973, there was a rising call for American “Energy Independence”.

Today, we can look back on the continuing failures of American government spanning the terms of seven Presidents, Republican and Democratic. Over this time we have been twisted and turned in our foreign policy by our pursuit of energy security, we have subsidized foreign governments inimical to our own interests, seen “petrodollars” diverted to corruption and terrorism, deployed hundreds of thousands of troops, and billions of dollars’ worth of materiel, fought the Gulf War, invaded Iraq, and remained engaged in a long term commitment in Afghanistan, at costs already exceeding a trillion dollars, all directly or indirectly due to our energy dependence.

And the costs of that dependence continue to grow. Today the American economy sits with over 16% unemployment, or underemployment. Yet even in this slack economy we will be sending over $300 billion dollars abroad this year to pay for American’s thirst for petroleum. This is equivalent to a tax – a levy – a bounty of about $1,000 for every man, woman and child in America…money that is desperately needed within the American economy to create jobs, build communities, fund education, repair infrastructure, and give our children and grandchildren a future. Instead it is sent abroad to fund governments in places like Venezuela, Nigeria, and states on the Arabian peninsula.

And then, we ask our military to organize, train and equip our forces, and deploy to fight, or provide secure access to these petroleum resources So, add to the $300 billion annual costs to the American economy in the defense budget for the “secure access” portion of the Defense Department budget – ships, aircraft, bases, Marines, ground troops, prepositioned equipment, exercises, and all the long-lead time procurement that goes with this. Then add another amount – $150-$200 billion per year for the costs of the actual engagement in Iraq and the fighting in Afghanistan. Surely we are one of the most generous nations in history, not only purchasing oil abroad but organizing vast armed forces , equipped, trained, deployed and engaged in fighting which is directly or indirectly aimed at protecting some of the very nations to which we are remitting vast sums of money in exchange for oil and gas. And somehow, although we don’t take the majority of our oil imports from the Gulf, nevertheless, we pay the vast majority of the costs for access there. Why should a nation struggling to create jobs and move its economy forward be spending hundreds of billions of dollars importing oil, when alternatives are available?

Of course, unlike 1973, we now understand that the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide and other global warming gases is contributing significantly, and perhaps decisively, to long-term world-wide climate change. We must address this, also as a threat to our national security. But however great this concern, as an American, I have to look first at our own country, and how we are squandering our near-term future.

Vice Admiral Dennis M. McGinn

The Advisory Board consists of about a dozen or 15 retired generals and admirals from all four of the military services, including the Coast Guard and the National Guard, and came up with the consensus in that report that climate change was a threat to national security because it will act as a threat multiplier for instability in critical regions of the world. This can be manifested in many different ways, but it occurred to me this summer when Pakistan had 20 million people affected by torrential monsoon flood, historical levels of flooding, that here is a nation that is nuclear armed, has an ongoing Taliban insurgency that threatens the stability of that government, and is essential to our success and the success of NATO in Afghanistan. And we have 20 million people that are affected by severe weather, the type of scenario that was exactly in the minds of the Military Advisory Board when we said climate change is a threat to national security.

It is not environmental restrictions on oil exploration that are keeping us from energy independence; it is a fundamental problem of supply and demand that will grow more divergent over time. We cannot drill our way to sustainable energy independence.  The US controls only 3% of the world’s known oil reserves but uses over 25% of the world’s oil supplies—we will never have enough domestic supply to meet our need for this fuel.

Clearly the U.S. Military will be called to respond to these new threats. At the same time, we will be confronted with more frequent resource based conflicts-think oil-in the most volatile regions of the world.  At the same time increasing demand for, and dwindling supplies of fossil fuels will add greatly to this instability in many of the very same places worst hit by climate change. In May 2009 the CAN Military Advisory Board concluded that America’s current energy posture constitutes a serious and urgent threat to national security – militarily, diplomatically and economically. This creates an ongoing unacceptable level of risk to our nation.

Some of [you] may be surprised to hear former generals and admirals talk about climate change and energy threats…but they shouldn’t be. In the military, you learn quickly that reducing threats and vulnerabilities is essential, well before you get into harm’s way. As we consider the threat of climate change and energy to global security, the trends and warnings are clear, we need to take appropriate action. Climate change has the potential to create more frequent, intense and widespread natural and humanitarian disasters due to typhoons, flooding, drought, disease, crop failure and the consequent migration of large populations. These climate-driven severe weather events will magnify existing tensions in critical regions, overwhelm fragile political, economic and social structures, causing them to fracture and fail. The predictable result will be much greater frequency and intensity of regional conflict and direct threats to U.S. interests and national security.

Population growth and projected per capita increase in energy consumption of the next 20 years will make fossil fuel supply and demand curves widely divergent unless we start now to diversify and change our energy posture. Our fossil fuel dependence will be with us for decades. Fierce global competition, instability and conflict over dwindling supplies of fossil fuels and increasing global warming will be a major part of the future strategic landscape.

Climate impacts like extreme drought, flooding, storm, temperatures, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and wildfire—occurring more frequently and more intensely across the globe—will inevitably create political instability where societal demands for the essentials of life exceed the capacity of governments to cope. As noted above, fragile governments will become failed states, and desperation and hopelessness will drive whole populations to be displaced on a scale far beyond what we see today. And into this turmoil and power vacuum will rush paramilitaries, organized crime, extremists producing a highly exportable brand of terrorism.

Clearly the U.S. Military will be called to respond to these new threats. At the same time, we will be confronted with more frequent resource based conflicts—think oil—in the most volatile regions of the world.  At the same time increasing demand for, and dwindling supplies of fossil fuels will add greatly to this instability in many of the very same places worst hit by climate change. In May 2009 the CAN Military Advisory Board concluded that America’s current energy posture constitutes a serious and urgent threat to national security – militarily, diplomatically and economically. This creates an ongoing unacceptable level of risk to our nation.

Militarily, our dependence on oil stretches our military thin because we are obliged to protect and ensure the free flow of oil in hostile or destabilized regions—even as our troops are on their 3rd and 4th combat deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan. Protecting our access to foreign oil jeopardizes our military and exacts a huge price in dollars and lives.

Beyond assuring the free flow of oil, our nation’s, and our military’s inefficient use of fuel adds to the already great risks assumed by our troops. It reduces combat effectiveness and puts our troops—more directly and more often—in harm’s way. Petro-dollars going into Iranian coffers have directly helped to finance our enemies in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The insurgents have used that money to buy communications, sensors and the most lethal components of improvised explosive devices and roadside bombs that continue to kill and maim our troops on a weekly basis.

Climate-driven disruption is such a viable threat that the Pentagon has already started to prepare contingencies for such scenarios, and focused on the issue in its 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, as did the State Department in its Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review.

Another aspect of this was that the board recognized that our economy, energy, climate change, and national security are all inextricably linked. If you want to develop policies and solutions to address any one of those, you have to carefully think through the effects on all of the others.

We got together and put out a report in May of 2009 that focused on the energy aspect of these interlinked challenges. And our main conclusion in that report was unequivocal. America’s energy posture constitutes a serious and urgent threat to our national security—diplomatically, economically, and militarily. In the military venue, we see it manifesting in Iraq with roadside bombs now in Afghanistan. We saw burning NATO fuel convoys that were along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. We see from intelligence reports that petro dollars that are going to Iran are finding their way into the hands of the Taliban and al Qaeda and being used to buy the equipment and the very lethal projectiles and components that are killing and maiming our troops on a weekly basis over there. That money is coming from global purchase of oil, and the United States purchases one-quarter of that oil every year.

Diplomatically, we are trying to do something about preventing a nuclear armed Iran from emerging. Our leverage in the international diplomatic community is undercut by the fact that we use 25% of the world’s oil every year and we sit on perhaps 3%.

And economically, make no mistake, the recession that we are hopefully and too slowly starting to come out of, has as a fundamental cause factor the tremendous cost of our addiction to oil in the past. In fact, if you go back in history, over the past four recessions, every one of them has been preceded within 6 months by oil spikes, oil price spikes.

This is not going to go away. We are going to come out of this recession. The economy of the world and the United States is going to heat up and so will the appetite for oil and so will return the volatile cycle but ever higher prices and ever scarcer availability, certainly over the next 10 years but perhaps even sooner than that. We have got to find ways to break that addiction.

Finally, in July of this year, the Military Advisory Board put out a report titled Powering America’s Economy: Energy Innovation at the Crossroads of National Security Challenges; and the key finding of this report was that our economy and our national security are so inextricably linked. As we look at ways to deal with our deficit, as we look for ways to afford all of the priorities of America, one of the things that will be inevitably on the table is how much do we pay for defense. If you don’t have a good and strong economy, you don’t have a good and strong defense structure in armed services. So there is an inextricable link. And the fact that our energy choices in the past and certainly going forward are going to have a tremendous effect for the good or for not good on our economic strength is the key part.

The main recommendation from this report that was published in July of this year was simply that the United States Government should take bold and aggressive action to support clean energy technology innovation and rapidly decrease the Nation’s dependence on fossil fuels.

This is an American challenge. It is one that Americans together will meet. It doesn’t have partisan labels on it. The solutions are available today. They need to be guided by leadership and good policy which enables us to advance our energy efficiency and to increase our choices of clean, renewable fuels in order to create opportunity for our economy, create opportunity for our society, and raise our level of national security and to be a leader in the global sense in meeting these energy and climate challenges.’’

Dr. Peter Gleick.  I offer one example in my testimony of the massive consequences expected simply from sea level rise along the California coast from an analysis my Institute did for the State of California. The value of infrastructure at risk along the coast of California from expected sea level rise is already $100 billion. There are 500,000 people in areas that are expected to be flooded from sea level rise, and that is one small impact in one small area of the world that we are going to have to deal with. We need environmental standards for greenhouse gas emissions, including not just carbon dioxide but methane, hydroflurocarbons.

I don’t often tell jokes at congressional hearings—and I am not an economist—but there is a classic economics joke about an economist walking down the street with his little girl. And the little girl—they are holding hands, and the little girl says, daddy, there is a $20 bill on the ground. And the economist says, don’t be silly, dear. If there was a $20 bill on the ground, someone would have found it already.

The truth is the potential for efficiency improvements are enormous. The ability to improve the efficiency with which we use energy in this country, do the things we want to do with much less energy, and I would argue water efficiency as well, which has an enormous greenhouse gas savings as well, is largely untapped. We have made progress in that area, but there is enormous progress to be made. And it is far, far cheaper to do that than for the Federal Government to be spending money on expensive, unreliable efforts to sequester carbon.

Mr. Kauffman, Chairman of the board of Levi Strauss & Company.  We rely upon an agricultural product, in this case cotton, to make 95% of our product. Extreme weather events in Pakistan have driven up prices of cotton 50% since July, 100% since the beginning of the year. So we are actually seeing prices that we haven’t seen since Levi Strauss himself was around. Climate change puts consumers of agricultural products at risk for crop availability, quality, and pricing.

Another opportunity for us is energy efficiency. At a single distribution facility—and we have quite a number of them—we could save over $600,000 a year, a 33 percent savings at this site. The millions of dollars that we could save from energy efficiency we would be able to reinvest in our business.

And in terms of energy efficiency, we could do more faster and cheaper with Federal legislation that incentivizes utilities to work with us. Utilities generally still have the incentive to sell more electricity rather than invest in energy efficiency.  In terms of energy efficiency, there are substantial upfront costs we must make to invest that are difficult for us to finance. We see that the financing system for renewables and energy efficiency is not up to the task. And while we applaud government policy in supporting more R&D, the emphasis on innovation over deployment make it difficult for us to achieve our objectives by using good enough technology that is available today.

KENNETH GREEN.  We hear about efficiency gains. The idea that there are massive efficiency gains just lying around is an economic fallacy. There are not $100 bills lying on the ground to get picked up by actors who internalize that value. If they have to go to the government to do something, it is because it doesn’t really make sense for them to do it without the government. It is not actual real efficiency. It is faux efficiency.

We should stop making things worse. Right now, governments incentivize people to live in climatically fragile areas. If they are flooded out of a coast, we rebuild them on the same coast. If they have a drought area, we subsidize bringing water in to remedy their drought. Government as an insurer of last resort is a risk subsidizer. Governments are great at building infrastructure. But they don’t price it.

I would like to point out somebody recently from the Tyndall Center in the U.K., one of their scientists, said that in order to really deal with climate change the developed world—the entire developed world—must forgo 20 years of economic growth. Does anyone realistically think that is going to happen? I don’t think so. And I think it is a waste of time and money and energy to focus on attempting to do what will not be done.

They are cutting their subsidies to wind and solar power, and rampant corruption has been discovered. In Spain some of the criminal cartels moved heavily into solar power and were using diesel generators to sell solar power at night to the Spanish government at a fixed rate higher than the competitive sources of energy. These things are, frankly, boondoggles. They are promoted by rent seekers, and this has been shown time after time after time.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR. We should be replacing the coal. We have 320 gigawatts of build capacity for coal in this country. We have 450 GW of natural gas capacity. The coal capacity is used 99% of the time, the gas capacity is used 38 percent of the time. And that is not good for the environment.

My home in Mount Kisco, New York is powered by geothermal. We could do that with virtually every home in our country outside of the major cities we have, that we are number two in solar resources in the world. The Scientific American just did a study saying that if we were to harness the solar in an area that is 75 miles by 75 miles in desert southwest, we could power 100% of the existing grid. The Great Plains States, the Saudi Arabia of wind. We have enough wind in Montana, North Dakota, and Texas to provide 100 percent of the energy grid of North America three times over, even if every American owned an electric car.

We need to develop a grid system in this country. And I know your prejudices against a national unified grid because of the ease with which that would facilitate coal power into New England when we already have a New England extraordinary wind resource that we ought to be exporting. But we need a grid system. We need a grid system, whether it is regional grids or national unified grids that are going to create a marketplace that is governed by rational rules, rather than having 50 different public utility commissions in 50 different States, each with its own arcane, Byzantine set of rules, a vulcanized set of rules that restricts access to the grid.

Today we have a marketplace in the energy sector that is governed by rules that were rigged by the incumbents to reward the dirtiest, filthiest, most poisonous, most destructive, most addictive fuels from hell, rather than the cheap, clean, green, abundant, and wholesome and local fuels from heaven. We need to reverse that dynamic.

You build an oil plant, now you have got to go to Saudi Arabia, punch holes in the ground, bring up the oil, refine it expensively, genuflect to the sheiks who despise democracy and are hated by their own people, get in periodic wars that cost $4.3 trillion, according to OMB—that is what this one is going to cost over the next 20 years—bring it across the Atlantic, with a military export that Exxon doesn’t pay for, but you and I pay for, then spill it all over the Gulf, spill it all over Valdez, burn it, and poison everybody in America.

 

 

Posted in Caused by Scarce Resources, Climate Change, Congressional Record U.S., Military | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Peak Carbon

Posted on May 1, 2018 by

[ This is from the Seneca Effect written by somebody in the Netherlands, wish I knew who, he or she is quite brilliant.

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 ]

2015-5-30. https://thesenecaeffect.wordpress.com

Is peak carbon behind us?

Back in November of last year, the US and China came to an agreement to ensure a peak in carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. After 2030, yearly emissions would go down. Estimates by scholars in China were that by 2030, emissions would peak at 10.6 billion tonnes, 34% above the 2012 rate of 7.9 billion tonnes a year.1 To wait this long with reducing emissions would be catastrophic, eliminating any chance we might have to stay beneath two degree Celsius.

The problem with passing the two degree target is that we expect a number of positive feedback loops to kick in eventually, that will start emitting such high amounts of greenhouse gasses on their own that humans lose their control over the process. As some examples, bacteria in wetlands start producing higher amounts of methane, while the melting of permafrost will release methane as well. Forests may start to die in giant forest fires, releasing the carbon that’s currently stored in their soil and biomass.

Is there no solution whatsoever then? Well, there is one glimmer of hope. This hope is referred to as peak carbon: The idea that most of the world’s remaining fossil fuels are of such low quality that their use will prove to be economically nonviable. As a result, carbon and methane emissions would peak. Humans would be forced to start using drastically less energy and the economy would rapidly start to contract.

Peak carbon would require a painful and difficult period of transition. How painful such a transition would be depends largely on whether we took measures to prepare ourselves for this scenario and how a society responds to sudden shortages. Societies that suffer internal cultural divisions, like Syria and Iraq, seem less capable of coping with prolonged periods of economic contraction in a stable and peaceful manner than societies that are more homogeneous, like Japan and Greece.

Peak carbon is an extension of a concept that most people have heard of, peak oil. Peak oil has traditionally been seen as the fossil fuel that will be first to pose significant problems of shortage. Unlike coal and natural gas, the Western world has had experiences with oil shortages in the 1970’s, as a result of political instability affecting the middle east. Thus our society’s dependence on oil has traditionally been more prominent on the public radar than our dependence on coal and gas.

There are however peculiar global developments that suggest we are reaching limits in multiple natural resources simultaneously, which may lead to the phenomenon of peak carbon. To start with, the world was surprised a few months ago, with the news that CO2 emisisons in 2014 had flatlined compared to 2013.2 This is a unique development that hardly anyone had anticipated. The Global Carbon Project estimated in September 2014 that CO2 emissions in 2014 would be 2.5% higher than in 2013.3

Thus, it would appear that in late 2014, something began to readily diverge from our projections. Something highly unusual appears to have happened in China.4 Economic growth declined to its lowest rate since 1990. Energy consumption in China grew by just 3.8%, while coal consumption dropped by 2.9%.

Important to note first of all is that this is not a fluke. The decline in coal consumption fits an overall pattern seen in China over the past few years, which suggests that China is running out of high quality coal. The image below shows Chinese coal production until 2009:

What we see here is that although Bituminous coal production continued to grow enormously, Anthracite production peaked. This is a signal of depletion, as anthracite is generally seen as a very high quality type of coal. Most of the world’s industrialized nations have hardly any anthracite left, some are even starting to run out of bituminous coal. As the image below demonstrates, the overall rate of growth in coal production also began to slow down before the drop observed in 2014:

This decline of coal consumption in China also corresponds to a global plateau in coal consumption:

Interestingly enough, the decline in coal consumption in China appears to continue. On an annualized basis, statistics show that in the first four months of 2015, coal consumption in China dropped by an incredible 8%, while overall CO2 emissions dropped by 5%.8 So, what has happened then? There have been suggestions that the Chinese data are simply inaccurate, that coal mines are continuing to produce coal without being registered by the Chinese government. However, the stabilization in coal production has been a process that has taken place over multiple years, so I consider this an unlikely explanation, as the data fit in line with what we would expect.

It would also be persuasive to assume that the Chinese economy has simply started to decarbonize, by transitioning to low-carbon sources of heat and electricity and increasing energy efficiency. This would contradict the Chinese plan to peak carbon emissions by 2030 however. Why wait until 2030 and risk a global catastrophe, if you’re perfectly capable of reducing your emissions without affecting economic growth today?

A third possible explanation would be to suggest that the Chinese economy is being involuntarily decarbonized. Perhaps the Chinese are simply no longer capable of burning ever increasing amounts of coal. Multiple factors can be responsible for this. Overseas demand for carbon-intensive products may have declined. Low coal prices triggered by low demand may have forced some coal manufacturers to drastically reduce their production, because they can not produce coal at such low costs.

Evidence that verifies the case for low demand being responsible would include the 6% decline in demand for steel in the first quarter of 2015.11 Rail freight in China is declining by double-digit figures, and electricity use has declined for the first time since 2009, back when the world was in the middle of the global recession. In light of these problems, some analysts are skeptical about the GDP growth figures coming out of China.

There are also other factors, that could be interpreted as either voluntary or involuntary decarbonization, depending on how you wish to look at it. The Chinese government estimated in 2014 that 20% of its farmland is polluted, as a result of industrial activity. Many places face epidemics of birth defects as a result of pollution and cities across China are facing enormous problems with smog. Some coal resources are so dirty that the Chinese government aims to ensure through regulations that they will never be burned.9 If there is no “clean” coal available to replace such dirty coal, it’s inevitable that less coal will have to be burned.

The idea of China hitting peak coal around this time may come as a shock to some of us, but others have anticipated something similar occurring on a global level around this time. In 2010, Tadeusz Patzek estimated that the world would hit peak coal around 2011.10 The exact year that global coal production would peak is less interesting than the implication. He found that 36 of the IPCC’s 40 projected scenarios for the future are not going to happen, simply because we will never find enough fossil fuels that we can afford to burn. Croft estimates that we only have enough fossil fuels left to raise global temperatures by another 0.8 degree Celsius, which should mean that we end up staying well below 2 degree, assuming that positive feedback loops don’t begin to kick in yet at such temperatures.20

The idea of peak coal is not as strange as it may seem. The deindustrialization of Europe and North America that we have seen occur can be largely attributed to the fact that we simply could not afford to maintain our energy-intensive economies. The United Kingdom, which was first to undergo the industrial revolution, saw its coal production peak in the year 1913, at 292 Mt (million metric tons). Today, electricity prices in Germany, Denmark and other European countries are around four times as high as the price in India and China.

Western governments take limited action to maintain energy-intensive manufacturing industries inside their own countries. Rather, they try to preserve the relevance of their economies by focusing on service jobs. We find for example that Western nations prefer to focus on branding, marketing and associated factors in their products. The EU ensures that only certain regions of France are allowed to call their wine champagne.

To make the case for peak coal in China, it’s important to note the historical difference in coal use between China and Europe. Whereas between the year 1 and 1000, China had a significant share of the world’s population, Europe’s share back then was relatively low. Lower population density allowed Europe to use wood as a source of heat energy, whereas China was forced to rely on coal. In Britain some monarchs even prohibited the burning of coal, because of the pollution it created.

As a result, we find that throughout recorded history, China has always had a fair amount of industrial activity involving coal combustion, whereas Europe did not. No other nation in the world came as close to an industrial revolution as Southern Song did between 1127 and 1279. Such industrial activity also would have been significantly less energy efficient than modern industrial activity. Thus, although coal was burned at nowhere near the yearly rate that China currently uses it, hundreds of years of industrial activity may have robbed China of some of its best and most easily accessible coal.

In addition to this, there is no guarantee that other nations have high quality coal reserves about as large as those found in Europe. Climatic and geological conditions have varied across different parts of the planets for millions of years. Europe’s brown coal deposits were mostly produced by the giant coniferous trees related to redwoods that once grew in Europe millions of years ago. A different climate in China can have the effect of producing fewer economically useful coal deposits than we find in Europe.

At around 28% of the world’s carbon emissions, China is the most important factor in global carbon emissions.The United States trails China at about 15% of the world’s emissions. Looking at coal alone, China and the US are responsible for 40% and 16.2% of emissions respectively. In regards to the United States, the total tonnes of coal mined peaked in 2008. On the other hand, the total energy content of the coal mined peaked in 1998, because the quality of coal mined continues to deteriorate.12 By 2012, the total energy content of coal mined in the United States was down to 86% of its 1998 high. Natural gas has been increasingly forced to substitute for coal as a result.

An interesting development we can note in American coal production is that the sulfur content in burned coal is steadily climbing. Whereas between 2005 and 2008, sulfur content hovered around 0.98%, by 2009 sulfur content began to climb, rising to 1.32% by 2014.16 This is odd, considering the glut of natural gas. We would expect that abundant natural gas would have the effect of enabling a move away from dirty coal. The rise in sulfur content is indicative of the increasing use of brown coal of a particular low quality.

Since China and the United States together constitute more than half of global coal production, a peak of coal use in these nations can be sufficient to ensure that the peak in coal use is now behind us. A skeptic might argue that this does not necessitate peak coal, because other developing countries home to billions of people are still nowhere near the level of electricity use of the Western world.

A big part of future coal use hinges on the amount of recoverable coal found in India, something still unclear. India’s coal use is rising rapidly to serve its rapidly expanding economy, but the industry is mired by tremendous corruption. This is a problem that can be overcome, but it leaves us to wonder how much can be stated with certainty in regards to the size of its coal deposits.

Greenpeace has published an interesting report on India’s coal reserves.13 By 2012 it stated, India’s main producer CIL, responsible for 80% of production, had revised its coal reserves downwards by 16% compared to 2010. The company has consistently failed to meet its production targets. Greenpeace estimated in 2013 that at India’s targeted growth rates, CIL’s official coal reserves could be depleted within 17 years.

Important to note here is that CIL’s coal reserves are in all likelihood hopelessly optimistic. CIL has not made any effort to estimate geographical and land use limitations in its estimate of extractable coal reserves. This is quite a big problem, as India’s population density is about as high as the Netherlands’. Much of it would thus seem likely never to be used, as the soil above the coal deposits will prove to be more valuable. To recover coal after all is inevitably a more disruptive process that recovering oil or gas.

When it comes to coal, it’s important to note that different grades of coal have different properties and uses. Anthracite is generally the most useful type, followed by Bituminous and sub-bituminous. There is also coal that can be classified as metallurgical grade, based on its purity. This type of coal has to be very low in contaminating elements, as steel is very vulnerable to the effects of adding small amounts of sulfur or phosphorus.

Finally, we have lignite, the desperate man’s coal. Burning lignite yields so little energy, that lignite has to be burned directly near the location where it is recovered, as transporting this heavy coal over large distances means that you simply end up spending more energy transporting the coal than you recover from it. At this point, Germany only has significant amounts of lignite left. This forces the country to forcibly evacuate small towns that happen to have lignite beneath their soil. For this reason, Germany is particularly enthusiastic about transitioning to renewable energy.

Having some background knowledge about the different types of coal out there allows us to look at stated coal reserves with some skepticism. As an example, Pakistan has large lignite deposits in the Thar desert. This lignite will have to be burned on the spot to generate energy, it can not be exported. Of course this yields some problems, as mining and burning coal requires large amounts of water, water that simply is not available in a desert in the middle of Pakistan.

This is part of a larger problem that industry in countries closer to the equator will face should they ever seek to utilize large amounts of nuclear or coal power. Water is used to generate power. This water can then be passed through cooling towers, where it is lost to evaporation. Large parts of the world are increasingly facing water shortages and will thus be less than enthusiastic about losing what little water remains to coal plants. These towers tend to be expensive to build, so many coal plants don’t have them. Rather than losing the water to evaporation, it can also be dumped back into a river or lake, where it causes thermal pollution, which kills most of the fish that live there and creates toxic algae blooms and other problems.

We’ve looked at the problems that coal extraction faces. It’s interesting to look at oil and natural gas now, although an in depth analysis of oil and natural gas depletion is outside the scope of this essay. It’s worth noting however, that there is agreement that conventional oil has peaked in 2006, as even the IEA admits.17

What has increasingly substituted for conventional oil is unconventional oil, that is comparatively dirty, with higher carbon dioxide emissions per barrel of oil production. The debate focuses on whether or not the economy can continue to function when it becomes fully dependent on such unconventional oil.

In regards to unconventional oil, it remains to be seen how much of its is economically viable to extract. Current oil prices have rendered much of the US shale oil deposits economically nonviable to extract, even though these companies benefit from low interest rates as a result of monetary policies. Companies have focused on “sweet spots”, where the geology is just right. The American “miracle” is also unlikely to be repeated elsewhere, as the United States is believed to have more than three quarters of the world’s reserves.

Shale gas, now making up 39% of US natural gas production, can be produced at a low cost, because of the negative externalities that are imposed on the environment. If companies can be sued for the earthquakes their waste injections cause, oil and gas production is jeopardized.18 In the meantime, the earthquakes continue to get worse. The Oklahoma geological survey projects 941 M3+ earthquakes over the entire year 2015, a thousand-fold increase over the earthquake rate before the wastewater injection process began.19

The problems of peak oil and peak coal are difficult to see as separate from one another, as shortages in one resource will significantly affect the production potential of the other. Production of oil shale, with its extensive network of pipelines and many wells, requires high amounts of steel. The collapse of the oil shale industry in the United States is causing hundreds of people working in the steel manufacturing industry to lose their jobs. Steel production in turn depends largely on coal, 12% of all the world’s coal is used to produce steel, a figure that includes the poor quality coal types like lignite that are exclusively used for electricity generation.14

We find ourselves faced with a situation where a variety of resources are becoming increasingly difficult to extract. As an example, the mining industry in Australia is faced with ore grades that have halved in thirty years, while waste that has to be removed to access the ores has doubled, causing a tremendous increase in required energy.14 This shouldn’t be surprising, as the process of industrialization and exponential economic growth has meant that exploitation of a variety of resources is now at record highs. The effect the situation has on our economy is comparable to adding a variety of heavy burdens on a camel’s back.

1 – http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/14/china-carbon-idUSL3N0T41EY20141114

2 – http://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/news/2015/march/global-energy-related-emissions-of-carbon-dioxide-stalled-in-2014.html

3 – http://www.earth-syst-sci-data-discuss.net/7/521/2014/essdd-7-521-2014.html

4 – http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-13/china-s-carbon-emissions-drop-for-the-first-time-since-2001

5 – http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/China_coal_prod.PNG

6 – Found on http://cassandraclub.wordpress.com

7 – Found on http://cassandraclub.wordpress.com

8 – http://www.vox.com/2015/5/22/8645455/china-emissions-coal-drop

9 – http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-coal-ban-highly-polluting-types-banned-starting-in-2015-1410852013

10 – http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/09/29/29greenwire-study-worlds-peak-coal-moment-has-arrived-70121.html?pagewanted=all

11 – http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-29/china-s-steel-demand-slides-from-peak-while-exports-supported

12 – http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=1&pid=7&aid=1&cid=ww,&syid=1980&eyid=2012&unit=TST

13 – http://www.greenpeace.org/india/Global/india/report/2013/Coal-India-Running-on-Empty.pdf

14 – https://coalactionnetworkaotearoa.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/can-we-make-steel-without-coal/

15 – https://web.archive.org/web/20130409115625/http://www.crcore.org.au/ind-challenge.html

16 – http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/current_year/march2015.pdf

17 – http://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/iea-chart-says-conventional-oil-production-peaked-in-2006.html

18 – http://www.wsj.com/articles/frackings-new-legal-threat-earthquake-suits-1427736148

19 – http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/Oklahoma_3.0_earthquake_bar_graph_since_1978.png/800px-Oklahoma_3.0_earthquake_bar_graph_since_1978.png

20 – http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/09/29/29greenwire-study-worlds-peak-coal-moment-has-arrived-70121.html?pagewanted=all

Posted in Peak Coal, Peak Oil | Tagged , | 1 Comment