Can the lights be kept on with distributed generation? 2015 U.S. House hearing on a reliable electric system

Posted on April 20, 2018 by

Preface.  Corporate speakers testify mainly, rather than less biased researchers from universities or national laboratories. Corporations are selling a product, and likely to exaggerate what their product can do.

The most interesting testimony is from Dean Kamen, who is “selling” his company’s Stirling engine generator to congress as a way to decentralize the grid by using them for distributed power from natural gas or oil.  Well, that doesn’t solve the finite fossil fuel problem.  It’s spun as a way to balance renewables, but I doubt that this can be done yet – the technology to manage hundreds of thousands of stirling engines, solar panels, and other distributed devices doesn’t exist, nor the math, algorithms, or computers to attempt to do so.  Nor can we revolutionize the grid quickly, because deregulation has forced every player into strictly and narrowly defined roles (i.e. just generation, just distribution, just selling electricity, etc). And if we did decentralize – would there be enough fossil fuels left to power them?

The advantage of a distributed system / microgrid / islanding is that cyber-attacks, natural disasters, and power outages could be kept within a much smaller area and after a natural disaster, neighborhoods would still have power because they use underground natural gas lines, less likely to be damaged than overhead power lines, and they can also run on gasoline, propane, and other fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, electric vehicles are creating a new demand for power equal to an entire home. Since renewables require an equal amount of fossil generation backup, that means more fossil power plants, not less in the future.  Since we are likely past peak oil in 2018, and within 20 years of peak natural gas and peak coal, this means dozens of new import Liquefied Natural gas facilities along our coasts that are potential terrorist targets and continued dependency on other nations with natural gas and coal, and more potential for war as fossils decline.

Whether centralized or decentralized, the electric grid mainly runs on fossil fuels, which are finite.  My own guess is that as the electric grid becomes increasingly unreliable, whether from cyber-attack, natural disasters, lack of hydropower, coal, or natural gas, or breakdowns from lack of maintenance, the richest 10% of Americans will buy a generator, which is how the wealthy cope now in the third world, and invest in more insulation.  The bottom 90% of Americans won’t be able to afford to do this, and will turn to wood to heat and cook with.  Already 10% of American homes use wood for heat, so that will lead to unsustainable cutting of forests.

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

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House 114-18. March 4, 2015. The 21st Century electricity challenge: ensuring a secure, reliable, and modern electricity system. U.S. House hearing.  116 pages.

Excerpts (with some alterations and cuts to make the testimony clearer):

ED WHITFIELD, KENTUCKY.  Mr Patel, you said “Customer adoption of electric vehicles is creating new demand for power, each vehicle equivalent to an entire home while charging, requiring new utility demand control measures to avert overloading of existing infrastructure. Please provide the study or data which you are using as a basis for your statement that electric vehicles are creating new demand for power equivalent to an entire home.

Naimish Patel, CEO, Gridco Systems.  Various sources of data are available to support my statement that electric vehicles are creating new demand for power, equivalent to an entire home.  One such source is a December 2014 ARRA report produced by the U.S. Department of Energy titled: “Evaluating electric vehicle charging impacts and customer charging behaviors: Experiences from six smart grid investment grant projects”  at http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/12/f19/SGIG-EvaluatingEVcharging-Dec2014.pdf  On page iv of the report, in the Grid Impacts section of Table 1. Summary of Key Project Experiences, it is noted that “The average power demand to charge most vehicles was 3-6 kilowatts, which is roughly equivalent to powering a small, residential air conditioning unit.” It is also noted in the same section that “…depending on the model, the load from one electric vehicle model can be as much as 19 kilowatts, which is more than the load for most large, single-family homes.”

Also:

  • The most common type of charger is a portable 120-volt special charging cord, referred to as AC Level 1 charging, which typically provides 3-5 miles of range per hour of charge. Depending on the size of the battery, and the initial state of charge, this could take 8 to 20 hours to fully charge a depleted battery.
  • Some makes and models — particularly all-electric vehicles or those with larger battery packs — may take about 20 to 60 hours to charge a fully depleted battery at 120 volts. While 120-volt charging is relatively slow, it can often be accomplished with little to no additional cost or installation work if an outlet is already available at home.
  • Users can cut charging times significantly by installing AC Le vel 2, 240-volt charging stations. However, these sy stems can add $600-$3,600 to the cost of in-home charging, depending on the availability of power in the electric panel. Typically, installations require permits and licensed electricians.

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:  KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity]

USDOE. December 2014. Evaluating electric vehicle charging impacts and customer charging behaviors – experiences from six smart grid investment grant projects. United States Department of Energy, electricity delivery and energy reliability. www.smartgrid.gov

ED WHITFIELD, KENTUCKY. The U.S. was the first nation to electrify, and our system of generation, transmission, distribution and related communications remains the best in the world. Nonetheless, new challenges are emerging, as are opportunities to modernize and improve the electric grid. The challenges are significant:

  • much of our grid is outdated
  • coal-fired generation facilities are shutting down at an alarming rate
  • reserve margins are inadequate in several regions
  • intermittent and remote renewable capacity is coming online
  • cyber threats pose a growing concern

While encouraging technology and innovation in the electricity sector should be a priority, policies must ensure that new grid-related products do no leave the grid more exposed or compromise customer information and privacy.

DEAN KAMEN, Founder and President, DEKA Research and Development Corporation.

In the 1880s there was these guys Edison and Tesla, who gave us big centralized plans, …now it is 150-year- old architecture. What do we know about it? Is it ready for disruption? Well, it is old, it is inefficient, it is unreliable, it is expensive, and it is dirty.

Quick facts about what the grid is today. We have about 1 terawatt, 1,000 gigawatts, of production capacity at an average of $1 a watt to produce. That is $1 trillion in generation assets.  More than half of it is 30 years old, and if you only replace the stuff that is that old at $1 a watt, it will cost $500 billion. Once you make that energy, you have to move it. High voltage transmission lines cost about $1 million a mile, and oops, sometimes they are not quite what we would like them to be. And 70% of those lines are 25 years old or more, and there are 280,000 miles of that high voltage lines, another $200 billion to replace.

Then you have the low voltage lines in all your neighborhoods–wires hanging on wooden poles. What could possibly go wrong? So these are a real deal, only $140,000 a mile, and there are 2.2 million miles and half of them are over 30 years old. And if you just replace just the old stuff, that’s another $150 billion. And then, of course, you have the annual capital cost of that infrastructure, which is $90 billion now to keep this architecture operating.

Everybody I know loves solar panels. So how do you catalyze more people to do this? Well, the more you put solar panels up without doing something else, you are actually hurting the grid because they add instability…

You have to do something that can catalyze this stuff to happen in a way that helps everybody, including the people supplying the power.  New technologies bring new opportunities, but they also sometimes bring problems, especially to stranded infrastructure.

From a practical point of view, the entire system that has ran for 150 years was premised on the generating company only making money by selling more power, so there is no encouragement to save.

I don’t think regulators understand that those big power plants are very good at producing a constant amount of power and it can take hours and hours to bring those big boilers up. When you start putting transient capability [like solar power] online –what happens when that cloud goes by and suddenly a couple of hundred megawatts that was there goes away, or when wind stops, you are asking that big tired grid you were trying to avoid paying their bill an hour ago, suddenly you are desperate for more power. They have a tougher time reacting and keeping a stable grid with these other systems online than they had before, and they are making less money.

In the case of Germany, the instability from a pure technology point of view, not an economic or financial point of view, but the instability induced in their large systems by all these new transient systems is making life difficult, causing a reliability issue and a security issue. And I think we should avoid that in this country.

I think we could make generators that use the largest buried infrastructure in the country – natural gas — that we don’t need $100 million a mile for. Plus many buildings have buried tanks with oil, propane. If our device could be moved close to where it is needed, but still on the energy producer’s side of that equation, yet just outside the meter, then the energy producers could have millions of these small devices that they own and operate, because grandma doesn’t want to become her own utility company because she has a solar panel, but if the utility companies and energy providers could compete with each other to have small units that are so close to the loads, they still get the full advantage of being a supplier of energy, except with just millions of little plants, they can avoid needing transmission lines, distribution lines, substations, et cetera, that everybody is talking about being expensive, unreliable, and subject to issues.

DAVID B. MCKINLEY, WEST VIRGINIA. I thought that the hearing was the ensuring a secure, reliable and modern electric system, and we were going to be talking a lot more about the grid, and I have gotten more confused as I have heard all this discussion. I am an engineer. I have heard very professorial comments, very in-depth, your white papers that you have all developed about this topic, but I wonder whether or not we have been able to reach America with the story, because we have been talking about source agnostic architecture. We have even heard about balkanizing. We have heard about platforms, we have talked about polar vortexes. Mr. Kamen, you were about as close to talking to the American public as I have seen in this panel. One thing I have learned in Congress in my 4 years here, that we have trouble when we are confronted with more than one option, and I haven’t heard the option.

I have heard seven or eight different themes of where we should go, and I am really trying to get to a point with the grid of a consensus on where we should go to develop grid reliability, because what we have not talked about is the public’s resistance. The public doesn’t want high-tension lines over their property, in their back yard’. We haven’t talked about electromagnetic pulse, the threat to our grid reliability with that, because we know that is a serious challenge. We have talked about the fact that we can shut off someone else’s grid in another country, and they can shut off our grid. There was some mention about the EPA regulations and shutting down some of our powerhouses that when we had this polar vortex, that we came within 700 megawatts of having a brown-out last winter. That is really threatening.   And then the option of the age issue, I would like for you to just explain in terms that we don’t use here in the beltway for Mildred Schmidt to understand, what does that have to do with age because we have waterlines and sewer lines, and buildings and roads and bridges that are far older than 25 years old. Why should I be worried about electric grid power lines being 25 years old? I would like to hear, is there a consensus of where we should go, where Congress should be putting its first priority in getting greater reliance or dependability, or are we just kind of talking abstract again? Is there a consensus?

Mr. KAMEN. We call it coopertition. We believe that if you apply technologies properly, everybody can win as they compete because the public gets the best that way. And I think what you have heard from everybody is the grid is getting older, it is getting, for various reasons — the environment, terrorism, cyber-attacks — more fragile.

You are hearing a lot of people adding a lot of new technologies.  Where there is a consensus should be that you have to get all the people that provide the net result to the public working together so that you don’t create an if-I-win-you-lose situation.

And the energy providers, the transmission or the generation—for instance, our partner for our little box is a major generator, NRG, yet they are now becoming one of the biggest suppliers of solar panels, and working with us on these small distributed boxes. In one perverse way, you could say they are undermining their core business, but, you know, like they always say, the railroads went away because they thought they were in the train business, not the transportation business.

And to your point, the public doesn’t care about CDMA and TDMA and Time Division—they care about a cell phone being more convenient than a landline. So if the public could have a simple appliance put into their home that already used infrastructure that we have great confidence in, because it is buried under the ground, like gas lines, like their oil, like their propane, and it could be made to work in parallel with solar and wind and the grid, because it sits at the intersection of all those things, somebody with an appliance like that would say, my costs went down because the waste heat from this thing is now my water system and my furnace, and I have more security and reliability because it is distributed, like getting a back-up generator free.  And the people that run the grid and all the other systems win as well because it deals with transient problems, is compatible with solar panels, is compatible with batteries, and is compatible with the big producers.

[  Mr. Kamen has made the case for distributed generation above,, but as Mr. Ivy points out below, there is a need for the opposite – states will need to run lines over a wider area to cope with the instability of variable power to balance it. Texas is an island of power (ERCOT) but in the future if wind penetration reaches 30% or more, not a big enough island to cope with that much variablity ]

Mr. IVY. As renewable energy gets to be much more prolific in our industry, our ability to offload the variability is a way to help manage the system reliability. If any one of us believes that we are going to get up to 30, 40, 50 percent penetration and manage it all on our own, we are not drinking the right Kool-Aid. So I think it is very important that we start looking at [running lines from Texas to other states]. It is almost blasphemy to say that you are going to build transmission outside the State, but you may well get to the point where that needs to be the thing that you do just to be able to help manage the variability.

Thomas Siebel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, C3 Energy.  You have an 800-pound gorilla in the room here:  the cybersecurity problem. This is an opportunity where the Federal Government can play a role.  The fact is any hostile government, or just 10 smart engineers from UC Berkeley,   could bring down the grid from Boston to New York in 4 days.   And if you bring in the leadership from Homeland Security, DHS, in here  what they will say is before we really do something about this, we are going to have the equivalent of 9/11. And then we will get serious and spend $100 billion a year on it.

DAVID  LOEBSACK, IOWA.   I am thinking in terms of a regulatory framework, to make sure that we integrate some of these things into the generation and provision of power to folks, because it was mentioned that we have to have the right regulatory framework, right policy, right regulatory approach. What is that approach?

Paul Nahi, Chief Executive Officer, Enphase Energy. I completely agree with Mr. Kamen that the right answer is distributor generation. In terms of the regulatory and policy changes that need to be adopted for that, we have to recognize that the potential for an adverse relationship between the renewable energy companies and the utilities exists. It doesn’t have to.  There are ways these companies can work together, there are ways that we can help the utilities adopt to a business model that would provide for more distributed generation. Right now, most of the distributed generation, not all but most, is done by third-party companies. There is no reason why the utilities themselves can’t take a greater ownership and greater responsibility for putting on more of that distributed generation.

BILL JOHNSON, OHIO. Mr. Atkinson, your testimony suggests that the grid of the future will enable electrons to flow into or even multiple directions. Why is having flexibility in power flows significant, and how can advanced grid technologies facilitate this?

Michael Atkinson, President, Alstom Grid, Inc., on Behalf of GridWise Alliance. In the traditional hub and spoke that was mentioned before, you have an outage upstream, everybody downstream is out of power. When you have multiple directional flow, you get a chance to re-switch your system, reconfigure your grid on the fly, thus allowing, all or some of the people to be brought back up immediately and not suffer that outage. The technologies today exist to do this and continue to get better, the algorithms continue to improve.

Mr. JOHNSON.  As a chief information officer for a global manufacturing company, I had to be concerned we had steady power. A lot of folks don’t realize in today’s high-tech arena what a power outage, a power surge, and constantly changing power parameters do to solid state circuitry. It wreaks havoc.

Joel Ivy, General Manager, Lakeland Electric, on Behalf of American Public Power Association.  If there is an outage somewhere in the field in the original hub and spoke method, you are out if you are downstream of that. There are high-speed switches that are sensing where these short-circuits are in the system, and talking to each other to try to figure out how to isolate it. And then the goal is to have an outage isolated to the smallest area that you can possibly have it in. So then that allows us to dispatch somebody straight to where the problem is, because normally it is lightning, it is trees, it is an animal, something that can be cleared up very quickly, we can get the lights back on very, very quickly.

MARK WAYNE MULLIN, OKLAHOMA. Mr. Kamen, you made a point in your written testimony that more than 50% of the generating capacity in the U.S. is 30 years old, and that 70% of the 280,000 miles of transmission line is more than 25 years old. What do you feel your company, as well as other companies like yours bring to the table in addressing this issue?

Mr. KAMEN. I think that like with a used car, you reach a point where it is cheaper to buy a new one than to keep fixing the old one.  If the proper incentives were put before the people that produce the energy, transmit the energy, distribute the energy, supply it to the end user, if they had a clean piece of paper and could invest their money in alternatives to fix the problems you’ve heard about  There are only a few plants that are hub and spoke, easy to take down, and it is very hard to make them self-healing. But if you could have thousands and thousands of small, locally operated and controlled units close to where you need the electricity and that you can also use their waste heat, you would get as a bonus to replace furnaces and heat water, you would be much safer against anybody taking one [centralized electric] system down. It might require more sophisticated controls and interaction, but as we have heard, that is becoming easier and easier. So if you could create a system instead of taking these very, very old systems, which they sort of have no other choice but to keep up and operating, and allow them to transition to a new alternative technology, they would do better.

Mr. MULLIN. What is keeping the companies from being able to do this?

Mr. KAMEN. From my understanding, when I have talked to people that do generation, that do transmission, it is a—it boggles my mind,… I have heard CEOs of major energy-related companies say I am not allowed to do transmission, I [am only allowed to] generate, or I am not allowed to generate, I [can only] do transmission. I can’t put your box somewhere there.

MORGAN GRIFFITH, VIRGINIA. I live on a cul-de-sac with 13 houses, [so how would your generators work in my neighborhood?]

Mr. KAMEN. The average American home consumes less than 2 kilowatts. So I would put a cluster of four 10 kilowatt units on a pad to handle your neighborhood. If one of them went down, there is enough redundancy for the other three to keep everybody happy, and at their convenience, somebody would fix the one that went down.  [And after a big storm] there is another advantage — we run on any fuel, and typically your neighborhood has buried lines in it that are bringing natural gas. You probably have buried tanks with heating oil or propane. Those things are way less susceptible to problems than wires running through all the trees that get taken down by ice or wind or hurricanes, and these boxes then are so close to where you need them that the rest of the system going down hundreds of miles away isn’t going to affect you, and again, they are so close to your loads that you can also take their ‘‘waste heat’’ and turn it into your heat and hot water.

We right now run on natural gas, propane, diesel fuel, gasoline. The device is actually running on something that looks like a burner in your hot water heater, which is why it doesn’t make lots of noise. An engine, diesel cycle, Rankine cycle, auto cycle, typical—an engine has a very specific kind of fuel because it touches every part of the inside of your engine. It gets atomized, a spark comes in, compression come—an engine typically has a very, very selective appetite for fuel, but your hot water heater will keep water hot if there is a flame under it, and it doesn’t really care what the fuel is. We are running a system that looks much more similar to your hot water heater, but we turn some of that energy into electricity instead of heat.

Mr. Green.  We have refineries and chemical plants, they are always looking for ways that they can efficiently run those plants as cheap as possible. And some of them probably have cut their fuel requirements over the years because the cogeneration and other things, in fact, I don’t think we have a chemical plant that doesn’t have a cogen facility, but do you expect industrial and consumer demand to increase over the new few years? We can’t save our way out of the power.

Gardiner, B. October 8, 2013. Bypassing the Power Grid. New York Times.

Small, decentralized generators are mostly inefficient, costing far more per unit of output than conventional power or even utility-scale renewable energy, like big solar farms.  Making haphazard changes to a system as complex as the electrical grid could have unintended consequences

 

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Why facts don’t change our mind

Posted on April 17, 2018 by

Preface. Below are excerpts from this article.  Longish descriptions of various studies at Stanford and elsewhere lead to conclusions such as that once formed, impressions are remarkably perserverant, and even after the evidence for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people failed to make appropriate revisions in these beliefs, a failure was quite impressive.

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

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Elizabeth Kolbert. February 27, 2017 Issue Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason. The New Yorker.

Any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?

In a new book, “The Enigma of Reason” (Harvard), the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question. Mercier, who works at a French research institute in Lyon, and Sperber, now based at the Central European University, in Budapest, point out that reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.

Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to cooperate. Cooperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.

“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective.

Consider what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them.

If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. Imagine, Mercier and Sperber suggest, a mouse that thinks the way we do. Such a mouse, “bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around,” would soon be dinner. To the extent that confirmation bias leads people to dismiss evidence of new or underappreciated threats—the human equivalent of the cat around the corner—it’s a trait that should have been selected against. The fact that both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our “hypersociability.”

Mercier and Sperber point out that aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.

This is because reason evolved to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group. Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.

Among the many, many issues our forebears didn’t worry about were the deterrent effects of capital punishment and the ideal attributes of a firefighter. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake news, or Twitter. It’s no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us. As Mercier and Sperber write, “This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.”

People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of a toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.

“One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.

This borderlessness, or, if you prefer, confusion, is also crucial to what we consider progress. As people invented new tools for new ways of living, they simultaneously created new realms of ignorance; if everyone had insisted on, say, mastering the principles of metalworking before picking up a knife, the Bronze Age wouldn’t have amounted to much. When it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.

Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain. It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about. Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also whether they could identify Ukraine on a map. The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention. (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)

Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.

This is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous. In a study conducted in 2012, people were asked their position on questions like: Should there be a single-payer health-care system? Or merit-based pay for teachers? Participants were asked to rate their positions depending on how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the proposals. Next, they were instructed to explain, in as much detail as they could, the impacts of implementing each one. Most people at this point ran into trouble. Asked once again to rate their views, they ratcheted down the intensity, so that they either agreed or disagreed less vehemently.

If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views. This may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.

One way to look at science is as a system that corrects for people’s natural inclinations. In a well-run laboratory, there’s no room for bias; the results have to be reproducible in other laboratories, by researchers who have no motive to confirm them. And this, it could be argued, is why the system has proved so successful. At any given moment, a field may be dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails. Science moves forward, even as we remain stuck in place.

In “Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us” (Oxford), Jack Gorman, a psychiatrist, and his daughter, Sara Gorman, a public-health specialist, probe the gap between what science tells us and what we tell ourselves. Their concern is with those persistent beliefs which are not just demonstrably false but also potentially deadly, like the conviction that vaccines are hazardous. Of course, what’s hazardous is not being vaccinated; that’s why vaccines were created in the first place. “Immunization is one of the triumphs of modern medicine,” the Gormans note. But no matter how many scientific studies conclude that vaccines are safe, and that there’s no link between immunizations and autism, anti-vaxxers remain unmoved. (They can now count on their side—sort of—Donald Trump, who has said that, although he and his wife had their son, Barron, vaccinated, they refused to do so on the timetable recommended by pediatricians.)

The Gormans, too, argue that ways of thinking that now seem self-destructive must at some point have been adaptive. And they, too, dedicate many pages to confirmation bias, which, they claim, has a physiological component. They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,” they observe.

The Gormans don’t just want to catalogue the ways we go wrong; they want to correct for them. There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. (Another widespread but statistically insupportable belief they’d like to discredit is that owning a gun makes you safer.) But here they encounter the very problems they have enumerated. Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. “The challenge that remains,” they write toward the end of their book, “is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”

“The Enigma of Reason,” “The Knowledge Illusion,” and “Denying to the Grave” were all written before the November election. And yet they anticipate Kellyanne Conway and the rise of “alternative facts.” These days, it can feel as if the entire country has been given over to a vast psychological experiment being run either by no one or by Steve Bannon. Rational agents would be able to think their way to a solution. But, on this matter, the literature is not reassuring.

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Why it is futile to think that Wind could ever make a significant contribution to energy supplies

Posted on April 8, 2018 by

Matt Ridley. May 15, 2017. Wind turbines are neither clean nor green and they provide zero global energy. Even after 30 years of huge subsidies, it provides about zero energy. The Spectator.

The Global Wind Energy Council recently released its latest report, excitedly boasting that ‘the proliferation of wind energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was installed across the global market last year’.

You may have got the impression from announcements like that, and from the obligatory pictures of wind turbines in any BBC story or airport advert about energy, that wind power is making a big contribution to world energy today. You would be wrong. Its contribution is still, after decades — nay centuries — of development, trivial to the point of irrelevance.

Even put together, wind and photovoltaic solar are supplying less than 1 per cent of global energy demand. From the International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption in 2014, and solar and tide combined provided 0.35 per cent. Remember this is total energy, not just electricity, which is less than a fifth of all final energy, the rest being the solid, gaseous, and liquid fuels that do the heavy lifting for heat, transport and industry.

[One critic suggested I should have used the BP numbers instead, which show wind achieving 1.2% in 2014 rather than 0.46%. I chose not to do so mainly because that number is arrived at by falsely exaggerating the actual output of wind farms threefold in order to take into account that wind farms do not waste two-thirds of their energy as heat; also the source is an oil company, which would have given green blobbers a excuse to dismiss it, whereas the IEA is unimpleachable But it’s still a very small number, so it makes little difference.]

Such numbers are not hard to find, but they don’t figure prominently in reports on energy derived from the unreliables lobby (solar and wind). Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority — three quarters — is biomass (mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke inhalation.

Even in rich countries playing with subsidised wind and solar, a huge slug of their renewable energy comes from wood and hydro, the reliable renewables. Meanwhile, world energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years. Between 2013 and 2014, again using International Energy Agency data, it grew by just under 2,000 terawatt-hours.

If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per annum. That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry in the early 2000s.

At a density of, very roughly, 50 acres per megawatt, typical for wind farms, that many turbines would require a land area [half the size of] the British Isles, including Ireland. Every year. If we kept this up for 50 years, we would have covered every square mile of a land area [half] the size of Russia with wind farms. Remember, this would be just to fulfil the new demand for energy, not to displace the vast existing supply of energy from fossil fuels, which currently supply 80 per cent of global energy needs. [para corrected from original.]

Do not take refuge in the idea that wind turbines could become more efficient. There is a limit to how much energy you can extract from a moving fluid, the Betz limit, and wind turbines are already close to it. Their effectiveness (the load factor, to use the engineering term) is determined by the wind that is available, and that varies at its own sweet will from second to second, day to day, year to year.

As machines, wind turbines are pretty good already; the problem is the wind resource itself, and we cannot change that. It’s a fluctuating stream of low–density energy. Mankind stopped using it for mission-critical transport and mechanical power long ago, for sound reasons. It’s just not very good.

As for resource consumption and environmental impacts, the direct effects of wind turbines — killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands — is bad enough. But out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale, which is why the phrase ‘clean energy’ is such a sick joke and ministers should be ashamed every time it passes their lips.

It gets worse. Wind turbines, apart from the fibreglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. They need about 200 times as much material per unit of capacity as a modern combined cycle gas turbine. Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of ‘clean’ renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.

A two-megawatt wind turbine weighs about 250 tonnes, including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. Globally, it takes about half a tonne of coal to make a tonne of steel. Add another 25 tonnes of coal for making the cement and you’re talking 150 tonnes of coal per turbine. Now if we are to build 350,000 wind turbines a year (or a smaller number of bigger ones), just to keep up with increasing energy demand, that will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That’s about half the EU’s hard coal–mining output.

The point of running through these numbers is to demonstrate that it is utterly futile, on a priori grounds, even to think that wind power can make any significant contribution to world energy supply, let alone to emissions reductions, without ruining the planet. As the late David MacKay pointed out years back, the arithmetic is against such unreliable renewables.

MacKay, former chief scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, said in the final interview before his tragic death last year that the idea that renewable energy could power the UK is an “appalling delusion” — for this reason, that there is not enough land.

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Richard Heinberg on why low oil prices do not mean there is plenty of oil, EROI, collapse

Posted on April 5, 2018 by

[ Yet another wise, thoughtful, and wide-ranging essay from my favorite writer of the many facets of a civilization about to decline as it is starved of the fossil fuels that feed it.  Although the topics are quite varied, Heinberg weaves them into a cloth that is more than the sum of the parts in explaining how the future may unfold.

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 ]

Richard Heinberg. 2017-4-25. Juggling Live Hand Grenades. Post Carbon Institute.

Here are a few useful recent contributions to the global sustainability conversation, with relevant comments interspersed. Toward the end of this essay I offer some general thoughts about converging challenges to the civilizational system.

  1. “Oil Extraction, Economic Growth, and Oil Price Dynamics,” by Aude Illig and Ian Schiller. BioPhysical Economics and Resource Quality, March 2017, 2:1.

Once upon a time it was assumed that as world oil supplies were depleted and burned, prices would simply march upward until they either crashed the economy or incentivized both substitute fuels and changes to systems that use petroleum (mainly transportation). With a little hindsight—that is, in view of the past decade of extreme oil price volatility—it’s obvious that that assumption was simplistic and useless for planning purposes. Illig’s and Schiller’s paper is an effort to find a more realistic and rigorously supported (i.e., with lots of data and equations) explanation for the behavior of oil prices and the economy as the oil resource further depletes.

The authors find, in short, that before oil production begins to decline, high prices incentivize new production without affecting demand too much, while low prices incentivize rising demand without reducing production too much. The economy grows. It’s a self-balancing, self-regulating system that’s familiar territory to every trained economist.

However, because oil is a key factor of economic production, a depleting non-renewable resource, and is hard to replace, conventional economic theory does a lousy job describing the declining phase of extraction. It turns out that once depletion has proceeded to the point where extraction rates start to decline, the relationship between oil prices and the economy shifts significantly. Now high prices kill demand without doing much to incentivize new production that’s actually profitable), while low prices kill production without doing much to increase demand. The system becomes self-destabilizing, the economy stagnates or contracts, the oil industry invests less in future production capacity, and oil production rates begin to fall faster and faster.

The authors conclude:

Our analysis and empirical evidence are consistent with oil being a fundamental quantity in economic production. Our analysis indicates that once the contraction period for oil extraction begins, price dynamics will accelerate the decline in extraction rates: extraction rates decline because of a decrease in profitability of the extraction business. . . . We believe that the contraction period in oil extraction has begun and that policy makers should be making contingency plans.

As I was reading this paper, the following thoughts crossed my mind. Perhaps the real deficiency of the peak oil “movement” was not its inability to forecast the exact timing of the peak (at least one prominent contributor to the discussion, petroleum geologist Jean Laherrère, made in 2002 what could turn out to have been an astonishingly accurate estimate for the global conventional oil peak in 2010, and global unconventional oil peak in 2015). Rather, its shortcoming was twofold: 1) it didn’t appreciate the complexity of the likely (and, as noted above, poorly understood) price-economy dynamics that would accompany the peak, and 2) it lacked capacity to significantly influence policy makers. Of course, the purpose of the peak oil movement’s efforts was not to score points with forecasting precision but to change the trajectory of society so that the inevitable peak in world oil production, whenever it occurred, would not result in economic collapse. The Hirsch Report of 2005 showed that that change of trajectory would need to start at least a decade before the peak in order to achieve the goal of averting collapse. As it turned out, the peak oil movement did provide society with a decade of warning, but there was no trajectory change on the part of policy makers. Instead, many pundits clouded the issue by spending that crucial decade deriding the peak oil argument because of insufficient predictive accuracy on the part of some of its proponents. And now? See this article:

  1. “Saudi Aramco Chief Warns of Looming Oil Shortage,” by Anjli Raval and Ed Crooks, Financial Times, April 14, 2017.

The message itself should be no surprise. Everyone who’s been paying attention to the oil industry knows that investments in future production capacity have fallen dramatically in the past three years as prices have languished. It’s important to have some longer-term historical perspective, though: today’s price of $50 per barrel is actually a high price for the fuel in the post-WWII era, even taking inflation into account. The industry’s problem isn’t really that prices are too low; it’s that the costs of finding and producing the remaining oil are too high. In any case, with prices not high enough to generate profits, the industry has no choice but to cut back on investments, and that means production will soon start to lag. Again, anyone who’s paying attention knows this.

What’s remarkable is hearing the head of Saudi Arabia’s state energy company convey the news. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Amin Nasser, chief executive of Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producing company, said on Friday that 20 [million] barrels a day in future production capacity was required to meet demand growth and offset natural field declines in the coming years. “That is a lot of production capacity, and the investments we now see coming back—which are mostly smaller and shorter term—are not going to be enough to get us there,” he said at the Columbia University Energy Summit in New York. Mr. Nasser said that the oil market was getting closer to rebalancing supply and demand, but the short-term market still points to a surplus as U.S. drilling rig levels rise and growth in shale output returns. Even so, he said it was not enough to meet supplies required in the coming years, which were “falling behind substantially.” About $1 [trillion] in oil and gas investments had been deferred and cancelled since the oil downturn began in 2014.

Mr. Nasser went on to point out that conventional oil discoveries have more than halved during the past four years.

The Saudis have never promoted the notion of peak oil. Their mantra has always been, “supplies are sufficient.” Now their tune has changed—though Mr. Nasser’s statement does not mention peak oil by name. No doubt he would argue that resources are plentiful; the problem lies with prices and investment levels. Yes, of course. Never mention depletion; that would give away the game.

  1. “How Does Energy Resource Depletion Affect Prosperity? Mathematics of a Minimum Energy Return on Investment (EROI),” by Adam R. Brandt. BioPhysical Economics and Resource Quality, (2017) 2:2.

Adam Brandt’s latest paper follows on work by Charlie Hall and others, inquiring whether there is a minimum energy return on investment (EROI) required in order for industrial societies to function. Unfortunately EROI calculations tend to be slippery because they depend upon system boundaries. Draw a close boundary around an energy production system and you are likely to arrive at a higher EROI calculation; draw a wide boundary, and the EROI ratio will be lower. That’s why some EROI calculations for solar PV are in the range of 20:1 while others are closer to 2:1. That’s a very wide divergence, with enormous practical implications.

In his paper, Brandt largely avoids the boundary question and therefore doesn’t attempt to come up with a hard number for a minimum societal EROI. What he does is to validate the general notion of minimum EROI; he also notes that society’s overall EROI has been falling during the last decade. Brandt likewise offers support for the notion of an EROI “cliff”: that is, if EROI is greater than 10:1, the practical impact of an incremental rise or decline in the ratio is relatively small; however, if EROI is below 10:1, each increment becomes much more significant. This also supports Ugo Bardi’s idea of the “Seneca cliff,” according to which societal decline following a peak in energy production, consumption, and EROI may be far quicker than the build-up to the peak.

  1. “Burden of Proof: A Comprehensive Review of the Feasibility of 100% Renewable-Electricity Systems,” by B.P. Heard, B.W. Brook, T.M.L. Wigley, and C.J.A. Bradshaw. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Volume 76, September 2017, Pages 1122–1133.

This study largely underscores what David Fridley and I wrote in our recent book Our Renewable Future. None of the plans reviewed here (including those by Mark Jacobson and co-authors) passes muster. Clearly, it is possible to reduce fossil fuels while partly replacing them with wind and solar, using current fossil generation capacity as a fallback (this is already happening in many countries). But getting to 100 percent renewables will be very difficult and expensive. It will ultimately require a dramatic reduction in energy usage, and a redesign of entire systems (food, transport, buildings, and manufacturing), as we detail in our book.

  1. “Social Instability Lies Ahead, Researcher Says,” by Peter Turchin. January 4, 2017, Phys.org.

Over a decade ago, ecologist Peter Turchin began developing a science he calls cliodynamics, which treats history using empirical methods including statistical analysis and modeling. He has applied the same methods to his home country, the United States, and arrives at startling conclusions.

My research showed that about 40 seemingly disparate (but, according to cliodynamics, related) social indicators experienced turning points during the 1970s. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of political turmoil. My model indicated that social instability and political violence would peak in the 2020s.

Turchin sees the recent U.S. presidential election as confirming his forecast: “We seem to be well on track for the 2020s instability peak. . . . If anything, the negative trends seem to be accelerating.” He regards Donald Trump as more of a symptom, rather than a driver, of these trends.

The author’s model tracks factors including “growing income and wealth inequality, stagnating and even declining well-being of most Americans, growing political fragmentation and governmental dysfunction.” Often social scientists focus on just one of these issues; but in Turchin’s view, “these developments are all interconnected. Our society is a system in which different parts affect each other, often in unexpected ways.

One issue he gives special weight is what he calls “elite overproduction,” where a society generates more elites than can practically participate in shaping policy. The result is increasing competition among the elites that wastes resources needlessly and drives overall social decline and disintegration. He sees plenty of historical antecedents where elite overproduction drove waves of political violence. In today’s America there are far more millionaires than was the case only a couple of decades ago, and rich people tend to be more politically active than poor ones. This causes increasing political polarization (millionaires funding extreme candidates), erodes cooperation, and results in a political class that is incapable of solving real problems.

I think Turchin’s method of identifying and tracking social variables, using history as a guide, is relevant and useful. And it certainly offers a sober warning about where America is headed during the next few years. However, I would argue that in the current instance his method actually misses several layers of threat. Historical societies were not subject to the same extraordinary boom-bust cycle driven by the use of fossil fuels as our civilization saw during the past century. Nor did they experience such rapid population growth as we’ve experienced in recent decades (Syria and Egypt saw 4 percent per annum growth in the years after 1960), nor were they subject to global anthropogenic climate change. Thus the case for near-term societal and ecosystem collapse is actually stronger than the one he makes.

Some Concluding Thoughts

Maintaining a civilization is always a delicate balancing act that is sooner or later destined to fail. Some combination of population pressure, resource depletion, economic inequality, pollution, and climate change has undermined every complex society since the beginnings of recorded history roughly seven thousand years ago. Urban centers managed to flourish for a while by importing resources from their peripheries, exporting wastes and disorder beyond their borders, and using social stratification to generate temporary surpluses of wealth. But these processes are all subject to the law of diminishing returns: eventually, every boom turns to bust. In some respects the cycles of civilizational advance and decline mirror the adaptive cycle in ecological systems, where the crash of one cycle clears the way for the start of a new one. Maybe civilization will have yet another chance, and possibly the next iteration will be better, built on mutual aid and balance with nature. We should be planting the seeds now.

Yet while modern civilization is subject to cyclical constraints, in our case the boom has been fueled to an unprecedented extreme by a one-time-only energy subsidy from tens of millions of years’ worth of bio-energy transformed into fossil fuels by agonizingly slow geological processes. One way or another, our locomotive of industrial progress is destined to run off the rails, and because we’ve chugged to such perilous heights of population size and consumption rates, we have a long way to fall—much further than any previous civilization.

Perhaps a few million people globally know enough of history, anthropology, environmental science, and ecological economics to have arrived at general understandings and expectations along these lines. For those who are paying attention, only the specific details of the inevitable processes of societal simplification and economic/population shrinkage remain unknown.

There’s a small cottage industry of websites and commenters keeping track of signs of imminent collapse and hypothesizing various possible future collapse trajectories. Efforts to this end may have practical usefulness for those who hope to escape the worst of the mayhem in the process—which is likely to be prolonged and uneven—and perhaps even improve lives by building community resilience. However, many collapsitarians are quite admittedly just indulging a morbid fascination with history’s greatest train wreck. In many of my writings I try my best to avoid morbid fascination and focus on practical usefulness. But every so often it’s helpful to step back and take it all in. It’s quite a show.

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Oil theft around the world: Cartels and exploding donkeys

Posted on April 4, 2018 by

Preface. Oil thefts cost Nigerian oil producers at least $18 billion a year. In Mexico, cartels spend only $5-8,000 to tap into pipelines and withdraw “unlimited” amounts of gasoline, and did so 7,000 times in 2016, resulting in $1 billion losses to PEMEX a year.

I expect that after oil production peaks (which it appears to have done in 2018), and is declining at 8.5% exponentially a year, desperation will grow everywhere, and in oil producing nations, the temptation of tapping into pipes inevitable, and the ability of governments to prevent oil piracy to dwindle as their revenues decline and the never-ending depression grows worse.

It will be so easy to steal in the U.S. where there are thousands of miles of oil pipelines in remote areas, that can’t all be patrolled, as was seen in Iraq when pipelines were blown up hundreds of times.

Oh dear, it’s started to happen already: 2022-4-8 Gas Theft Rings Have Now Stolen More Than $140K Worth of Fuel Across U.S.

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 ]

Calcuttawala, Z. May 31, 2017. Oil theft around the world: Cartels and exploding donkeys. oilprice.com

Thousands of miles of oil pipelines connect the world’s oil producing hubs to their key customers’ refineries and electrical grids. By replacing trucks, the advent of the pipeline has dramatically reduced the carbon emissions associated with transporting fuel from point A to point B, but their unattended nature makes them an attractive target for thieves who could refine and sell the products for rock-bottom prices on the black market or other illicit venues.

Oil theft has become incrementally more sophisticated over the past few decades as transnational gangs and separatist organizations steal fuel to fund their operations. Deepening geopolitical rivalries among states that share pipeline routes also encourage state-backed embezzlement of energy resources.

Nigeria

Nigeria notoriously suffers from oil theft perpetrated by pirates in the Gulf of Guinea, separatist groups in the Niger Delta, and private citizens looking to make a quick buck. In 2016, Michele Sison, the U.S. deputy ambassador for the United Nations at the time, said Africa’s largest producer lost $1.5 billion in revenues every month due to the extensiveness of the oil laundering game across the nation.

Illegal refineries near the Niger Delta allow stolen oil to be processed and used in the local economy, but a new initiative by Lagos would allow the facilities to become legal and secure oil from the government at a negotiated price. Nigeria’s oil minister Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu advanced the plans last month in order to dissuade locals from attacking oil infrastructure.

A portion of the stolen crude leaves Nigerian borders for processing elsewhere. Evidence from 2014 suggests Nigerian crude had been smuggled into Ghana, mixed with Ghanaian crude before refining and export to Morocco and other European markets for sale on legal markets.

Mexico

Cartels active in the northern half of this Latin American country are ready to be free from their drug addiction. With a modest upfront capital investment of $5,000 – $8,000, cartels have realized they can tap directly into state-owned gas pipelines and withdraw seemingly unlimited supplies of gasoline, which they then sell along the highway at a discount to official government prices. It’s a win-win situation whereby the drug cartels make 100 percent profit margins and citizens get “cheap” fuel.

Last year’s numbers from state-run PEMEX said the nation’s pipeline had been tapped almost 7,000 times in order to supply these illegal markets, which grow in size every year due to heavy participation from ordinary citizens as demand catalysts. The more prolific the fuel thieves become, the more expensive gasoline becomes for legal customers, which only encourages them to become the cartels’ newest buyers. It’s a vicious cycle.

The thefts amount to about $1 billion in losses annually, says Luis Miguel Labardini, an energy consultant at Marcos y Asociados and senior adviser to Pemex’s chief financial officer in the 1990s. “If Pemex were a public company, they would be in financial trouble just because of the theft of fuel,” he said to Zero Hedge. “It’s that bad.”

Azerbaijan

Like Nigeria, groups aiming to steal fuel from this country target crude resources. The criminal organizations that specialize in the practice fill up trucks of the illegally obtained raw goods and transport them to neighboring countries in trucks and trains—which do not have to be searched by customs officers due to the terms of trade agreements with neighboring countries, according to a report by Forbes.

Global Risk Insights notes that almost 60% of the Azeri economy operates underground, with untaxed and unregulated oil activities representing a large chunk of the dark underbelly of the national GDP.

Morocco

The border between regional rivals Morocco and Algeria was closed for security reasons in 1994 following an attack on the Atlas Asni Hotel in Marrakesh. Still, thousands of barrels make it across the border on donkeys, according to a report by The Guardian in 2013. That summer, Algerian authorities became resolved to end petrol trafficking on the desert border, resorting to the execution of the animals from a distance. In two instances, donkeys had even been blown up.

Morocco imports the vast majority of its fuel needs, since it has virtually no fuel reserves of its own. The cheap illegal fuel from its neighbor saves Rabat hundreds of thousands of dollars in import costs, so law enforcement turns a blind eye to the smuggling, which occurs far from official checkpoints.

Thailand

The differential between oil and gas prices in Malaysia and Thailand spurs the unauthorized transfer of the former’s fuel via land and sea routes through the Gulf of Thailand. Even after Malay authorities lowered gasoline subsidies, prices remained lower than those in its northern neighbor.

Most of the fuel movement occurs on a small scale in this region. For example, in February, law enforcement near the Thai-Malay border caught three cars with modifications to hold 500 liters of fuel in the vehicle’s bodies.

“Their modus operandi was to fill up petrol at stations near the Bukit Bunga bridge, Tanah Merah, using local vehicles before smuggling them into Thailand,” said the local chief of police. “We believe their activities had been going on for some time. Stern action will be taken against petrol stations found to be in cahoots with smugglers.”

Ships carrying refined oil and gas cargo have the options of selling their goods to other ships at sea. The carriers, most often disguised as fake fishing vessels, bring the remaining fuel to Thai shores, where the traffickers will find dozens of new costumers.

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How horses changed native cultures after 1492

Posted on April 2, 2018 by

[ This is a very brief overview of Peter Mitchel’s “Horse Nations”.  As oil and other fossils decline, will we will almost certainly return to using more horse “muscle power” as we did 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: Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

Mitchel, Peter.  2015. Horse Nations. The worldwide impact of the horse on indigenous societies post-1492. Oxford University Press.

To remind you of how important horses were to past tribes and civilizations, consider their use in cavalry battle, plowing, transporting goods, pulling carts and wagons, and so on.

The latest archeological evidence shows that horses were probably first domesticated in the mid-fourth-millennium BC in northern Kazakhstan for milk and meat.  Before that horses were one of many hunted animals.  When people first began riding horses is less certain, but certainly by the mid- to late third millennium BC.

This book covers the impact of the horse on cultures all over the world, though I was mainly interested in Native American impacts.  This is such a brief history though, since it wasn’t long before the near extinction of bison and European settlement ended the horse culture of the Plains and other regions with lots of pastureland could sustain thousands of horses.

Horses could radically change a culture.  They determined when and where people camped since they had to have winter fodder and shelter.  For example, in the 1740s Europeans observed that Comanche’s’ large herds forced them to live apart in order to find enough pasture and water for their horses.  To accomplish this, groups split up seasonally.  Before horses, bison were the main decider of where to camp.  By the early 1800s there were an average of four horses per person, and the highest priority, since bison and other essentials couldn’t be procured without horses.

Natives had their horses and dogs transport goods on a travois that they pulled along the ground, and lasted about a year. They could also be used to dry meat or provide shade.  The heaviest cargo was the Tipi.  A Blackfoot home was typically made of 12 to 14 bison hides and altogether (with pegs and lining) weigh about 70-85 kg, and the 19 poles to support it another 180 kg, with total weight of 250-265 kg pulled by 3 horses. Wealthier natives hauling larger lodges needed even more horses.  An average family of 8 living in one tipi probably needed at least 12 horses: 3 to carry the tipi, 2 for packing personal possessions, 3 ridden by women and children plus 2 more for men, and 2 kept for hunting bison.  When families didn’t have enough horses, they overloaded those they had, borrowed horses and became beholden to them, or used more dogs.

It may appear that the unfair distribution of wealth with the 1% owning nearly as much as the bottom 99% is new to modern civilization, but centuries ago some native Americans amassed far more wealth than other tribal members.  For example, about one in twenty Blackfoot members owned 50 or more horses while 25% of families had less than 6, half the ideal number.  The wealthy individuals could now haul around more material possessions, trade horses for more wives, process more bison hides to sell or trade for guns.   This made poorer men who wanted to marry keen to raid other tribes and steal their horses, escalating tribal warfare.  A man could also gain much prestige by giving away some of the horses obtained in a raid.  Poorer men became their laborers, herding and processing hides for the wealthy which enriched them further.  Since horses were lent out far more often than given away, some families began to grow increasingly rich and their wealth hereditary, and less likely to starve.

“Horse wars” became more common, with the fiercest tribes those that lived in the most northern areas where horses were much harder to keep in these harsh environments.

There was an ecological price to pay for this though, repeated use of good winter campsites caused overgrazing, degrading the ability of the land to sustain large numbers of horses in good health.

Pack animals

Experiments show that dogs can drag loads of 60 lbs (27 kg) up to 16.8 miles (27 km) a day, though less than that if temperatures go above 68 F (20 C).  Historic observations recorded loads of 66-100 lbs (30-45 kg) up to 50 km.

Horses can carry 5 times as much further than dogs, as well as pull much harder, with an extra advantage of not competing with people or dogs for food.

You might expect that would be the end of dogs, but they have their advantages.  Horses can’t eat while working, but to maintain their heavy weight a horse must eat about 2% of its mass a day, which means grazing most of the time. Horses also need extra food to survive the harsh winters of the Plains.

And all the horse sweat means double or triple as much water, and even more if a mare is lactating to feed their colt milk that comprises 5% of their body mass every day.  Water is especially problematic in the winter, because the dry grass they eat doesn’t provide them any water.  Often nearby water is polluted by waterfowl, has too much algae, and other problems that sicken horses.  So their better ability to move a lot of weight long distances has a price.  Dogs on the other hand are less liable to be stolen, reproduce faster, grow quicker, withstand cold winters better, and can eat snow to gain enough water.  They can share human shelters, need less training, spend little time eating, and usually don’t stray far.

Packhorses could carry up to 705 lbs (320 kg) at a time, and carried thinks like pemmican made of bison meat, fat, and berries that could last for years.  Mules could do the work of 2 horses and valued that way.

Horses vastly expanded trade.  First because horses were very valuable. Between the Nez Perces and Northern Shoshones, a horse was worth 2 bearskins, or ten sheepskins, or 4 bags of salmon. More goods could be hauled to trade further distances. Before horses most trade routes were along rivers with canoes hauling the gods.

Not all Indians adopted horses in to their culture.  Great Basin bands rejected them because they depended on plants to survive, not animals.  The aridity of the environment meant few could be kept, and there was a risk that horses would eat some of the plants and grasses they depended on.  It was feared they’d harm the land, which turned out to be true, ecological studies show horses reduced grass and shrub cover, impoverished reptile, rodent, and ant populations and diminished soil organic matter, shade, and precipitation interception, causing more erosion.  Destruction which continues to this day, since Nevada has more feral horses than any other state, tens of thousands of them, which are minimally managed and can’t be hunted.

 

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Preventing economic shock wave: Securing the port of Houston from a terrorist attack

Posted on March 29, 2018 by

oil tanker on fire

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[ An attack on (LNG) ships, oil tankers, or the Houston port facilities Houston would cause an oil shock, since a third of oil refining takes place there, and it’s also the second largest petrochemical center in the world.  An oil shock could lead to a financial shock since corrupt banking and Wall Street firms have prevented meaningful reforms. Plus we’re at the end of growth. How can a financial system designed for endless growth to pay back debt continue?  When peak oil is generally acknowledged, credit will dry up since no one will be able to grow in order to pay the debt back. Plus there’s over $200 trillion in unfunded liabilities.  All of this and more makes the global financial system very shaky.  Perhaps we’re only a terrorist attack, oil shock, hurricane, or earthquake away from another financial crash.

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 ]

House 112-41. August 24, 2011. Preventing economic shock wave: Securing the port of Houston from a terrorist attack. House of Representatives. 62 pages.

Excerpts:

Mr. MCCAUL. Osama bin Laden’s ‘‘war of a thousand cuts’’ on the U.S. economy has always been a key facet of his strategy. His personal files found in his lair at Abbottabad, Pakistan, revealed a brazen idea to blow up oil tankers. By doing so, he hoped to damage not only the United States, but the world’s economy. The picture of an oil tanker ablaze, like this one off the coast of Yemen, would indeed add fuel to our financial crisis. Al-Qaeda and its affiliates have a history of attacking ships. In January 2000, there was an attack on the USS Sullivan. In October of 2000, a small boat with explosives blew a hole in the side of the USS Cole, killing 17 of our sailors. In October 2002, a French oil tanker was set ablaze, killing and injuring several crew members in the Straits of Hormuz. In 2005, there was an attack (1) against the USS Ashland. In July of 2010, there was a terrorist attack on a Japanese oil tanker.

The Government Accountability Office in its report on terrorist attacks targeting energy tankers states the supply chain faces three types of threats: Suicide attacks with explosive-laden boats similar to the one used against the USS Cole in the Gulf of Aden; standoff attacks with weapons launched from a distance, such as rocket- propelled grenades and; third, an armed assault used by pirates off the coast of Africa.

Not only would a successful attack result in the loss of life and have a detrimental effect on the economy, it would also be a psychological blow and would have environmental consequences.

The Port of Houston is the energy capital of the United States, and it is a target-rich environment. The port stretches from Galveston Bay, past Texas City, across the Gulf Intercoastal Waterway, past Bayport and the San Jacinto Monument, and deep into the City of Houston. The port includes a ship channel, a 52-mile highway for shipping. It has a wide range of businesses and is not just one of the physically largest ports in America, but also a leader in the movement of cargo.

Most importantly, roughly 25% of the oil imports for America flow through the Port of Houston. Each day, 25 to 30 oil and chemical tankers move along the Houston Ship Channel, and 31% of America’s crude oil refining capacity takes place right here in this harbor. If catastrophe struck the port, there is little spare capacity to import and refine crude oil elsewhere in the country. In short, an attack on the Houston port would be crippling.

A 2007 study by the Houston Port Authority estimated that the port directly leads to $285 billion in National economic activity, 1.5 million jobs, and $16.2 million in Nation-wide tax revenues. The U.S. Coast Guard estimates that if the Houston Ship Channel were closed, it would have a direct negative impact on the economy of approximately $406 million per day.

Americans are now paying nearly $4 for a gallon of gas. Even an attack causing little damage could raise prices at the pump by a dollar or more. The Port of Houston is integral to America’s economy. We must ensure there are no gaps in our security at this port and ensure that terrorists do not wound our economy or harm our citizens by successfully carrying out an attack in Houston.

The U.S. Coast Guard, Texas State and county officials, and industry stakeholders associated with the Port of Houston, have done a great deal to protect this port and its shipping from a terrorist attack. The U.S. Coast Guard, who is present here today, and local police, as the Sheriff is here today, have access to a real-time satellite tracking system that pinpoints the exact size and location of every ship in and around Houston. The Coast Guard has heavily armed vessels patrolling the channel along with the Harris County Sheriff boats. Equally important, Texas established the Houston Ship Channel Security District, a unique industry-Government partnership, to assist protecting the facilities surrounding the ship channel.

The GAO has made several recommendations to mitigate terrorist attacks at ports. It recommends that all participants should plan for meeting the growing security workload as liquefied natural gas shipments increase; that ports should plan for dealing with the economic consequences of an attack; that terrorism and oil spill response plans at the National and local level should be integrated; and that performance metrics should be developed for an emergency response.

I do want to point out another issue, and that is that once the Panama Canal project is complete in 2004 to deepen the Canal, they will be able to accommodate vessels with drafts up to 50 feet. Unfortunately, the Houston Ship Channel cannot accommodate such large ships because it only is dredged to 45 feet. Larger ships will not be able to enter the Houston Ship Channel. Additionally, it is notable that if a ship were sunk in the middle of the Channel, it would effectively cut off commercial traffic in the port until the ship could be refloated and moved. The cost of a shutdown would damage this economy extremely.

Mr. KEATING.  We are going to examine the Port of Houston which links the city of Houston with over 1,053 ports in 203 countries and is, therefore, an excellent location to determine exactly what the best practices are in maritime security. The Port of Houston is one of the largest ports in the world, and it is home to the world’s largest concentration of petroleum facilities and $15 billion in petrochemical complex, which is ranked second in the entire world. Although much attention is given to aviation security since 9/11, and rightly so, we cannot ignore the very real potential of threats that exist in the maritime sector and the steps that must be taken to protect our ports and waterways from the threat of terrorist activity.

My district is also near the Port of Boston, which is the oldest running port in the Western hemisphere. So I am no stranger to the maritime environment, and I look forward to examining the similarities and differences between security measures here in Houston and those in the Port of Boston which supplies 90 percent of the Massachusetts heating and fossil fuels.

Both the Port of Houston and Boston house tankers carrying liquefied natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas, and oil. If a terrorist attack occurred at a port like that and resulted in the explosion of any of these volatile materials, the result would truly be catastrophic. Unfortunately, terrorists overseas have demonstrated that they have the ability to carry out these type of attacks, and the fact that they haven’t occurred here in our country should mean nothing to us. We should be vigilant and ready.

The Chairman mentioned the very real possibility in terms of the suicide boat attacks of the tanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen that killed one person, injured 17, and spilled 90,000 barrels of oil. In 2010, the Coast Guard approved shipments of liquefied natural gas from Yemen to our home area within 50 feet of residential neighborhoods, despite concerns that the cargo was coming from a country that has been identified as a terrorist safe haven and has previously experienced terrorist attack of their own.

The economic impact of the Limburg attack included a short- term collapse in international shipping in the Gulf of Aden and, ultimately, cost Yemen $3.8 million a month. If that type of attack ever occurred here and caused a massive oil spill, even larger than the one that occurred in Yemen, we may, once again, experience the type of economic damage that occurred in the aftermath of Deepwater Horizon and its oil spill.

According to Dun and Bradstreet, Deepwater Horizon’s oil spill negatively impacted 7.3 million active businesses in 5 Gulf States, 85% of which were small businesses with less than 10 employees. So this just isn’t a big corporation or big business concern, economically it affects even our small businesspeople. It also affected 34 million jobs, $5.2 trillion in sales, and the price of oil went up.

Mr. GREEN. I represent most of the Port of Houston. I also share the Port of Houston with Congressman Ted Poe and Pete Olson to the east, but where you are standing or sitting today is in our district. As you know, it is the No. 1 foreign tonnage port in the country. It is the lifeblood of the economy in southeast Texas, but I think in the whole country, because of what we produce in refined products and other products in our community. We have five refineries and more chemical plants than I can count. I think if you compare our port security to every other port that I know of in the country, we have done so much more because, again, of the volatility of the products we produce.

Mr. Stephen L. Caldwell, Director of Maritime and Coast Guard Issues, Homeland Security and Justice Issues, Government Accountability Office.  The infrastructure utilized through these transportation resources includes the Colonial Pipeline system, which is the largest petroleum product pipeline system in the Nation and is vital to the demands of energy throughout the Southern part of our Nation and the East Coast. The Nation’s economy and security are heavily dependent on oil, natural gas, and other energy commodities. Bolstering port security in Houston and throughout the country is of paramount concern. The Port of Houston is a 25-mile-long complex of public and private facilities located just a few hours’ sailing time from the Gulf of Mexico.

More than 17 million people live within 300 miles of the city, and approximately 60 million live within 700 miles. The danger is very real that we may be escorting a weapon of mass destruction to its target. For every mile along the Houston Ship Channel that dangerous cargo passes, an additional 2,000 people are at risk. Clearly, once the cargo reaches the city, the risk is at its greatest.

Highlights of GAO–11–883T, Why GAO Did This Study.  The Nation’s economy and security are heavily dependent on oil, natural gas, and other energy commodities. Al-Qaeda and other groups with malevolent intent have targeted energy tankers and offshore energy infrastructure because of their importance to the Nation’s economy and National security.

The U.S. Coast Guard—a component of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—is the lead Federal agency for maritime security, including the security of energy tankers and offshore energy infrastructure. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) also has responsibilities for preventing and responding to terrorist incidents. This testimony discusses the extent to which: (1) The Coast Guard and the FBI have taken actions to address GAO’s prior recommendations to prevent and respond to a terrorist incident involving energy tankers, and (2) the Coast Guard has taken actions to assess the security risks to offshore energy infrastructure and related challenges. The Coast Guard and the FBI have not yet taken action on a fourth recommendation to develop an operational plan to integrate the National spill and terrorism response plans. The Coast Guard has taken actions to assess the security risks to offshore energy infrastructure, which includes Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) facilities (facilities that are involved in producing oil or natural gas) and deep water ports (facilities used to transfer oil and natural gas from tankers to shore), but improvements are needed.

The Nation’s economy and security are heavily dependent on oil, natural gas, and other energy commodities. Nearly half of the Nation’s oil is transported from overseas by tankers. For example, about 49 percent of the Nation’s crude oil supply— one of the main sources of gasoline, jet fuel, heating oil, and many other petroleum products—was transported by tanker into the United States in 2009. The remaining oil and natural gas used in the United States comes from Canada by pipeline or is produced from domestic sources in areas such as offshore facilities in the Gulf of Mexico. With regard to these domestic sources, the area of Federal jurisdiction— called the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS)—contains an estimated 85 million barrels of oil, more than all onshore resources and those in shallower State waters combined.13 In addition, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP), a deepwater port, is responsible for transporting about 10 percent of imported oil into the United States.

As the lead Federal agency for maritime security, the Coast Guard seeks to mitigate many kinds of security challenges in the maritime environment. Doing so is a key part of its overall security mission and a starting point for identifying security gaps and taking actions to address them. Carrying out these responsibilities is a difficult and challenging task because energy tankers often depart from foreign ports and are registered in countries other than the United States, which means the United States has limited authority to oversee the security of such vessels until they enter U.S. waters.

Offshore energy infrastructure also presents its own set of security challenges because some of this infrastructure is located many miles from shore.

Energy tankers face risks from various types of attack. We identified three primary types of attack methods against energy tankers in our 2007 report, including suicide attacks, armed assaults by terrorists or armed bands, and launching a ‘‘standoff’’ missile attack using a rocket or some other weapon fired from a distance. In recent years, we have issued reports that discussed risks energy tankers face from terrorist attacks and attacks from other criminals, such as pirates. Terrorists have attempted—and in some cases carried out—attacks on energy tankers since September 11, 2001. To date, these attacks have included attempts to damage tankers or their related infrastructure at overseas ports. For example, in 2002, terrorists conducted a suicide boat attack against the French supertanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen, and in 2010, an incident involving another supertanker, the M/V M. Star, in the Strait of Hormuz is suspected to have been a terrorist attack

Our work on energy tankers identified three main places in which tankers may be at risk of an attack: (1) At foreign ports; (2) in transit, especially at narrow channels, or chokepoints; and (3) at U.S. ports. For example, foreign ports, where commodities are loaded onto tankers, may vary in their levels of security, and the Coast Guard is limited in the degree to which it can bring about improvements abroad when security is substandard, in part because its activities are limited by conditions set by host nations. In addition, while tankers are in transit, they face risks because they travel on direct routes that are known in advance and, for part of their journey, they may have to travel through waters that do not allow them to maneuver away from possible attacks. According to the Energy Information Administration, chokepoints along a route make tankers susceptible to attacks.

Further, tankers remain at risk upon arrival in the United States because of the inherent risks to port facilities. For example, port facilities are generally accessible by land and sea and are sprawling installations often close to population centers. Our work on energy tankers identified three main places in which tankers may be at risk of an attack: (1) At foreign ports; (2) in transit, especially at narrow channels, or chokepoints; and (3) at U.S. ports. For example, foreign ports, where commodities are loaded onto tankers, may vary in their levels of security, and the Coast Guard is limited in the degree to which it can bring about improvements abroad when security is substandard, in part because its activities are limited by conditions set by host nations. In addition, while tankers are in transit, they face risks because they travel on direct routes that are known in advance and, for part of their journey, they may have to travel through waters that do not allow them to maneuver away from possible attacks. According to the Energy Information Administration, chokepoints along a route make tankers susceptible to attacks. Further, tankers remain at risk upon arrival in the United States because of the inherent risks to port facilities. For example, port facilities are generally accessible by land and sea and are sprawling installations often close to population centers.

We will continue our broader work looking at the security of offshore energy infrastructure, including Coast Guard security inspections and other challenges.  This figure is based on the most recently available data for a full year from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.  The OCS is a designation for all submerged lands of which the subsoil and seabed are outside the territorial jurisdiction of a U.S. State, but within U.S. jurisdiction and control.

table 1 number of tankers attached by pirate 2006-2010

 

 

 

 

 

 

As shown in the table, pirate attacks against tankers have tripled in the last 5 years, and the incidence of piracy against tankers continues to rise. From January through June 2011, 100 tankers were attacked, an increase of 37% compared to tankers attacked from January through June 2010. Figure 1 shows one of the recent suspected pirate attacks. In addition, tankers are fetching increasing ransom demands from Somali pirates. Media reports indicate a steady increase in ransoms for tankers, from $3 million in January 2009 for the Saudi tanker Sirius Star, to $9.5 million in November 2010 for the South Korean tanker Samho Dream, to $12 million in June 2011 for the Kuwaiti tanker MV Zirku.

The U.S. Maritime Administration and the Coast Guard have issued guidance for commercial vessels to stay 200 miles away from the Somali coast. However, pirates have adapted and increased their capability to attack and hijack vessels to more than 1,000 miles from Somalia using mother ships, from which they launch smaller boats to conduct the attacks.

International Chamber of Commerce’s International Maritime Bureau operates a Piracy Reporting Center that collects data on pirate attacks worldwide. For more information on U.S. Government efforts to combat piracy, see GAO–10–856, which discusses the Coast Guard’s and other agencies’ progress in implementing efforts to prevent piracy attacks.

Risks to Offshore Energy Infrastructure.  Offshore energy infrastructure also faces risks from various types of attacks. For example, in 2004, a terrorist attacked an offshore oil terminal in Iraq using speedboats packed with explosives, killing two U.S. Navy sailors and a U.S. Coast Guardsman. Potential attack methods against offshore energy infrastructure identified by the Coast Guard or owners and operators include crashing an aircraft into it; using a submarine vessel, diver, or other means of attacking it underwater; ramming it with a vessel; and sabotage by an employee.

In addition to our work on energy tankers, we have recently completed work involving Coast Guard efforts to assess security risks and ensure the security of offshore energy infrastructure. Specifically, our work focused on two main types of offshore energy infrastructure that the Coast Guard oversees for security. The first type are facilities that operate on the OCS and are generally described as facilities temporarily or permanently attached to the subsoil or seabed of the OCS that engage in exploration, development, or production of oil, natural gas, or mineral resources.17 As of September 2010, there were about 3,900 such facilities

Based on Coast Guard records, we found that Coast Guard field units in several energy- related ports had been unable to accomplish many of the port security responsibilities called for in Coast Guard guidance. According to the data we obtained and our discussions with field unit officials, we determined that resource shortfalls were the primary reasons for not meeting these responsibilities. Furthermore, the Coast Guard had not yet developed a plan for addressing new liquefied natural gas (LNG) security resource demands.

According to Coast Guard officials, mobile offshore drilling units (MODUs), such as the Deepwater Horizon, do not generally pose a risk of a terrorist attack since there is little chance of an oil spill when these units are drilling and have not struck oil. However, the officials noted that there is a brief period of time when a drilling unit strikes a well, but the well has yet to be sealed prior to connecting it to a production facility. The Deepwater Horizon was in this stage when it resulted in such a large oil spill. During that period of time, MODUs could be at risk of a terrorist attack that could have significant consequences despite a facility not meeting the production or personnel thresholds. For example, such risks could involve the reliability of blowout preventer valves—specialized valves that prevent a well from spewing oil in the case of a blowout.

The 2009 National Infrastructure Protection Plan, 2010 DHS Quadrennial Review, and a National Research Council evaluation of DHS risk assessment efforts have determined that gaining a better understanding of network risks would help to understand multiplying consequences of a terrorist attack or simultaneous attacks on key facilities. Understanding ‘‘network’’ risks involves gaining a greater understanding of how a network is vulnerable to a diverse range of threats. Examining how such vulnerabilities create strategic opportunities for intelligent adversaries with malevolent intent is central to this understanding. For example, knowing what damage a malicious adversary could achieve by exploiting weaknesses in an oil-distribution network offers opportunities for improving the resiliency of the network within a given budget.

The findings of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill incident illustrate how examining networks or systems from a safety or engineering perspective can bring greater knowledge of how single facilities intersect with broader systems. The report noted that ‘‘complex systems almost always fail in complex ways’’ and cautioned that attempting to identify a single cause for the Deepwater Horizon incident would provide a dangerously incomplete picture of what happened. As a result, the report examined the Deepwater Horizon incident with an expansive view toward the role that industry and Government sectors played in assessing vulnerabilities and the impact the incident had on economic, social, and environmental systems

CAPTAIN JAMES H. WHITEHEAD III, SECTOR COMMANDER, SECTOR HOUSTON-GALVESTON, U.S. COAST GUARD. We also rely heavily on our port partners to be the ‘‘eyes on the water.’’ With an average of 350 daily tow movements in the Houston Ship Channel and more than 100 waterfront facilities with a vigilant security presence, marine industry stakeholders are well-positioned to recognize when things are out of the ordinary and serve as a valuable resource by diligently reporting breaches of security and suspicious activity.

Houston handles over 50 percent of all containerized cargo arriving at Gulf of Mexico ports. Additionally, more than 50 percent of the gasoline used in the United States is refined in this area. With more than 100 petrochemical waterfront facilities, Houston is the second-largest such complex in the world. Major corporations such as Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Saudi ARAMCO, Stolt Nielson, Odfjell USA Inc., Sea River and Kirby Marine have National or international headquarters in Houston.

The Port of Houston accommodates a large number of tankers carrying crude oil, refined products and chemical cargoes. With approximately 9,600 deep draft ship arrivals each year, the Coast Guard maintains a very extensive Port State Control program in the Houston-Galveston area. The Port State Control program ensures the safe carriage of hazardous materials in bulk. Because over 90 percent of cargo bound for the United States is carried by foreign-flagged ships, this National program prevents operation of substandard foreign ships in U.S. waters.

SHERIFF ADRIAN GARCIA, HARRIS COUNTY, TEXAS.  We have learned about Osama bin Laden, how he had some of the same information showing how important the ship channel is and the Port of Houston is. No doubt would-be terrorists in the United States and foreign countries know this, too. Next time they scheme to kill Americans and disrupt the energy supply of Planet Earth, they may think about targeting the very ground that we are on today.

We keep our electronic eyes trained on the ship channel 24/7 with camera sensors, radar, and other technology. Data from these high technology devices is fed into a monitoring center that we operate on the other side of town 24/7. We help the Coast Guard escort high-value asset vessels. We join the Coast Guard and CBP in boarding ships and scanning ship hulls, and although several operations are highly sensitive, I can tell you that our patrols on land and water have responded to calls for service such as suspicious persons in vehicles, security zone breaches by personal water craft, sunken boats, downed power lines, industrial accidents, security card violations at plant gates, and others.

We are also in touch with pipeline companies, railroads, and emergency planners.

In a very different kind of pioneering outreach, I have established what we call the Incidence Response Forum. We use it to engage the widespread Middle Eastern and South Asian communities in the Houston area. This is a two-way communication pathway for law enforcement to share information with key civic and religious leaders. The spirit in which we started this program several months ago was expressed very well in a Homeland Security memo issued by the Federal Government within the last 3 weeks. It is titled, ‘‘Empowering Local Partners To Prevent Violent Extremism In The U.S.’’ Here is a brief excerpt that refers to the attempts by terrorist groups to recruit American residents:

‘‘Countering radicalization to violence is frequently best achieved by engaging and empowering individuals and groups at the local level to build resilience against violent extremism. Law enforcement plays an essential role in keeping us safe, but so too does engagement and partnership with communities.’’

But our Incident Response Forum has other uses. By sharing information with these constituents, we help protect them against misguided attacks that may stem from terrorist acts anywhere in the world. These leaders can also report hate crimes, help calm tensions that may arise in ethnic communities and provide feedback about the effectiveness of law enforcement by the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. We are conducting crisis response exercises with this group.

JAMES T. EDMONDS, CHAIRMAN, PORT OF HOUSTON AUTHORITY.  The country’s largest refinery, with a refining capacity of 567,000 barrels a day, is located on the channel. From Houston, refined energy products are delivered over the infrastructure that transports them to every market east of the Rocky Mountains through the networks of roads, rails, and pipelines originating in Houston. This includes the 5,519-mile Colonial Pipeline system, which is the largest petroleum product pipeline system in the Nation and is a vital energy artery for the South and East Coast.

CAPTAIN WILLIAM J. DIEHL (U.S. COAST GUARD, RET.), PRESIDENT, GREATER HOUSTON PORT BUREAU, INC.  The district’s infrastructure improvements include wireless and fiber optic wire communication systems with integrated analytical and intelligence video software, surveillance and detection cameras, night vision, motion detection technology, and additional technology components such as radar, sonar, and sensor packages. We have already added 112 cameras, 69 handheld radiation detectors, two marine side-scan sonar units, four patrol boats, seven patrol trucks, five radar sites, and an underwater remotely- operated vehicle to our regional security picture.

The only way we are going to get there is through our ports. To keep our ports vibrant we need trade agreements, reliable intermodal transportation (i.e., roads, rail, & barge infrastructure) and dredging. Of these three, dredging is the most pressing. We are choking our global competitiveness by not maintaining our ship channels. Currently 8 of our 10 largest ports are not at their authorized width or depths. We can talk today about securing our ports, but if we cannot get ships in or out, then that conversation will not mean much. Needless to say, at the Port Bureau, we are dedicated advocates for

Mr. CALDWELL. This is basically an illustration of the energy supply for the Nation, and when you look at this map, it really brings out the fact that the majority of the energy for the Nation comes right out of here. I know the ExxonMobil refinery refines about 31 percent of the Nation’s energy. If that was taken out by a small vessel like this one, you can imagine the long-term consequences, economic. It could cripple this Nation from an energy standpoint and an economic standpoint. Can both of you speak to that issue in terms of how important this port really is?

Mr. EDMONDS. Something in the neighborhood of 49% of the refined products used in this country every day come from the Houston Ship Channel industries and an eighth of the gasoline consumed every day. So it would be devastating to the economy of the country. The tragedy is you don’t even have to blow up an Exxon. You can just shut off access to the waterway and you shut down all that refining capability. There is something leaving this port 24 hours a day through a pipeline or railcar or truck. So there is all kinds of arteries of movement, and you damage any one of those and that has a devastating economic impact.

Captain DIEHL.  One-third of our economy is associated with global trade, and that trade comes and goes through our ports. Ninety- five to  99 percent of it by tonnage probably comes in and out of our ports by ships. So it is not only the Port of Houston, but it is all our major ports are key to our economy. You shut it down; we are going to start heading towards a recession. What makes us unique as Houston is these refineries. You can shut down a container port and move up the coast to the next container port to deliver those boxes. You can’t package up the refinery and move it. You can’t take those pipelines and pull them out of the ground and shift them over to New Orleans. That is what is unique.

Captain WHITEHEAD. In fact, 2 days from now we have a Yemeni  LNG tanker. We have one coming into the Port Arthur area. Although we don’t have any LNG tankers come into this area, the Houston Ship Channel, but we do have them come into both Freeport, Lake Charles, and Port Arthur. With those, we do take additional measures. We utilize our MSSTs. Our maritime security safety teams assist us in securing the—as well as we work with our port partners when they come in as well to secure the port, make sure that we board the vessel before it even comes in, do security sweep, escort the vessel in. So we take additional security measures with LNG tankers that come into port.

Mr. EDMONDS. Because of our geography and because of weather patterns, we are hurricane prone. So for many, many years we have had a very sophisticated hurricane plan. After 9/11, that was our baseline to begin to build off of to try to apply security issues to that plan because they are very much interrelated. I will say to you that in the most recent situation with Ike, the hurricane plan worked very well. There is a schedule that, as a storm begins to come, we begin to get ships out of the channel, begin to batten down everything until basically everything is secured, including container of wharf grains. Everything is secured and everything is gone or tied down, and it worked very well for us in Ike.

Additional reading

  • GAO, Maritime Security: Federal Efforts Needed to Address Challenges in Preventing and Responding to Terrorist Attacks on Energy Commodity Tankers, GAO–08–141 (Washington, DC: Dec. 10, 2007).
  • GAO, Maritime Security: Actions Needed to Assess and Update Plan and Enhance Collaboration Among Partners Involved in Countering Piracy off the Horn of Africa, GAO– 10–856 (Washington, DC: Sept. 24, 2010);
  • GAO, Maritime Security: Updating U.S. Counterpiracy Action Plan Gains Urgency as Piracy Escalates off the Horn of Africa, GAO–11–449T (Washington, DC: Mar. 15, 2011).
  • GAO, Maritime Security: DHS Progress and Challenges in Key Areas of Port Security, GAO– 10–940T (Washington, DC: July 21, 2010).
  • GAO, Standards for Internal Control in the Federal Government, GAO/AIMD–00–21.3.1 (Washington, DC: November 1999).

 

 

 

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Wells Fargo created bogus bank accounts and credit cards without customer knowledge, billed them millions

Posted on March 26, 2018 by

[ I know this is “old news” from 2016, but the drawback of newspapers is that stories aren’t repeated.  What an insane level of corruption we’ve reached! Just look at the financial book list I haven’t yet posted at the bottom. Yet not one banker or wall street firm member went to jail after the mortgage bubble and other illegal actions after the financial crash in 2008.  Get your money out of the big banks before the Republicans shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and there’s no one to protect you.

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:  KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity]

Hongo, H. September 8, 2016. Wells Fargo Is in Trouble for Charging Customers Millions for Bogus Accounts. gizmodo.com

On Thursday, federal regulators announced that they were slapping Wells Fargo with a $100 million penalty after discovering employees created hundreds of thousands of bank accounts and credit cards in customers’ names without their knowledge, costing account holders an estimated $2.5 million in fees.

According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 5,300 Wells Fargo employees have been fired for using “improper sales practices,” which included transferring customers’ funds into newly created, unauthorized accounts to meet incentivized sales goals. In other cases, employees secretly applied for credit cards, signed up for online banking and activated debit cards in customers’ names.

In a 2013 L.A. Times story credited with first uncovering the scheme, former Wells Fargo employees claimed that managers coached workers on how to artificially raise sales numbers to meet the “relentless pressure” of sales quotas:

“They’d just tell the customers: ‘You’re getting a credit card,’” [former banker Erick] Estrada said. He admitted to opening unneeded accounts, though never without a customer’s knowledge, he said.

When customers complained about the unwanted credit cards, the branch manager would blame a computer glitch or say the card had been requested by someone with a similar name, Estrada said.

One former branch manager who worked in the Pacific Northwest described her dismay at discovering that employees had talked a homeless woman into opening six checking and savings accounts with fees totaling $39 a month.

“It’s all manipulation. We are taught exactly how to sell multiple accounts,” the former manager said. “It sounds good, but in reality it doesn’t benefit most customers.”

“This widespread practice gave the employees credit for opening the new accounts, allowing them to earn additional compensation and to meet the bank’s sales goals,” said the CFPB in a press release. “Consumers, in turn, were sometimes harmed because the bank charged them for insufficient funds or overdraft fees because the money was not in their original accounts.”

An analysis commissioned by Wells Fargo found that some 1,534,280 deposit accounts and 565,443 credit card applications may have been created without customers’ knowledge since 2011.

In addition to the $100 million fine—the largest handed out by the CFPB since it was created after the 2008 financial crisis—Wells Fargo has agreed to conduct a comprehensive, independent review of sales practices and pay refunds to all affected customers, who will not be required to take action. At least one former financial regulator, however, questioned whether the penalty was large enough for a bank worth over $250 billion.

“It sounds like a big number, but for a bank the size of Wells Fargo, it isn’t really,” David Vladeck, the former director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, told CNN.

In a statement on Thursday, Wells Fargo said it has set aside $5 million for refunds to customers, 100,000 of whom have already been repaid.

“Wells Fargo is committed to putting our customers’ interests first 100% of the time, and we regret and take responsibility for any instances where customers may have received a product that they did not request,” said the bank.

Financial corruption booklist (in progress)

Corporations

Financial cycles and the History of Stock Exchanges

  • The Coffee Trader. David Liss.
  • Reminiscences of a Stock Operator: With New Commentary and Insights on the Life and Times of Jesse Livermore. Edwin Lefèvre.
  • Mobs, Messiahs, & Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance & Politics. William Bonner.
  • Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation. Edward Chancellor

Fraud and Corruption on Wall Street

  • Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street. Michael Lewis
  • Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire. Matt Taibbi
  • The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, & Prosperity—& What We Can Do about It. Les Leopold
  • Catching the Wolf of Wall Street: More Incredible True Stories of Fortunes, Schemes, Parties, and Prison. Jordan Belfort
  • Fiasco: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader. Frank Partnoy
  • Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets. Frank Partnoy
  • Den of Thieves. James B. Stewart
  • Young money. Inside the hidden world of Wall Street’s post-crash recruits. Kevin Roose
  • When Genius Failed: The Rise & Fall of Long-Term Capital Management. Roger Lowenstein
  • The Predators’ Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the Junk Bond Raiders. Connie Bruck
  • A Fool and His Money: The Odyssey of an Average Investor . John Rothchild
  • Serpent on the Rock: Crime, Betrayal and the Terrible Secrets of Prudential Bache. Kurt Eichenwald

High Frequency Trading

  • Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market. Scott Patterson.
  • Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt. Michael Lewis

Debt

  • The New Empire of Debt: The Rise & Fall of an Epic Financial Bubble. William Bonner
  • O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. John Lanchester

Accounting firm corruption

Final Accounting: Ambition, Greed and the Fall of Arthur Andersen. Barbara Ley Toffler

Insurance Deceit and Fraud

  • Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claim and What You Can Do About It. Jay M. Feinman

 

The Banksters: Savings and Loan Crisis

  • Big Money Crime: Fraud & Politics in the Savings & Loan Crisis. Kitty Calavita

Real Estate Bubble

  • Reckless Endangerment
  • Housing Bubble Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon by Gretchen Morgenson

Banking

  • All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power by Nomi Prins
  • The unauthorized biography. Felix Martin.
  • Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves by Andrew Ross Sorkin
  • Catching the Wolf of Wall Street: More Incredible True Stories of Fortunes, Schemes, Parties, and Prison by Jordan Belfort
  • Betrayal: The Life and Lies of Bernie Madoff by Andrew Kirtzman
  • Ponzi’s Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend by Mitchell Zuckoff
  • Stolen Without A Gun: Confessions from inside history’s biggest accounting fraud – the collapse of MCI Worldcom by Walter Pavlo
  • Unaccountable: How the Accounting Profession Forfeited a Public Trust by Mike Brewster
  • Blood on the Street: The Sensational Inside Story of How Wall Street Analysts Duped a Generation of Investors by Charles Gasparino
  • Wall Street Versus America: A Muckraking Look at the Thieves, Fakers, and Charlatans Who Are Ripping You Off by Gary Weiss
  • Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and unknowns in the dazzling world of derivatives by Satyajit Das
  • Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence by Bruce H. Mann
  • Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das
  • Reform of the financial system requires changing our political system Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress–and a Plan to Stop It by Lawrence Lessig
  • Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America by Charles H. Ferguson
Posted in Banking | Comments Off on Wells Fargo created bogus bank accounts and credit cards without customer knowledge, billed them millions

We Must Preserve The Earth’s Dwindling Resources For My 5 Children

Posted on March 23, 2018 by

Brenda Milford. June 28, 2006. We Must Preserve The Earth’s Dwindling Resources For My 5 Children. The Onion. Vol 44 Issue 27

“As we move into the 21st century, it is our responsibility to think of the future of the earth—not for ourselves, but for those who will inherit what my husband and I leave behind when we’re gone. If we do not join together and do what’s best for this, our only planet, there may not be an environment left in which my five children, and their 25 children’s 125 children, can grow up and raise large upper-middle-class families of their own.

Nothing less than the preservation of my descendents’ lifestyle itself is at stake.

Imagine a world devoid of pristine wilderness for my progeny to explore on the weekends in the sport-utility-vehicles of the future, leaving my youngest son, Dylan, with nowhere to blow off steam on off-road adventures. Imagine a world in which my beautiful middle son, Connor, is denied his twice-daily half-hour hot showers because of water shortages. Picture what it would be like for my oldest boy Asher, preparing to start his first semester at Stanford, to have to go without basic amenities such as cable television, satellite radio, central air, or massage chairs, all because of the shortsighted squandering by his parents’ generation of our non-renewable energy sources today.

Though it seems like a far-off nightmare, this terrible vision is all too possible. Would you want to live in a world where my five children had to endure such horrible deprivations? I know I wouldn’t.

If we don’t take action now, my daughters Kimmy and Jenna may not be able to blow-dry their hair for 45 minutes to an hour each morning, nor may my future sons-in-law cut their grass atop enormous, diesel-powered riding mowers. In fact, they may not even have lawns—at least not the lush, verdant kind that requires constant watering and pesticide treatment. It’s conceivable that one day my five children’s spacious yards may be entirely composed of synthetic Astroturf, or—God forbid—those tacky wood chips my sister in Arizona uses.

In a cruel irony, those wood chippings will get more expensive as the world’s timber supply continues to shrink.

Encroaching urban sprawl has already begun to spoil the view from the porch of our beautiful new summer home on Lake Wakenaka. Sadly, the view from the bay windows of our first summer home, the one we built at our Woodland Acres property six years earlier, has already been ruined by such unchecked development. Must my children grow up in a world where only one of their parents’ summer homes is surrounded by the beauty of nature? It’s unthinkable, I know, but we must face facts.

This is to say nothing of the deleterious impact the destruction of our global ecosystems will have on the wildlife my family enjoys hunting. Biodiversity is crucial to another 100 years of deer-, quail-, duck-, bear-, moose-, bobcat-, and bison-shooting summer recreation for my descendants.

We must take steps immediately to devise safe, alternative energy sources that my future offspring can safely consume. If we don’t develop new fuels now, there will be none left for those who issue from my loins to burn and continue to burn for all time. I don’t want my 625-odd great-grandchildren to have to wait 20 or 30 precious seconds for their toilets to flush. I don’t want their 3,125 children to live in a hellish society where they cannot own their own snowmobiles. And I shudder to think that my 15,625 great-great-great-grandchildren may not be able to have TVs in every room that they can leave on all day and all night. Is it our right to deny my progeny of their gargantuan RVs and motorboats, as well? Of course not.

We cannot, in good conscience, lay such a burden on tomorrow’s generations of Melfords. My children are the future. And at the end of the day, isn’t it family—my family—that truly matters?”

Posted in Population | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren (excerpts)

Posted on March 20, 2018 by

Preface. Here are some excerpts to give you a taste of how delightful and well written this book is, hope it inspires young women to go into science.  And something good to read when the grid goes down…

Warning: these are kindle notes meant to give you a sampling of her writing and how hard it is for a woman to succeed in science, plus interesting info about plants, trees, and other topics.

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

Hope Jahren. 2017. Lab Girl. Vintage.

PEOPLE LOVE THE OCEAN. People are always asking me why I don’t study the ocean, because, after all, I live in Hawaii. I tell them that it’s because the ocean is a lonely, empty place. There is six hundred times more life on land than there is in the ocean, and this fact mostly comes down to plants. The average ocean plant is one cell that lives for about twenty days. The average land plant is a two-ton tree that lives for more than one hundred years. The mass ratio of plants to animals in the ocean is close to four, while the ratio on land is closer to a thousand. Plant numbers are staggering: there are eighty billion trees just within the protected forests of the western United States. The ratio of trees to people in America is well over two hundred.

***

People don’t know how to make a leaf, but they know how to destroy one. In the last ten years, we’ve cut down more than fifty billion trees. One-third of the Earth’s land used to be covered in forest. Every ten years, we cut down about 1% of this total forest, never to be regrown. That’s a land area about the size of France. One France after another, for decades, has been wiped from the globe. That’s more than one trillion leaves that are ripped from their source of nourishment every single day. And it seems like nobody cares. But we should care.

***

The vast emotional distances between the individual members of a Scandinavian family are forged early and reinforced daily. Can you imagine growing up in a culture where you can never ask anyone anything about themselves? Where “How are you?” is considered a personal question that one is not obligated to answer? Where you are trained to always wait for others to first mention what is troubling them, even as you are trained to never mention what is troubling you? It must be a survival skill left over from the old Viking days, when long silences were required to prevent unnecessary homicides during the long, dark winters when quarters were close and supplies were dwindling.

***

When you go into a forest you probably tend to look up at the plants that have grown so much taller than you ever could. You probably don’t look down, where just beneath your single footprint sit hundreds of seeds, each one alive and waiting. They hope against hope for an opportunity that will probably never come.

When you are in the forest, for every tree that you see, there are at least a hundred more trees waiting in the soil, alive and fervently wishing to be.

The first real leaf is built using only a vague genetic pattern with nearly endless room for improvisation. Close your eyes and think of the points on a holly leaf, the star of a maple leaf, a heart-shaped ivy leaf, a triangular fern frond, the fingery leaves of a palm. Consider that there can easily be a hundred thousand lobed leaves on a single oak tree and that no two of them are exactly the same; in fact, some are easily twice as big as others. Every oak leaf on Earth is a unique embellishment of a single rough and incomplete blueprint.

Light equals life for a plant. As a tree grows, its lower branches become obsolete, too shaded by the newer ones above to be of any further use. A willow tree loads these used branches with reserves, fattens and strengthens them and then dehydrates their base such that they snap off cleanly and fall into the river. Carried away on the water, one out of millions of these sticks will wash up onto a bank and replant itself, and before long that very same tree is now growing elsewhere. What was once a twig will be forced to function as a trunk, stranded under conditions it had never considered. Every willow tree features more than ten thousand such snap-off points; it sheds 10 percent of its branches in this way every single year. Over the decades one—maybe two—of these will successfully take root downriver and grow into a genetically identical doppelgänger.

THE LIFE OF A DECIDUOUS TREE is ruled by its annual budget. Every year, during the short months from March to July, it must grow an entire new canopy of leaves. If it fails to meet its quota this year, some competitor will grow into a corner of its previous space and thus initiate the long, slow process by which the tree will eventually lose its foothold and die. If a tree expects to be alive ten years hence, it has no alternative but to succeed this year, and every year after.

Let’s consider a modest, unremarkable tree—the one living on your street, perhaps. A decorative maple tree, about the height of a streetlight—not a majestic maple reaching its full height in the forest—a demure neighborhood tree that’s only one-quarter the height of its regal counterpart. When the sun is directly overhead, the little maple in our example casts a shadow about the size of a parking space. However, if we pluck off all the leaves and lay them flat, side by side, they would cover three parking spaces. By suspending each leaf separately, the tree has stacked its surface area into a sort of ladder for light to fall down. Looking up, you notice that the leaves at the top of any tree are smaller, on average, than the leaves at the bottom. This allows sunlight to be caught near the base whenever the wind blows and parts the upper branches. Look again and you’ll notice that leaves low in the canopy are of a darker green; they contain more of the pigment that helps each leaf absorb sunshine, allowing them to harvest the weaker rays that penetrate shade. When building foliage, a tree must budget for each leaf individually and allocate for each position relative to the other leaves. A good business plan will allow our tree to triumph as the largest and longest-living being on your street. But it ain’t easy, and it ain’t cheap.

The leaves on our little maple, all taken together, weigh thirty-five pounds. Every ounce therein must be pulled from the air or mined from the soil—and quickly—over the course of a few short months. From the atmosphere, a plant gains carbon dioxide, which it will make into sugar and pith. Thirty-five pounds of maple leaves may not taste sweet to you and me, but they actually contain enough sucrose to make three pecan pies.

The pithy skeleton within the leaves contains enough cellulose to make almost 300 sheets of paper.

In order to accumulate all of the soil nutrients that 35 pounds of leaves require, our tree must first absorb and then evaporate at least eight thousand gallons of water from the soil. That’s enough to fill a tanker truck. That’s enough to keep 25 people alive for a year.

***

The NSF is a U.S. government agency, and the money that it provides for scientific research comes from tax dollars. In 2013, the budget of the NSF was $7.3 billion. For comparison, the federal budget allocation for the Department of Agriculture—the people responsible for supervising food imports and exports—was about three times that amount. Each year, the U.S. government spends twice as much on its space program as it does on all of its other scientists put together: NASA’s 2013 budget was more than $17 billion. And these discrepancies are nothing compared with the disparity between research and military spending. The Department of Homeland Security, created in response to the events of September 11, 2001, commands an annual budget that is fully five times larger than that of the entire NSF, while the Department of Defense’s mere “discretionary” budget comes to more than sixty times that sum.

***

One side effect of curiosity-driven research is the inspiring of young people. Researchers generally love their calling to excess, and delight in nothing better than teaching others to love it also; as with all creatures driven by love, we can’t help but breed. You may have heard that America doesn’t have enough scientists and is in danger of “falling behind” (whatever that means) because of it. Tell this to an academic scientist and watch her laugh. For the last thirty years, the amount of the U.S. annual budget that goes to non-defense-related research has been frozen. From a purely budgetary perspective, we don’t have too few scientists, we’ve got far too many, and we keep graduating more each year. America may say that it values science, but it sure as hell doesn’t want to pay for it. Within environmental science in particular, we see the crippling effects that come from having been resource-hobbled for decades: degrading farmland, species extinction, progressive deforestation…The list goes on and on.

$7.3 billion sounds like a lot of money. Remember that this figure must support all curiosity-driven science—not just biology, but also geology, chemistry, mathematics, physics, psychology, sociology, and the more esoteric forms of engineering and computer science as well. Because my work is about learning why plants have been so successful for so long, my research falls within the NSF’s paleobiology program. In 2013, the amount of funding that paleobiology gave out for research was $6 million. This is the entire annual budget for all of the paleontology research that happens in America, and the dinosaur-diggers predictably secure the lion’s share.

 

***

A vine that we know by the name “kudzu” arrived in Philadelphia as a gift from Japan to honor the 1876 centennial. Since that time kudzu has expanded to cover a total land area the size of Connecticut. Thick ribbons of kudzu embroider thousands of miles of highways in the American South. Kudzu thrives within the roadside ditches where we throw our beer cans and cigarette butts.

***

When I was separated from the lab, attending some seminar or conference, it was the series of twisted e-mails from Bill that held me fast to what I loved about my job, even while trapped with pasty middle-aged men who regarded me as they would a mangy stray that had slipped in through an open basement window. There’s a place somewhere where I am part of the in-group, I would remind myself as I stood alone with my buffet dish in some Marriott ballroom, apparently radiating cooties and so excluded from the back-slapping stories of building mass spectrometers during the good old days.

***

Each time I returned to Georgia Tech from traveling, I tried to throw myself into working even harder. I began to set aside one night a week as an all-nighter (Wednesdays) in order to complete the paperwork that went unattended while I served on committees tasked with documenting the potential obsolescence of chalkboards on campus. I learned that female professors and departmental secretaries are the natural enemies of the academic world, as I was privileged to overhear discussions of my sexual orientation and probable childhood traumas from ten to ten-thirty each morning through the paper-thin walls of the break room located adjacent to my office. By these means I learned that although I was in desperate need of a girdle, I was better off than one of the other female professors, who would never lose all that baby weight by working all of the time.

As hard as I worked, I just couldn’t get ahead. Showers became a biweekly ritual. My breakfast and lunch were reduced to a couple of cans of Ensure from the cases that I kept under my desk, and in desperation, I once threw one of Reba’s Milk-Bones in my purse so that I could gum it during a seminar, trying to keep peoples’ attention off of what I knew would be my growling stomach. The acne that I had never wrestled with as a teenager decided to make up for lost time with a magnificent debut, and I passed the workday biting my nails with ferocity. My brief forays into romance had convinced me that I would be relegated to love’s bargain bin; none of the single guys that I met could understand why I worked all of the time, and nobody wanted to listen to me talk about plants for hours, anyway. Everything about my life looked pretty well messed up compared with how adulthood had always been advertised to me.

***

Karen left us for the summer in order to accept a coveted internship at the Miami zoo, only to find that most of what zookeepers actually do amounts to pretty routine hygiene maintenance, and that the only thing worse than an animal that doesn’t appreciate this is one who does. Placed upon the lowest rung of the ladder, she was sent to work in the primate enclosure. Karen’s job was to apply anti-inflammatory cream to monkey genitalia, which were in need of daily soothing due to their constant and indiscriminate use. Once the monkeys had recognized her as their new vehicle of relief, they began mobbing her when she entered the room. Bill and I could hardly absorb this story when she told it to us, it was just too wonderful, but it got even better. It turns out that it is a hard-hearted monkey indeed that remains unmoved during a good slathering of bacitracin, and most monkeys proved considerably more responsive to her reluctant manipulations.

The zoo had fitted Karen with a protective plastic shell meant to discourage her charges from clutching on to her and wildly humping her frame, but it wasn’t 100 percent effective. On the upside, her many animal behavior classes had provided her with the intuition necessary to condition these monkeys to the concept of a glory hole; the downside was that seeing them lined up and “standing at attention” through a chain-link fence first thing in the morning was enough to make her rethink a career in veterinary medicine altogether. She returned to our lab after the internship having decided that maybe botany wasn’t so boring after all.

***

A CACTUS DOESN’T LIVE in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn’t killed it yet. Any plant that you find growing in the desert will grow a lot better if you take it out of the desert. The desert is like a lot of lousy neighborhoods: nobody living there can afford to move. Too little water, too much light, temperature too high: the desert has all of these inconveniences ratcheted up to their extremes. Biologists don’t much study the desert, since plants represent three things to human society: food, medicine, and wood. You’ll never get any of those things from the desert. Thus a desert botanist is a rare scientist indeed and eventually becomes inured to the misery of her subjects. Personally, I don’t have the stomach to deal with such suffering day in and day out.

In the desert, life-threatening stresses aren’t a crisis; they are a normal feature of the life cycle. Extreme stress is part of the very landscape, not something a plant can avoid or ameliorate. Survival depends on the cactus’s ability to tolerate deathly grim dry spells over and over again. If you meet a barrel cactus that’s tall enough to touch your knee, it is likely to be more than twenty-five years old. Cactuses grow slowly in the desert—during the years when they do grow, that is.

A barrel cactus has folds like an accordion, and deep within these folds are the pores that let air in and water evaporate out. When it becomes very dry, a cactus sheds its roots to prevent the parched soil from sucking all the water back out of it. A cactus can live for four days with no roots and still continue to grow. If there is still no rain, the cactus begins to contract, sometimes for months, or until all the folds have closed together. Its spines form a dense and dangerous fur protecting what is now a hard, rootless ball of plant. In this posture, the cactus can sit without growing and await rain for years, while continuously punished by the sun. When it finally rains, the cactus will either return to full functioning within twenty-four hours or show itself to be dead.

***

When we met Ed in front of the building that housed his laboratory, it was mid-morning on a Tuesday. He took us inside and introduced us all around, proudly telling people that he’d known me since I was a new student, that I was now a professor doing great things.

He told about how he had gone on a soils trip with me and I had slept in my car because I didn’t want to lose valuable daylight hours setting up a tent. He told them that I was the hardest-working student he’d ever seen and that he knew I was special from the first time that he met me.

After he finished, I looked up at Ed and said, “Thank you.” Then I cringed as, one by one, the people to whom I was being introduced sized me up and down, each of them wearing a look with which I was very familiar. It was the look that says, “Her? That can’t be right; there’s a mistake here somewhere.” Public and private organizations all over the world have studied the mechanics of sexism within science and have concluded that they are complex and multifactorial. In my own small experience, sexism has been something very simple: the cumulative weight of constantly being told that you can’t possibly be what you are.

***

Remaining stationary and naked outside in the below-freezing weather for three months is a death sentence for almost every living thing on Earth, except for the many species of trees that have been doing it for a hundred million years or more. Spruce, pine, birch, and the other species that blanket Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia endure up to six months of frozen weather each year.

In order to prepare for their long winter journey, trees undergo a process known as “hardening.” First the permeability of the cell walls increases drastically, allowing pure water to flow out while concentrating the sugars, proteins, and acids left behind. These chemicals act as a potent antifreeze, such that the cell can now dip well below freezing and the fluid inside of it will still persist in a syrupy liquid form. The spaces between the cells are now filled with an ultra-pure distillate of cell water, so pure that there are no stray atoms upon which an ice crystal could nucleate and grow. Ice is a three-dimensional crystal of molecules, and freezing requires a nucleation spot—some chemical aberration upon which the pattern may start to build. Pure water devoid of any such site may be “super-cooled” to forty degrees below zero and still remain an ice-free liquid. It is in this “hardened” state, with some cells packed full of chemicals and others sectioned off for purity, that a tree embarks on its winter journey, standing unmoved through the frost, sleet, and blizzards of the season. These trees do not grow during winter.

The vast majority of northern trees prepare well for their wintertime journey, and death due to frost damage is extremely rare. A chilly autumn brings on the same hardening as a balmy one, because the trees do not take their cue from the changing temperature. It is the gradual shortening of the days, sensed as a steady decrease in light during each twenty-four-hour cycle, that triggers hardening.

AGRONOMISTS AND FORESTERS have charted the growth of hundreds of plant species, starting in 1879 when a German scientist noticed that the increasing weight of a corn plant, when graphed against the days of its development, resulted in a line with a curious lazy-S shape. These scientists had weighed their potted plants daily, and for the entire first month they saw very little growth. Then, during the second month, the plants’ weights shot up sharply; they doubled in size each week until they reached their maxima at three months of age. The scientists were then surprised to see the weights drop off again, and by the time they began to flower and produce seed, the plants weighed only about 80 percent of what they had been at their largest.

There are botany textbooks that contain pages and pages of growth curves, but it is always the lazy-S-shaped ones that confuse my students the most. Why would a plant decrease in mass just when it is nearing its plateau of maximum productivity? I remind them that this shrinking has proved to be a signal of reproduction. As the green plants reach maturity, some of their nutrients are pulled back and repurposed toward flowers and seeds. Production of the new generation comes at a significant cost to the parent, and you can see it in a cornfield, even from a great distance.

For our experiments, we exploit the most fundamental difference between plants and animals—namely, that most plant tissues are redundant and flexible: a root can become a stem if need be, and vice versa. The fragmentation of a single embryo can lead to several copies of that plant, each with an identical blueprint of genes. New propagation techniques allow us to answer questions like “Does a tree remember extreme malnutrition experienced during childhood?” by starving one seedling for years while lavishing nutrients upon its identical twin. Such experiments are the only way to find definitive answers; they are deeply repugnant and obviously unethical with human subjects. Plants, in contrast, are fair game.

***

Our world is falling apart quietly. Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-hundred-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood. In our relentless and ever-intensifying obsession with obtaining a higher volume, potency, and variety of these three things, we have devastated plant ecology to an extent that millions of years of natural disaster could not. Roads have grown like a manic fungus, and the endless miles of ditches that bracket these roads serve as hasty graves for perhaps millions of plant species extinguished in the name of progress. Planet Earth is nearly a Dr. Seuss book made real: every year since 1990 we have created more than eight billion new stumps. If we continue to fell healthy trees at this rate, less than six hundred years from now, every tree on the planet will have been reduced to a stump. My job is about making sure there will be some evidence that someone cared about the great tragedy that unfolded during our age.

 

Posted in (Auto)biography | Tagged , | 4 Comments