Post Carbon Institute Publications

OutThere Monthly - Interview with Richard Heinberg

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:53:22 GMT

By Juliet Sinisterra, posted Feb 8, 2012:

In 2003 The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies by Richard Heinberg was published. The book is a somber, detailed analysis of the central role that fossil fuels have played and continue to play in just about every aspect of our lives—and what happens to us when they peak.

Heinberg, a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and author of ten books, has most recently published, The End of Growth: Adapting to our New Economic Reality. Biological economists such as Herman Daly and oil geologists like Colin Campbell have been warning for years, that once we hit, or start to approach the limits of natural resources on this planet, the abnormal growth that our economy has experienced these past 150 years will start to retreat. Heinberg tackles what this new era, without growth, looks like, its ramifications, and the potential for new types of human and environmental well-being. Central to his work is his overriding compassion for our world and those of us who populate it.

OTM: You start your book with a basic overview of economic history, and the roles of currency and usury. Why is it important to understand money and its relationship to our current ecological predicament?

RH: In traditional societies, money and debt played a relatively small role in people’s daily lives. With the massive economic growth of the 19th and 20th centuries, which came about because of the temporary availability of cheap fossil energy, money became an essential tool enabling capital accumulation, the trading of rights to natural resources, and the distribution of manufactured products. During the past two decades, innovations in the financial world multiplied debt and monetary claims on real goods to such an extent that now there is no way all the existing claims can ever be honored. We let the environment go to ruin, we let people suffer, and we let communities disintegrate because doing anything to protect them would hamper further economic growth.

What has gone wrong? Have we just gotten too greedy? I argue that what we’re seeing is the convergence and—crucially—the ending of two trends: a two-century expansion of production (economic growth) based on cheap energy, and a concurrent expansion of credit based on the belief that the economy will continue to grow forever. We can print all the dollars we want, but we can’t make land, water, topsoil and other resources. So we have reached a fundamental turning point in our economic history, where resource limits are forcing an end to economic growth.

OTM: In Chapter 3, “Earth’s Limits: Why Growth Won’t Return,” you discuss and show the historical correlation between rising oil prices and economic recessions. While most economists look to the housing bubble as the primary cause of the crash of 2008, you and other oil geologists and biophysical economists have looked to the escalating prices of oil as the root cause. Can you talk briefly about this?

RH: I’m not saying the housing bubble had no role in triggering the current economic crisis. Of course it was a proximate trigger, but it wasn’t the only one. People tend to forget that the oil price spiked to $147 in July 2008—the highest level ever. Every oil price spike since 1970 has been followed by a recession. On the basis of oil prices alone, we should have expected to see a long and deep recession commencing in the third or fourth quarter of 2008. The timing of the bursting of the housing bubble was also affected by oil prices. As several economists (including James Hamilton of the University of California, San Diego) have pointed out, it was in exurban neighborhoods where most residents had long commutes that house prices first started falling. Once the cost of filling the tank of a typical SUV shot to over $100, folks in those communities realized they didn’t have enough money at the end of the month to pay their mortgages and credit card bills.

It’s always important to see events in perspective. Why did we have a credit bubble in the first place? Because of expectations that the economy would continue to grow and house prices would continue to escalate. Why would people expect the economy to grow continually? Because it has grown so much over the past few decades. Why has it done so? Because we had access to cheap, plentiful energy from fossil fuels. Of course, markets and technological innovation played their roles, but without abundant cheap energy we could not have achieved economic growth on a scale remotely similar to what we’ve seen. Seen in context, the 20th century was one long fossil-fueled mania. We are just starting to wake up from it.

OTM: I found Chapter 7, “Life after Growth,” to be a great blueprint of where we need to be heading from a community development perspective. In a related blog, you discuss the need to be happier with living with less, living slower, smaller and poorer. Can you expand on this?

RH: The consumer lifestyle did not evolve spontaneously; it was deliberately engineered by corporate America and the advertising industry as a way of dealing with the problem of overproduction during the fossil-fueled boom times. Acquiring more stuff can give us a momentary jolt of stimulating brain chemicals, and we can easily get addicted to that kind of stimulation, but it doesn’t actually make us happy. Having nurturing relationships with the people around us, having a sense of autonomy and agency, and being engaged in creative work is far more satisfying over the long term. Being shackled to the consumer treadmill actually works against that kind of deeper satisfaction.

Traditional societies understood the value of slowing down and reining in consumption; that’s why most families in such societies sent at least one child to live in a meditative monastery wherein voluntary poverty was extolled as a high virtue. During the 20th century we tended to forget values having to do with community and love of nature, because they didn’t help promote economic growth. Now that the growth era is over and done with, it’s a really good idea to get back in touch with sources of happiness that don’t require a big salary, big spending, a big house, and a big car. Being a genuine optimist doesn’t mean thinking that circumstances will always be to our liking; rather, it’s maintaining a positive attitude and making the most of what life has in store.

From the February 2012 Issue of OutThere Monthly

View with images in magazine format (page 15)

The great carbon bubble: Why the fossil fuel industry fights so hard

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:34:17 GMT

By Bill McKibben, posted Feb 7, 2012:

If we could see the world with a particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one of its most prominent features at the moment would be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a lark. As yet -- as we shall see -- it’s unfortunately largely invisible to us.

In compensation, though, we have some truly beautiful images made possible by new technology. Last month, for instance, NASA updated the most iconic photograph in our civilization’s gallery: “Blue Marble,” originally taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. The spectacular new high-def image shows a picture of the Americas on January 4th, a good day for snapping photos because there weren’t many clouds.

It was also a good day because of the striking way it could demonstrate to us just how much the planet has changed in 40 years. As Jeff Masters, the web’s most widely read meteorologist, explains, “The U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s.”

In fact, it’s likely that the week that photo was taken will prove “the driest first week in recorded U.S. history.” Indeed, it followed on 2011, which showed the greatest weather extremes in our history -- 56%of the country was either in drought or flood, which was no surprise since “climate change science predicts wet areas will tend to get wetter and dry areas will tend to get drier.” Indeed, the nation suffered 14 weather disasters each causing $1 billion or more in damage last year. (The old record was nine.) Masters again: “Watching the weather over the past two years has been like watching a famous baseball hitter on steroids.”

In the face of such data -- statistics that you can duplicate for almost every region of the planet -- you’d think we’d already be in an all-out effort to do something about climate change. Instead, we’re witnessing an all-out effort to... deny there’s a problem.

Our GOP presidential candidates are working hard to make sure no one thinks they’d appease chemistry and physics. At the last Republican debate in Florida, Rick Santorum insisted that he should be the nominee because he’d caught on earlier than Newt or Mitt to the global warming “hoax.”

Most of the media pays remarkably little attention to what’s happening. Coverage of global warming has dipped 40% over the last two years. When, say, there’s a rare outbreak of January tornadoes, TV anchors politely discuss “extreme weather,” but climate change is the disaster that dare not speak its name.

And when they do break their silence, some of our elite organs are happy to indulge in outright denial. Last month, for instance, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by “16 scientists and engineers” headlined “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” The article was easily debunked. It was nothing but a mash-up of long-since-disproved arguments by people who turned out mostly not to be climate scientists at all, quoting other scientists who immediately said their actual work showed just the opposite.

It’s no secret where this denialism comes from: the fossil fuel industry pays for it. (Of the 16 authors of the Journal article, for instance, five had had ties to Exxon.) Writers from Ross Gelbspan to Naomi Oreskes have made this case with such overwhelming power that no one even really tries denying it any more. The open question is why the industry persists in denial in the face of an endless body of fact showing climate change is the greatest danger we’ve ever faced.

Why doesn’t it fold the way the tobacco industry eventually did? Why doesn’t it invest its riches in things like solar panels and so profit handsomely from the next generation of energy? As it happens, the answer is more interesting than you might think.

Part of it’s simple enough: the giant energy companies are making so much money right now that they can’t stop gorging themselves. ExxonMobil, year after year, pulls in more money than any company in history. Chevron’s not far behind. Everyone in the business is swimming in money.

Still, they could theoretically invest all that cash in new clean technology or research and development for the same. As it happens, though, they’ve got a deeper problem, one that’s become clear only in the last few years. Put briefly: their value is largely based on fossil-fuel reserves that won’t be burned if we ever take global warming seriously.

When I talked about a carbon bubble at the beginning of this essay, this is what I meant. Here are some of the relevant numbers, courtesy of the Capital Institute: we’re already seeing widespread climate disruption, but if we want to avoid utter, civilization-shaking disaster, many scientists have pointed to a two-degree rise in global temperatures as the most we could possibly deal with.

If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons -- five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground.

Put another way, in ecological terms it would be extremely prudent to write off $20 trillion worth of those reserves. In economic terms, of course, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil (and people in places like Venezuela).

If you run an oil company, this sort of write-off is the disastrous future staring you in the face as soon as climate change is taken as seriously as it should be, and that’s far scarier than drought and flood. It’s why you’ll do anything -- including fund an endless campaigns of lies -- to avoid coming to terms with its reality. So instead, we simply charge ahead. To take just one example, last month the boss of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Thomas Donohue, called for burning all the country’s newly discovered coal, gas, and oil -- believed to be 1,800 gigatons worth of carbon from our nation alone.

What he and the rest of the energy-industrial elite are denying, in other words, is that the business models at the center of our economy are in the deepest possible conflict with physics and chemistry. The carbon bubble that looms over our world needs to be deflated soon. As with our fiscal crisis, failure to do so will cause enormous pain -- pain, in fact, almost beyond imagining. After all, if you think banks are too big to fail, consider the climate as a whole and imagine the nature of the bailout that would face us when that bubble finally bursts.

Unfortunately, it won’t burst by itself -- not in time, anyway. The fossil-fuel companies, with their heavily funded denialism and their record campaign contributions, have been able to keep at bay even the tamest efforts at reining in carbon emissions. With each passing day, they’re leveraging us deeper into an unpayable carbon debt -- and with each passing day, they’re raking in unimaginable returns. ExxonMobil last week reported its 2011 profits at $41 billion, the second highest of all time. Do you wonder who owns the record? That would be ExxonMobil in 2008 at $45 billion.

Telling the truth about climate change would require pulling away the biggest punchbowl in history, right when the party is in full swing. That’s why the fight is so pitched. That’s why those of us battling for the future need to raise our game. And it’s why that view from the satellites, however beautiful from a distance, is likely to become ever harder to recognize as our home planet.

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

Bill Rees' Last Lecture

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:53:55 GMT

By Justin Ritchie, posted Feb 2, 2012:

By Justin Richie, The Tyee

Last December, after more than 40 years teaching at the School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) at the University of British Columbia, Bill Rees gave his last lecture as a full-time professor.

As one of his last students, I found his class captivating, and in following up with many of his former students, realized they felt the same way. His career defined the modern science of sustainability, and touched the lives of many, inspiring individuals to devote their lives towards adapting our species to live responsibly on this planet.

"I can't imagine a better job," said Rees. "I get up in the morning and it's wide open. I can't imagine that people pay me to be a teacher at a university, to work with brilliant young minds, and have enjoyed every minute of it.”"

Rees' reputation as an academic maverick began in the 1970s, when he was appointed to a committee to set up what became the Westwater Resource Institute. Because the team of academics on the committee didn't know each other, they decided to hold a series of short talks describing the work they were doing.

"I had been at UBC a couple of years then, and... I was trying to figure out how ecology could fit into planning, which was very much oriented towards social sciences at the time. I delivered a talk on a few topics I thought were important, including human carrying capacity [and] a quick and dirty estimate of how many people the resources of the Lower Mainland could support. My number was roughly 50,000," he said.

Canadian resource economist Peter Pierce approached Rees after his talk and invited him to lunch. Rees was excited to think he had influenced an established, well-known economist, but Rees recalls Pierce telling him, "You're obviously not a stupid person, but if you continue to pursue this line of research, your career at UBC will be nasty, brutish and short."

Pierce explained that the idea of carrying capacity for humans had long been made irrelevant by modern economics, which understood that human technological innovation and trade would be able to overcome any resource restraints. It was a friendly wake-up call for Rees.

"I'm critical of my students who come into planning school without an understanding of science, yet I had no understanding of economics. I left that meeting with my tail between my legs and it took me a few years to recover. Yet, something was working away in the back of my mind."

One night, Rees woke up and everything clicked.

"It was like there was a lightbulb over my head. I realized that even if a human population was trading, the concept of carrying capacity asks how many people a particular habitat can support, and I flipped the ratio over. I started asking how much area is needed to support a certain number of people, [and] that area could be anywhere on the planet."

The concept of the ecological footprint was born, allowing Rees to challenge the traditional economic notions of trade and technology.

Bill and the 'Bryan Adams Phenomenon'

Rees joined SCARP in 1969. His four-decade career at UBC has been marked by a prolific output of writings, a resume of over 80 pages and the development of the ecological footprint concept, while helping to found numerous organizations such as the David Suzuki Foundation, the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics and the International Society for Ecological Economics.

Rees said he's always been motivated to help others understand his love of the planet's evolutionary processes. "I have always found ecology stunning and fascinating. How organisms adapt and change in their environments... it exceeds the best science fiction in terms of its sheer wonder," he says.

As the current director of SCARP, Penny Gurstein reviews the student evaluations of Rees' courses at the end of each term. "I saw written comments where people said things like, 'This course changed my life.'"

Thomas Bevan from Kitchener, Ontario started at SCARP last year and took his first class with Rees in early 2011, following up with a second course as soon as he could.

"Bill was amazing," Bevan said. "He made a convincing argument for why humans must collectively change the paradigm that informs our policy on economic growth. But most of all he was fun, and made the classroom a fun and exciting atmosphere, where it was safe to ask the silliest questions." Bevan was so touched by Rees, he wrote a poem about his experience in the class. (See below.)

Motivating individual students to work towards a sustainable society, Rees helped quietly shape Vancouver. Mark Holland's career was defined by his time in Rees' classes, leading him to become one of Vancouver's first professional sustainability consultants. "I was able to start my practice because of Bill's approach, which wasn't environmentalism. It was simple, pragmatic, factual and comprehensive, not a political ideology."

Holland was first inspired by Rees during his undergrad in Landscape Architecture in the early 1990s. "I heard about Bill all the time in my classes and received permission to take his graduate level courses. This set the trajectory for the next 15 years of my life."

After 10 years of pursuing many different university degrees, Holland said, "Bill is the most compelling professor I've ever sat under. His ability to weave things from apparently unrelated disciplines together was unparalleled and phenomenal. He brought a completely different perspective on governance and public policy, and his background in ecology anchored him in looking at how the human species could manage itself on this planet."

Jennie Moore will finish her PhD with Rees in the next few months. She credits her first experiences sitting in Rees' lectures as where she developed her "internal compass."

"I've seen him raise a room of 500 people to their feet where they are wiping tears from their eyes," she said. "When he speaks from the heart, he can connect deeply with other people."

As with many students who took Rees' classes at SCARP, both Moore and Holland weren't aware of his legacy before the class. For many years, Rees' impact on the science of sustainability went mostly unacknowledged, they said.

"Bill suffers from the Bryan Adams Phenomenon," said Moore. "He's so much larger internationally than what his impact locally has been. While SCARP and Vancouver will always be the place where the ecological footprint was invented, I haven't seen the local government adopt the footprint to the extent that I have in other places around the world.

"With the Greenest City Action Plan, it is the first time a city locally has acknowledged and worked with the ecological footprint, and Metro Vancouver will be referring to it in a new strategy. It is starting to take hold, but it has taken a long time."

Party at the end of the world

Rees was reluctant to have a retirement party that recognized his work. "Bill is the kind of guy that is really uncomfortable with any acknowledgements about himself, and he really just wants to sit in his office and work," said SCARP's Gurstein.

On Nov. 19, colleagues and friends like David Suzuki gathered to deliver a tribute to Rees at a banquet organized by The One Earth Initiative, a non-profit organization Rees helped found, and where he'll be spending some of his time now that he's a professor emeritus at SCARP. Former students flew in from Winnipeg and even Halifax for the event.

"In the end, I was very touched, very moved and enjoyed myself immensely," Rees said.

Letters from friends that couldn't attend were read aloud, and Rees was presented with gifts, like a survival backpack to help him navigate the coming collapse he frequently talks about.

"A lot of people talk about Bill's gloom and doom scenarios, even though he's just describing trends due to our biology to consume as much as possible," Emmanuel Prinet of One Earth explained.

Suzuki and his wife gave Rees a wind-up flashlight. Other gifts from friends included bird-watching binoculars and an emergency bottle of wine. Because peak oil would slow down Rees travel schedule, Prinet contributed several books to the backpack, one of them titled The Best Places to Kiss in the Northwest.

The evening closed with a hand-drawn stop animation video put together by One Earth, telling the story of how Rees was inspired to link human carrying capacity to the word "footprint" when a colleague remarked that his newer laptop had a much smaller footprint on his desk than his older, bulkier model. The animation shows how Rees was influenced growing up on a farm in Ontario, the place where he first realized that humanity wasn't separate from nature -- and where he lost a toe, literally giving him a smaller footprint.

Planning for the future

As UBC moves towards building an international reputation in sustainability, it will have to do so without the man that Holland credits for establishing it. "I think a very significant amount of UBC's position on the global stage and reputation for sustainability is because of the almost-psychosocial impact that Bill has on people."

While SCARP is a school in transition, the profession of planning is facing an equally dramatic shift. "When I came to the school in the early 1970s," said Rees, "planning in the public domain was much more appreciated.

"Over 40 years, we've had a substantial change in public attitude. We've gotten into a market mentality. We've ceded our ability to control our destiny to the values of the marketplace."

The world is facing several crises simultaneously, he points out, "and if we're going to pull this off as a species, we're going to have to use planning in a way we've never had a precedent for."

Planning today must regain "a high understanding of the fundamental hard science associated with global change and the economic ramifications of that. There is a huge social justice issue, and it's entirely conceivable that over the next few decades we'll see potentially hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing rising oceans and drying lands," Rees said.

"All of these strategies of land use planning and water planning are going to come to the forefront in ways we could never conceive."

Now that he's leaving the planning school, Rees will be focusing more of his energy on the One Earth Initiative.

"Just prior to the World Urban Forum, Bill made a presentation at an event at UBC," One Earth co-founder Dagmar Timmer said. "Bill's very first slide was a picture of a factory in China and he said, 'What is our contribution as Vancouver to this cloud?' That slide in itself was such a strong motivator for us getting started."

One Earth's first big event was the 2006 United Nations World Urban Forum, focusing on policies for creating regenerative urban footprints. Rees was the keynote. He's still influencing policy, giving a speech at the UN last month. After Rees spoke, one the delegates raised his placard and said to Rees, "I don't understand why I'm not getting this level of detail in my briefings. Why aren't my briefings telling me the scope of the challenge so we can get serious about it?"

Getting serious, while still creating a positive vision for living sustainably, is One Earth's goal. It's largely Rees' vision, though he may have a reputation as Dr. Doom.

"Bill always says to us that we need to think at least 10 years ahead," says Prinet. "He's trying to not just think about today, but imagining what's happening later and integrating that in his thinking about policy ideas."

Rees' next footprints

No longer teaching full time at SCARP, Rees is moving on to what's next. He's already been invited to teach short term courses at a few universities. For the first stop of his world tour, he'll be at Newcastle University for most of March.

In December, as Rees' his last course at SCARP wound down, he reminded his students to use science to focus on long-term consequences. By understanding the issues of ecological degradation and sustainability covered during the semester, each and every student was now tasked with building a new cultural narrative that shifts our species from competitive individualism, greed and narrow self-interest toward community cooperation and collective interest.

Though tinged with hope, his message rides on tremendous consequences from inaction. Rees quoted from the 2007 Swedish Tällberg Forum which stated, "Do we know what we need to do? Probably yes. Will we do it? Probably not."

Rees laid out it down. "Failure to assert collective reason over instinct will lead to civil strife, resource wars and ecological destruction. That's the summary of the entire course."

Understanding the immensity of the burden he'd just given to the few dozen students in the room, he lightened the mood by joking, "Your job is to go forth into the world and change everything, so that I may enjoy a fruitful retirement."

A Tribute Poem to Bill Rees from One of His Students
Bill taught us in planning
To find a soft landing
His tale wasn't bitter,
Wasn't too sweet
Getting us up off our lazy feet!
Things are changing
It's in the air
To emphasize this in class
He would even swear
Just look at the others
He would say
The Maya
The Inca
The Canasapuray
These people all fell
From what we can tell
Making the mistake
To pollute their own lake
These faults
They can guide us
To make a different kaleidoscope
And in this new lens we will see
How complex things can really be
Hopefully, then we will be on the mend
And Bill was able to show all this as a life loving friend
— Tom Bevan

Image credits: 1. Students in Rees' last class say their goodbyes, 2. David Suzuki toasts to Rees' retirement - by Justin Ritchie

Originally published at The Tyee

The Peak Oil Crisis: Election 2012

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:41:29 GMT

By Tom Whipple, posted Feb 2, 2012:

If current trends continue, gasoline prices and U.S. energy policy seem destined to play a larger role in the political debate prior to the November elections than ever before. Gasoline on the East Coast is already within striking distance of all-time highs and most prognosticators are talking about the likelihood of $4+ gasoline before summer. Although the U.S. consumer is more inured to $4 gasoline than four years ago, the crossing of the $4 barrier is bound to set off another round of recriminations and finger pointing as to just who or what is causing this phenomenon. If what happened in 2008 is any indication we are in for another round of bizarre proposals from our politicians - remember the "sue OPEC" legislation.

The fundamental energy policies of the two U.S. political parties have been pretty well set for the last four or five years although there has been some give in response to transient political pressures. Most Democratic politicians continue to express concerns about the potential threat to the planet caused by increasing CO2 emissions and therefore reflexively tend toward policies that favor reduced consumption of fossil fuels either through increased efficiency or replacement with renewables or even nuclear power.

For the most part, Republican politicians, whether they believe it or not, have embraced the position that increased burning of fossil fuels either is not responsible for climate change or is such a slow moving phenomenon that it need not be dealt with in the foreseeable future - "if it is real, the grandchildren can worry about it." Increasing domestic energy consumption at all costs which incidentally is relatively painless to the voter is the proper course. This position, of opposing efforts to control emissions is of relatively recent vintage and came about when it became apparent that controlling carbon emissions would likely result in heavy costs to fossil fuel producers and consumers alike.

What does peak oil have to say to us about the coming election? In general, those who understand the nuances of the phenomenon of the peaking of global oil are saying that world oil production is either at or is very close to reaching its all-time peak. In recent years leveling out of conventional oil production has resulted in a fivefold increase in oil prices. This increase in oil prices is believed by many to be a key reason, if not the key reason, for the economic troubles currently besetting much of the world. The undeniable conclusion is that, given the current situation and the prospects for oil prices, it is unlikely that there will be an economic rebound or a meaningful increase in employment until such time that new and affordable sources of energy come into general use.

Now this is clearly a conclusion that no voter wants to hear, which is exactly why no government or politician running for office is saying much if anything about it. While the real issue of this election is how we can reorganize our civilization to get through the decades ahead when motor fuel becomes unaffordable, our economy continues to contract, and we are likely to be devastated by repeated natural disasters stemming from climate change. Incidentally, it is interesting to note that federal disaster declarations, related to extreme weather events, totaled 15 in 1981, 43 in 1991, and 99 in 2011.

The Republican candidate in the coming election has the luxury of ignoring reality and telling the voters that he can do exactly what they want, create jobs, grow the economy, and ensure plentiful supplies of cheap energy. All this can be achieved without subjecting voters to any more pain than the incumbent administration has already caused them. Thus the Republican platform for the coming election likely will be one of lifting all possible restrictions on the domestic production of energy. Tax breaks for fossil fuel producers will be continued on the grounds that reducing them would amount to a tax increase, and support for renewable sources will be reduced on the grounds that they will not be needed after the bonanza of new oil, coal, and natural gas comes forth from eliminating regulations.

Democratic candidates will have to sell a more nuanced platform. As most Democratic politicians not representing fossil fuel producing districts profess some concern for the threat posed by carbon emissions, they have a more difficult case to make. While the responsible case in an era of depleting fossil fuels is to advocate energy conservation and efficiency first, and then to seek out policies to avoid or prepare for lower standards of living, these courses would require sacrifice on the part of voters who as yet do not see where they will be necessary.

Despite the increasing incidence of extreme weather around the world, for the time being a majority of Americans are rejecting the connection between burning fossil fuels and aberrant weather events. This rejection is not so much because they do not believe the science, which most do not understand anyway, but because climate change is not perceived to be such an immediate threat as that posed by a lack of jobs.

President Obama is attempting to steer a course through this thicket by embracing policies which make long-term sense from an environmental point of view and yet do limited damage and leave him hope of reelection. In recent days the President has unveiled the energy plan he will take into the election campaign. The centerpiece is to embrace natural gas as a transportation fuel as it can be produced domestically, is currently much cheaper than oil, and while not carbon-free, emits less CO2 and other pollutants than do oil products. He has also opened more public land and offshore areas for drilling - although nowhere near what the industry and many Republicans politicians are calling for.

Although it is likely that the President and his Secretary of Energy understand that a decline in world oil production is not far away, it is simply not a topic to be raised prior to an election as the political risk is simply too great. Someday, likely within the next decade, the US and the rest of world's governments will have to acknowledge there is a problem here, and unless alternative sources of energy can be developed and brought into general use quickly, major changes in economic activities and lifestyles are going to take place.

Originally published February 1, 2012 at Falls Church News-Press

Enemies of the State

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:12:54 GMT

By Asher, posted Jan 31, 2012:

Almost exactly nine years ago, opposition to the US invasion of Iraq was reaching a fever pitch. On February 15, 2003 millions of people around the world rallied to protest the inexorable march to war, including in over 150 cities in the United States. The case for war — coming from the Bush White House and its supporters through every pore of the mainstream media complex — was fierce and demanding, an hourly barrage of breathless warnings that at any moment Saddam Hussein could unleash nuclear or biological terrorism on Americans. And yet, while the vast majority of Americans (wrongly) believed the Administration's claims that Iraq held WMDs, most still favored diplomacy over invasion.

A month later, of course, after the US and its "coalition of the willing" invaded Iraq, public opposition to the war became unpopular. Vocal opponents were regularly vilified by pundits and politicians as somehow being unpatriotic, traitors, appeasers, cowards, or "blame America 1st"ers. It was not an easy time to stand on principle.

The current debate in Canada over the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline reminds me a little of those days.

Think I'm being bombastic? Well, check out this ad and this ad by the oil industry front group, Ethical Oil, and then decide who is being bombastic.

The theme of these ads, apparently, is that we shouldn't get oil from Saudi Arabia since they persecute women and gays there, and they destroy their natural environment in the process of producing oil.

Now, let me be perfectly clear, the human rights issues in Saudi Arabia are very real and very grave. But is this really the only choice at hand? And I have yet to see Ethical Oil raise concerns about human rights abuses in China, the primary market for Northern Gateway Pipeline oil.

BTW, this is what Ethical Oil wants us to believe tar sands production looks like.

And this is what tar sands extraction looks like in reality.

Ok, so tar sands proponents are stretching the truth about the environmental impacts of oil production. What else is new?

What's new is the sinister tone that the conservative government in Canada and pipeline supporters have taken to defining their opponents. In the hours before an independent review panel began hearings on the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver published an open letter warning of "environmental and other radical groups" that:

... threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda. They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest.

(I hope Oliver managed to wipe off some of that unseemly bitumen before draping himself in the Canadian flag.)

This line of attack has been pursued further, as exemplified brilliantly by Ethical Oil spokesperson Kathryn Marshall on a recent CBC news show:

This is becoming a battle between reasonable, everyday, hardworking Canadians and foreign special interests and their deep pockets and their puppet groups who are trying to hijack and gum up a Canadian process.

(Kathryn Marshall mysteriously failed to respond to repeated attempts by the host to inquire about the sources of Ethical Oil's funding, and whether any of it comes from oil companies.)

Last week, Andrew Frank signed a sworn affadavit claiming that the Prime Minister's Office threatened the charitable status of Tides Canada for providing funding to ForestEthics, a vocal opponent of the pipeline. In this open letter, Frank claimed that:

... no less than three senior managers with TidesCanada and ForestEthics (a charitable project of Tides Canada), have informed me, as the Senior Communications Manager for ForestEthics, that Tides Canada CEO, Ross McMillan,was informed by the Prime Minister’s Office, that ForestEthics is considered an “Enemy of the Government of Canada,” and an “Enemy of the people of Canada.”

After the letter was published, Frank was fired for "violating the confidence of ForestEthics."

A government spokesperson denied Frank's claim and Tides Canada CEO, Ross McMillian, published an an op-ed yesterday stating that "Frank had the wrong facts but the right idea."

We may never know the truth, but the larger point remains: The rhetoric directed at opponents of the pipeline is deeply troubling. History has shown time and time again what happens when nations rush to judgment or paint their fellow citizens as "enemies," "radicals," or "puppets of foreign interests." In the US, we don't have to think back too far.

If, like me, you're not a Canadian, you may not think this pertains much to you. I'm afraid you're wrong.

For one thing, the energy and environmental impacts of tar sands production are not limited to within the borders of Canada. The tar sands extracted in Alberta, piped across indigenous lands and pristine wilderness to British Columbia, and shipped on tankers to be burned in China or India is part of an ecological, energy, and economic web to which we are all attached.

For another, I fully expect the debate over US unconventional fossil fuels (shale gas, shale oil, oil shales, etc.) to heat up as we near the 2012 elections — that is, if the environmental community can get it together enough to from a strong opposition.

Candidates on both sides of the aisle — including President Obama — are endorsing more drilling, and the American Petroleum Institute has launched a campaign to equate domestic unconventional oil and gas drilling with economic and energy security. Congressional Republicans hope to force Obama's hand on the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would bring tar sands down from Canada to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, to either paint him as putting the environment over jobs or risk losing the support of one of his key bases.

As long as we allow proponents of unconventional oil and gas to claim a false choice between energy and economic security and the environment, and as long as we allow them to vilify opponents as being somehow unpatriotic or radical, we run the very real risk of losing a battle where the future of our planet and species is at stake. Ok, so maybe I am being a little bombastic. But am I wrong?

photo credit: tar sands photo copyright Garth Lenz.

The peak oil crisis: On closing our refineries

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:41:24 GMT

By Tom Whipple, posted Jan 26, 2012:

Here is one more thing for those of us who live in the northeastern U.S. to start worrying about - the refineries that make our gasoline, diesel, heating oil, etc. are dropping like flies.

In today's economy, these refineries are simply losing so much money that their owners who are not major oil companies that make billions from oil production are having put them up for sale or close them down. In recent years we lost refineries in Westville, NJ, and Yorktown, Va. A large refinery in southeastern Pennsylvania was shut down in December as was one in New Jersey. A third large Philadelphia refinery is up for sale and will be closed in July if no buyer can be found.

Last week we learned that what once was one of the largest refineries in the world (500,000 barrels a day [b/d]), located in the US Virgin Islands and which has been shipping about 200,000 b/d to the U.S.'s east coast will close next month. If you add up the rated capacities of refineries being closed you are looking at something approaching 1.5 million b/d, but as these refineries were not running at capacity or sending their entire product to the northeastern U.S., we are losing more on the order of 800,000 b/d of daily production. If this is not enough several European refineries, another source for gasoline in the U.S., have recently closed down or are up for sale.

Leaving out the 200,000 b/d of oil products that has been coming from the Virgin Islands, the three big Philadelphia area refineries were producing about 40 percent of the gasoline and 60 percent of the diesel being consumed in the northeast. Making up for a loss of this size is likely to take some doing. The EIA is already warning of higher prices in the area and the possibility of spot shortages as the logistics of keeping the northeast supplied with liquid fuels is becoming far more complicated.

Some of the loss in refining capacity can be made up by increasing production at the remaining refineries in the northeast, increasing the amount of ethanol in gasoline, or trying to push more oil through the pipelines from the Gulf Coast refineries. These pipelines, however, are already moving about 2.5 million b/d which is close to max capacity.

The only real solution to getting large amounts of finished petroleum products to the northeast is by water from the Gulf Coast refineries, Europe, or beyond. The EIA says there is enough capacity to bring additional quantities of petroleum products into NY harbor, but the Philadelphia area presents a problem for the port facilities are set up to unload crude for refineries and would have to be reworked to take in oil products for distribution. As the facilities are up for sale, little can be done until the ownership of the undocking facilities is settled.

Another problem in all this is the Jones Act which requires that all products being moved from one U.S. port to another be transported in U.S. built, owned, manned, and flagged ships. As there are not many tankers meeting these criteria, finding adequate transport may be hard to find. Shipping oil products from abroad is not a problem, and about 500,000 b/d of gasoline, besides that coming from the Virgin Islands, is already coming into the ports on the U.S.'s east coast. While most is coming from Europe, some is coming from as far away as India which is already sending us 40,000 b/d.

Replacing the lost supply of refined gasoline may not be too much of a problem, but the distillates -- diesel and heating oil --may be another problem. As the EU has been switching to diesel from gasoline in recent years, the continent has had a surplus of gasoline that refiners have been happy to sell to the U.S., but diesel is in tight supply around the world, and very little is imported into the U.S., mostly from dedicated refineries in Canada. Attracting adequate supplies of diesel and heating oil to East Coast markets in the future is likely to require a hefty price premium or there will be shortages.

While it is always possible that somebody will come along, buy the unprofitable refineries, and make a go of operating them, given the general state of the US economy with the steady reduction in the demand for oil products, this does not seem likely. The impact from the shuttered refineries will be felt first through increases in gas prices along the East Coast, particularly north of Washington. There are already hints that such a price increase in underway. For years my neighborhood gas station has always sold its regular for within a penny or two of the national average which for the last week has been around $3.38 per gallon. My neighborhood station, however, is currently posting $3.60 or nearly 22 cents above the range where it has traditionally sold. While this unusual spread could be a temporary aberration, it could also be a harbinger of things to come. In New York and Connecticut, relatively high gasoline tax northeastern states, regular gasoline is now selling for $3.68 with is only 3 cents below California, the traditional price leader in the lower 48.

When refinery closings come together with the traditional winter-spring increase in gasoline prices we could be looking at some never-before-seen gasoline prices in the $4-5 a gallon range before the year is out. Five dollar gasoline means diesel could be well north of $5 when the effect of the global diesel shortage is considered. This will certainly not do much for economic recovery later this year and would certainly roil the political pot. Alternatively, the EU may encounter such serious problems later this year that gasoline prices will go down.

Originally published January 25, 2012 at Falls Church News-Press

Organics and Sustainability: Reflections on my New York Times Misquote

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:01:25 GMT

By Michael Bomford, posted Jan 24, 2012:

The phone rang as I was tying up loose ends for my last day in the office before Christmas. New York Times reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal wanted my thoughts on the sustainability of organic agriculture… a subject that I think about a lot. I gave her my cell phone number and asked her to call back.

She called again Saturday afternoon, as my kids and I returned home from Christmas shopping. I plunked them in front of a video and put her on speaker phone so that I could peel butternut squash for a solstice potluck that evening. We talked for a half hour or so, and she said she’d let me know when her story would run.

I didn’t hear back from her, but a friend in New York City contacted me on New Year’s Eve to tell me I had been quoted in a front page story. It dealt with important questions about the sustainability of growing organic vegetables in the deserts of Mexico’s Baja peninsula. Apparently it had legs. It was the most e-mailed story in the paper for much of the first week of 2012. It contained some of the ideas that I had discussed as I peeled squash, but only one direct quote from me. My heart sank as I read it:

Organic agriculture used to be sustainable agriculture, but now that is not always the case.

That’s not what I had said. It wasn’t even a statement I could agree with. Yet there it was, immortalized in America’s newspaper of record with my name attached to it.

I immediately fired off the following letter to the editor, which has not been published:

I disagree with the statement attributed to me that “organic agriculture used to be sustainable.” Most organic farms remain more sustainable than their conventional counterparts. If we must import produce from Mexico we should support the farmers there that grow it organically.

US produce imports from Mexico have almost tripled since 1990, driven by growing demand for inexpensive fruit and vegetables out-of-season. Most of this supply comes from conventional farms. Sourcing more of it from organic farms will not solve the important sustainability issues Rosenthal addresses, but it makes things better, not worse.

Despite growth in demand for organic products, less than 1% of farmland in the USA or Mexico is certified organic. Organic farms tend to use energy and water more efficiently than conventional farms. They pollute less. Organic farmers are often healthier, and better able to make a decent living from small, diversified farms, such as those that dominate Mexico’s organic sector. Supporting them promotes sustainability.

I have tried to reconstruct my conversation to figure out Rosenthal could have heard me say something I don’t believe. I was trying to explain that sustainability is not a black and white issue. Scientists disagree on how best to measure it, because it incorporates a broad range of environmental, economic and social considerations. When the term was coined by the Brundtland commission in 1987 it was defined as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

It’s an ambitious goal, seldom truly achieved. We live in a world where almost a billion people live in hunger, even as we exhaust the reserves of fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources on which we increasingly depend. We spew carbon, pollute our groundwater with nitrogen and our surface water with phosphorus, and melt the ice at the same poles where our persistent pesticides accumulate. We are failing to meet the needs of the present, even as we compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Our current way of living is clearly unsustainable, and the food system that supports it can’t be sustained indefinitely either. This concerned Sir Albert Howard, the father of organic agriculture in the west. Seventy years ago Howard was fascinated by the fall of civilizations, which he saw as an inevitable result of unsustainable food systems. He looked to the agriculture of long persistent civilizations – like China and India – for examples of ways to feed ourselves sustainably. The “practices of the Orient” that he held up as examples were built on a foundation of small, diverse, labor-intensive farms integrating animal and crop production. Few inputs were needed because resources were recycled on the farm by composting, to build soils rich in organic matter that retained water and nutrients. “Organic farming” evolved into a shorthand description for the type of agriculture that Howard advocated. The term “sustainable agriculture” showed up years later, and often incorporated similar concepts and ideas.

For many years, organic agriculture – like sustainable agriculture – was defined by principles, rather than specific practices. In his 1981 essay, Solving for Pattern, Wendell Berry called for solutions that solve multiple problems without creating new ones. He used an organic farm as an example, saying that it

is not one that uses certain methods and substances and avoids others; it is a farm whose structure is formed in imitation of the structure of a natural system; it has the integrity, the independence, and the benign dependence of an organism.

Berry concluded on a note of caution:

But we must not forget that those human solutions that we may call organic are not natural. We are talking about organic artifacts, organic only by imitation or analogy. Our ability to make such artifacts depends on virtues that are specifically human: [...] A good solution, then, must be in harmony with good character, cultural value, and moral law.

Organic agriculture,to Berry, was a human attempt at moral agriculture. And people have been known to disagree on questions of morality. While a growing cadre of farmers and eaters found inspiration in Howard, Berry, and other eloquent pioneers of organic agriculture, each had a different interpretation of what actually constituted organic farming. Money complicated things further. Growing consumer demand and premium prices for organic products motivated questionable labeling of “organic” food from farms that clearly violated organic principles. People who bought organic food weren’t always getting what they thought they were buying.

In response, organic certifiers began to emerge. They developed sets of organic standards, identifying acceptable practices based on principles, philosophy and ideals of organic agriculture. Most prohibited the use of synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, for example. Organic certification remained voluntary, however, and different certification agencies had different standards. A person who bought a certified organic product from Kentucky could get something grown in a way that would not be allowed by certifiers in Oregon.

Beginning in 1990, the USDA began to develop a single national standard for organic agriculture. The controversial process took more than a decade, but national organic standards became legally enforceable in 2002. They dictated what methods and substances were allowed for use on organic farms, and they made organic certification mandatory.

Organic agriculture had gone from being a fuzzy concept, based on high ideals but open to dramatically different interpretations in practice, to being a clearly defined set of practices. National organic standards drew a line in the sand, transforming shades of grey into black and white, organic and not organic. A colleague of mine compares being an organic farmer to being pregnant… you either are or you aren’t. There’s no part-way about it.

Sustainable agriculture, meanwhile, remains open to all sorts of different interpretations. Systems and practices can be more or less sustainable. When somebody tells me they don’t farm organically but they farm sustainably I have to ask what they mean by that. Everybody means something different. Even when people agree on the goals of sustainability, they can disagree on how best to accomplish those goals, or measure progress toward them.

This is what I tried to explain to the New York Times reporter as I prepared my squash. Organic agriculture and sustainable agriculture are based on similar principles. They both used to be fuzzy ideas, but that is no longer the case for organic agriculture, which became more cut-and-dried with the introduction of national organic standards. Apparently she heard me say that organic agriculture used to be sustainable, but isn’t always anymore.

This bothers me, because it suggests that I think there was a golden age of sustainable organic agriculture, which is now behind us. The New York Times story uses me to bolster its thesis that growth of the organic sector is compromising sustainability. In fact, I think it’s the other way around: Each farm that transitions to organic agriculture makes our food system a little more sustainable. Choosing an organic product over a similar conventional product is a vote for sustainability.

The New York Times article deals specifically with the problem of aquifer depletion beneath the deserts of Mexico’s Baja peninsula. Conventional agriculture is responsible for most freshwater use globally, and must shoulder much of the blame for the fact that aquifers the world over are being drained faster than they are recharged. This is clearly unsustainable. It’s happening in Mexico, but it’s also happening in California, the Midwestern US, India, China, and the Middle East. Just about every country growing irrigated grain is depleting aquifers to do it.

Groundwater depletion in the regions of the U.S.A., Europe, China and India and the Middle East for the year 2000 (mm/year; clockwise from top‐left). From Wada et al., 2010 (Click image to go to source).

Since some of the farms in the Baja Peninsula are organic, the problem is presented as an example of growth in the organic sector promoting unsustainable practices. Ironically, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization recently released a report called Sustainable Options for Addressing Land and Water Problems that identifies organic farming as part of the solution to such problems. Organic standards don’t regulate irrigation methods or acceptable water sources, but they do promote practices that improve water use efficiency, build soils that retain water, and reduce pollution of remaining water resources. The Mexican organic vegetable farms highlighted in the article happen to use trickle irrigation, which uses up to 75% less water than sprinkler or flood irrigation systems. They aren’t required to do so by organic standards, but the fact that the farmers can fetch a premium for their organic produce may have allowed them to invest in more sustainable technology. Michael O’Gorman, who used to manage an organic farm in Mexico, describes the irrigation practices used by organic farmers in the Baja peninsula as “some of the most inventive and advanced water saving systems in the world.”

O’Gorman offers his own perspective on the particular farms highlighted in the New York Times article:

The group doing all of Del Cabo’s production in the southern end of the peninsula is one of the oldest grower-owned organic cooperatives in the world. It is owned by the same 151 families (average acreage less than 10) that were given ownership by organic farming pioneers in the early 1980s. It was started, and remains, as a social enterprise to give Mexican farmers a dignified alternative to waiting on tables and cleaning any of the nearly 500,000 luxiorious hotel rooms that American and European tourists inhabit daily[...] In fact the reason why organics developed in this part of Mexico is because the big conventional growers had no interest in the small fields that were owned by Mexican families. Del Cabo growers are religious about organics.

Americans like tomatoes. We eat — and import — more of them every year. In 1981 the average American consumed about a pound of tomatoes each month, of which just 3 ounces were imported. Today the average American eats more than a pound and a half of tomatoes monthly, and a half pound of that is imported, mostly from Mexico. Even our American-grown tomatoes are mostly tended by farm laborers from Mexico and other Latin American countries, who often work in indentured servitude to bring us cheap fruit. The brutal environmental and social costs of America’s conventional tomato industry are detailed in Tomatoland (2011), by award-winning investigative journalist Barry Estabrook:

Fields are sprayed with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides. Tomatoes are picked hard and green and artificially gassed until their skins acquire a marketable hue. Modern plant breeding has tripled yields, but has also produced fruits with dramatically reduced amounts of calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin C, and tomatoes that have fourteen times more sodium than the tomatoes our parents enjoyed. The relentless drive for low costs has fostered a thriving modern-day slave trade in the United States.

Those who tend our crops suffer the health effects of direct exposure to herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, and fumigants, whether they are in Mexico or the USA. In the 1990s a team of anthropologists led by Elizabeth Guilette studied effects of pesticides on children from farming families in the Yaqui valley and foothills of northwestern Mexico. Families in the valley used conventional farming practices with numerous pesticide applications; those in the foothills practiced traditional farming without pesticides. Children from conventional farming families in the valley had much poorer motor skills, less endurance, and worse memory than those who grew up in the foothills without pesticides. Evidence of the effects Guilette and her team observed included representative drawings by her four year-old subjects:

Representative drawings of a person by 4-year-old Yaqui children from the valley and foothills of Sonora, Mexico (Guillette, 1998. Click image to go to source). Valley children are exposed to pesticides; those in the foothills are not.

As a father of young children, I find these images heartbreaking. I want to be able to choose healthy foods for my kids without hurting other kids in the process. Thankfully, I can grow my own tomatoes, or rely on local farmers to grow tomatoes for me using low-input season extension technology, for about half the year. If I must have fresh tomatoes in January then I can choose organic to support farmers — wherever they are — who step off the pesticide treadmill. This won’t fix all of the problems of our industrial food system, but it can make it a little more sustainable.

Originally published at Organic Kentucky

“Sewer Mining” – Efficient Water Recycling Coming to a Community Near You

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:39:21 GMT

By Sandra Postel, posted Jan 23, 2012:

It sounds yucky at best, but mining sewage is growing in popularity, especially in Sydney, Australia, where a decade of drought forced some creative thinking about how to get, use and manage water.

In 2004, when reservoir levels around Sydney hit record lows during the Big Dry, Sydney Water, the municipal water provider, tightened water-use restrictions to stretch the city’s drinking water supplies. One of its customers, the Pennant Hills Golf Club, founded in 1923 and boasting a championship course, got anxious that the curbs on water use would cause its prized greens to turn to ugly browns.

The club decided to take an unusual step: it requested permission to tap into the sewer line that ran through the golf course, and then treat and use that wastewater to irrigate its 23 hectares (57 acres) of greens.

Raw sewage (left) gets turned into high-quality water for re-use (right) while the dark "mixed liquor" (middle) returns to the bioreactor. Photo credit: Permeate Partners

The Pennant Hills project was one of Sydney’s earliest. Today at least four sewer-mining schemes are operating in the New South Wales capital, with eight more in the works, including at Macquarie University and the Sydney Airport.

Just as the name implies, sewer mining involves tapping into a wastewater collection system, siphoning some of the sewage off to a treatment facility, and then reusing the reclaimed water onsite for landscape irrigation, toilet flushing or other uses not requiring water pure enough to drink.

Areas of Israel, California and other water-short parts of the world have practiced wastewater reuse for decades. What’s unique about sewer mining, however, is that it’s smaller in scale and decentralized. Instead of collecting a whole city’s wastewater and sending it to a large centralized treatment plant and then piping the reclaimed water great distances for re-use, with sewer mining the acquisition, treatment and re-use of the sewage typically all happens in the same location.

When well planned and designed, sewer mining can yield a variety of benefits. It can relieve overtaxed wastewater systems, trim water and wastewater infrastructure costs, reduce energy and chemical use, and save drinking water for activities that really need drinking-quality water. These water-savings, in turn, can help keep more water in rivers, lakes and streams – which is especially crucial during droughts and summer months, when river flows are low and water demands are high.

“Sydney Water initially couldn’t get its head around the concept (of sewer mining),” said Kurt Dahl, managing director of Permeate Partners, the consultancy that designed the Pennant Hills system.

It was a new concept to me, too. I toured the club’s water reclamation system during a trip to Sydney. The more I saw and listened, the more it made sense.

The sewer pipe running through the golf course carries wastewater from about one thousand homes to the coastal town of Manly, where it receives primary (very basic) treatment and then gets dumped into the sea. So the project was mining wastewater that not only would go unused but would add pollutants to the ocean. And as long as the golf club siphoned off flow during peak hours of toilet flushing and showering – the morning and evening – it wouldn’t interfere with the pressure and flow rate needed to get the remaining sewage to Manly.

The sewer-mining scheme has cut Pennant Hills’ potable water use by 92 percent, which earned the club an award from Sydney Water. Due to the club’s use of treated wastewater onsite, Sydney Water no longer needs to supply it with some 70 megaliters (18.5 million gallons) per year of drinking water.

In addition, the nitrogen in the sewage has virtually eliminated the need to fertilize the golf course: small amounts of nitrogen get added every time the greens are irrigated. The fertilizer savings are somewhat offset, though, by the need to add gypsum to the soil to counteract the extra sodium in the reclaimed water.

Overall, the system has proven to be a cost-effective way to drought-proof the links and reduce stresses on Sydney’s water supply. And the golfers, apparently, are pleased.

“Old-time club members say this is the best the golf course has looked in thirty years,” Dahl said.

What makes sewer mining feasible – and the reason it is likely to catch on and spread – are the advancements in membrane technologies over the last decade. At the heart of the Pennant Hills treatment process, as well as many other sewer-mining projects, is a membrane bioreactor (MBR). The raw sewage first goes through biological treatment by microorganisms. The resulting product is then drawn through a membrane: while the water makes it through, the membrane’s microscopic pores block the solids and pathogens. This dark “mixed liquor,” or activated sludge, then returns to the first chamber of the bioreactor process, while the water either moves on to its intended use or gets further treatment, typically ultraviolet or chlorine disinfection.

The membrane bioreactor process has been around for thirty years, but both the cost of the membranes as well as their energy requirements have decreased substantially. As a result, MBRs are now cost-competitive with conventional wastewater treatment, even while producing higher-quality water.

According to Dahl of Permeate Partners, MBRs now treat more than 3 billion liters (792 million gallons) of water a day, and installed capacity is growing rapidly.

Dockside Green, a 15-acre mixed residential-commercial site in Victoria, British Columbia, and one of the first planned communities to earn LEED Platinum certification, uses an MBR system to treat all of the community’s sewage. The reclaimed water is used to flush toilets, irrigate the landscape and add flow to a local creek. According to Chris Allen, regional manager with General Electric’s Water and Process Technologies division, water conservation measures — including the installation of dual-flush toilets, water-efficient fixtures, and gray water systems — have added further benefit, reducing indoor water use by 65 percent.

Solaire, a 293-unit apartment complex in the Battery Park section of New York City, has the first U.S. onsite water reclamation system built right inside a residential apartment building. According to Allen, it recycles about 25,000 gallons per day to the building’s cooling towers, toilets and landscapes.

One of the world’s largest sewer mining projects is at Cauley Creek, a high-end community in Fulton County, Georgia, northeast of Atlanta. As with Sydney’s Pennant Hills Golf Club, Cauley Creek residents became concerned that drought conditions would lead to restrictions on water withdrawals from the Chattahoochee River. Commissioned in April 2002, the community’s MBR system can now reclaim 5 million gallons of wastewater per day, which get used by area schools, churches, homes and a golf course. In addition to allowing more water to remain in the Chattahoochee, the system produces reclaimed water of high enough quality to release any excess back to the river. In keeping with the community’s rural character, the treatment plant sits quietly inside a classic red barn, complete with a weather vane.

As we more fully adapt to water’s limits, we will choose landscapes that don’t require irrigation at all and recycle more water to grow food rather than thirsty lawns. But creative ways to take the “waste” out of wastewater will be crucial to closing the gap between our growing water demands and Earth’s finite supply.

Originally published January 16,2012 at National Geographic
Part of National Geographic's Freshwater Initiative

Heinberg - Pacific NW and Canadian tour dates

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 22:49:11 GMT

By Richard Heinberg, posted Jan 19, 2012:

Richard Heinberg is launching his Canadian tour with a webinar on Salt Spring Island, BC, January 26th from 7:00-9:30 at ArtSpring Theatre. The event will be hosted by the Transition Salt Spring and the Salt Spring Conservancy. Details.

Other events in BC:

February 6-8, South Cariboo Sustainability Society, 100 Mile House, BC

February 9th,12:30pm - 2pm Public Talk on The End of Growth in Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability Public Hall, University of British Colombia, Vancouver, B.C.

Friday, February 10th - 5pm-6pm Keynote to open World Community Film Festival/Public Talk for Village Vancouver. Details

February 10, UBC School of Community and Regional Planning Annual Symposium, Vancouver, BC

February 8-11, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC

Oregon Events

February 28-29, Corvallis, OR
March 1-2, Public Interest Environmental Law Conference (PIELC), Eugene, OR
March 3, NLC Committee on Sustainability, Eugene, OR

With Gas so Cheap and Well Drilling Down, Why is Gas Production so High?

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:36:27 GMT

By David Hughes, posted Jan 19, 2012:

Natural gas prices have declined to below $3.00/mcf, levels not seen for years, yet the EIA posted the highest gas production ever in October, 2011. U.S. gas production is growing despite annual well completion rates that are half that at the peak of the drilling boom in 2008, when gas price topped $12.00/mcf. Proponents of shale gas as a “game changer” suggest that, despite the well known high decline rates of shale gas wells, their productivity is sufficient to grow production with far fewer wells at historically low prices. Others, such as Arthur Berman, claim that shale gas plays require much higher prices to be economic. The answer may lie in the gas produced in association with oil drilling, which is near all time historical highs.

Figure 1 illustrates the annual number of gas wells and gas production documented by the EIA. Although drilling is still well above 1990’s levels, it is only half that of the all time record drilling levels reached in 2008.

Natural Gas Production versus Annual Drilling Rates, 1990-2011

Figure 1 – Annualized U.S. natural gas production and drilling rates, 1990-2011.

U.S. natural gas production has reached production levels of 4.6 percent above the previous 1973 peak, and nearly 16% above the recent 2001 peak. While some of this increase is likely due to delayed tie-ins from the 2008 drilling boom, and some due to the high initial productivities of shale gas wells, these are not likely the whole story.

Hydraulic fracturing has certainly changed the game with respect to gas production from shales and tight rocks, albeit with widely reported collateral damage including methane leakage into groundwater, pollution from produced frackwater disposal on the surface, induced earthquakes from frackwater injection into disposal wells and the environmental footprint of industrialized landscapes. Equally important is the game changing nature of applying hydraulic fracturing to producing oil from shales.

Figure 2 illustrates annualized crude oil production versus well drilling rates. Drilling rates are near all time highs, more than double the rates of the 1990’s, and have succeeded in increasing production to levels not seen since late 2003 (yet down 42% from 1971). Production has grown by 0.65 million barrels per day above the all time low in U.S. oil production in May, 2008, causing some pundits to declare a new era of “American energy independence”.

Crude Oil Production versus Annual Drilling Rates, 1990-2011

Figure 2 - Annualized U.S. crude oil production and drilling rates, 1990-2011.

Large amounts of natural gas are produced in conjunction with the production of hydraulically fractured shale oil and in association with conventional oil drilling. Given the price differential between oil and gas at present many companies have changed their focus to shale oil or liquids rich shale gas to enhance economic returns. Although much associated gas in the production of shale oil is simply flared, as in the Bakken play in North Dakota, much is also produced into the market even at current low prices. Thus the apparent “too- good-to-be-true” statistics showing growing gas production with declining drilling are simply that – too- good-to-be-true. The record drilling for oil, and its contribution to gas production, is masking the high drilling rates required to grow gas production in the EIA statistics (which classify a well as either “oil” or “gas” depending on its principal product).

Drill baby drill – Recent drilling rates are near all time highs
Production decline rates in both shale gas and shale oil wells are very high – first year declines in Barnett shale gas wells are in the order of 65% and are higher in Haynesville wells. Similar decline rates are observed in shale oil plays. Thus new wells must continually be drilled to offset depletion in existing wells. Figure 3 illustrates the aggregate footage drilled for oil and gas in the U.S. and the average depth of the wells.

Annual Footage Drilled versus Average Well Depth 1990-2011

Figure 3 - Annualized U.S. aggregate footage drilled and average well depth, 1990-2011.

It can be seen that the footage drilled is near all time historical highs. And it can be argued that a hydraulically fractured foot, drilled in 2012, required much higher inputs of energy and capital investment than a foot drilled in 1980, as the deposits targeted are so much more challenging (or marginal, depending on your perspective). In addition, the average depth of a well is 40 percent deeper than it was in 1990. This reflects the declining EROEI associated with domestic U.S. oil and gas production, which can only be expected to decline further going forward.

So, despite vocal industry proponents to the contrary, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Growing, or even maintaining, U.S. oil and gas production will require an increasing level of inputs in terms of the number of wells drilled, the footage drilled, the capital investments required, and, likely, the large amounts of collateral environmental damage incurred.

J.D. Hughes, Post Carbon Institute, January, 2012

Security by Design

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:17:08 GMT

By David Orr, posted Jan 19, 2012:

It is commonly assumed that our national security depends only on our capacity to project military power beyond our borders and has little to do with how we organize the internal business of the country. The nation’s armed strength and its “soft power” are necessary components of security, but they are not—and cannot be—the whole of it. A larger vision of security includes the internal resilience, health, and sustainability of the nation, that is to say its capacity for self-renewal. Real security, in other words, is inseparable from issues of energy policy; education; public health; preservation of soils, forests, and waters; and broadly based, sustainable prosperity.

From this perspective, America is less secure than at any time in its history, despite expenditures in excess of $1 trillion per year for the defense budget and war appropriations. The challenges of the twenty-first century are larger, more complex, and longer-lived than any we have faced before. Of these, the most salient is not terrorism or the ongoing global economic crisis, but rather the threat posed by rapid climate destabilization.¹ What was a solvable problem when first presented to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 is approaching irreversible catastrophe. The heart of the problem is our failure to establish a coherent and farsighted energy policy despite the verbal commitments of every president since 1973 to raising energy efficiency and developing renewable energy sources. That failure, in turn, has amplified many other problems now grown into crises, including the unnecessary expenditure of trillions of dollars paid to unfriendly governments to secure oil resources that we waste because of inefficiency; foreign policy entanglements in politically unstable regions; the resulting military burdens—financial and human—of fighting wars to maintain access to energy that we otherwise would not need; and blowback from consequences that we fail to anticipate.

The failure to establish a farsighted energy policy also drives other problems. Cheap energy in the form of nitrogen fertilizers has created a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey. In turn, the industrialized food industry has helped to create the current obesity epidemic. The same pattern holds true across many other areas: suburban sprawl necessitates our dependence on cheap oil for transportation, manufacturing systems average 3,200 pounds of waste for every pound of product placed on a store shelf, and our national energy system is only 13 percent efficient.² In these and similar cases, there is a growing mismatch between the scale, seriousness, and long-term nature of problems and our willingness and capacity to act.

That policy paralysis is the outcome of 30 years of shortsighted and bitter partisanship, which has reduced our capacity to solve serious problems at the national level. Contrived scandals, lies, and scare tactics about higher energy prices and lost jobs have encouraged many politicians to dismiss threats such as climate change. Following the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United (2009), the power of secret and unaccountable money has become more pervasive than ever before. The Tea Party movement, funded by those with much to gain from public befuddlement, misdirected anger, and more deregulation, has changed the political landscape—at least for the time being—and effectively closed the window of opportunity for federal climate legislation that existed in early 2009. Too much money in politics, the power of an unaccountable extreme right-wing media, failed leadership, and too much power in the hands of senators representing more cows than people all add up to what Eric Alterman has called “Kabuki Democracy,” a system that is rigged to prevent solutions to public problems and seems incapable of repairing itself. And beneath the surface of U.S. politics, in particular, are deeply rooted beliefs that individual liberty trumps the public good and that government is almost always wrong, except when it endeavors to wither away.

For comparison, in the decade between 1940 and 1950, the country became the “arsenal of democracy,” fought and won wars in Europe and the Pacific, created the United Nations, passed the GI Bill to integrate returning servicemen into a growing economy, expanded Social Security, took the first faltering steps toward racial integration, contained the spread of Communism, and created the Marshall Plan to stabilize the societies and economies of Western Europe.

In today’s gridlocked political environment, however, we would have done none of these things. The underlying reasons are many, but two stand out. The first is simply the lack of an organizing principle for both domestic and foreign policy. The clear threats of Nazism and Communism once galvanized sufficient bipartisan consensus for action. Our present long-term threats, however, arise mostly from our own behavior, profligacy, and negligence, and from the growing complexity of the global economy, not from dependably loathsome external enemies. Cartoonist Walt Kelly long ago captured the essence of the problem in Pogo’s words: “We’ve met the enemy and he is us.”

A second reason for our inability to respond to complex and long-term issues is the lingering power of obsolete laws, policies, organizations, and worldviews that were designed to manage the industrial and agrarian economies of previous centuries. In the industrial era, governments, corporations, and civic organizations were organized hierarchically. Cause and effect were presumed to be transparent and linear, and problems could be broken into their components much like mass production on a factory assembly line. That system worked miracles measured in gross material output, the expansion of the consumer economy, and the transformation of rural societies into mass urban industrial nations. As circumstances and technology changed, however, the flaws of hierarchical organization, such as “groupthink,” rigidity, fragmentation, and lack of foresight, became more costly and often proved fatal to organizations that could not adapt. In the faster world of seven billion people and tens of thousands of nongovernmental organizations and global corporations networked by the Internet, hierarchy and centralized control are often counterproductive. In other words, where information, capacity, and organizational structure are distributed through networks, hierarchical systems prove less and less effective. Successful organizations of the future will be flexible, disaggregated, hyper-efficient in their use of energy and resources, and capable of learning and foresight.

The result of these changes is a backlog of unsolved problems that include an exorbitant national debt, looming fiscal insolvency, waning global influence, and a wasteful, hence unsustainable national lifestyle. The U.S. is ceding entire emergent industries, including advanced renewable energy technology, to China, Japan, India, and Germany. We are increasingly vulnerable to rapid climate destabilization as well as to economic shocks, terrorism, cyber-terrorism, environmental degradation, and combinations of any or all of the above.

These problems will be amplified by sudden and unpredictable events similar to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, or the financial collapse of 2008.^3-6 Such occurrences are the by-product of complexity, global scale, and the sheer velocity of events that defy prediction. And they are becoming more frequent and more powerful with the increasing complexity of the global system. In the words of one analyst, “we must squarely face the awful fact that our security will become ever more perilous.”⁵

To achieve security, therefore, requires that we move beyond over-reliance on military force and even “soft power” to goals promoting long-term sustainability and resilience. For the twenty-first century, the concept of sustainability should be the new organizing principle for both domestic and foreign policy, just as the doctrine of containment against the Soviet threat served in the previous century, as Mark Mykleby proposes in this issue. The idea of sustainability first came to prominence in the writings of Lester Brown in the early 1980s and in the Brundtland Commission report of 1987, entitled Our Common Future. The term implies many things including a rapid transition to energy efficiency and renewable energy sources as well as management of soils and forests for long-term health, elimination of waste, and changes in economic accounting necessary to preserve “natural capital” so that each generation leaves “as much and as good” for succeeding generations. Sustainability requires that we (a) see the world in all of its social, economic, and ecological complexity as one interactive system and (b) extend our time horizons sufficiently far into the future to foresee and forestall outcomes that would otherwise compromise the well-being of future generations. In other words, the adoption and development of a sustainable society requires that we apply the science of systems thinking to governance, infrastructure, economy, and natural resources over the long haul.

The chief characteristic of sustainable systems is resilience, or the capacity of the system to “absorb disturbance, to undergo change and still retain essentially the same function, structure, and feedbacks.”^7-9 It is a concept long familiar to engineers, mathematicians, ecologists, designers, and military planners. Resilient systems are characterized by redundancy so that failure of any one component does not cause the entire system to crash. They consist of diverse components that are easily repairable, widely distributed, cheap, locally supplied, durable, and loosely coupled. However, resilience differs from sustainable development in one critical respect. Sustainability is sometimes described as an end-state as if it could be achieved once and for all. The goal of resilience, on the other hand, implies the capacity to make ongoing adjustments to changing political, economic, and ecological conditions. In practical terms, resilience is a design strategy that aims to reduce vulnerabilities by shortening supply lines, improving redundancy in critical areas, bolstering local capacity, and solving for a deeper pattern of dependence and disability. The less resilient the country, the more military power is needed to protect its far-flung interests and client states, hence the greater the likelihood of wars fought for natural resources. Resilient societies, on the other hand, do not send their young to fight and die in far-away battlefields because they lack wit, foresight, and design intelligence.

At the national level, adoption of sustainability as an organizing concept would require fundamental changes in policy, law, and the organization of federal agencies. A National Sustainability Act, a modern day equivalent of the National Security Act of 1947 or the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 is needed to (a) integrate policy across agencies and departments of the federal government; (b) upgrade the capacity for foresight throughout all government departments and agencies; and (c) align federal policies, taxation, and research and development expenditures to coincide with the goals of sustainability.

In the absence of federal leadership, states and regions have created policies on specific issues, such as carbon emissions (see, for example, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative developed by the Western Governors’ Association and the New England governors). Similarly, ICLEI–Local Governments for Sustainability has organized cities to take climate action at the municipal level and to develop broader policies to encourage sustainability on a larger scale. Others, like the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), are working to develop economic alternatives. Within different sectors of the economy, there have also been important innovations: renewable energy technologies are increasingly cost-competitive, agriculture and manufacturing are increasingly imitating natural systems in order to reduce waste, and the U.S. Green Building Council’s design standards have improved the energy efficiency of new building projects.

Each of these and similar efforts is promising but, again, limited in focus and scope. Although sustainability is by definition a systems concept, it has been attempted mostly as a series of one-off projects in which each part functions in isolation from the others. As a result, we’ve made disconnected efforts where the total is less than the sum of the parts. Sustainable development still requires a more complex strategy on a scale where the parts are designed to reinforce the integrity, resilience, and prosperity of the whole. As Kentucky writer and farmer Wendell Berry once put it, our goal is to advance models that “solve for pattern,” so that every solution solves multiple problems, while causing no new ones.

The challenge is, of course, to translate local and regional interest into national action. Faced with paralysis at the federal level and catastrophe dead ahead, a small group of us, representing Oberlin College, the Department of Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, the New America Foundation, and others, has been meeting for the past year to explore the feasibility of creating a National Sustainable Communities Coalition that builds on years of rapid advances in the art and science of applied sustainability. We do not propose a single model or one-size-fits-all approach. To the contrary, the particular priorities of member organizations will vary with local circumstances, scale, ecology, topography, and culture.

We have two overriding goals, the first of which is to promote local and regional catalysts for integrated responses to probable disturbances in the years ahead. In doing so, we propose to take the words sustainable and resilience out of the realm of abstraction and make them Main Street realities, the default approach for how things are done in communities across the country.

Our second goal is to join sustainability with a larger national dialogue about strategy, security, and the American future that moves the political discussion beyond the present liberal versus conservative impasse. For three decades, we have been talking past each other and, in the meantime, we have become more vulnerable to a wider array of threats than ever before. We believe that heading off the worst of climate change and building resilient and fair societies are two sides of the same coin. Together, they lead to genuine security. The network we propose will integrate models of sustainability into a larger national narrative about our highest values. At the same time, it would foster new initiatives, amplify existing efforts, accelerate momentum, spread best practices, link otherwise separate endeavors, and mobilize popular support for a new and better direction for the United States.

One possible objection is that the scale of funding required is prohibitively large. But, as policy analyst Patrick Doherty notes, there is a third way between austerity on one hand and deficit spending on the other. It requires that we eliminate avoidable costs endemic to unsustainable development and terminate tens of billions of dollars that we pay each year to subsidize things we don’t need and don’t want.

Another objection is that the scope and scale of a national network is too large. But the fact is that, if we are to secure the nation’s future, we will have to learn how to do integrated local planning. And we cannot wait for the federal government to catch up. If we wait, we will do it badly, expensively, and ineffectively as a series of one-off projects. If we act now, we can build national resilience systematically and effectively.

The core ideas in this essay go back at least as far as the writings of George Kennan, the visionary diplomat who developed the conceptual framework for what became our national Cold War strategy of containment. In 1954 he wrote, “I think we can no longer permit the economic advance of our country to take place so extensively at the cost of the devastation of its natural resources and its natural beauty. I think that we shall have to take stock in the most careful manner of what is still left to us out of the original fund of topsoil and mineral resources and water tables and forests and wildlife.”¹⁰

Sixteen years later, Kennan went further to propose “a new and more promising focus of attention . . . a major international effort to restore the hope, the beauty, and the salubriousness of the natural environment.”¹¹ The difference from his time to our own is the awareness of both the scope, scale, and duration of the problems we face and the growing capacity to build a resilient, fair, prosperous, and sustainable America. We have wasted much of any margin for error that we once had. We must now act with unprecedented ingenuity, discipline, and speed. The choice is ours.

References

New, M, Liverman, D, Schroder, H & Anderson, K. Four degrees and beyond. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369, 6-19. (2011).
Ayres, R & Ayres, E. Crossing the Energy Divide 64 (Pearson Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2009).
Taleb, N. The Black Swan 2nd edn. (Random House, New York, 2010).
Bremmer, I & Keat, P. The Fat Tail (Oxford University Press, New York, 2010).
Ramo, JC. The Age of the Unthinkable 97 (Back Bay Books, Boston, 2009).
Gladwell, M. The Tipping Point (Little Brown, Boston, 2000).
Walker, B & Salt, D. Resilience Thinking 32 (Island Press, Washington, 2006).
Lovins, A & Lovins, H. Brittle Power Ch. 13 (Brick House Press, Andover, MA, 1982).
Lovins, A et al. Small is Profitable (Rocky Mountain Institute, Snowmass, CO, 2002).
Kennan, GF. Realities of American Foreign Policy 111 (Norton, New York, 1954).
Kennan, GF. To prevent a world wasteland. Foreign Affairs 48, 413 (April 1970).

Originally published at Solutions Magazine

The peak oil crisis: cold fusion update

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 22:31:43 GMT

By Tom Whipple, posted Jan 19, 2012:

There have been enough developments in the cold fusion story during the last two weeks to warrant revisiting the subject. For those of you who came in late, cold fusion, also known as Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR), is a phenomenon in which hydrogen, under proper conditions, is combined with palladium or nickel to produce heat. If the reaction can be developed to the point at which it makes lots of heat safely, then the world will change forever as the ingredients for the process and the costs of the reactor appears to be very inexpensive. The process leaves behind no adverse products such as greenhouse gases, ionizing radiation, radioactive waste or even ash.

Should the phenomenon prove economically viable, it has the potential of eliminating the need to burn fossil fuels for heat, light, industry, and transportation. In short LENR seems too good to be true and therein is the problem, for there is much skepticism that a new way of energy that has the potential to render all other forms of energy production - oil, coal, gas, wind, solar, biofuels -- obsolete can possibly be real.

Leaving aside for the moment the sometimes acrimonious debate that is going on between true believers in the phenomenon and the hard-core skeptics and the lack of mainstream media coverage, let's review some recent developments. Last week at a meeting of the UN's World Sustainable Energy Conference in Geneva representatives of the International Society for Condensed Matter Nuclear Science gave presentations on the state of research on the LENR-Cold Fusion phenomenon. In short, numerous scientists from all over the world have conducted experiments in which they observed excess heat coming from combining either palladium or nickel with hydrogen. These reactions have been repeated many times and cross-verified by other labs, so there is now little doubt that the cold fusion or LENR can really take place.

In the hindsight of years of experiments we have learned two things about this phenomenon. The first insight is that getting the reaction to occur is more difficult than thought 23 years ago. This is the reason why other labs were unable to reproduce the Pons-Fleischman experiments that caused so much excitement back in 1989, leading to the whole concept being pronounced a failure. The second discovery is that the reaction seems to be different from the fusion of hydrogen or deuterium into helium that takes place in the sun or a hydrogen bomb. This suggests that endless comments from physicists that "fusion" can only take place at extremely high temperatures are missing the point. Critics are comparing apples with oranges.

With LENR we seem to be dealing with a new natural phenomenon which is not as yet understood although there are numerous theories which attempt to describe what seems to be happening. These theories involve the dense mathematics of nuclear theory and are for the most part incomprehensible to the layman.

The second development of recent days was the release of a video on a NASA website touting the future of LENR. This video was released as part of a U.S. patent application by a NASA scientist that seeks to patent LENR reactions for the U.S. government. The video can best be described as effusive for it says that a nickel-hydrogen reaction has demonstrated the capability of making excessive amounts of energy cleanly and will someday be able to replace fossil fuels. The NASA video is so strong in its endorsement of the concept that the NASA scientist involved was forced to issue a statement pointing out that there is much work still to be done and that without further proof, he does not endorse the claims being made by the Italian entrepreneur Andrea Rossi and his Greek competition Defkalion Green Technologies.

So long as cold fusion was restricted to lab-bench amounts of heat, few people paid much attention to a phenomenon which was generally perceived as discredited junk science. However, the current controversy started early last year when the Italian/American entrepreneur Andrea Rossi claimed that he was not only making heat from a low energy nuclear reaction, he was making so much heat that commercially viable cold fusion was already here. The problem with Rossi's announcement was that he, like Thomas Edison, wants to make some money from his claimed discovery that by putting finely ground nickel powder together with hydrogen in the presence of a catalyst, lots of heat is produced. As Rossi still refuses to release the details of his process or let other independent laboratories examine and reproduce the phenomenon, even several semi-public demonstrations of heat production have not been enough to quell the cries of "fraud," "scam," or "impossible under the laws of physics."

Rossi has dismissed the disbelievers and announced that he was going to validate his discovery by selling devices to the public that would produce useful amounts of heat while consuming only tiny amounts of powdered nickel. Those of you who have seen the video of a hydrogen bomb going off should be aware that nuclear fusion produces millions of times more energy than the simple combustion of a fossil fuel so that only very small amounts of nickel need to be consumed in making large amounts of heat.

Over the past weekend Rossi granted a rare interview to a friendly blogger in which he released considerable new information on his progress towards commercializing his process. During the interview he reiterated the concern the Chinese or others who do not take intellectual property rights seriously would reverse engineer and make off with his discovery if he were to release details of his process prior to having a marketable product.

This, of course, continues the controversy as to whether or not he has made a major breakthrough. Interestingly, Rossi has repeatedly said that the first prototype unit was sold to a "customer" in the U.S. - speculation is that it could possibly be DoD's DARPA. This device now has been in the hands of the unknown "customer" for two months who should have had time to figure out if it works or if he has just paid $2 million for a fraud. This of course assumes that there really is a "customer" which some still doubt as no one has stepped forward to acknowledge purchasing such a device.

In his new revelations, Rossi describes a home sized unit under development with a core about the size of a cigarette box that contains the nickel, some form of hydride that contains the hydrogen and the catalyst. This box takes about an hour to heat up before it starts producing excessive heat. Rossi says the reaction between the nickel and the hydrogen generates gamma rays which are turned into heat by the lead shielding of the box and must be carried away by a cooling system or the core will melt into a hot, but harmless, puddle of lead and nickel.

Rossi says he is working with the US firm of National Instruments to design a control system for his nickel-hydrogen reactor and with Underwriters Laboratory to certify the device as safe for home use. Interestingly, National Instruments has confirmed that they are working with Rossi, but refuse to release any details of the arrangements. Another interesting development is that Rossi now hopes to be selling the newly designed 10 Kwh home heating units in the U.S. later this year for $400-$500.

The question as to whether commercial cold fusion is as imminent as Rossi hopes is still open. As the story develops, more labs verify the phenomenon, and Rossi does not ask for money for other than actually selling a device, the cries of scam and fraud have largely melted away to be replaced by assertions that it is too good to be true and certainly nothing will be marketable in the foreseeable future. Rossi says he is preparing to contract with two European Universities in the near future to test and certify his device soon as many onlookers have been demanding.

The most interesting facet of this seemingly bizarre story is that while we are dealing with a technology that, if it works as claimed, will clearly be as significant to the course of civilization as the development of agriculture, steam power, electricity, and flight, it has been barely mentioned in the mainstream media. As more details are released, however, it is becoming apparent that if it is verified, we are dealing with a rather simple and cheap technology that could see widespread adoption in a very short period. As prices of fossil fuels increase, the attraction of an extremely cheap energy source obviously will prove irresistible despite opposition from those having much to lose from its widespread adoption.

It must be reiterated that while it seems likely that LENR reactions are a real phenomenon, it has yet to be proven that commercial products which can start replacing fossil fuels are only months away. We should have some answers to this question - one way or another -- before the year is out.

Originally published January 18, 2012 at Falls Church News-Press

Congress doesn’t know when to stop digging

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:10:21 GMT

By Bill McKibben, posted Jan 13, 2012:

[Excerpt]: John Boehner’s got a problem — a statistical trap that’s going to take some real work to get out of.

His drive to completely discredit the institution of the Congress has stalled: 9 percent of Americans still somehow approve of the way our legislature functions. And those 9 percent must be kind of stubborn: I mean, 16 percent of Americans approved of the way BP handled the Gulf oil spill, and 13 percent approve of polygamy. If that hard-core 9 percent didn’t mind, say, threatening to shut the government down three times last year, it’s going to be next to impossible to turn them off.

Happily, the House Speaker seems to have a plan.

Having attached a rider to the payroll tax cut that forces the President to make a decision on the Keystone pipeline in the next 60 days — a rider the administration says will force it to deny the permit — he now is attempting to punish those representatives who didn’t go along. The National Republican Campaign Committee last week sent out press releases to 55 recalcitrant members of Congress, insisting they speak out against the president.

In other words: Boehner wants those “vulnerable” representatives to join the harem he maintains on behalf of the fossil-fuel industry. Yes! That should do it — get everyone in Congress in bed with the industry everyone hates the most and maybe you really can persuade the last 9 percent to pack it in.

Because here’s the deal: the reason, above all, that everyone despises Congress is because they think it’s bought and paid for. And Keystone is the perfect example. When the House took its vote on the issue in December, 234 members voted to “expedite” the pipeline. They’d taken, between them, $42 million dollars from the fossil fuel industry, as compared with only $8 million for the 193 on the other side.

Read full article

Originally published January 12, 2012 at The Hill.

Reality Strikes Back: A Review of Richard Heinberg’s The End of Growth

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:16:14 GMT

By Chris Stratton, posted Jan 11, 2012:

By Chris Stratton, The Center for a New American Dream

If you’re worried about the recession and looking for reassurance that the world’s economies will soon be back on track and everything will return to normal, you should probably stop reading now.

But maybe you’re concerned about all the debt we’re in. Maybe you’re skeptical about how we currently measure societal progress and personal well-being. If you’re prepared to examine the hard, unsettling economic and environmental realities that await us, then may I recommend to you, brave reader, Richard Heinberg’s The End of Growth.

Heinberg’s overarching message is that the current economic downturn is not temporary and that, because we have now reached fundamental, unalterable ecological limits, economic growth is gone for good. In other words, the world is in for a permanent economic depression, as currently defined.

Heinberg sets up his defense of this profound assertion by first exploring the historical context of the discipline of economics, demonstrating how theories that have existed since Adam Smith’s time still influence our decision making about national debt dilemmas.

Heinberg then recounts the 2008 economic crisis in considerable detail and using a lot of jargon. After reading this section, I’m still not sure I know the difference between a mortgage-backed security and a collateralized debt obligation, but I can tell you this: people got greedy. The economy has gotten way, way, (way) too complicated. And our entire economy is now fundamentally addicted to debt and to continued, indefinite growth. Oops.

Heinberg goes on to explain that because we’re reaching peak…well…peak everything, and because economic growth relies on natural resources and the Earth’s ability to process our wastes, this growth simply can’t continue. He says that our money has come to represent claims on goods and services that just don’t exist. Through debt and “fiat” currency, the amount of money in the world just gets bigger and bigger, while the Earth’s total stock of resources remains the same. Something has to give.

Unlike previous authors, going back to Thomas Malthus, then later Dennis and Donella Meadows, Herman Daly, and more recently, Tim Jackson and Gus Speth—to all of whom Heinberg gives their due—he’s not just saying that economic growth should stop or that it will stop. He’s saying that it in fact has stopped, whether we like it or not. Discussion in the popular media aside, this is not a choice. Physical laws dictate that all living things must stop growing at some point and, our adamant resistance notwithstanding, the human species has reached that point.

But haven’t we heard before how growth will stop because we’ve run out of resources? (Think The Population Bomb.) So far, it hasn’t happened. Innovation (say the business people), substitution (say the economists), and efficiency (say the scientists) have always allowed us to overcome any resource limitations and advance along the path of progress and growth—and they will continue to do so in the future. But Heinberg says, not this time. Today, innovation mostly just involves tweaking existing technologies. And some materials fundamental to economic growth—most notably fossil fuels—simply have no substitutes. And efficiency can be used to decouple energy use from economic growth only to a certain point.

Heinberg asserts that the end of growth has profound social and economic implications for “developed” and “developing” countries alike. The argument from the rich has long been that we don’t have to be concerned about redistributing the economic pie (both among and within countries) because the pie is constantly growing; well, without growth, that argument falls apart. And remember all that “development” that developing countries were going to do? …maybe not so much. In short, Heinberg says we’ll no longer have the prospect of growth to paper over issues of inequity. The Occupy movement began after this book was published, but if Heinberg is right, it’s just the beginning of many inequity-based upheavals to come.

Great, so we’re screwed. Now what? The bad news is that we can’t keep “improving” in the ways we have traditionally defined it—primarily by consuming ever more and better stuff. The good news, say Heinberg and many others, is that maybe we don’t need growth to be better off. Maybe our measurements of well-being and progress have been flawed all along. Heinberg advocates for “redefining progress” using alternative economic metrics that, unlike GDP, are not based on how fast we make and consume stuff, but rather on how happy and healthy we are, whether or not our communities are thriving, and how much agency we have in our lives.

And what about all those fossil fuels still in the ground? Heinberg says we must use what viable reserves that remain to transition as gracefully—and quickly—as possible to a steady-state, equitable, renewably powered, bioregion-based economy. No problem, right? But here’s the thing: that’s our only choice. Anything less, and the outcomes are well nigh unthinkable. Welcome to the 21st century!

On the whole, I can’t recommend The End of Growth highly enough. Heinberg is skilled at writing about complex topics in an accessible way without dumbing them down. That said, some concepts he discusses just don’t lend themselves to simplification, so unless you’re accustomed to readings with lots of technical jargon and graphs, parts of the book (especially the chapter describing the causes of our current economic crisis) may be a bit of a slog. But skim, slog, summarize—whatever you need to do to get the gist. It’s worth it! We can’t find our way out of this mess until we have a good understanding of exactly how we got into it.

The End of Growth is essential reading for anyone concerned about the fate of humans. If you care about what may (or may not) become of us, and how we might reasonably go about steering that prospect toward a more desirable outcome, you should study the contents of this book closely. Sharing its contents widely is crucial to our well-being and to the well-being of our progeny.

Chris Stratton lives in Oakland, CA, and researches residential energy efficiency at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The Peak Oil Crisis: Gasoline in 2012

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:57:13 GMT

By Simone, posted Jan 11, 2012:

In recent days there has been much discussion in the press about what might happen to gasoline prices in the coming year.

Cognizant of the fact that retail gasoline is currently running nearly 30 cents per gallon higher than it was in January 2008 the year when prices topped out at a national average of $4.11 and that gasoline futures have risen by 30 cents a gallon in the last few weeks, there is reason for concern. Typical of the stories is one from the Los Angeles Times that quotes Tom Kloza, long-time chief analyst for the Oil Price Information Service and the go-to guy when one needs numbers and forecasts on gasoline prices.

Kloza notes that for the last decade gasoline futures prices, which ultimately determine pump prices, have risen from an autumn low to a spring high by an average of 83 percent. During these years, the annual winter-spring price surge has varied anywhere from 52 to 169 percent making higher prices by summer a fairly sure bet. This year the 2011 low for gasoline on the NY futures market likely will turn out to have been $2.44 a gallon on November 25. If one does the arithmetic using the average price jump of 83 percent, futures prices could be expected to top out in the vicinity of $4.46 a gallon next spring. Adding in the additional 60 cents to get the gasoline taxed and to the nozzle of your pump, we could theoretically be paying a national average on the order of $5.00 a gallon before the 4th of July. This of course assumes that nothing bad happens in the Middle East that restricts or seriously threatens the flow of oil exports and sends prices much higher.

The $5 scenario is too much for Kloza so he settles for a fall-to-spring increase of only 40-45 percent this year which has pump prices topping out between $3.90 and $4.25 a gallon. An increase of only 40-45 percent, of course, would be the smallest winter-spring price rally in this century, but $4 a gallon is something the average American has seen before and can comprehend - forecasting $5 gasoline for six months from now is simply not acceptable considering the economic and political havoc it would be likely to cause.

If the price spike of 2008 obtains, $4+ gasoline is the breaking point for many Americans. Driving will drop, new car sales will plummet, trucks and airplanes will be parked, and with them a big piece of the American economy will grind to a halt. Four years ago, the drop in gasoline consumption was so sharp that it sent prices down $2.40 cents a gallon to an end of the year low of $1.65 thereby freeing up billions of dollars that were going into gas tanks in July and saving the economy from much more serious trouble.

A lot has happened in the past four years that will affect gasoline prices in 2012 so this year is unlikely to be a repeat of 2008. Europe and the Middle East are coming unstuck and at this stage, it is impossible to say which will have the most influence on prices. A European recession will moderate the demand for oil and possibly spread the contagion over much of the world. An interruption of oil supplies from the Middle East would instantly send prices higher to much higher depending on the nature and duration of the interruption.

We also have a looming refinery problem in the U.S. and Europe coming up this summer. As demand for gasoline has dropped, refining has become less profitable, causing refiners to shutter or if possible sell some of their less-profitable refineries -- some 2.6 million barrels a day (b/d) of refining capacity has been closed in the advanced economies. In Europe, the continent's largest independent refiner is shutting down three refineries halting about 250,000 b/d of refining. In the northeastern U.S. however, the situation is much worse. Three large Pennsylvania refineries, which can refine 550,000 b/d and which constitute half the refining capacity on the East coast, are for sale. Two have already been shut down and the third is due for closure if a buyer cannot be found. While this loss of US refining capacity can be made up by increased shipments of refined products from Europe and the Gulf Coast, there will likely be added costs and delays that could result in shortages and higher prices.

Short of a supply disruption, it is hard to imagine U.S. gasoline prices going to $5 a gallon this year, although $4 looks like a good bet. The economic and political turmoil that would ensue as gasoline climbed beyond $4 without any obvious cause would be unprecedented. With the US in the midst of federal elections, pressure on the administration to do something as more and more people were forced out of work would be unprecedented. The same sort of demagogy that we witnessed four years ago would be out in force with politicians blaming speculators and environmentalists for the problem and demanding releases of oil from strategic reserves and the removal of restrictions on drilling.

High gas prices are the remedy for high gas prices. As they did before, consumers would cut back on consumption, but this time it is different as much of the "fat" (discretionary travel, recreational driving by teenagers, etc.) has already been wrung out by the weak economy. U.S. oil consumption is currently down about 2.3 million b/d since 2005. Wringing out the next 2 or 3 million b/d is going to be much more painful especially if the cuts have to happen in weeks or months rather than decades.

Although rarely admitted, it is obvious in hindsight that the $2.40 a gallon plunge in gasoline prices during the second half of 2008 played a major role in keeping the recession relatively mild as compared to what happened in the 1930s. It is difficult to see prices falling this much after the spring run-up this year. There is simply too much Arab Spring in the air that will continue to add risk premiums to oil prices even if the various confrontations do not worsen.

Originally published January 10, 2011 at Falls Church News-Press

Image credit: whatatravisty/flickr

Film review: Why ‘Thrive’ is best avoided

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:23:18 GMT

By Rob Hopkins, posted Jan 11, 2012:

What do you do when you are the heir to the Proctor and Gamble fortune and you have spent years surrounding yourself with new agey thinking and conspiracy theories? You make a film like ‘Thrive‘, the latest conspiracy theory movie that is popping up all over the place. I’ve lost count of the number of people who have asked me “have you seen ‘Thrive’?” Well I have now, and, to be frank, it’s dangerous tosh which deserves little other than our derision. It is also a very useful opportunity to look at a worldview which, according to Georgia Kelly writing at Huffington Post, masks “a reactionary, libertarian political agenda that stands in jarring contrast with the soothing tone of the presentation”. Here’s the trailer to give you a taste:

Visually the film is like some kind of Star Trek fan movie crossed with a National Geographic wildlife film, and is largely built around Gamble’s own years of ‘research’ into the question of what it is that “stops life on earth from thriving”. A reasonable question to ask, but his approach can hardly be called ‘research’ due to the low standards he accepts as ‘evidence’ and his all-round lack of critical analysis. His research, such as it is, is cherry-picked to deepen and support his established worldview, rather than the worldview being built from a careful analysis of the evidence. As we’ll see, this is a dangerous foundation.

So here’s the film’s argument in a nutshell. Humanity is killing itself and the world around it because free energy sources are being deliberately kept from us, cures for cancer are being kept from us, all because we are controlled by an invisible elite who want to create a ‘new world order’ to control us all and prevent us from thriving. So let’s look at some of the film’s central arguments in turn.

Free energy machines

One of the key threads of the film revolves around free energy, the idea that we can generate unlimited clean energy by just tapping into the ‘torus’, a shape that supposedly pervades the universe (see right), and which could yield endless free energy. ’Thrive’ would have you believe that there are dedicated independent scientists around the world bravely defying the laws of thermodynamics only to have their work seized by the FBI, their patents bought up and ‘lost’, or harassed into silence. Yet all we are offered as evidence is some grainy film of machines that could be anything doing anything, and some smart computer graphics of spinning torus shapes.

If this amazing breakthrough that would rewrite science and win Nobel Prizes for anyone involved were actually a reality, and if you were going to spend huge amounts to make a film to argue for their existence which you would then put out into the public arena, surely you would get a working model of such a device into the studio with some impartial scientists to verify it in operation? If they actually exist, and actually work, then this wouldn’t be a big challenge surely? As Kyle Hill writes in his review of the film, “wanting something to be true does not make it more possible”, and “someone wanting to invent such a device is not evidence”. ‘Free energy’ is a world notoriously riddled with charlatans and cranks.

Gamble argues that these technologies could provide “enough energy to transform the entire earth”, and here’s a key point I want to challenge. The idea that free energy would be a universal good (even if it were feasible, which it’s not – the US Patent and Trademark Office gets so many nonsensical requests for patents on perpetual energy devices that they now refuse to even look at them without a working model) is deeply dubious. Kimberly Carter Gamble, Foster Gamble’s partner, states at one point in the film that:

“… so much of the pain on the planet has to do with the lack of access to energy”.

Wow, now there’s a statement. How many people on this planet would argue that much of the pain on the planet has to do with the developed world having lack of access to energy? While of course for millions in the developing world, lack of access to energy is a huge impediment to being able to attain a reasonable standard of living and to move beyond poverty, in the developed world, cheap energy (you could argue that for the past 150 years fossil fuels have been so cheap that they might as well have been ‘free energy’) has allowed Western nations to conquer, plunder, colonise, mine, clearcut, dominate and oppress.

While it has also allowed us to do many good things, energy cannot be seen in isolation from our relationship with other resources. Free energy would mean we would drain the aquifers faster, degrade the soils faster, work our way through the earth’s other depleting resources at an accelerated rate. Nowhere in the film is the idea of limits even mentioned, apart from occasional mentions that believing in ‘scarcity’ is one of our problems.

Can anyone seriously argue that the United States (which is principally the focus of this film) with a new free source of energy would be a more responsible member of the global community? Would they happily share it with the rest of the world? (the current stand-off about Iran’s nuclear energy programme rather indicates that they wouldn’t). I would argue that it is only the realisation that we are nearing the end of the age of cheap energy, cheap fossil fuels, that is finally bringing some sense, some awareness of the fact that we live on a finite planet and that we need to live more responsibly. Gamble’s argument that we could have enough free energy “to transform the entire earth” fills me with dread and foreboding rather than excitement.

We are told that oil companies are spending “huge amounts of money” suppressing free energy, with no evidence presented to support that at all. I would hazard a bet though that if even any money at all is spent on such things, it is a tiny fraction of what is spent on climate change denial, funding dubious organisations which attempt to undermine climate science, all of which gets no mention here. Of course we already have technologies that can harness natural energies and which provide clean energy – they are called renewables, we know they work, and we can install them today. ‘Free energy’ is a fantasy, and will always remain so. As Kyle Hill writes in his review, ”just because the universe is hard to understand and many times mysterious, does not mean that anything goes”.

Down the conspiracy rabbithole

Then we are bombarded with the full range of conspiracy thinking. 9/11 was an inside job, there is a conspiracy to suppress natural medicines, “Big Brother’s not coming, it’s already here”, we are one step away from a “military dictatorship”, a climate treaty in Copenhagen would have been “a tax base for tyranny”, there are ‘chemtrails’ in the sky to deliberately poison us, there is a deliberate attempt to reduce the world’s population underway, there is only a cancer epidemic because all the cures have been suppressed, etc, etc.

UFOs are also brought into the picture, which is odd as they serve little to deepen his argument, rather the argument seems to go like this: there are UFOs and they are extraterrestrial craft, and in order for them to have got here, they must have free energy machines, so therefore the Elite must know about this and be keeping it from us. As he writes on the film’s website, “if we can expose the suppression, reveal the truth about ET visitation, and further develop new energy technologies that ETs apparently rely on, then we can decentralize power and make massive strides toward a thriving future”. I’ll leave you to decide whether that 2+2+2=9 kind of logic makes any sense to you, and whether the word ‘apparently’ constitutes an evidence base. Naturally, no evidence is presented to support this other than a few fuzzy videos of lights in the sky in different parts of the world.

Wheeled out as ‘experts’ to support the film’s arguments are Deepak Chopra and, erm, David Icke, among others. Gamble is keen on talking about “my research”, yet his research, such as it is, is so undemanding that I am reminded of Sir Terry Frost’s words, “if you know before you look, you cannot see for knowing”. Gamble wheels out the classic conspiracy theorists’ gambit, “could I be wrong? Perhaps. But what if I’m not?” No, you are wrong. And even if you were right, you have presented us with so little evidence to back up you claims that you would have no way of knowing whether you were right or not.

He also does the other classic conspiracy theorist’s trick of saying “don’t just take my word for it, do the research yourself”, offering links on the film’s website that all back up his arguments, rather than giving a rounded balanced view of arguments and counterarguments. There’s some dreadful rubbish on there, the film ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ is presented as evidence that climate change is probably not a problem, for example, and the appalling section on climate change beautifully states “those who point to solar activity as a cause of global warming are often ridiculed and accused of being funded by the oil industry, even when that’s not the case”. “Even when”?

Ah, so that’s what ‘Thrive’ is all about …

Then, at the end of the film, we finally get into Thrive’s manifesto, it’s vision for the future and how we might get there. There is lots in there that I wouldn’t disagree with, more local food, renewable energy, local banking, local shopping and so on, apart from free energy being thrown into the mix too. But now, it is in this final section of ‘Thrive’ that the dark side of the film emerges. One of the things put forward, alongside local food, renewables and so on, is “little or no taxes”. Eh? Where did that come from?! Ah, now we get into the real agenda of the film, a kind of New Age libertarianism, a sort of cosmic Tea Party, and it all starts to get deeply alarming.

Gamble sets out his 3 stages to get to humanity’s being able to thrive. Firstly, he argues, we need to hugely scale back the defence industry and the Federal Reserve. Well I could go along with that, but then the second is “shrink government’s role in order to protect individual liberty”, and the third is then, because we are now freer, with “no involuntary tax and no involuntary governance” and with “rules but no rules” (?), we can all now thrive. OK, whoa, let’s pause here for a moment. Indeed the film’s website goes further, describing ‘involuntary taxation’ as “plunder” and ‘involuntary governance’ as “tyranny”.

In her review, Georgia Kelly quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes as saying “taxes are what we pay for a civilised society”. In spite of all it’s cosmic graphics and pictures of forests from the air, it is in essence a kind of New Age Tea Party promo film, arguing for a society with no government, no taxes, no laws, alongside “interplanetary exploration”, which somehow combine to create a world that respects the rights of all. Apparently, this would lead to a world where “everyone would have the opportunity to thrive”. In reality, it would lead to a world in which the wealthy would thrive, but the rest of us would lose healthcare, social welfare, libraries, public transport, pension entitlement, social housing etc etc. Sounds more like a surefire route to the kind of Dickensian world that led to the creation of a welfare state in the first place.

Responding to any of the truly global issues, such as climate change (which ‘Thrive’ clearly dismisses as part of the conspiracy), would no longer happen due to intergovernmental co-operation presumably being interpreted as steps towards a ‘one world government’. The film presents its suggestions in complete isolation from any notions of ‘society’ and community, presenting a vision of the future where the entire global population is living the same lifestyle as Gamble, the resources to enable this presumably being imported from other planets, or perhaps created afresh using magic?

Nowhere in the film do you hear the words ‘less’, or anything about reduced consumption in the West. Just as free energy and cures for cancer are our birthright, so, presumably, is the right to consume as much as we like – to think otherwise is to lapse into a ‘scarcity’ mindset. What I find most alarming about ‘Thrive’ is that most of the people who have asked me “have you seen Thrive?” are under 20, and they seem genuinely excited by it. Perhaps it is the simplicity of the message that appeals, the “all we need to do is” clarity of its ask. But having to discuss why free energy machines are impossible and the shortcomings of conspiracy theories with otherwise educated young people who are inheriting a warming world with its many deep and complex challenges is deeply depressing.

How we might actually help the world thrive

‘Thrive’ is dangerous because it invites us to put our faith for the future in a fantasy. A fantasy that free energy is possible, a fantasy that the only thing that is preventing us from creating a benign and enlightened society is a handful of powerful families. Things that are already very successfully preventing the world from thriving include:

climate change (you try thriving in a world with a world whose temperature has risen 11°F, as the IEA warned this week)
the fact that we fail to see reducing our oil demand as a key as a key aspect of energy security, oil prices having quadrupled since 2003 and going nowhere other than up, UK North Sea oil production falling by 22.5% in 2011 (a record fall) and North Sea natural gas production falling by 29.5% (a record fall) in 2011
Social inequality, which as the book ‘The Spirit Level’ so brilliantly showed, underpins many of our other social problems
Our economic system, designed to channel money upwards rather than downwards and to enrich the 1%, but this is a sufficiently abhorrent system (see, for example, Nicholas Shaxson’s brilliant ‘Treasure Islands’, review coming soon) without invoking secret societies and conspiracies to explain it

The solutions are already out there, there are proven technologies, proven strategies, and we need to work on all levels, as indeed the film argues, and to withdraw our support from a corrupt and ineffectual model which is taking us over the brink, and put that support into creating a more resilient, localised and accountable model. However, it’s not about ‘interplanetary travel’, it’s about finding our feet, here and now, in the communities and the soils that surround us. It’s not about ‘free energy’, it’s about learning to appreciate what a precious thing energy is and learning to live well with less of it. It’s not about ‘no involuntary taxation’, it’s about taxes that disincentivise the things that are narrowing our future options, and incentivising the things we need to get in place urgently. It’s not about ‘no government’, it’s about truly democratic government using its considerable powers to build resilience, decarbonise society, shift the collective focus. The few countries in the world that are actually seriously engaging with the climate issue are those with stronger government, not weaker government.

I have occasionally been interviewed for a film and then squirmed with embarrassment when I have seen the final context in which my interview has been used. I can only imagine that some of the progressives, such as Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, who appear in this film, are similarly horrified with ‘Thrive’. It is a film that offers us nothing, and which, taken to its logical conclusion, would lead to our having thrown away the few options for actually thriving that remain open to us. It is the film equivalent of a self-published book, with no critical editor rounding off the corners, and as a self-funded film a sense that you can do what you like. Avoid.

Originally published January 10, 2012 at Transition Culture.

Geopolitical Implications of “Peak Everything”

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 18:08:27 GMT

By Richard Heinberg, posted Jan 10, 2012:

From Solutions Journal, January 2012. Also published in the 20th Anniversary edition of Richard Heinberg's Musletter.

From competition among hunter-gatherers for wild game to imperialist wars over precious minerals, resource wars have been fought throughout history; today, however, the competition appears set to enter a new—and perhaps unprecedented—phase. As natural resources deplete, and as the Earth’s climate becomes less stable, the world’s nations will likely compete ever more desperately for access to fossil fuels, minerals, agricultural land, and water.

Nations need increasing amounts of energy and raw materials to produce economic growth, but the costs of supplying new increments of energy and materials are burgeoning. In many cases, lower-quality resources with high extraction costs are all that remain. Securing access to these resources often requires military expenditures as well. Meanwhile the struggle for the control of resources is re-aligning political power balances throughout the world.

This game of resource “musical chairs” could well bring about conflict and privation on a scale never seen before in world history. Only a decisive policy shift toward resource conservation, climate change mitigation, and economic cooperation seems likely to produce a different outcome.

America’s Resource Geopolitics

The United States—the world’s current economic and military superpower— entered the industrial era with a nearly unparalleled endowment of natural resources that included an abundance not only of forests, water, topsoil, and minerals, but also of oil, coal, and natural gas. Like all other nations, the U.S. has approached resource extraction using the low-hanging fruit principle. Today its giant onshore reservoirs of conventional oil are largely depleted, and the nation’s total oil production is down by over 40 percent from its peak in 1970—despite huge discoveries in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. Its total coal resources are vast, but rates of extraction probably cannot be increased significantly and will likely begin to decline within the next decade or two. Unconventional hydrocarbon resources (such as natural gas liberated by the hydrofracking of shale deposits) are beginning to be commercialized, but come with high investment costs and worrisome environmental risks. U.S. extraction rates for many minerals have been declining for years or decades, and currently the nation imports 93 percent of its antimony, 100 percent of its bauxite (for aluminum), 31 percent of its copper, 99 percent of its gallium, 100 percent of its indium, over half its lithium, and 100 percent of its rare earth minerals.[1]

America has much to lose from any substantial reshuffling of global alliances and resource flows. The nation’s leaders continue to play the game of geopolitics by 20^th century rules: they are still obsessed with the Carter Doctrine and focused on petroleum as the world’s foremost resource prize (a situation largely necessitated by the country’s continuing overwhelming dependence on oil imports, due in turn to a series of short-sighted political decisions stretching back at least to the 1970s). The ongoing war in Afghanistan exemplifies U.S. inertia: most geostrategic experts agree that there is little to be gained from the conflict, but withdrawal of forces is politically unfeasible.

The United States maintains a globe-spanning network of over 750 military bases[2] that formerly represented tokens of security to regimes throughout the world—but that now increasingly provoke resentment among the locals. This enormous military machine requires a vast supply system originating with American weapons manufacturers that in turn depend on a prodigious and ever-expanding torrent of funds from the Treasury. Indeed, the nation’s yawning budget deficit largely stems from its trillion-dollar-per-year, first-priority commitment to maintain its military-industrial complex.

The U.S. currently engages in “special operations” in 120 countries[3], using elite commando units skilled in assassination, counterterrorist raids, foreign troop training, and intelligence gathering. These teams can be deployed to support U.S. geopolitical interests in a variety of ways, including influencing elections or supporting factions within revolutions. The U.S. also maintains the world’s most lavishly funded ($80 billion in 2010) intelligence bureaus, the CIA and NSA, which conduct electronic and human information gathering activities in virtually every country on the planet.[4]

Yet despite America’s gargantuan expenditures on intelligence gathering and high-tech weaponry, and its globe-spanning ability to project power and to influence events, its armed forces appear to be stretched to their limits having continuously fielded around 200,000 troops and even larger numbers of support personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan for the past decade, where supply chains are both vulnerable and expensive to maintain.

In short, the United States remains an enormously powerful nation militarily, with thousands of nuclear weapons in addition to its unparalleled conventional forces, yet it suffers from declining strategic flexibility. The nation still retains an abundance of natural resources, but its consumption rates of many of those resources have grown to nearly insatiable levels, necessitating growing flows of resource imports from other nations. Meanwhile, its ability to pay for those imports is increasingly in question as its domestic economy shrinks due to financial system volatility, government spending cutbacks, high unemployment, an aging workforce, and shrinking average household net worth. For all of these reasons, the U.S. is widely characterized as “an empire in decline.”

The Global Geopolitical Resource Landscape

China is the rising power of the 21^st century, according to many geopolitical pundits, with a surging military and plentiful cash with which to buy access to resources (oil, coal, minerals, and farmland) around the planet. Yet while it is building an imperial-class navy that could eventually threaten America’s, Beijing suffers from domestic political and economic weaknesses that could make its turn at the center of the world stage a brief one. These include limits to available coal resources, a domestic real estate bubble, weakness in its banking sector, falling demand for Chinese exports in the U.S. and Europe, and widespread local political corruption.

Even as countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua reject American foreign policy, the U.S. continues to exert enormous influence on resource-rich Latin America via North American-based corporations, which in some cases wield overwhelming influence over entire national economies. However, China is now actively contracting for access to energy and mineral resources throughout this region, which is resulting in a gradual shift in economic spheres of interest.

Africa is a site of fast-growing U.S. investment in oil and other mineral extraction projects (as evidenced by the establishment in 2009 of Africom, a military strategic command center on par with Centcom, Eucom, Northcom, Pacom, and Southcom), but the continent also a target of Chinese (and European) resource acquisition efforts. Proxy conflicts there between and among these powers may intensify in the years ahead—in most instances, to the sad detriment of African peoples.[5]

The US still maintains a dominant position in the Middle East, but the region is is characterized by extreme economic inequality, high population growth rates, political instability, and the need for importation of non-energy resources (including food and water). The revolutions and protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen in early 2011 can be interpreted as showing the inability of young, growing, and largely unemployed populations to tolerate sharply rising food, water, and energy prices in the context of autocratic political regimes.[6] As economic conditions worsen, many more countries—including democratic nations outside the Middle East, the U.S included—could become destabilized in much the same way.

America’s best shot at expanding its oil interests lie in the deep oceans and the Arctic.[7] However, both military maneuvering and engineering-mining efforts will see diminishing returns as costs rise and payoffs diminish.

Climate change is likely to exacerbate geopolitical rivalry with China, although it's important to recognize that climate risks will not be evenly apportioned. Unstable states will become more unstable, poor nations poorer. Many of the areas of greatest geopolitical risk are also most at risk for impacts from climate change. Equatorial regions are most likely to suffer from extreme drought and occasional catastrophic flooding, while some northern temperate regions may see some transitory benefit from warming—though unpredictable weather will plague nearly every region. With the melting of Arctic ice, new mineral and energy resources in the northernmost portions of the planet will become accessible, as will new trade routes; this may lead to a “Cold Rush” of economic and military exploitation and open a new theater for international conflict.[8]

Which raises the question: Can such consequences be averted, and how? The answer may hinge on whether, and in what ways, humanity chooses to compete or cooperate in response.

Competition versus cooperation

The world’s governments engage continually in both cooperative and competitive behavior, though sometimes extremes of these tendencies come to the fore—with all-out conflict exemplifying unbridled competition. Geopolitics typically involves both cooperative and competitive strategies, with its long-term goal centering on the furtherance of national interest (including increased control of territory and access to resources). Recent decades have generally seen increasing international cooperation, showing up in the expansion of trade, the proliferation of treaties and conventions, and the development of international institutions for justice and conflict resolution. The UN, WTO, World Bank, International Criminal Court, as well as regional economic (e.g., Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or SCO) and military (e.g., NATO) cooperation groups exemplify this trend. While some of these efforts appear to be geopolitically motivated, others seem to be genuine attempts to reduce both international tensions and global environmental problems while advancing human rights.

This trend toward increasing international cooperation could see a reversal in coming years and decades. As noted above, history is replete with instances of resource scarcity fomenting conflict.[9] In such cases, competitive advantage typically resides either with nations that have domestic resources and the ability to defend them; or with nations that develop a vigorous, flexible, and motivated military force able to take advantage of other nations’ weaknesses in order to seize control of their resources.

In addition to international conflict, a failure of human cooperation in the face of resource scarcity may also manifest as increasing conflict within nations. Since 1945, three-quarters of all wars have occurred within nations rather than between them, with most occurring in the world’s poorest countries.[10] About as many people may have died as a result of civil strife since 1980 as were killed in the First World War. Civil conflicts devastate poor nations by destroying essential infrastructure, driving human and capital flight, diverting scarce financial resources toward military spending, undermining social trust, aggravating existing food shortages, and spreading disease.

If the path toward increasing competition leads to both internal and external conflict, then the result—for winners and losers alike, in a “full” world seeing rapid resource depletion—will most probably be economic and ecological ruin accompanied by political chaos.

Yet this is not the only outcome available to world leaders and civil society. A cooperative strategy is at least theoretically feasible—and its foundations already exist in institutions and practices developed during recent decades.

The world has seen successful efforts to rein in commercial whaling, to ban the use of CFCs, and to respond to natural disasters. If we are to avert deadly resource competition in the future, further agreements on climate change mitigation and non-renewable resource conservation will be needed, along with cooperative efforts to stabilize population and engineer a comprehensive global energy transition. Some of these agreements are already under discussion.

For many years, the UN has led cooperative scientific efforts to understand climate change (via the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC) and governmental efforts to combat it (via the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC). In international meetings beginning with the Kyoto Climate Change Conference of 1997, nations have discussed politically acceptable ways to cap global carbon emissions.

A potential international mechanism for conserving non-renewable resources is outlined in the present author’s book The Oil Depletion Protocol. An agreement along these lines would require nations each year to reduce oil production and imports by the annual global depletion rate (about 2.5 percent).[11] Cooperatively capping and diminishing both petroleum production and consumption in this way would reduce oil price volatility, promote energy conservation and conversion to alternative energy sources, and head off geopolitical struggle over dwindling petroleum supplies. Such a plan would likely work best in combination with national quota rationing programs for individuals and businesses; if annually shrinking quotas were tradable, energy misers would benefit financially while energy gluttons would have to pay extra.[12] The Oil Depletion Protocol has been endorsed by several city councils in the U.S. and by the Portuguese Parliament. Similar protocols could be applied to other internationally traded non-renewable resources.

The protocol in itself is not likely to be enough. Measures are also needed to limit population growth, and to convert existing infrastructure to a low carbon future, especially in developing countries, where efforts can be made to bypass fossil fuel-dependent transport and food system altogether.

All of the required effort need not come from governments. Grassroots conservation and cooperation efforts have already sprung up in the form of groups like Transition Initiatives, which have sprung up in hundreds of towns and cities around the world. Transition Initiatives got their start in 2005 in Britain through the work of a Permaculture teacher named Rob Hopkins. In his Transition Companion, Hopkins tells how he came up with the strategy, and sets forth a range of useful guidelines for groups.[13] Nearly all of Rob’s prose is saturated with irrepressible optimism:

Transition Initiatives are not the only response to peak oil and climate change; any coherent national response will also need government and business responses at all levels. However, unless we can create this sense of anticipation, elation and a collective call to adventure on a wider scale, any government responses will be doomed to failure, or will need to battle proactively against the will of the people. . . . Rebuilding local agriculture and food production, localizing energy production, rethinking healthcare, rediscovering local building materials in the context of zero energy building, rethinking how we manage waste, all build resilience and offer the potential of an extraordinary renaissance—economic, cultural and spiritual.[14]

Taken together, current cooperative efforts toward resource conservation, climate mitigation, and population stabilization are woefully insufficient—as exemplified by failed climate talks, continued global population growth, and ever-heightening international competition for access to dwindling fossil fuels supplies. There are plenty of justifications for pessimism: after all, won’t the first nations to engage in resource conservation lose economic advantage to those that engage in conquest and consumption maximization? Wouldn’t even one major national holdout undermine a worldwide cooperative effort at climate protection?

Dramatically expanding international and domestic cooperation at this worrisome moment in history may seem like a tall order. The only advantage to doing so is that it is the only path going forward that doesn’t end in a global tragedy in which the fate of the “winners” is hardly preferable to that of the “losers.”

Richard Heinberg is a Senior Fellow-in-Residence of Post Carbon Institute and a member of the Editorial Board of Solutions. He is the author of ten books including The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. Portions of this article are adapted from The End of Growth.

References

[1] U.S. Geological Survey, 2011, “Mineral commodity summaries 2011: U.S. Geological Survey,” 198 p.

[2] Department of Defense, “Base Structure Report Fiscal Year 2010 Baseline (A Summary of DoD’s Real Property Inventory),” 206p.

[4] Nick Turse, August 3,2011 (6:21 PM), “Tomgram: Nick Turse, Uncovering the Military’s Secret Military,” TomDistpatch.com,.

[5] Michael Klare, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (New York: Henry Holt, 2008), chapter 6.

[6] Vicken Cheterian, “The Arab Crisis: Food, Energy, Water, Justice,” Energy Bulletin, Posted January 26, 2011

[7] Brice Pedroletti, “China Seeks to Mine Deep Sea Riches,” The Guardian, December 7, 2010.

[8] Naval Postgraduate School, “Arctic Doom, Arctic Boom,” publication announcement for the second volume in the Arctic Security Project.

[9] Philippe Le Billon, "The Political Ecology of War: Natural Resources and Armed Conflicts." Political Geography 20 (2001), 561–584

[10] Colin H. Kahl, States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World (Princeton University Press, 2006), accessed online August 8, 2011,

[11] Richard Heinberg, The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism and Economic Collapse (Canada: New Society Publishers, 2006).

[12] A proposal for tradable energy was proposed in the UK by the late economist David Fleming, and has drawn significant interest from government. See TEQs.

[13] Rob Hopkins, Transition Companion (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2011).

[14] Hopkins, Transition Handbook, (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2008), p.15.

Image credits: US military vehicles - Morning Calm News/flickr; Arctic map - BBC

At the Crossroads of Sustainability: A Conversation with Bill Ryerson

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:12:05 GMT

By Bill Ryerson, posted Jan 10, 2012:

By Michael Charles Tobias, Forbes

[Extract]: Imagine a country like French Guiana or Vanuatu – with human populations of 225,000 to 235,000 – emerging, every day! That is the conundrum facing humanity and the natural world. The human population explosion, multiplied by its cumulative consumption, represents what many believe to be the most significant challenge ever faced by life on Earth in billions of years. This is an equation that forms the basis for most rational analysis of global environmental issues. It is a starting point. In the absence of dealing with it, most other techno-fixes or alleged ecological “solutions” are unlikely to produce much traction.

I spoke with Bill Ryerson about this essentially fundamental reality we are all grappling with. Ryerson is President of Population Media Center (Shelburne, Vermont) and CEO of the Population Institute (Washington, DC). He has endeavored to help solve the population problem for 40 years, including 25 years of using social change communications worldwide. You can read his chapter in the Post Carbon Reader, “Population: the Multiplier of Everything Else.”

During his career, Ryerson has served as Director of the Population Institute’s Youth and Student Division, Development Director of Planned Parenthood SE Pennsylvania, Associate Director of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England and Executive Vice President of Population Communications International.

Michael Tobias: Bill, most corporations and students of the environment– consumers, people everywhere – seem to be paying some lip-service to the word “sustainability.” What is the underlying reality, in your opinion? Is human civilization moving in a sustainable direction?

Bill Ryerson: Michael, sustainability is the ultimate health issue, the ultimate human rights issue, and the ultimate environmental issue. Books like “Collapse” are ringing alarms for the public, while numerous scientists are now debating not whether the collapse will occur, but when – and how bad it will be.

Michael Tobias: Arguably, humankind is exceeding the Earth’s biological carrying capacity. Our global footprint enshrines a multitude of economic impacts that are bundled together. Oil and agriculture, for example, are linked in problematic ways people often ignore, no?

Bill Ryerson: Absolutely. Industrial agriculture and our industrial way of life depend on non-renewable resources, particularly cheap oil. Consider what happened in 2008 when the price of oil rose to $140 per barrel.

The price of food went so high that there were food riots worldwide. Remember, oil is used in pumping irrigation water, plowing, planting, fertilizing, harvesting, transport to market, refrigeration, transport home, and cooking. Modern industrial agriculture is the process of turning oil – and water – into food. While the recession reduced demand for oil, and prices dropped, the “recovery,” such as it is, has led oil prices back up to over $100 per barrel, and food is now near all time peak prices.

Michael Tobias: Another crucial variable that makes or breaks all other environmental speculation is the availability of fresh drinking water. Where does our species stand at this point in terms of fresh water?

Bill Ryerson: Water is being over-pumped to meet the growing demand of an additional 225,000 people at the dinner table each and every day – a new Egypt every year in population numbers.

Read full interview

Image credit: SFview/flickr

Armed with naïvete

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 22:16:56 GMT

By Bill McKibben, posted Jan 5, 2012:

My resolution for 2012 is to be naïve -- dangerously naïve.

I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a sucker’s bet. Try as hard as you can, you’re never going to be as cynical as the corporations and the harem of politicians they pay for. It’s like trying to outchant a Buddhist monastery.

Here’s my case in point, one of a thousand stories people working for social change could tell: All last fall, most of the environmental movement, including 350.org, the group I helped found, waged a fight against the planned Keystone XL pipeline that would bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Canada through the U.S. to the Gulf Coast. We waged our struggle against building it out in the open, presenting scientific argument, holding demonstrations, and attending hearings. We sent 1,253 people to jailin the largest civil disobedience action in a generation. Meanwhile, more than half a million Americans offered public comments against the pipeline, the most on any energy project in the nation’s history.

And what do you know? We won a small victory in November, when President Obama agreed that, before he could give the project a thumbs-up or -down, it needed another year of careful review. (The previous version of that review, as overseen by the State Department, had been little short of a crony capitalist farce.) Given that James Hansen, the government’s premier climate scientist, had said that tapping Canada’s tar sands for that pipeline would, in the end, essentially mean “game over for the climate,” that seemed an eminently reasonable course to follow, even if it was also eminently political.

A few weeks later, however, Congress decided it wanted to take up the question. In the process, the issue went from out in the open to behind closed doors in money-filled rooms. Within days, and after only a couple of hours of hearings that barely mentioned the key scientific questions or the dangers involved, the House of Representatives voted 234-194 to force a quicker review of the pipeline. Later, the House attached its demand to the must-pass payroll tax cut.

That was an obvious pre-election year attempt to put the president on the spot. Environmentalists are at least hopeful that the White House will now reject the permit. After all, its communications director said that the rider, by hurrying the decision, “virtually guarantees that the pipeline will not be approved.”

As important as the vote total in the House, however, was another number: within minutes of the vote, Oil Change International had calculated that the 234 Congressional representatives who voted aye had received $42 million in campaign contributions from the fossil-fuel industry; the 193 nays, $8 million.

Buying Congress

I know that cynics -- call them realists, if you prefer -- will be completely unsurprised by that. Which is precisely the problem.

We’ve reached the point where we’re unfazed by things that should shake us to the core. So, just for a moment, be naïve and consider what really happened in that vote: the people’s representatives who happen to have taken the bulk of the money from those energy companies promptly voted on behalf of their interests.

They weren’t weighing science or the national interest; they weren’t balancing present benefits against future costs. Instead of doing the work of legislators, that is, they were acting like employees. Forget the idea that they’re public servants; the truth is that, in every way that matters, they work for Exxon and its kin. They should, by rights, wear logos on their lapels like NASCAR drivers.

If you find this too harsh, think about how obligated you feel when someone gives you something. Did you get a Christmas present last month from someone you hadn’t remembered to buy one for? Are you going to send them an extra-special one next year?

And that’s for a pair of socks. Speaker of the House John Boehner, who insisted that the Keystone approval decision be speeded up, has gotten $1,111,080 from the fossil-fuel industry during his tenure. His Senate counterpart Mitch McConnell, who shepherded the bill through his chamber, has raked in $1,277,208 in the course of his tenure in Washington.

If someone had helped your career to the tune of a million dollars, wouldn’t you feel in their debt? I would. I get somewhat less than that from my employer, Middlebury College, and yet I bleed Panther blue. Don’t ask me to compare my school with, say, Dartmouth unless you want a biased answer, because that’s what you’ll get. Which is fine -- I am an employee.

But you’d be a fool to let me referee the homecoming football game. In fact, in any other walk of life we wouldn’t think twice before concluding that paying off the referees is wrong. If the Patriots make the Super Bowl, everyone in America would be outraged to see owner Robert Kraft trot out to midfield before the game and hand a $1,000 bill to each of the linesmen and field judges.

If he did it secretly, the newspaper reporter who uncovered the scandal would win a Pulitzer. But a political reporter who bothered to point out Boehner’s and McConnell’s payoffs would be upbraided by her editor for simpleminded journalism. That’s how the game is played and we’ve all bought into it, even if only to sputter in hopeless outrage.

Far from showing any shame, the big players boast about it: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, front outfit for a consortium of corporations, has bragged on its website about outspending everyone in Washington, which is easy to do when Chevron, Goldman Sachs, and News Corp are writing you seven-figure checks. This really matters. The Chamber of Commerce spent more money on the 2010 elections than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined, and 94% of those dollars went to climate-change deniers. That helps explain why the House voted last year to say that global warming isn’t real.

It also explains why “our” representatives vote, year in and year out, for billions of dollars worth of subsidies for fossil-fuel companies. If there was ever an industry that didn’t need subsidies, it would be this one: they make more moneyeach year than any enterprise in the history of money. Not only that, but we’ve known how to burn coal for 300 years and oil for 200.

Those subsidies are simply payoffs. Companies give small gifts to legislators, and in return get large ones back, and we’re the ones who are actually paying.

Whose Money? Whose Washington?

I don’t want to be hopelessly naïve. I want to be hopefully naïve. It would be relatively easy to change this: you could provide public financing for campaigns instead of letting corporations pay. It’s the equivalent of having the National Football League hire referees instead of asking the teams to provide them.

Public financing of campaigns would cost a little money, but endlessly less than paying for the presents these guys give their masters. And it would let you watch what was happening in Washington without feeling as disgusted. Even legislators, once they got the hang of it, might enjoy neither raising money nor having to pretend it doesn’t affect them.

To make this happen, however, we may have to change the Constitution, as we’ve done 27 times before. This time, we’d need to specify that corporations aren’t people, that money isn’t speech, and that it doesn’t abridge the First Amendment to tell people they can’t spend whatever they want getting elected. Winning a change like that would require hard political organizing, since big banks and big oil companies and big drug-makers will surely rally to protect their privilege.

Still, there’s a chance. The Occupy movement opened the door to this sort of change by reminding us all that the system is rigged, that its outcomes are unfair, that there’s reason to think people from across the political spectrum are tired of what we’ve got, and that getting angry and acting on that anger in the political arena is what being a citizen is all about.

It’s fertile ground for action. After all, Congress’s approval rating is now at 9%, which is another way of saying that everyone who’s not a lobbyist hates them and what they’re doing. The big boys are, of course, counting on us simmering down; they’re counting on us being cynical, on figuring there’s no hope or benefit in fighting city hall. But if we’re naïve enough to demand a country more like the one we were promised in high school civics class, then we have a shot.

A good time to take an initial stand comes later this month, when rallies outside every federal courthouse will mark the second anniversary of the Citizens United decision. That’s the one where the Supreme Court ruled that corporations had the right to spend whatever they wanted on campaigns.

To me, that decision was, in essence, corporate America saying, “We’re not going to bother pretending any more. This country belongs to us.”

We need to say, loud and clear: “Sorry. Time to give it back.”

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. To catch Timothy MacBain’s first Tomcast audio interview of the new year in which McKibben discusses how the rest of us can compete with a system in which money talks, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

Originally posted January 5, 2012 at Tom Dispatch

The peak oil crisis: closing out the year

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 12:49:11 GMT

By Simone, posted Jan 5, 2012:

The returns are in and we now know that world price of a barrel of oil averaged $111 in 2011. This was up 14 percent from last year and well above the previous high of $100 set in 2008.

The average barrel of oil that we bought last year cost $15 more than the year before. Here in America, we burn about 6.7 billion barrels of the stuff each year. Therefore, our collective oil bill for 2011 was about $100 billion higher for the same amount of energy that we burned in 2010. This $100 billion created few new jobs here in the USA. Much of it went overseas and into the coffers of people who don't like us very much.

Last year's news was dominated by the Arab spring and its derivatives which spread from Wall Street, to Moscow, to villages in China as the revolution in communications technology coalesced in the hands of a new generation making dissidence against governments everywhere far easier to organize. By the way, the latest count of cell phones shows that in excess of 5 billion have been produced. Not all of these are still active, of course, but for a world of 7 billion people, many of whom are too young to talk much less carry a mobile phone, that is an impressive number. It is clear the world is changing in ways we cannot yet comprehend.

The peak oil story changed little last year. Global oil production hung in around 88 million barrels a day (b/d) despite the Libyan uprising which took nearly 1.6 million b/d out of production for several months. For much of last year global oil production was below consumption resulting in a gradual drawdown of world reserves. With OECD stockpiles of about 2.6 billion barrels, plus the new reserves being accumulated in China, a slight shortfall in production is not a problem for the time being.

During 2011 it became apparent that the demand for diesel is becoming a worldwide problem. While the demand for gasoline has been falling, at least in the OECD nations, the demand for diesel has been increasing. As electricity production falters around the world mainly due to droughts, aging equipment, and unaffordable fuel prices, the demand for diesel generated backup electric power has surged. Vital uses for electricity such as in hospitals, public safety, and water pumps will continue no matter what the cost. It should be noted that much of the increase in "oil" production in recent years has been made up of natural gas liquids and ethanol which are not commonly used to produce diesel, leaving the quantity of feedstock for diesel production stagnant.

The year ended with little change in the assessment for the prospects for global oil supplies. Despite all the hype concerning new oil finds and technological breakthroughs in oil production, these developments still are not contributing enough new oil to offset the annual decline of 3 million b/d from existing fields and the annual increase of circa 1 million b/d of new demand. The bottom line among those following this issue is that global oil production likely will start to decline in the next one to five years as depletion gets ahead of very-costly-to-produce new sources of "oil."

Keep in mind the phenomenon of falling net exports. As oil exporting countries grow larger and wealthier, they are consuming an increasing share of their own oil production leaving less and less to export. Most of us really don't care how much oil in produced in the world; the real issue for most countries is how much is available that can be imported for domestic use. Jeffrey Brown, a Texas geologist and one of the leading students of net exports, notes that if you leave out the oil going to two growth powerhouses - China and India - then for the last five years the oil available for import by the rest of the importing nations has been dropping at the rate of 2.8 percent each year. Brown estimates that if current trends continue, the oil available for import by most of the world will fall by 5 to 8 percent each year for the rest of the decade.

Much of the burden of this decline in exports is falling on poorer nations, many of which are already being priced out of purchasing some of the fuel necessary to run their electric power stations. In a certain sense, oil available for import has already peaked. Note the 14 percent increase in price last year. In America, we still seem to be able to import as much as we need, but an increasing share of our refined products are now being exported as domestic consumption is falling.

From oil's point of view, 2011 was an unusually turbulent year. Not only did we have Arab Spring which reduced oil and gas exports from several countries during the year, we also saw increasing tensions across the region which have the potential to do serious damage to oil exports in coming months. Balancing the political problems in the Middle East were the economic problems that are coming to a head in most OECD countries and possibly China as well.

How these opposing forces play out in the coming year could easily determine the course of world events for years to come. The EU could muddle along in the midst of a mild recession patching together financial arrangements as necessary to hold the Eurozone together. Alternatively many are talking about a financial collapse in the EU that could trigger a global depression and lower demand for oil.

There are so many forces at work in the Middle East it seems irresponsible to attempt to prognosticate an outcome. At best matters will bump along with only an occasional impact on oil exports. At the other end of the scale is the possibility of major hostilities, either civil or international, which could alter many of the political balances that have obtained since World War II and could easily inflict damage to the global economy on a scale not seen since the 1940's.

Originally published January 4, 2012 at Falls Church New-Press

Book Review: The Post Carbon Reader (Daniel Lerch interview)

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:50:10 GMT

By Simone, posted Jan 4, 2012:

by Kyle Curtis

A primer about everything that's wrong in the world- and what you can do to fix it.

Let’s make this clear from the beginning: The Post Carbon Reader is not an easy read. Indeed, if you’re looking for a breezy take on the end of the world, I would instead recommend World War Z. But whereas Max Brooks’s novel is a gore-drenched take on the zombie apocalypse, I'd state that The Post Carbon Reader is much more horrifying. There is little to fear of a rise of the undead. But throughout the Reader’s 450+ pages, it becomes clear just how and in what manner we are collectively destroying our fragile planet. The stark truth about how the actual end of the world is currently occurring is much more unsettling than the most fantastic fictional scenario possibly imagined.

That said, The Post Carbon Reader is an essential read, for no other purpose to have the quotable facts and information readily available. This will come in handy for engaging nay-saying friends and family members, of course, but this information is also helpful to engage policy makers and elected officials, encouraging them to address the myriad of issues discussed in this book. Once you complete The Post Carbon Reader, it might be all too tempting to throw your hands up in the air, overwhelmed to do anything about the host of problems our modern society faces. Instead, the Reader should serve as inspiration that provides a blueprint of the next steps that need to be taken. As the title of the final chapter reads “What to do now,” the Reader explicitly makes its case about what is wrong. The challenge is: what are you going to do about it?

The Post Carbon Reader was developed by the Post Carbon Institute, an organization devoted to finding the solutions for a “peak oil” society. Based out of Santa Rosa, California, the PCI has a satellite office in Portland, sharing space in a suite with such other non-profit organizations as Physicians for Social Responsibility and Portland’s Gay Men’s Chorus. As the Publications Director for the PCI, Daniel Lerch is the sole staffer manning the Portland office and it was from here that he pieced together The Post Carbon Reader. To mark the one-year anniversary of the publication of the Reader, Lerch spoke from Mexico at the tail end of a sabbatical, where he discussed the process of editing the Reader, the differences between Portland and Mexico City, and provided insight on a few of the issues addressed by the Reader.

Before we discuss the book, I am interested in the experience you’ve had in Mexico City. Clearly, there is a cultural difference going from the United States to Mexico, but there must also be another form of shock when you go from Portland- and its reputation for sustainability, planning, and livability- to one of the world’s megalopolises. How has that been like for you, coming from the perspective formed through your association with the Post Carbon Institute?

I’ve had a wonderful time in Mexico City. This is an incredible city. There are so many amazing things to see and do. The one thing, though, is that the traffic is so bad- to do anything you really need to walk or catch the subway. So you end up not doing as much as you might want to. This is a very different time than when I was last in Mexico City, about seven years ago. Then I stayed in a youth hostel and was right next to the subway and able to walk everywhere. And I was able to check out all of these really incredible local economies scattered throughout the different neighborhoods. This time, however, I’m apartment sitting in a really nice, upscale neighborhood nowhere near the subway. I need to take taxis everywhere; it’s hard to get around. Without traffic, it takes fifteen minutes to get from my place to the airport on a Sunday morning. On a Friday afternoon, it takes two hours.

From a Peak Oil perspective, and the Post Carbon Institute’s emphasis on planning and developing a society that’s far less reliant on fossil fuels, does your experience in Mexico City make you cringe?

In so many ways, Mexico City is a real-world example of the extreme sustainability challenges we'll be facing. Particularly in regards to transportation- just like every other large city in developing countries, there is this growing middle and upper classes and as a result there are a large number of new car owners that didn’t exist fifteen years ago. The infrastructure was not prepared for the increased number of cars on the road. While transportation planning is sort of a sustainability problem, the biggest issue facing Mexico City is that of water. The city has a population of 20 to 30 million residents- there isn’t enough clean water available for that many people. It’s a huge city in the middle of fairly arid country, not like Portland which is right next to a glacier. In Portland, sustainability problems aren’t so apparent. In Mexico City, these sustainability problems are very tangible: air, water, economic inequality. There is just so much out in the open, both bad and good things.

So let’s talk about The Post Carbon Reader….

Did you get horribly depressed when you finished it?

I’m going to make it clear that it’s a pretty tough read to have how we are destroying our planet explained in explicit detail. Could you describe the process of how the Reader was put together? Most of the contributions were provided by “fellows” of the Post Carbon Institute- were these previously written and published works, or were they written and contributed specifically for the Reader?

I just recently wrote something for the Post Carbon Institute website about the process of editing the Reader to mark the one-year anniversary. But to get a full idea of what went into putting the Reader together, I should go back to the beginnings of the PCI in 2003. The Institute was founded to focus on what the effects of Peak Oil would be on society, and how to plan for them, and then to collaborate with grassroots organizations that were tackling these issue by offering support, especially with relocalization efforts. Up until 2008, the concept of Peak Oil was not really well-known besides various circles. My interest in Peak Oil came from my city planning background, certain that planners needed to know about these issues. And then 2008 happened: oil shot up to over $150 a barrel, Lehman Brothers crashed and Wall Street got bailed out, Obama was elected- a whole set of changes that the Post Carbon Institute viewed as an opportunity. Finally, people might be able to understand that something funky was going on with oil prices and maybe- just maybe- people might be willing to “get it” regarding Peak Oil, sustainability, the climate.

For the Post Carbon Reader, we recruited thirty fellows, each of who had a similar viewpoint regarding the end of cheap fossil fuels, climate change, an end to unrestrained growth- basically viewpoints about how we need to rethink society. The Institute viewed the Reader as the opportunity to put our statement out, a statement about what we believe in. We wanted to avoid the term “manifesto,” but we wanted to put our viewpoint out there. In early 2009, we started collecting content, with most of the Reader comprised of original content from authors for the book. The shared themes of the contributions provided for the Reader included building resilience and the limits to growth. There were deeper views provided from experts of different areas. The Reader goes deeper into certain areas- while there is a shared theme of building resiliency, each author keeps their own voice. For example, Josh Farley provides an academic chapter on ecological economics. In the food chapter, the contributions were provided by non-academic writers. There is a whole range of voices between these examples. The only authors we reprinted works from were Bill McKibben and David Orr, who are both busy but quite prolific. McKibben’s contribution was a reprint of the first chapter of his book ‘Eaarth,’ which clearly explains the realities of climate change.

By the time I finished The Post Carbon Reader, my copy was dog-eared and marked up, so that I could easily refer to certain points. It almost looks like a college textbook. Has the Reader been incorporated into the curriculum of any college courses?

Absolutely. There are twenty different college courses that are currently, planning, or have used the Reader in their past curriculum. The Post Carbon Institute is collecting the various syllabi and quotes from instructors and students who have used it in their studies. On our website, there is an opportunity for students and teachers to connect who have used and would like to discuss the book. The Reader has definitely been embraced by academia, which has been a driving force for the book’s sales. When we were ready to send to print, we went with a small publisher so that we could have complete control. But that meant we had to sacrifice on the connections and resources that a larger publisher would have. We are also going through the electronic-book direction as well. So far, ten thousand hard copies of the Reader have sold, along with twenty thousand electronic copies. Those are pretty good sales figures, especially for an independent reader on what’s not exactly the most attention-grabbing subject matter.

So let’s talk about particular excerpts of the book. One interesting chapter was the one provided by Bill Rees, who wrote about how it was part of “human nature” to live in an unsustainable manner. As such, being able to collectively adopt the sustainable lifestyle choices necessary to ensure long-term survival is a challenge. As Rees points out, for this to occur, entire belief systems will need to be restructured due to the cognitive dissonance and political inertia of modern society. I found this chapter to be insightful when I consider interactions with those who willfully resist all scientific arguments and evidence that dramatic changes need to occur, immediately, to avoid future catastrophe.

This was one of my favorite chapters of the Reader. Bill Rees is incredible- when you watch a video of him speaking on these subjects, he sounds like you would imagine from reading him. The idea of rigid belief systems that need to be reconstructed is an incredibly important point. You can’t just throw data and facts at people, who are going to reject them due to emotional processes. When you talk about overwhelming issues, people are going to get down. Human beings are hard-wired not to deal with that, and I’m not exactly sure how to get over that. That’s why it’s incredibly important for sustainability advocates and activists to talk with psychologists to understand how the brain works, particularly in regards to messaging. To show how things are worse than we think they are we need to think in a different way, one that is more realistic and grounded.

There is a chapter on buildings, and how they are the number one source of greenhouse gas emissions. This might be news for a large number of people, who may view buildings as having a passive impact on the environment, compared to vehicle emissions or coal plants spewing toxic emissions. In Portland, there is much discussion about net-zero buildings, with construction set to begin on the Oregon Sustainability Center and developers seeking to standardize the net-zero concept. Do you believe that by addressing how our buildings are constructed- and as a result how our cities are designed- will have a sizable effect on the threats posed by climate change?

The conversation about buildings is big and complicated, and is best served being viewed through a larger sustainability lens. There is a false feeling that we can innovate our way out of the sustainability crisis, that if we just use the right technology then everything will be fine. From the Post Carbon perspective, new technology is fine, but it is unrealistic to expect that it is going to lead to the massive 80 percent reduction in energy needed by mid-century. It is vital that we view LEED ratings and triple-glazed windows in the right context. If every new building was constructed LEED platinum, if every existing building was retro-fitted to LEED platinum, that is still not enough to solve this crisis. There is so much to unpack about buildings, architecture, and planning- including how they are inhabited, located, and needed. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves to solely rely on steps that aren’t going to solve the crisis.

Towards the end of the book, there is a chapter that focuses on the steps communities can take towards resiliency. Rob Hopkins, the chapter’s author, links the degree with oil dependency with the degree of vulnerability- which should give pause to the “Drill, baby, drill” crowd who is arguing in support of the Keystone pipeline. While Hopkins argues for localization, he does not suggest that the outside world become walled off, but instead focusing on meeting the needs that can be met locally, locally.

Richard Heinberg, one of the founders of the Post Carbon Institute, has a saying he likes to use, that we are moving away from globalization whether we want to or not. At the same time, it is too much to expect that we will fully transition to completely local economies- we've had globalization in one form or another for thousands of years. Localization is about control, and how we can control where the most basic things come from to where we are. With globalization, we do not have that control. A vast portion of our community food supply is from sources far away. Globalization is a set of systems and structures that has a lot of vulnerabilities. The economy is wrapped up in a global system. Consider this: we might celebrate when a WalMart closes down and goes out of business, but that’s now a couple hundred families without a source of cheap food. If WalMart were to suddenly go away entirely, many people would need to re-learn former patterns of meeting their needs: from finding and buying food from more expensive sources, to possibly even preparing and preserving their own food. Same with transportation- we got around without cars one hundred years ago, but can you imagine getting around without them now? If oil tops $200 a barrel or $7 a gallon, horses and streetcars aren’t going to suddenly re-appear. Globalization, with these systems that are continually threatened, will break down. And, as they say, “The bigger they come, the harder they fall.” So, in preparation, we may want to create what PCI co-founder Julian Darley called "a parallel public infrastructure", one that is well-suited for a world of more expensive oil. We need to re-examine all the various systems that create our life- communications, social, and others to make them beneficial both for the present and the future.

From your position as Publications Director for the Post Carbon Institute, are there any particular stories or issues you are keeping an eye for the upcoming year?

I am really impressed by the efforts of Bill McKibben and his organization, 350.org, in resisting the Keystone pipeline. They have been remarkably successful in inserting their discussions into the political sphere. I think that’s better than just showing up and raising a stink. I am following Occupy Wall Street, and we sent copies of the Reader to the library in Zucotti Park that was destroyed.

I’m staying on top of domestic fossil fuel extraction- such as shale gas and oil shale- that really took off last year. Environmental groups have been talking about the health risks of this kinds of energy development for years, but the mainstream media didn’t focus on these stories until, what, about six months ago? Also, the Post Carbon Institute is trying to figure just how much of this stuff is out there. We want to make clear what the consequences are of pursuing these resources, especially as we believe that this production is unfounded for energy independence. The Post Carbon Institute is not only interested in influencing the public conversation, but influencing policy as well. The Obama administration hears quite a lot from fossil fuel industry lobbyists and from the Department of Energy that shale gas reserves will be the source of our future energy needs. We need to inform them that shale gas isn’t the energy of the future, and provide science-based reasons why that's so. When people are given bad information, they make bad policy decisions. So I’m paying attention to shale gas, climate issues, net energy issues. I am more and more trying to find the pieces of information that are not being told, and getting this information out there.

Are you looking forward to trading the Mexico City megapolis lifestyle and return to Portland?

In some ways I don’t miss Portland- I know what the weather’s like. The culture in Mexico is deep and nourishing. Mexico does have problems- although I have avoided the narco-violence, it still pops up. When I was in Guadalajara, I heard that twenty headless bodies were found not that far from my apartment. News like that makes everything more real. When compared to developing countries, it makes me realize not only how good we have things in the States, but how what happens in the States almost happens in an unreal world, due to our immense wealth- especially our energy wealth.

Originally published January 3, 2012 at Blue Oregon

The Post Carbon Reader
Edited by Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch.
Published by Watershed Media in collaboration with Post Carbon Institute.
Distributed by University of California Press.
544 pages. ISBN 978-0-9709500-6-2. $24.95

YOU ARE HERE: The Oil Journey Presentation

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:09:29 GMT

By Tod, posted Dec 21, 2011:

`YOU ARE HERE: THE OIL JOURNEY`

Thanks to your support, we have just completed "You Are Here: The Oil Journey." This is a customizable presentation *you* can use to tell your own journey and to invite new people to join the larger conversation. This animated slide show delivers PCI's core message honestly, but in a compassionate way that...well, just watch it and see for yourself.

The recording presented above features the mellifluous voice of the legendary actor, author, screenwriter and narrator Peter Coyote. The video is intended as a model upon which you can base your own real-world presentations of the Oil Journey deck. Please feel free to share it with your friends and peers.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO PRESENT THE OIL JOURNEY IN YOUR COMMUNITY?

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thanks

This presentation was made possible through the contributions of PCI's generous supporters (thank you!) who contributed to our IndieGoGo campaign.

Like all of our work, the making of YOU ARE HERE: The Oil Journey, was a truly collaborative process. We particularly want to thank the team at Ranch7 Creative who worked creatively and painstakingly to make the presentation look stunning. Deep appreciation also goes to Peter Coyote, who generously offered his time and voice to do the narration (and thank you Bill B. for the introduction!).

Ultimately, this presentation is about the hundreds of folks out there who will personalize this story and share it with their own community.

credits

Written by Post Carbon Institute Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg. Narrated by Peter Coyote. Presentation Graphics by Ranch7 Creative. Audio editing by Screaming Lizard Productions. Audio recording at Command Productions. Full photo credits can be found here (PDF).

The Peak Oil Crisis: 2012 – Apocalypse Now?

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 10:50:26 GMT

By Tom Whipple, posted Dec 21, 2011:

This would not be a biblical apocalypse or even a Mayan one, but rather an event of our own making. The world has made so many problems for itself in recent decades that the whole edifice of civilization is showing signs of coming unglued.

This sort of thing has happened within living memory - remember 1914 and 1939 - so a year is which much comes undone should not come as a great surprise. If you are looking for a general theory of what is about to happen to us, you might start with Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies in which the author identifies 17 examples of rapid societal collapse. In a nutshell, if anybody thinks the Roman Empire collapsed from too much complexity, one should look at the U.S. tax code or the efforts to refinance the EU's sovereign debt. Compared to the machinations of the 7 billion people currently running around the world, the Romans were running a kindergarten.

Whether the global civilization, or significant parts thereof, comes unstuck sooner or later is obviously a judgment call, but a case can be made that some very bad things might be coming in the next year or so. There would seem to be two fundamental problems behind the coming upheavals. One is that we are running into constraints on resources and the other is that the OECD nations have simply accumulated so much debt that it is unlikely to ever be repaid. No one ever thinks of the atmosphere's ability to absorb and carry off carbon emissions as a resource, but as the world's climate changes for the worse, that is exactly what it is. It could easily turn out over the course of the next 10 decades, that the atmosphere's ability to absorb greenhouse gases turns out to be far more important than reserves of fossil fuels.

Looking at what seems to be shaping up for 2012 that could be of apocalyptic proportions we have the rapidly deteriorating financial situation in the EU. Despite endless expressions of optimism on the part of political leaders, most unbiased observers believe there is nothing that can be done to prevent an economic downturn. Some are politely referring to this downturn as a double-dip recession, but others foresee a global depression equal to or worse than the one that occurred 80 years ago. The "worse than" thesis comes from the notion that there will not be the quantities of cheap energy available to support a recovery, and that there will have to be a major transition in the sources and use of energy before economic growth will ever resume.

While most attention has been paid to refinancing debt, persistently high oil prices are gaining increasing recognition as a major factor in slowing economic growth. While high oil prices coupled with new technologies have brought forth new sources of oil, most commentators ignore the fact that this "new" oil in simply unaffordable in today's economies. The older cheap stuff that we have been living on for the last century still makes up about 75 percent of our daily consumption, but, and this is a big but, the cheap oil is disappearing at the rate of 3-4 million barrels a day (b/d) each year. In 20 years cheap oil will be largely gone, replaced by unaffordable "unconventional oil," if we can raise enough capital to exploit the stuff. Recent economic research shows that when the U.S. spends more than 4.5 percent of its GDP on oil, it goes into recession. Although there is some debate on how to calculate the price at which oil prices seriously damage the GDP, some say $90 a barrel will do nicely. Keep in mind that oil has been selling in most places for over $100 a barrel during 2011 and shows no signs of retreating very much in the near future.

The second set of problems likely to explode in 2012 is the political instability. The most serious is in the Arab world, but as demonstrations in Moscow, China, Kazakhstan, Europe, and even mild ones on Wall Street show, social unrest is turning into a worldwide problem as resources become constrained and economic growth slows. Mankind now has seven billion mouths to feed and these are increasing by 70 million each year. There is going to be a turning point, the only question is when?

Unrest and various geopolitical confrontations have already reduced or eliminated oil exports from Libya, Yemen, and Syria this year. Efforts to sanction Iran seem to be picking up steam and the oil markets are nervous that many countries soon will be forced to stop buying Iranian crude. The Syrian situation continues downhill and the delicate Iraqi political balance that was crafted by the US appears to have lasted for only a few days after the last US troops were withdrawn. It is a good bet that there is going to be less oil exported from the Middle East and possibly Central Asia by the end of next year - raising oil prices despite deteriorating economic conditions.

On top of an emerging global economic downturn and the prospects for less oil from the Middle East, we have the United States where the electorate seems to have voted itself into political gridlock while seeking to vote for better times. It seems likely that very little in terms of improving economic policies will be accomplished in Washington until another election or two takes place and the electorate can sort out some sort of coherent path for the country. Until then a large case of fiscal austerity and more unemployment will be the order of the day.

The case for major new troubles starting in 2012 rests on the likelihood of the collapse of much or all of the Eurozone and increased turmoil in the Middle East. The interesting part of this scenario is both of these situations can come about in numerous ways. This of course increases the chances markedly that something very bad will indeed happen soon.

Originally published at Falls Church News-Press

Buying Local Yields More Jobs, Stronger Communities

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:34:48 GMT

By Simone, posted Dec 19, 2011:

[Excerpt]: According to the National Retail Federation, Americans will spend an average of about $700 per person on holiday season shopping this year and, despite the hype surrounding Black Friday, the busiest shopping week immediately precedes Christmas. But rather than enduring long lines and sparse service at chain stores, we urge you take a different approach: seek out your local independent merchants and service providers, meet your neighbors and fully integrate your values in your purchasing decisions.

This is not a call to "get out and shop" -- far from it. In fact, we encourage you consider many great gifts that don't increase consumption: a meal at an independent restaurant, tickets to a local concert, durable locally-made goods. Most of all, consider the many benefits of patronizing local independent businesses for whatever you choose. Among the benefits:

* You'll create local jobs. And not just any jobs. While chain outlet's create mostly positions for clerks and cashiers, local businesses are hiring accountants, graphic designers, webmasters and many other positions the chains (or online giants) centralize at corporate headquarters. A multitude of small entrepreneurs provides a more vital and durable financial base than dependence on a few large corporations.

* Local businesses typically require less driving, consume far less land and have a lighter environmental impact. Because they focus primarily on local markets, local businesses place a high premium on being easily accessible by local residents. They tend to bolster community character and vitality, rather than segregating residential areas from clusters of big box development...

Read full article

Post Carbon Fellow Michael Shuman is research director for the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies and author of the upcoming book from Chelsea Green and Post Carbon Institute Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity. Jeff Milchen is a co-founder of the American Independent Business Alliance, , which helps communities develop effective buy local/independent campaigns and many other pro-local initiatives.

Originally published December 16, 2011 at AMIBA

“Another world is not only possible… she’s opening a bakery round the corner”.

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:13:15 GMT

By Rob Hopkins, posted Dec 15, 2011:

I spent a fascinating afternoon on Monday at an ‘Economic Summit’ (nowhere near as glamorous as it sounds) for Members of South Hams District Council and West Devon Borough Council. The meeting was called to update councillors on the strategic thinking within the councils in terms of the economic development of the area and to hear their views on it. Three communities were invited to present to the councillors the work they were doing to regenerate their economies, and Totnes was one of them. What I want to do in this post is two things simultaneously. I want to give some reflections from that meeting, but also give a review of ‘The Portas Review’ (“an independent review into the future of our high streets”) which was published yesterday. Together they give a sense of the two deeply different narratives that were on show at the Summit, the dangers that their incompatibility presents, as well as the opportunities that emerge.

Narrative One. ‘Produce Economic Growth or Die Trying’

At the summit event, this was the narrative pushed by the (all-male) presenters from the Council as they unveiled their strategic plans and the new role of local authorities in the local economy. Most used term of the day? “Identifying barriers to growth”. Growth, so this narrative goes, is only being held back by ‘regulation’ and ‘red-tape’, and by a lack of spending on new infrastructure. The solutions we need are large scale ones. Tim Jones, chair of the Local Economic Partnership, waxed lyrical about Sainsburys building a new regional depot in the area, a vital piece of infrastructure and investment that will create jobs, the new £10bn Hinkely Point C nuclear power plant getting the go-ahead in the area was, he stated, “a project to die for”.

He talked about the different things that the area apparently needs, roads, more construction and so on, one of which was mentioned as “that whole debate about renewable energy” (funny, there wasn’t any debate around any of the other things). The next speaker stated that the councils have “some great credentials in the environmental sector” without stating what those actually were. This is all, we should remind ourselves, in a context now where sustainable development has been redefined as any development which sustains economic growth. The talk was all of “creating the conditions” for attracting businesses and of having a more “flexible” planning system (i.e. build what you like where you like). At events like that 2 years ago, the term ‘low carbon economy’ was banded about freely. Now nobody even mentioned it once.

Narrative Two. ‘Erm, we already have a vibrant economy thanks’.

Now here’s where it got really interesting. Even before we got to give our presentation, a number of the council members stood up to say that in the area, 65-85% of economic activity is already generated by small to medium sized businesses, the majority of whom employ less than 25 people. As one member said “why do we need a Sainsburys distribution centre? We have local grocers, local farmers, local processors, local markets. This will undermine, not support them”. These are the businesses that weather economic storms because they have nowhere else to go. They don’t make a decision to relocate and overnight throw hundreds of people onto the dole. They are the businesses that actually build a community’s resilience. They are the ones with the links to local farmers, local producers, local people, and to each other. They are the ones who care about that place, because they have to live there. What is required, one might suggest, is to stop undermining that sector of the economy, and to rethink its value in the context of the bigger challenges bearing down on us fast.

“Barriers to growth?”. Start with these….

I started my presentation by pointing out the very real barriers to growth that represent the elephants in the corner as far as Narrative Two is concerned. The first is the woeful oil dependency it fosters, and the fact that all the changes we had heard proposed thus far would increase our oil dependency rather than reduce it, and this is not a time when that is a smart thing to do. Bloomberg are now stating that the smart money in the options market is for the price of oil to reach $150 a barrel within a year. The Financial Times reports that the cost of importing oil into the EU has risen from $280bn in 2010 to over $400bn in 2011, and it is clear now that the price of oil will strangle any possibility of a revival of economic growth (and if you think ‘unconventional oil’ will make much of a difference, think again). You want to identify a barrier to economic growth? Well there’s one very big one. Until we massively reduce our oil dependency, we can kiss any chance of any sort of revival in our economic fortunes goodbye.

Then of course there’s climate change, and the fact that our inability to prevent runaway climate change within the next few years will be the mother of all “barriers to growth” (and the smart money is on the probability that we won’t prevent it). And, lest we forget, there’s the economic crisis, the scale of which few people still appreciate. In a recent post at Automatic Earth, Stoneleigh quotes Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital in the US as saying “our government doesn’t have enough spare cash to bail out a lemonade stand”. Yet bailing out the EU would take hundreds of trillions of dollars, which no-one has. And if we in the UK think that by not signing this week’s EU treaty we are somehow insulated from the crisis unfolding there, have a look at this chart by Morgan Stanley Research:

As George Soros put it recently, “people don’t realize that the system has actually collapsed”. All of a sudden the word “barrier”, at least in the way it was used at the Summit, looks like a considerable understatement. The question that needs to be asked, I said in my presentation, is “does any particular new development or development model increase our oil dependency and our scale of economic precariousness, or decrease it?” These are the very real risks, the very real “barriers to growth” identified by the World Economic Forum as the risks with the greatest perceived likelihood of occurring and economic impact on developed economies. Let’s get real here.

Enter ‘The Portas Review’

Mary Portas (see right), star of ‘Mary, Queen of Frocks’ (a TV programme where she goes and makes-over failing retailers) was asked by the government to do a report about how to revive the UK’s high streets, and her report was published yesterday. In the main I have to say I thought it was rather good, delicately straddling the space between ‘Narrative 2′ than ‘Narrative 1′. At one point she says, in a soundbite perfect for our discussion about the Sainsburys distribution centre:

“A pound spent in a retailer with a localised supply chain that employs local people has far greater domestic impact than a pound spent in a supermarket or national chain. What’s more, out-of-town developments are often presented as major new sources of employment, but we need to recognise that this ‘job creation’ is often just job displacement”.

Her argument is that rather than sit back and be battered, high streets need to come out fighting, to innovate, to become places people want to visit. She puts forward some great ideas for making our high streets the vibrant, bustling places they need to be:

The solutions need to bubble up from each place. As she puts it, “each high street will need to find its own bespoke response to revival, rather than being prescribed some generic response from on high”
“Local people”, she argues need to be seen “as co-creators not simply consumers”
She argues for the creation of ‘Town Teams’, charged with regenerating high streets and town centres, arguing that shopping malls have a management team, and high streets need something very similar
She argues for ‘Super BIDs’ (Business Improvement Districts) where local businesses come together, funded by an annual fee to all local traders, to oversee the stimulation of business in the area. These ‘Super BIDs’ she argues could have the power to compulsorily purchase empty shops and get them going again
She proposes new street markets, where for perhaps just £10 a table, anyone could sell anything (legal), and some of the shops could also have stalls
She proposes cuts in business rates for new start-up businesses
Big retailers, she argues, could mentor smaller businesses, and large chain retailers should be compelled to highlight in their annual reports “what they are doing at a local level to support the local high street”
She also is clear that one big problem is absentee landlords who have no interest in their property being a part of this kind of regeneration process, and she suggests ‘empty shop management orders’ and a range of ways to force landlords to use their properties more responsibly
The community should have the right to take over empty properties, and as well as the ‘Right to Buy’, she also proposes a ‘Right to Try’, which I love, arguing that “if [a community] can’t buy an empty property then they should be able to try it”, and “to go into the property and test co-operative ventures”.
She also proposes the use of loyalty cards, although doesn’t mention the Brixton Pound, which would no doubt, like the forthcoming Bristol Pound, be right up her (high) street.

In short, there are loads of great ideas in the report. I love her talk of “looking beyond simply price-based considerations to include community wellbeing and long-term sustainability”. There is a passion that runs through it which I admire. I do however have just two criticisms of the report. The first is that there are a couple of places where I feel she is simply not angry enough, where she pulls her punches. She acknowledges the terrible situation that many high streets have been thrown into by out of town shopping centres and supermarkets muscling onto the high street, but is frustratingly shy about naming names as to how that has happened. She writes:

“The fact is that the major supermarkets and malls have delivered highly convenient, needs-based retailing, which serves today’s consumers well. Sadly the high street didn’t adapt as quickly or as well. Now they need to”.

It’s a bit like blaming a mugging victim for not ducking in time when the mugger took a swing at him. It is hard to adapt quickly enough when a supermarket pitches up next to your shop and undercuts all your prices, provides acres of free parking and uses all the other tools at its disposal to push you out of business. Have a look at this graph from the report showing the percentage change in UK store numbers between 2001 and 2011:

This is not a change in direction that happened by accident. Nor did, as the report states, the fact that 8000 supermarket outlets now account for over 97% of total grocery sales in the UK. This ‘transition’ (if you like) was supported, indeed driven, through subsidies, through a planning system driven by the same mania for growth that we are seeing today, it was driven by corporate interests, lobbyists, a whole wretched economic model that saw small businesses as disposable and large corporates and shareholder returns as essential, not just by unimaginative shopkeepers who failed to “adapt” quickly enough. Communities up and down the country tried to resist their towns being taken over by out-of-town shopping centres, becoming ‘CloneTowns’, and tried to protect their local traders by stopping supermarkets opening up on their high streets or one the edge of town, but were usually defeated by supermarkets’ huge budgets and legal fire power.

To give her her due she does suggest that when it comes to communities and supermarkets, there is not a level playing field. Her suggestion that “people need a powerful, legitimate voice and planning needs to be a much more collaborative process than it has been to date”. She suggests that developers should make a financial contribution to ensure that the local community has a strong voice in the planning system (I can see that one going down like a lead balloon). There is a key tension here though in terms of a government who would see such an approach as a “barrier to growth”, as unnecessary ‘red tape’ to be swept asunder.

The other problem with it is that reading it one would think that the decline in high streets is happening in isolation from the larger economic picture. There are some trends working in favour of the high street. The price of fuel has meant that John Lewis recently reported that sales at their out-of-town stores are now down 12% compared to their town centre stores. I would have love to have seen what this report would have looked like if she has explicitly been asked to look at how high streets could also boost community resilience in the wider sense, actually responding to the looming energy crisis, to the debt crisis. Although she does touch on some things that would be very helpful for this, some joining up of dots is frustratingly elusive.

Back at the summit… tools for building bridges

What was fascinating at the summit was a sense that began to emerge about how a dialogue might look that was about building a bridge between these two narratives. It was the Conservative councillors who were arguing for support for local businesses, for more apprenticeships, for support for new businesses. Arguing that economic growth, as we’ve known it so far is over, is probably not going to register, whereas presenting Transition as the opportunity for entrepreneurship and innovation, for supporting local businesses which are key to community resilience, seems to gain far greater traction. What will impress such people is not the amount of carbon we’ve saved, but the number of jobs we’ve created. Often they see those two things as mutually exclusive, we can model just the opposite. Once Transition becomes the thinking that underpins hundreds of jobs in a place, it becomes a no-brainer.

The Portas Review presents a powerful and well-reasoned argument that we need to nurture and revive the high street, that they need to be diverse and innovative, that local people need to be more involved and that they need some kind of protection from the predation of the chainstores.

I left the meeting feeling that the strategic planning guys are a dead loss, they have to make the kinds of plans that include Sainsburys distribution centres and nuclear power plants because that’s their job. They represent a slow moving supertanker in terms of how long it takes to move things forward, and how long it takes to turn them around, what the film ‘The Story of Broke’ refers to as ‘the dinosaur economy’. Will the finances to build them still be in place in a couple of years? Will the realisation dawn that they deplete rather than enhance the area’s resilience? Will the new Community Resilience Framework‘s assertion that it is up to communities to choose what they are building resilience to mean that they will also, under the localism agenda, be given the powers to resist things they see as diminishing their resilience?

A question arises here in terms of timing. We have very little time to make this stuff happen, it needs to happen now. Local authority strategic infrastructure planning work stretches out 20 years into a very uncertain future, yet moves very slowly and is very difficult to turn around. So the question that arises from the Summit is is there any value to a Transition initiative putting its energy into these long-term strategic consultations or into setting up community enterprises, retraining, reskilling, new food systems and so on? Also, given that most of the money from central government is distributed via. the networks of Narrative One, much of the resource that is needed to build the more resilient systems won’t reach them. Again, plugging the leaks of our economy and enabling inward investment are vital. I think this is a different take on emergency preparedness, that what we need to do right now is to take the ‘can do’ spirit and entrepreneurial drive Portas lays out, combined with the bottom-up mobilisation, the intentional localisation and resilience-building that runs through Transition, and harness the inherent enthusiasm and support for this that can be found everywhere.

Transition is so important because it is about doing things, engaging the community, starting to create and model the economy we do want to see. Across the world, Transition initiatives are doing just that, whether it’s Sustainable Dunbar’s new community bakery now open for business, Bath and West Community Energy just raising £721,350 in a community share launch for renewables in the area, or the Plymouth Food Charter which Transition Plymouth are a key part of, they are starting to model the kind of economy for which there is much more support. Yes it needs support, it needs investment, it needs that money currently being spent on bypasses and new roundabouts, and it needs to be far more visible on the ground. Portas puts it beautifully in her report, “what really matters, what’s really important, is that we roll up our sleeves and just make things happen“. Indeed.

At the end of the meeting, one of the senior representatives of South Hams District Council stood up to give his reflections on the day, and what he said gave a great sense of how these two narratives might find some common ground, and how Council thinking might shift. He talked about how own his thinking had shifted as the day went by, and that he was now questioning why developing an economic strategy for the area always meant thinking in terms of large scale ‘solutions’ and big centrally-funded infrastructure projects, and that perhaps focusing on local economies might be a more skillful way to move forward. This felt like a powerful observation, and one we can certainly build on locally.

I often end talks with Arundhati Roy’s quote “another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing”. Might we be able to adapt her quote, so that, in the context of what I have written about here today, it is not only a case of hearing her breathing, but being able to see her, around us, setting up local businesses, reviving her local economy, setting up a community bakery, mentoring scores of young people with business ideas, attracting inward social investment finance, creating the models whereby people can invest in their communities, creating economic blueprints which set out the case clearly for how the local economy can be strengthened and supported? Yes there are very real barriers to growth, such as the barrier that you can’t do infinite growth on a finite planet, but there are no barriers to the growth of the innovation, community and resourcefulness that already underpins our local economies and local traders, and which represents the real bedrock on which a new, more resilient economy needs to be built.