Resource Insights

Canada is leaking emergy

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 13:17:00 +0000

That's not a typo in the title. Emergy is a term coined by famed energy and ecology researcher Howard Odum. An analysis underpinned by the emergy concept explains why importers of Canada's natural resources such as crude oil, natural gas, unfinished wood, grains and metal ores are getting a bargain as much of Canada's emergy endowment is given away for free.

Canada has long been a major exporter of natural resources. Blessed with large forests, massive mineral and hydrocarbon deposits, and fertile prairies, Canada's small population hasn't needed all that it can produce. And so, much of its natural wealth has been exported to other nations hungry for raw materials, energy and food. All of this has helped to make Canada a rich, developed country with an enviable standard of living and a wide array of well-funded public services for its citizens including universal health care.

So great is Canada's natural endowment that it has more than made up for the fact that the country and its people have been giving away a substantial portion of the value of their resources to foreign customers for free. And, the country is planning to expand that giveaway as it gears up for much larger exports of synthetic crude oil and bitumen from its huge tar sands mining operations in Alberta.

To understand this giveaway, one needs to understand emergy, a concept invented by energy researcher Howard Odum. Emergy is the "available energy of one kind that has to be used directly or indirectly to make a product or service." Emergy is something close to "embodied energy" though the way that term is used today often leaves out nature's energetic contribution. Odum discerned something which is not obvious to even the professionally trained observer of international trade: Much of the value of natural resources comes through nature from the soil, the sun and geologic processes. These processes represent substantial inputs of energy. Buyers of such resources pay little more than the costs of extraction (or growing, in the case of crops) plus transportation. Therefore, they pay almost nothing for the free services nature provides.

This wouldn't be so injurious to Canada if it processed and transformed most of these natural resources itself. But it does so only on a limited basis. Much of the harvest from its farm fields and forests and the output from its mines and wells is shipped to other countries for processing. When some of this comes back in finished form, Canadians pay a hefty premium for that processing since unlike nature's services, human processing cannot be provided free of charge. Odum would say that the emergy balance in the exchange is negative. More emergy value goes out than returns.

But Canada has a substantial manufacturing and service economy. It, too, imports some raw and partially finished goods to produce finished goods for export--in some cases back to countries that provided the raw materials. So, Canada has benefitted to a certain extent from the uneven terms of trade that emergy-blind trade arrangements assure.

Not so well-off as Canada are many developing countries which have little or no manufacturing and processing capability, but a large resource base, either agricultural or mineral or both. These countries are forced to export many of their resources rather than process them at home. The agricultural and mineral exports from several Central and South American countries and many African countries come to mind.

An emergy analysis explains in part why many developing countries remain so impoverished despite their abundant natural resources. While there are often other problems in such countries involving governance and geopolitical instability, understanding the uneven terms of trade that an emergy analysis would reveal can go a long way in explaining the economic difficulties they suffer.

Where the decision has been made to process more of a country's natural wealth at home, there is a better chance for economic success. The valuable free emergy supplied by nature provides more jobs and value to the home country if it can process the resources which embody that emergy.

And, just as this is becoming apparent to many resource-rich developing countries, some developed countries such as Canada--when it comes to the tar sands--and the United States--when it comes to U. S. grain and timber exports--are regressing to a policy that increases giveaways of their natural wealth. All this is done in the name of a free trade ideology that is devoid of any appreciation of nature's role in providing us with so much of what we need on a daily basis.

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Howard Odum's book "A Prosperous Way Down" (summarized here in a reprinted presentation by Odum) provides a clear and concise explanation of emergy and how emergy exchanges affect the economies of countries through trade. Below is a table from the book that though dated provides an idea of how developed and developing countries rank in their emergy exchanges. Undoubtedly, China has improved its emergy ratio in trade since it now has a huge industrial base. But the relative position of other countries may not have changed that much. Andrew Nikiforuk's "Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent" provides a revealing window into Canada's tar sands development strategy including its foolish and excessive export of unrefined oil products to the United States even as Canada continues to import large quantities of oil to the eastern part of the country from abroad for want of an east-west pipeline.

Balance of Traded Wealth Evaluated with Emergy
Various numbers from the 1980s

*Nation*	*Emergy from Within %*	*Ratio of Emergy Received to Emergy Exported*
Netherlands	23	4.3
West Germany	10	4.2
Japan	31	4.2
Switzerland	19	3.2
Spain	24	2.3
U. S. A.	77	2.2
Taiwan	24	1.89
India	88	1.45
Brazil	91	0.98
Dominica	69	0.84
New Zealand	60	0.76
Poland	66	0.65
Australia	92	0.39
China	98	0.28
Former Soviet Union	97	0.23
Liberia	92	0.151
Ecuador	94	0.119

Source: "A Prosperous Way Down" by Howard T. Odum and Elisabeth C. Odum

A brief ecological manifesto

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 13:05:00 +0000

I'm not a European, but I play one on the Internet--at least for the next month. Comment: Visions, a website which "explores the personal views of thinkers, innovators and scientists about possible solutions to global warming, overpopulation and dwindling resources," asked me and other "European intellectuals and leaders" to respond to the following question for the month of July posting: What can we do to ensure that generations to come have a sustainable future?

Comment: Visions is a collaboration between The European Voice, a newspaper which covers the European Parliament, and the euronews [sic] television channel, both of which are owned by The Economist Group, owners of The Economist magazine and other publications. The Comment: Visions site is produced in association with Shell, a fact which gave me some misgivings. But as I looked at the previous questions and responses, I discovered a wide range of views, some of them quite radical, at least by the standards of The Economist and Shell. And so, I decided to participate.

I attempted to write a concise, blunt assessment of our ecological predicament in hopes that perhaps at least one person of influence might read and understand what I believe we face. I have reproduced my answer below. For the other answers, go to the Comment: Visions home page for July.

Now to the mystery of how I became a European intellectual. The site clearly invites non-Europeans to participate. I took the phrase "European intellectual and leader" from one of the emails I received and was pleased at what I perceived to be a promotion. I think the site operators may have gotten my name from Scitizen, a science news site based in Paris for which I am a columnist. They never said how they came across my name.

In any case, here is what I wrote. See if you think I hit the mark for being concise and blunt.

We are in overshoot. Failure to recognize this fact and act on it will ultimately condemn humans worldwide to nature's cure for this condition: collapse. Overshoot is a well-defined ecological term; it means an organism is temporarily living beyond the long-term carrying capacity of its environment, that is, the ability of the environment to provide it with the needed food, energy and other resources for the long-term and to absorb the pollution it produces without destroying that carrying capacity.

Collapse is a more indefinite term, but it does not mean annihilation. Collapse in the case of human society implies a fairly rapid decline in population over perhaps many decades and the reorganization of society into smaller and far more decentralized units.

For those who say that this cannot happen, the onus is on them to show that the record of history (which is replete with such instances) and the findings of science no longer apply to humans. Our predicament is probably most aptly described by ecologist William Catton Jr. in his book entitled "Overshoot." The enabling substances for this overshoot have been fossil fuels. They have provided a one-time endowment of exceptionally concentrated energy which we have used to extract large yields from farms, forests, mines, fisheries and factories. Fossil fuels have enabled us to increase our population and our wealth exponentially in the last 150 years.

But once these finite fuels are burned, they are gone forever. The long-run alternative is solar, its derivatives of wind and water power, and possibly nuclear power. However, our problems run deeply across multiple natural systems--climate, fisheries, water, farm fields, and forests to name a few. Merely deploying alternative energy quickly enough to replace fossil fuels will not solve all our problems. In fact, increasing our use of energy could put even more pressure on the very natural systems upon which our lives depend.

How then are we to climb down off this ledge of overshoot and avoid crashing headlong into the valley of collapse? And, what should our destination be? The historical record has only a handful of examples of long-term sustainable societies, and they are based on agriculture and hunting and gathering. The Indian agricultural village and the Australian Aboriginal culture come to mind. But few people in industrialized nations desire a return to such forms of human society. When modern people speak of sustainability, they mean a sustainable industrial society. And so, we are in uncharted waters for there is no historical example of such a society to guide us.

We must rely instead on certain principles to tell us what to do. The bedrock principle that nature suggests is this: We cannot have infinite growth in the consumption of resources inside a finite system, the Earth. If we are in overshoot, as I suggest, then we are beyond the point of growing and must recede from our current consumptive habits.

How can we achieve this? I admit that my solution is one no sane politician would embrace: a steady-state economy, that is, an economy in which neither the throughput of material resources nor the associated pollution would grow. The quality of goods and services, however, could continue to increase so long as that increase in quality does not demand the use of additional resources. And, the satisfactions we obtain from nonmaterial sources such as friends and family, athletic and artistic pursuits, and religious practice could continue to deepen and grow indefinitely. Note, however, that while this is the description of a steady-state economy, it is not one of a steady-state society. Both the economic and cultural life of such a society would continue to evolve.

All of this seems hard enough to imagine, let alone implement. But we must go even further for we cannot achieve a sustainable, steady-state economy by merely ceasing to grow. Rather, because we are already in overshoot, we need to reduce drastically our use of resources, especially energy. This will doubtless require new technology to make us vastly more efficient. But it will also require that we rearrange our lives and change our habits so as to accomplish our goals by using far fewer resources than we do today. We will also need to bring down population gradually over time to a level consistent with long-term sustainability.

While what I'm suggesting may seem like an impossible political task, it is the only feasible solution for a sustainable industrial society. Either we summon the will to bring about a steady-state economy or nature will tragically and remorselessly implement one for us. These are our choices.

Is the United States drifting toward "war socialism"?

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 13:50:00 +0000

Jay Hanson is a well-known voice on issues of peak oil and sustainability. A systems analyst by trade, he established one of the first web sites (dieoff.org) to discuss these issues in depth in the mid-1990s. His latest web venture is a site called War Socialism on which he describes a form of governance which might become the only viable one in the coming age of scarcity unless we can muster unprecedented global cooperation to manage the decline.

By discussing "war socialism" I am not endorsing it. In fact, Hanson proposes an alternative, a global government that severely restricts human use of the global commons, that is, the natural resources upon which all of us depend. But Hanson is no lightweight. He has thought very deeply about our ecological predicament. He has tried to square what he knows about human behavior with what he believes needs to be done in the world we now face. It is clear from the organization and emphasis of his new site that he does not believe it is probable that the kind of global cooperation he would prefer will actually emerge.

To understand "war socialism" one needs first to understand that Hanson believes that the most likely (though certainly not preferable) trajectory for humanity is a massive dieoff that will claim the lives of 90 percent of the human inhabitants of the Earth. Absent the kind of cooperation Hanson would like to see in managing the coming decline, the only rational strategy may be for one's own country to work to outcompete other countries. The picture he paints is not an appealing one. But when you are trying to be one of the 10 percent who will survive the coming collapse, there is little room for sentimentality.

So, let's look at the war socialism society Hanson describes, and let's see if some of its building blocks are already in place in the United States. Here are the basic principles:

Increase our fraction of global net energy (divert energy from competitors) directly by military action.

Comment: There is little room to deny that the United States has long engaged in military action to increase and secure its access to resources, especially energy. With U. S. troops all over the Middle East that pattern continues.

Increase our fraction of global net energy economically by increasing asset values (e.g., pumping up the stock market and real estate prices).

Comment: This has rather successfully been done during the last 25 years though clearly it was not sustainable. We are trying to do it all over again.

Reduce energy demand by eliminating unnecessary economic activity.

Comment: Nothing has been done in this regard unless you count the shipping of jobs overseas.

Reduce energy demand by reducing human population levels (e.g., closing our borders, deporting as many as possible and discouraging births).

Comment: There are periodic calls for immigration restrictions but little has been done. Deportations are currently focused on people thought to be likely threats to the country and as such are part of the so-called "War on Terror." While birthrates had been declining for a long time, they have now resumed an upward trend due in part to the influx of immigrants who tend to have larger families.

Plant “Victory Gardens” throughout the country.

Comment: The local food movement has become surprisingly vibrant in the United States. While home and community gardens still make up only a small fraction of the food supply, their popularity is expanding rapidly.

Heavy funding for basic energy research.

Comment: While funding is large for basic energy research, much of it is directed at fossil fuels instead of renewable energy sources.

Pollution control rollback, streamline permitting (no Environmental Impact Statements, etc.) for alternate energy. No more permits for fossil fuel power plants. No more funding for roads. No more building permits except in special cases.

Comment: While President George W. Bush did his level best to roll back environmental rules for power plants and industry and to streamline permitting, he did it primarily on behalf of fossil fuel installations instead of alternative energy projects. Road building continues apace; but the recession (depression?) has slowed new building permits to a crawl.

Full-on conservation, local energy production to minimize grid vulnerabilities, and a crash alternate energy production program. (Conservation will help under a government that limits economic activity).

Comment: Marginal efforts have been made here and there (e.g. weatherization programs, renewable energy portfolio standards), but nothing that could be characterized as "full-on."

Free mass transit.

Comment: While mass transit ridership has been rising as the fuel costs of owning an automobile have increased, only marginal efforts have been made to expand the availability of mass transit. In addition, fares for mass transit users have actually been rising.

The report card for the United States as a war socialist society is decidedly mixed. We seem to have the war part down. But the socialist part is lacking. The current administration wants to redistribute benefits in American society, most notably through new health care spending meant to bring all people under some kind of coverage. It has enacted funding for a plethora of public works projects, but many of them are simply more road building. The administration seeks to expand renewable energy, but has a keen interest in the coal industry through such doubtful technologies as carbon sequestration.

But one might ask why the socialism part of Hanson's war socialism society is so important? The answer is social cohesion. In the coming crisis if people don't feel they have a stake in the system, then they will be much less likely to work or fight or submit to the rules for the common good. Hanson believes that without substantial internal cooperation, no society will weather the coming storm. Instead, we may simply devolve into a lawless anarchy.

War socialist ideas are also in the news in Great Britain where the British National Party won seats in the European Parliament. This case is interesting because the BNP is explicit about the danger of peak oil and the world of shrinking resources we can expect. Some of its prescriptions sound harsh, and others seem enlightened. The party has been trying to repackage itself with difficulty because of its racist, right-wing heritage. The basic BNP response is increased self-sufficiency and isolation: 1) a military which defends Great Britain and doesn't seek foreign adventures, 2) a halt to immigration, 3) deportation of illegals and noncitizen criminals, 4) a devolution of power to local governments, 5) a reversal of the privatization of British rails and new investment to expand public transportation, 6) a selective withdrawal from the global economy and increased local manufacturing, 7) food self-sufficiency based on organic methods, and 8) cooperative ownership of power production (with wind given as a primary example).

The BNP website no longer makes it sound like a party that fits neatly within the reactionary right (though in practice its emphasis on a "white" Britain remains central). Still, some of its ideas are actually quite close to those described by Hanson as war socialism. What's not in view is an aggressive foreign and military policy designed to extract resources from competing nations, something that Britain's major parties clearly embrace. The BNP, which is a minor party, is relevant to British politics because major parties often neutralize minor ones by co-opting their ideas. And, Britain is actually further along the war socialism path than the United States.

We and Hanson can still hope for unprecedented cooperation to manage the coming decline. But he may be right that if that cooperation doesn't emerge, we may be faced with a decision about making preparations for an all-out and probably violent scramble for the world's remaining resources--a contest in which a disciplined, cohesive and militarized society has the best chance of survival. Is he missing a viable third or fourth way? Even more important, is there time to implement a different path as nations successively awaken to the realities of peak oil and resource stringency and increasingly focus on self-preservation rather than cooperation?

Which matters most? The size of the tap or the tank?

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:18:00 +0000

My latest column on Scitizen entitled "Which Matters Most? The Size of the Tap or the Tank?" has now been posted. The theme will be familiar to frequent readers of this blog. Here is the teaser:

Energy optimists are fond of citing very large numbers for worldwide fossil fuel resources such as oil and natural gas. But they conveniently leave out the critical variable. How fast can we actually produce these resources?....Read more

Green shoots: An alternative view

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 12:30:00 +0000

I am seeing green shoots everywhere these days. But not in the places in which Wall Street's strident financial cheerleaders and Washington's happy economists are. I am seeing green shoots in the many cracks in the suburban neighborhood roads I now travel daily by bicycle.

Unlike the supposed financial green shoots, these green shoots are not propitious. It is mid-June and the cities which I traverse by bike do not seem to have the wherewithal to douse the weeds that are cracking their streets. I also ride across many lovely private parking lots that are breaking up like so many crumbled cookies with no one seeming to want to fix them. I am reminded of images from a History Channel series called "Life After People" which depict what the Los Angeles freeway system would look like just one year after the disappearance of people (surprisingly green!) and how it might appear one hundred years after people (like a nature preserve!).

The roads are, of course, crumbling. But this has long been the case in Michigan where the governor and legislature refused to do anything about it throughout the 1990s and the early part of this decade for fear of voter reaction to new taxes. (One can still today close one's eyes and know immediately whether one is on the Michigan or the Ontario side of the Canadian border just by how the car rides.)

Not surprisingly, in the face of the current financial crisis, our local colleges and universities are doing what they can to encourage green shoots of their own on their campuses, namely, deferring even more maintenance.

There are reports, of course, of dramatic declines in capital spending by industry as well, especially by the energy industry. This is a natural response to the financial downturn, and we won't know for some time whether capital spending will recover to previous levels. In the public sphere, however, in the United States there has been a chronic underinvestment in what would be called public capital goods, and it is now getting much worse as governments at all levels are forced to slash spending.

These then are the origins of my green shoots, and they constitute an ominous sign about the ability of the economy to renew itself in the face of financial collapse and energy stringency. Every modern economy has what in economic parlance is called capital stock. That is the stock of goods (buildings, machines, roads, vehicles, power plants, etc.), both public and private, that are used to produce the objects and services we expect and depend on. In order for an economy to grow its output, it must either make the capital stock more efficient or it must simply create more of it. This would include factories, but also ships and trucks to transport goods to and from those factories, and often more roads and ship channels to transport them on or through. But in order for our existing capital stock not to fall into disrepair, we must maintain it or replace it.

If and when we find ourselves unable to increase (or make more efficient) the capital stock and simultaneously maintain the existing stock, we will be at that point in time which the authors of "Limits to Growth" envisioned. We would no longer be able to attain economic growth because the maintenance and/or replacement demands of the existing capital stock overwhelm our resources and prevent us from accomplishing both maintenance and growth at the same time. Ugo Bardi provided an excellent explanation of this problem recently on "The Oil Drum: Europe," dubbing it peak capital.

That's what my green shoots are telling me. Let me repeat it again: We may be nearing the point where the existing capital stock including the public infrastructure has grown so large and our resources, both financial and physical, have become so tight that we can no longer both maintain and expand the capital stock simultaneously. This does not necessarily lead to a dramatic collapse so much as a grinding decline in productive capacity. Over time the economy has more and more difficulty extracting basic resources from the Earth, manufacturing objects from those resources, and transporting those objects to markets, all while maintaining the buildings related to these activities.

It may be too early to sound the alarm on the end of economic growth. But if this is not the moment when we've reached the limits to growth, it looks very much like a dress rehearsal. And, that means that opening night cannot be far away.

What if the techno-optimists and cornucopians are half right?

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 13:29:00 +0000

Some days I wake up and wish for the world's techno-optimists and cornucopians (TOCs) to be right. The future would be so much easier for all of us. But perhaps more immediately, the present would become a less worrisome time zone. Those who anguish about peak oil, climate change, water depletion, and the panoply of resource and ecosystem disasters that are already arriving or are in the making would get a pleasant reprieve. And, the vast majority of citizens on the planet who almost never give such things a thought would simply go on as they have been.

That this majority should, in my view, give more thought to such matters goes without saying. But if the evidence were so clear--I don't say obvious because it's obvious to me but still unclear to most others--then we'd already be making significant progress on these problems. Instead, they are getting worse, some of them very rapidly.

But, how pleasing it would be if I were wrong, and the TOCs were right. We could all sit back and wait for the miracles to arrive from the scientists, the engineers, and the various high priests of high technology. We could count on the Earth to give us her abundance in whatever quantity we need, when we need it, and at prices and energy costs we can afford.

But what if the situation is not clear cut? What if the TOCs are half right? What if, for example, oil shale were to become a low-cost, high-volume source of oil for the world in relatively short order because of technological breakthroughs (which the techno-optimists keep telling us are inevitable)? There is as much potential oil locked in oil shale in the American West as in all the world's known oil reserves combined. (Link opens to large PDF prepared by the U. S. Energy Information Administration.)

But herein lies the problem. The TOCs cannot count on solving any single ecological or resource problem in isolation. For as those who understand oil shale know, both large amounts of water and large amounts of energy will be necessary to extract oil from it.

No worries, say the TOCs. We'll design a process that needs neither copious quantities of water nor extravagant amounts of energy.

So, let's say they succeed, and let's assume there is enough other oil production to sustain projections of world economic and population growth through 2050. Now, all the other resource and ecosystem problems are likely to get worse.

No problem, respond the TOCs. First, we'll fix the climate through geoengineering. We'll put mirrors in space to intercept a portion of the sunlight and reverse global warming.

Are you sure this won't create perverse climate effects in various regions or localities? We think there won't be a problem, the TOCs say. (Not particularly reassuring.)

But what about the acidification of the oceans that is a byproduct of rising carbon dioxide emissions? We'll put quicklime in the oceans, they respond. That will solve it.

But where will you get the energy to produce the quicklime from limestone? We'll get it from flared gas, solar thermal and nuclear power, say the TOCs.

And, for projects of this scale, how will you convince the public to pay for these gargantuan public works projects? For example, the energy requirements for producing the quicklime alone would be equivalent to one-third the total production of oil each year!

We're scientists and technologists, not politicians, the TOCs respond. Somebody will have to convince the public.

How about water depletion? Simple, the TOCs say. We'll desalinate. There's lots of water in the ocean.

And, where will you get the energy to do that? We'll use nuclear power and solar thermal to do it.

We thought you were going to use that energy for making quicklime? Oh, we'll just have to build a lot more capacity, the TOCs respond.

And, so the scale of the responses grows ever larger with each challenge. And, the logistics of having to do them simultaneously is glossed over. And, the political hurdles are largely ignored. And, the side effects have to be dealt with using yet more techno-fixes. And, all of this will be done against a backdrop of ever-growing population and increasing living standards worldwide. Right?

And, yet some of the many schemes proposed by the TOCs may be implemented. Some of them may even work and work well. But it is doubtful that their approach will succeed at solving more than a fraction of our major ecological and resource problems, let alone the problems they create with their solutions. The trouble is that the resources, energy and money devoted to such fixes will not be available for alternate adaptive strategies such as powering down and relocalizing, both of which require an infrastructure significantly different from the one we have now. Naturally, these more humble strategies could be aided by technology, but not of the kind that the TOCs are hoping will keep us on a course of business as usual.

That points us to the biggest danger of all: It's not that the TOCs are dead wrong, something I believe might actually be clear to nearly every thinking person if it were true. Rather, the biggest danger is that the TOCs are half right and that their endless parade of techno-fixes will prevent resources from flowing to other endeavors which are much more likely to produce a sustainable world in the long run.

Peak oil, sustainability and the problem of freedom

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 12:38:00 +0000

In lieu of my weekly posting, I'm linking to a guest post I wrote for The Oil Drum entitled "Peak Oil, Sustainability and the Problem of Freedom" which was posted today. Here is the lede:

In the film "A Beautiful Mind" the putative hero is John Nash, the Nobel prize-winning mathematician who struggles with paranoid schizophrenia and ultimately overcomes it. The same John Nash early in his career created a model of human behavior that lives on in our institutions and policies and which has significantly constricted our views of human freedom. So says a BBC documentary series entitled "The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom."....Read more

Hypocritical modelers

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Sun, 31 May 2009 12:47:00 +0000

Oil companies like to use models to estimate their reserves and the potential of unexplored fields. Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's largest oil company and a longtime supporter of the global warming denial lobby, tells us the following on page 8 of its 2007 annual report: "Using proprietary technologies and tools, including advanced reservoir prediction models and geological data visualization, we have significantly improved our ability to identify, model, and understand oil and gas reservoirs."

Exxon and its fossil fuel partners in the denial lobby seem to like models well enough when they use them for their own purposes; but through their hired mouthpieces they decry the use of models for climate change forecasting. (The Heritage Foundation to whose pages the previous link leads received consistent funding from Exxon throughout this decade.)

The companies support the dissemination of statements such as the following:

Scientific forecasting research has shown that experts aren’t able to provide accurate predictions in this kind of complex and uncertain situation. It doesn’t matter whether experts present their forecasts as certain outcomes, detailed scenarios, expectations, likelihoods or probabilities. Or that the forecasts are the product of hard thinking by many highly qualified experts, or even of mathematics or computer simulations. The expert forecasts are nonetheless worthless.

What could be more complex than the modeling suggested by this Exxon press release detailing projects around the world, some of them deep underwater, in which modeling was an important component? What could be more complex than modeling the oil and natural gas reserves of the world's largest oil company? Except perhaps modeling the entire world's oil and natural gas reserves. (See Exxon's claim about the extent of those reserves below.)

Exxon wants the public, their shareholders, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Minerals Management Service and the United States Geological Survey to accept their reported reserves and their estimates of potential new reserves all based on their models. The company's chief executive officer even wants us to believe that fossils fuels will still be the dominate fuels 100 years from now. Is that what the company's models are telling it? And, yet Exxon and its fellow travelers send forth messages into the world that implore us not to believe in models--that "expert forecasts are...worthless." That being the case, should these companies' forecasts of the fossil fuels they believe they can get out of the ground be considered worthless as well?

Clearly, it is not modeling which Exxon and others in the fossil fuel lobby want us to distrust. They merely dislike modeling which demonstrates a possible future that is disadvantageous to their executives and their shareholders. The truth is that corporations of all kinds, governments, nonprofits,and even individuals rely on forecasting models to give them some starting point for evaluating possible outcomes. And, while forecasts of many kinds often have wide margins of error, they can point out possible risks, which, if they indicate severe consequences, may cause us to act to head off those consequences or prepare to mitigate them.

Don't believe Exxon and its hired hands when they feign concern over climate change models. They, too, like to use models to substantiate their pronouncements. What the members of fossil fuel lobby are really telling us with their critique of models is that they are hypocrites of the first order. But, that's something that should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following the activities of Exxon and the fossil fuel lobby in the public discussion of climate change.

Holiday Break

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Sun, 24 May 2009 12:30:00 +0000

I am taking a holiday break this week and expect to post again on Sunday, May 31st. In the meantime, I hope you'll take a look at my latest column on Scitizen entitled "Energy: The Achilles Heel of the Resource Pyramid." Enjoy the weekend!

Energy: The Achilles heel of the resource pyramid

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Sat, 23 May 2009 21:44:00 +0000

My latest column on Scitizen entitled "Energy: The Achilles Heel of the Resource Pyramid" has now been posted. Here is the teaser:

When economists say that we have far larger mineral resources today than ever before, they are usually referring to a model known as the resource pyramid. What they often fail to mention is that cheap, abundant energy is the key input into this model and that without it much of our presumed abundance would vanish....Read more

The freedom lobby

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Sun, 17 May 2009 11:22:00 +0000

There is nothing so intoxicating as freedom. That's partly because the word is so abstract that people can define it in any way that they want. And, naturally they define it in ways that they believe will give them the maximum purchase on wealth, power, pleasure and security.

So, it should come as no surprise that the word "freedom" is frequently deployed like a cluster bomb in order to discredit opponents in a public debate. Who, after all, wants to be classified among "the enemies of freedom"? That's why the climate change denial lobby now uses this word incessantly. It is one of the last arrows in its quiver as the world contemplates ever tighter restrictions on greenhouse gases.

Now, what do the climate change deniers mean by freedom? Do they mean freedom of speech, assembly, and religion, cherished rights guaranteed under the U. S. Constitution? Do they mean freedom of association? Do they mean free elections and representative government?

None of these seems to be on their minds. In its most elemental form the freedom they seek is the freedom for individuals to exploit all the resources they can get their hands on at whatever rate and in whatever manner they choose. Here is an example from a recent letter to the editor to a Florida newspaper:

Celebrate the fact that you live in the greatest economy in the world and that you can afford two cars. Celebrate that you can still afford to gas them up. Celebrate the freedom this gives you. And realize that the people who want you to curtail your enjoyment of the economy have no intention of curtailing their enjoyment.

A more sophisticated and ideologically grounded version comes from Vaclav Klaus, current president of the Czech Republic:

I see another big problem in environmentalism and in its currently most aggressive form - global warming alarmism. This ideology has gradually turned into the most efficient vehicle for advocating extensive government intervention into all fields of life and for suppressing human freedom and economic prosperity.

Again, the concern is with so-called economic freedom, primarily to grab whatever wealth one is able to grab. This is an appealing doctrine to those who have the skills and social position to do just that. And, there is an important second component to this freedom, property rights. Property rights become very important if you already have a lot of property (wealth) or the prospect of gaining a lot of property. So, it is again no surprise that the financial press--The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Post among them--see climate change as a canard to gyp them and their readers out of their rights to use their property--primarily property that emits a lot of greenhouse gas--as they see fit.

What these defenders of freedom don't tell us is what they are willing to do to defend the property rights of the inhabitants of coastal cities and countless seaside villages should their communities be swamped by rising sea level--one of the most widely expected effects of global warming. Nor do they tell us what they might be willing to do to protect the water supplies of billions dependent on Asian mountain rivers as the glacial meltwater that feeds them disappears. How might they answer the farmers whose formerly fertile fields become drought-stricken deserts as climate change proceeds? Who do all these people see about the violation of their property rights?

What is conspicuously absent from the freedom lobby's lexicon is the word "justice." They are all for freedom so long as it doesn't include the freedom to hold them accountable for their contributions to the demise of other people's homes and livelihoods. Here they simply ignore their own arguments about property and freely trample on the rights of others to have a livable climate. The private property zealots refuse to acknowledge that the atmosphere belongs to all of us and that that implies that no single person or group has the right to abuse it.

What the freedom lobby has conveniently forgotten is that society is a social contract. As philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote, without that contract we would be free to do whatever we wish and the result would be a "war of all against all." The ruling ethos would be that of "might makes right."

The second historical memory lapse is that property is a social convention. The reason something qualifies as private property is because we all agree that it does. There are certain things which we explicitly say are not private property such as public parks, roadways, waterways and museums. They belong to the community. In general the world has said that water belongs to the community. It stands to reason that climate belongs to the community not just of human beings, but of all living things.

The point is that private property rights have always been subject to the agreement and needs of the community as a whole. There never has been and never will be a right to unfettered use of one's property inside society.

So, what is the freedom lobby really selling? Since they care little for the imperiled property rights, livelihoods, and lives of those who come after us, their agenda can properly be described as the defense of privilege. They are busy defending those who have already acquired considerable property and wealth that could be subject to restrictions or taxation designed to preserve the climate for future generations. Any diminution of those privileges is attacked as an assault on freedom.

The middle and lower classes are recruited into this attack by telling them that their energy-intensive way of life will become endangered: Large automobiles will no longer be available or will become beyond their reach; suburban commutes will become increasingly expensive; well-heated homes will become a thing of the past; hot showers will be a luxury item; air travel will become prohibitive; and above all, jobs will disappear and shift to scofflaw nations overseas who do not enact greenhouse gas restrictions. What the wealthy backers of the freedom lobby don't want the targets of their propaganda to know is that this moneyed elite won't suffer any of these things themselves. Nor do they want them to know how severe the effects of climate change could be including imperiling basic necessities such as food and water.

(Not discussed, of course, is that peak oil and natural gas production may bring an end to our energy-intensive way of life long before any restrictions on greenhouse gases do.)

The freedom lobby also likes to use other labels to brand their opponents. If you are for the regulation of greenhouse gases, you are a socialist or less often a communist, or occasionally a totalitarian. What the freedom lobby fails again to remember is that all of these 20th century systems depended heavily on burning vast quantities of fossil fuels. The problems associated with fossil fuels are not limited to one ideology. They affect all of humanity and need to be addressed under a variety of economic and social systems.

If, however, you want the freedom to be thirsty or to be hungry or to be hopelessly flooded out of your home near the ocean, you can join the freedom lobby and enjoy a few more years or perhaps even a decade or two of huffing and puffing at the imaginary enemies of freedom before the real basis of your freedom, an intact and functioning nation and community, starts to degrade inexorably. By then the wealthy backers of fossil fuel intensive industries will have decamped to their second homes in more habitable places away from the shoreline and nearer the world's remaining stores of food and drinkable water.

Let's party 'til the helium's gone

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Sun, 10 May 2009 20:42:00 +0000

Helium is fun. When you fill balloons with it, they defy gravity. If you fill your lungs with it and then talk, you'll probably sound like one of The Chipmunks, a fictional all-animal singing group whose voices were sped up to give them a high-pitched, squeaky quality. Children, of course, love to have helium-filled balloons floating around their birthday parties; and adults like them, too, for weddings, anniversary parties and even for adult birthday parties.

The fun qualities of helium, however, stand in stark contrast to its deadly serious applications which are increasingly endangered. For although helium is the second most abundant element in the universe--hydrogen is the first--it is exceedingly rare on Earth; and, our cavalier attitude toward its use threatens tasks that are critical to maintaining our complex society.

Unlike, say, rubber which a compound that can be synthesized using other substances, helium is an element. Therefore, it cannot be synthesized from other more abundant elements or molecules. A small amount of helium is produced in nuclear reactions, but the cost of extracting it is exceedingly high, and no commercialization has been attempted. Essentially, we're stuck with what we have--that is, until it runs out.

Perhaps the most important uses of helium are in its liquid form. Helium is the gold standard for low-temperature processes and research. In its liquid state it can reach temperatures as low as -459 degrees F or almost absolute zero, the temperature at which all molecular motion would cease. (No one has ever succeeded at reaching absolute zero, and theoretically, it is thought to be impossible to achieve.)

Liquid helium simply has no equal. Currently, it is critical in magnetic resonance imaging, a non-invasive diagnostic procedure that allows physicians to obtain images of many tissues and organs, notably the brain, that are superior to those provided by X-rays. This is an application for which superconductivity is critical, and very low temperatures are essential for optimum results. In addition, superconductivity is an area of intense ongoing scientific research for ways to reduce electricity losses in the electrical grid and increase the efficiency of power storage and electric motors.

Perhaps the most visible use for helium beyond filling balloons is that in filling airships or blimps. More exotic uses include rocketry where helium is used to flush out fuel tanks and then prepare liquid oxygen and hydrogen for those tanks. Helium is preferred for this work and for blimps because it is nonflammable and inert, that is, under ordinary circumstances it doesn't chemically combine with other elements.

These two properties also make it ideal as a shielding gas for certain types of critical welding. Preventing normal atmospheric gases from reaching a weld can enhance its strength and quality. The same properties make helium critical for producing silicon wafers, the basis of today's electronic world.

In addition, helium is used for heat transfer in gas-cooled nuclear reactors, and it is used to check for leaks in critical equipment because it flows more readily through such leaks. There are many more uses, both industrial and scientific, but you get the idea.

The vast majority of helium reserves and production are located in the United States. The only economical way to obtain helium is to separate it from natural gas. Helium is produced in the Earth's crust as a product of radioactive decay, primarily of uranium and thorium. In most cases the helium migrates to the surface, rises into the atmosphere and escapes into outer space. But some of the helium is trapped in natural gas reservoirs which are the richest source available. (Helium occurs in the atmosphere, but at far too low a concentration to be economically extracted.)

Unfortunately, the fate of helium supplies is inextricably linked with natural gas supplies. No one extracts natural gas for the helium content since the helium concentration is no more than 7 percent, and that's in the very richest fields. And, very few fields in the world have enough helium in them to make it worth extracting. At the rest of the world's natural gas fields helium is simply removed along with other impurities and vented into the atmosphere.

Since natural gas is a fossil fuel, its days are numbered. No one knows for certain when production will peak and then begin to decline though some estimates put it around 2030. Regional peaks may occur sooner. Helium is expensive enough to be shipped worldwide, and so its extraction may peak with that of natural gas worldwide, though the peaks of the helium-rich fields that produce it will be the crucial factor.

What should we do? One obvious strategy is to recycle helium. This is difficult and expensive to do, and so only sufficiently funded research laboratories that use a lot of helium bother to do it. Most of the world's helium once it is used is simply vented to the atmosphere where it eventually floats up into space. Certain uses such as in party balloons could be banned or heavily taxed. But as demand drops from such a restriction so would the price causing other users in all likelihood to use more.

Recycling could become mandatory. But this would rule out many current applications or make them so prohibitively expensive that the result would be the same. A very high across-the-board tax could make recycling more attractive, but would certainly bring resistance from heavy industrial users. And, such a tax would have to be applied worldwide to be effective.

Another strategy is to find substitutes. There are already substitutes for some uses such as the use of argon in welding. We could go back to using hydrogen in airships and balloons, but that could easily result in another Hindenburg. For processes that require temperatures below -429 degrees F there is simply no substitute.

The problem with helium is not an isolated one. The way we've used it and become dependent on it mirrors the way we've become dependent on other rare and finite resources. Instead of building sustainability into our systems by making sure the component processes and materials are sustainable, we seek the immediate benefits provided by finite resources without a thought about ultimate consequences. The response to this concern is almost always that we will find substitutes when it becomes necessary in the quantities we need at the prices we can afford. With 6.7 billion people on the planet and growing, and a rapidly increasing proportion of that number gaining access to the modern industrial way of life, can we be certain this is how things will turn out?

I had an exchange not too long ago with a professional in the computer industry. Disbelieving my assertion that in the next decade we could run short of indium and gallium, two key metals in electronics, he insisted that these metals simply can't be scarce because they have already been and continue to be put into billions of electronic devices. So far, the world's policymakers have adopted the same line of argument with helium, leaving all of us essentially to blow up a few more balloons and party 'til the helium's gone.

Geoengineering the climate: Bad for you and our energy future

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Mon, 04 May 2009 15:18:00 +0000

My latest column on Scitizen entitled "Geoengineering the Climate: Bad for You and Our Energy Future" has now been posted. Here is the teaser:

Proposals to reduce global warming through giant engineering projects or so-called geoengineering abound. Almost all are in the idea stage. But even if they were ready to deploy today, they would be dangerous for the planet, counterproductive for our energy future and unfair to the public.......Read more

Peak oil and mass communication

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Sun, 03 May 2009 14:50:00 +0000

In lieu of my weekly posting, I'm linking to a guest post I wrote for The Oil Drum entitled "Peak Oil and Mass Communication" which was posted today. Here is the lede:

If you remember one thing about mass communication, remember this: Effective mass communication is sloganeering. Unfortunately, this truism makes mass communication a poor fit for a complex issue such as peak oil....Read more

Does understanding complexity beget a tragic view of life?

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 13:15:00 +0000

Sheer exuberance is often enough to carry the young into the most daunting and dangerous of endeavors. But as we age, experience can make us more hesitant. Many people discover that the universe can sometimes be arbitrary, that completely unforeseen events can ruin careers and even end lives, that, in short, life is tragic.

But paradoxically the tragic view of life doesn't beget mere glumness. Instead, it teaches prudence which can be a good thing and occasionally a lifesaver. It actually inculcates a more profound appreciation of those moments of happiness and bliss, for the tragic view of life cautions us that these are not the products of will and planning, but rather mostly the result of serendipity. Those with the tragic view do not believe that everything must end in tragedy; rather, they believe that tragic endings are an ever present possibility.

As we mature we are ushered into the complexities of life. But when the willingness to accept these complexities is blunted or eliminated, maturity never arrives. Many remain in an adolescent state preferring an optimistic gloss on a simple-minded model of the world. As Thomas Homer-Dixon wrote recently:

Collectively we have been behaving like adolescents – believing we're invulnerable, living for today while ignoring tomorrow, and sneering at anything that smacks of prudence.

And, we have behaved this way when it comes to the financial legerdemain which has brought the world economy to its knees. The high priests of finance had the adolescent exuberance for trading and making money, but none of the appreciation for the hazards embedded in the complex financial instruments they were selling.

The tragic view of life teaches humility in the face of complexity. That humility is notably lacking in the world of neoclassically trained economists, the ones who run the houses of finance and public policy in nearly every Western economy. The levers and pulleys of the economy seem plainly obvious to them. And, the idea that we could fail to understand the risks we are taking with our financial system or find ourselves dangerously short of critical commodities needed to run modern society is labeled preposterous. (These economists sound a little like the adolescents Homer-Dixon describes above.)

But a deeper understanding of the complexities of a world society embedded in a vastly complex biogeochemical system called the Earth requires a more sober assessment. Homer-Dixon says in his book, "The Upside of Down," that the emphasis on efficiency over resilience in our various human systems has left us vulnerable to the multiple threats of climate change, energy depletion and biodiversity destruction.

Joseph Tainter, author of "The Collapse of Complex Societies," posits that increasing complexity in society eventually leads to diminishing and then negative returns and results in a society more vulnerable to collapse.

Jared Diamond, author of "Collapse", focuses on the environmental damage which led to the disappearance of previous societies including Greenland Norse settlements, Easter Island, the Anasazi in what is now called the American southwest, and the Mayans. Our complex relations with and dependence on the natural world give Diamond concern about the future of modern industrial civilization.

Tainter warns that previous collapses were visited on discreet societies separated by vast distances from others that continued to thrive. The next collapse, he believes, must be worldwide since we have now essentially created one planetary society tightly linked by finance, commerce, technology, and travel.

By contrast the careless optimism of the technologists and the economists is predicated on simple-minded models of society and its relationship to the natural world. We often hear the following: "We've always found substitutes for critical materials which were running out. Prices rise for the scarce commodity, and substitutes are developed and introduced." Jared Diamond would beg to differ that this is always the case. But economists' thinking doesn't include the complication of history.

And, for the technologists the focus is on the idea that the natural world can be engineered both to help it regain its equilibrium--geoengineering the climate is just one example--and to provide ever increasing resources from its lowest grade deposits--seawater is often invoked as a source for important minerals such as uranium.

The fact that there is currently no method of extracting uranium from seawater that gives us more energy than we expend doesn't phase the technologists. "We will figure it out," they say. "It is inevitable." Well, very few things are inevitable. In addition, the notion that we could make a mistake in trying to engineer something as complex and poorly understood as world climate and thereby create worse problems barely enters their heads. It is hubris borne of simplistic thinking.

It is not the role of those who adopt the tragic view of life merely to predict tragedy. Tragedies, by definition, will continue to occur no matter what we do. Instead, these prudent thinkers are busy identifying trends that could possibly be forestalled and reversed so as to prevent tragic consequences.

But it takes a tragic view of life to imagine such scenarios in the first place. The simpleminded optimists can dazzle us only so long as they are lucky and skirt tragic failures. Their triumphs--at least so far as population and economic growth are concerned--have gone on for a very long time. But the debt that is building up in the natural world in the form of resource depletion, climate change, pollution and destruction of biodiversity and also in society in the form of overoptimized systems vulnerable to breakdown, can only be appreciated by those who seek to understand complex systems. Also required is the humility to accept that we will never fully understand such systems and must therefore act with a very wide margin of safety.

There are still opportunities to prevent societal collapse, the complexity theorists believe. But without swift and thoroughgoing changes in our current practices and priorities, we may all too soon suffer the fate of many societies before us, but on a scale never before seen.

Does Rick Perry see the future?

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 15:31:00 +0000

Not long after the end of the First World War Germans, now able to cross the border with Switzerland freely, began showing up at the office of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. They described dreams that he believed foretold a great social and political upheaval in Germany. He later wrote of his frustrations whenever he related this information to others since for them there seemed to be not a cloud in the sky.

Fast forward to today. We recently heard the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, speak openly of the possibility of secession from the United States, something that might be classified as a waking dream or fantasy. History records the woeful consequences last time anyone took that idea to its logical conclusion in the United States, and so, not surprisingly, few people are taking it seriously for the moment. The immediate reason behind the mention--made while addressing a group participating in the recent April 15th tax protests--was probably that Perry faces a primary next year against fellow Republican, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison.

As it turns out, Perry may be doing more than positioning himself further to the political right in preparation for a primary battle; he may be channeling a sentiment that is more widespread than people believe. Texas has a long history of secession movements. One was active there in the early 1980s when I lived in the state. The beef then was that Texas's oil wealth was being expropriated through the windfall profits tax and sent to Washington. But the rest of the country is not immune. Wikipedia lists 17 groups working for some sort of secession across the United States.

The Rachel Maddow Show reported that besides Texas, legislators in six other states have introduced bills meant to affirm their states' "sovereignty." Oklahoma has already passed its resolution. Just in case you wondered, the other states are Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Missouri and Washington.

All of this might be regarded as so much posturing among politicians eager to draw attention to themselves--or simply tin-foil-hat thinking among members of the secessionist movements. But once you push aside the racially-tinged states' rights arguments and realize that 1) the movement has a foothold (however tenuous) beyond the South and 2) that at least one group, the Second Vermont Republic, can be considered progressive in its principles, the idea of secession yields to a more nuanced interpretation.

The social and political upheaval which the dreams of Jung's German patients presaged eventually expressed itself in the rise of the Nazi Party. Secession, however, is a more fitting kind of upheaval in the United States, a society for whom rebellion is a more dominant trait. I am reminded of a class of American college juniors and seniors to whom I showed Adolf Hitler's speech to the Nazi youth during the Nuremberg rally of 1934. Remember, I told them, this is before World War II, before the concentration camps, and before the Kristallnacht. No one knows anything about these things because they haven't yet happened. The speech did come after the Reichstag fire and the granting by the German legislature to Hitler the right to rule by decree. While controversial and outspokenly anti-Semitic, Hitler in the fall of 1934 was still widely seen as more and less just another politician who, in this case, was making just another speech to the nation's youth.

Hitler covered the usual shibboleths: be thrifty, stay physically fit, study hard, get involved in your community and work for the betterment of the nation. Nothing remarkable here. Was there anything he said, I asked the class, that any American politician wouldn't say to American youth today? A flurry of hands went up. The students said it almost in unison: "Be obedient." No American politician would invoke such a sentiment whether he believed it important or not.

Many of my acquaintances kept telling me during the Bush Administration that America was on the verge of becoming a fascist state and that (according to a few) President George W. Bush would not step down when his term ended. I, on the other hand, have long feared the anarchical tendencies in American life: the states' rights ideology, the vigilantism often seen in the pre-civil rights South, the secessionist movements and every kind of centrifugal political force pursued in the name of localism, but really a pretext for 1) undermining the rights of unionized workers, women, ethnic and racial minorities, and gays and lesbians and 2) destroying the environment in contravention of federal law.

The need for relocalization of the economy in the wake of peak oil and climate change is forcing me to re-examine my views. I am of the belief, however, that should relocalization become a widespread adaptation strategy or simply be forced upon us, the locale where one lives in the United States will become of increasing importance--not only because the availability of basic resources needed for human survival differs from place to place, but also because retrograde notions of human rights, governance and education are likely to be reinstituted (probably gradually) in some areas of the country, particularly the South and West.

It is no surprise, then, that relocalization of economic activity implies relocalization of governmental power. In fact, a kind of precursor to secession, nullification, has already appeared in the form of city councils resolving not to cooperate with federal officials in enforcing the so-called Patriot Act. It has also manifested itself in cities and states proceeding with climate change initiatives when the federal government's official policy was that climate change was not a problem. My previous piece, "The New Nullification," details several other examples.

My sense is that the United States will not undergo a sudden, sharp devolution of power to states and municipalities. In fact, for now with the money flowing freely from the federal government--borrowed and printed though it may be--states and cities are unlikely to pull away from the central government in any meaningful way. Even the Texas legislature, controlled by Gov. Rick Perry's party, the Republicans, thinks it's a bad idea to refuse federal aid and go it alone.

But as it becomes impractical or impossible to provide such massive federal aid on a continuous basis--and I believe this will prove difficult during what I expect to be a lengthy economic downturn similar to the 1930s--the necessity to find local solutions to a persistent crisis may become more acute. For this reason an ongoing economic slump may end up feeding continued calls for secession as well as create receptivity to genuinely useful relocalization efforts.

Until all the evidence is in

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 19:18:00 +0000

Nobody actually waits until all the evidence is in. The simple reason is that all the evidence will never be in. For that to occur one would have to know about everything going on in the universe right now and where those things would lead in the future. For Earth-bound residents, perhaps it would be sufficiently rigorous to know everything that is going on in the solar system and its future.

What do people mean when they say they want to wait until all the evidence is in? Most often they mean they want to wait for more information. But, sometimes they mean nothing of the sort. Sometimes they mean they want you to wait until all the evidence is in before you proceed to do something they don't like. In other words it's a stalling technique, one used quite effectively by the fossil fuel industry to prevent meaningful action to control greenhouse gasses.

The implication behind this ruse is that public policy is made based on all the evidence. But this has never been the case and never will be the case. Public policy is made based on incomplete information and perceived probabilities of gains and threats. (It's also made based on the influence of powerful interest groups; but that would require a discussion all by itself.) This is why modeling has become such an important tool for those involved in climate and energy supply research. If we had all the information, we wouldn't need models that announce possible outcomes based on incomplete information.

So, if we can't wait until all the evidence is in, what standards should we use to guide our decision-making, both in public policy and in our daily lives? I would propose two that we already use. First, unlike the standard for criminal court cases which rightly requires jurors to judge someone guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, civil cases require only a preponderance of evidence for a party to prevail. When it comes to the issue of climate change, the preponderance of evidence is clearly on the side of those advocating for a swift and dramatic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Are there bits of information which are inconclusive when it comes to the dangers of climate change? Certainly, there are. But the vast bulk of the information, the preponderance of the evidence we now have, points to huge risks ahead.

This leads me to my second principle for decision-making: the precautionary principle. The precautionary principle is actually a very conservative principle in the original meaning of the word "conservative." The main thrust of this principle is that actions which have the potential to pose severe risks or irreversible harm to society should be prohibited or seriously restricted until evidence accumulates that suggests that the risks are below a threshold acceptable to society. This is a slippery principle. But its usefulness rests on the same foundation as the first principle: an evaluation of risks and uncertainties. It is axiomatic that the more uncertainty there is associated with a given policy or course of action, the greater the risk. And, so the burden is on those proposing a policy or action to show that the risks and uncertainties are at acceptable levels.

Now you might think that the second principle contradicts the first. After all, those advocating for dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are suggesting a radical departure from current practice. But this is where the severity of the risks of two courses of action must be weighed against one another. Those advocating for severe curbs on greenhouse gasses have complex models suggesting risks to the very foundations of civilization: to food and water supplies; to public health because of the possible spread of diseases formerly restricted to the tropics and because of a significant increase in heat-related deaths; to public order as refugees flee low-lying regions inundated by rising sea levels; to peace as nations vie over increasingly scarce water and agricultural resources. The list goes on. On the other side of the argument is the threat to economic growth posed by expenditures needed to move away from fossil fuels. There is also the possibility of reduced opportunities for a better standard of living for the poor. (This argument cleverly avoids all mention of redistribution or enhanced public services as a means to assist the poor.)

The problem is that the decision to put the world on a fossil-fuel diet took place more than two centuries ago with no understanding of where it would lead. The initial levels of fossil fuel combustion might not have posed much of a threat at all for a very long time. But fossil fuel consumption and population have been moving targets (mostly up) since the dawn of the industrial revolution. And, that means our threat assessment needs to move with it. Not only is all the evidence never going to be in, but the evidence is actually changing over time as population rises, as technology and infrastructure change and expand, and as the biogeochemical processes of the Earth react to that change. Witness the increasingly rapid melting of the world's major ice sheets.

We need to recognize the phrase "until all the evidence is in" for what it really is: 1) a stalling technique, 2) a reflection of the ignorance of the speaker about the limits of our knowledge or 3) a colloquialism signaling the desire to wait for more information. Having sorted that out, we can move on to more prudent and efficacious ways of making public policy and personal decisions.

The unbearable lightness of information

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 12:27:00 +0000

This decade was the one that was supposed to usher in the era when bits and bytes would replace tons and barrels as the measure of what an economy does. The information economy would eclipse the economy of blast furnaces and railcars.

The allure of such an economy is that it was said to be less resource intense, less driven by the high-amplitude economic cycles of the industrial economy, and more driven by the need for and efficient use of information, something that is always in demand. It turned out not to be so. The tech bust of the early part of this decade highlighted the vulnerability of the so-called information economy to cyclical forces and also the reliance of that economy on the more substantial physical economy.

We mistake the lightness of electrons and the vaporous nature of the information that rides on them for the lightness of the entire economy behind them. Every person who works in the so-called information sector of the economy must be housed, clothed, schooled, provided transportation, provisioned with household goods, given opportunities for entertainment and recreation, supplied with a wide array of public services, and...well, you get the idea. And, much of the manufacturing economy which previously provided employment in the United States and other industrialized nations has simply shifted to China and other low-cost locales. As it turns out, one of the main tasks of the information economy is to direct and manage the resulting global logistical system, a system that continues to bear down with its ever increasing weight on the landscape and the environment.

Howard Odum, the great pioneer in understanding energy flows in nature and society, understood that information, far from being a feathery presence in society, is actually its most resource- and energy-intensive output except for the natural process of species formation.

To read the chart below one must know that Odum turned all measurements into equivalent calories of solar energy which he dubbed solar emcalories. Concentration of emcalories leads to their greater and greater usefulness to human society. Diffuse sunlight on a field only warms a person for as long as the sun shines. But the energy concentrated in field crops can be stored until needed for food or fuel. Such is the role of what Odum calls transformities, that is, the transformation of previously concentrated energy into more concentrated, more energy-intense forms. Transforming fossil fuels into electricity is another example.

TYPICAL TRANSFORMITIES

Adapted from "A Prosperous Way Down" by Howard T. Odum and Elisabeth C. Odum

*Item*	*Solar Emcalories Needed Per Calorie Produced*
Sunlight energy	1
Wind energy	1,500
Organic matter, wood, soil	4,400
Potential of elevated rainwater	10,000
Chemical energy of rainwater	18,000
Mechanical energy	20,000
Large river energy	40,000
Fossil fuels	50,000
Foods	100,000
Electric power	170,000
Protein foods	1,000,000
Human services	100,000,000
Information	1 X 10¹¹
Species Formation	1 X 10¹⁵

Odum is not trying to discount the usefulness of information. In fact, energy embodied in the various products of nature and of human societies generally becomes more useful, the more concentrated it gets. Energy that is more concentrated is more easily transported and used. And, energy which becomes the above-mentioned weightless information may be the most potent of all. It was Archimedes who said, "Give me where to stand, and I will move the earth." He was, of course, talking about the power of the lever to move things. The key element, however, is a piece of information, namely, where to stand.

Far from being costless or weightless or light on resource use, information comes to us at very great expense. Today, we talk about the vast volume of information that is being produced. But is this the case? Aren't we really talking about the vast quantity of copies of information flowing through the information system? Aren't we also talking about the vast quantity of gossip that moves through that system? As anyone who sifts through the information on the Internet on a regular basis knows, a good piece of solid, actionable information is not always easy to find. In proportion to the chatter and clutter on the Internet, there simply isn't that much good information. Perhaps one reason is that genuinely useful new information is so very hard to produce.

The idea that ours is a new age when people first began to grasp the importance of information is patent nonsense. When someone tells you that we are moving into an information society, you can retort that we have always been an information society: information about how the forest works and where one might find food, about how to grow crops and which ones grow best, about how to cut and stack stone upon stone to make buildings that will last for the ages, about how to float vessels on water, about nearly everything human societies value past and present. We are now copying and disseminating what information we have on a grander scale and at a faster pace than ever before. And, we certainly have a lot of information about how to make the earth, the sky, and the sea give us whatever we want. In truth, much of the modern "information revolution" is nothing more than this.

What we are lacking is the widespread understanding of how to live within the limits prescribed by the planet. Putting to rest the idea that so-called information-based industries somehow have a negligible impact on the biosphere might be a good first step in focusing us on the kind of information that we will need to become partners with nature rather than its adversaries.

Why doomer porn is good for you

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 13:54:00 +0000

Spend an afternoon reading peak oil doomer sites on the Internet and you may alternate between the desire to reach for a kitchen knife and end it all and the inclination to dismiss the information on the sites as complete bunk. Hence the often voiced criticism of this approach to the peak oil issue: It creates a mental paralysis in some readers who conclude that nothing can be done and causes many others to reject peak oil as the invention of unbalanced survivalists living on the fringe of society.

There is certainly something to this criticism even if the caricature of the doomers is overblown. Most of the doomers I know live in city neighborhoods, hold regular jobs and involve themselves in their communities like so many of us. In this piece I'm going to take the contrarian side and suggest that so-called "doomer porn," that is, extreme Mad Max-style scenarios concerning the human destiny, serves important purposes.

If peak oil preparation is about anything, it is about scenario planning. Since no one knows the future, we can only imagine possible outcomes. Planning for a single possible outcome is not planning at all. Experience tells us that almost nothing ever goes according to plan. This is even more true when our plan is based on the trajectory of all of human civilization. So the wise course is to imagine many scenarios that seem to be within the realm of possibility and maybe a few that don't. In doing so we can evaluate the consequences of those possible outcomes and judge whether their severity warrants some preparation.

Let me explain. If I believe my actions could at worst result in a hangnail for me, I might dismiss this concern as something not worth worrying about. But if I risk losing an arm, I'm going to be far more attentive. I may decide that what I'm about to do isn't worth the risk or that I need to take special precautions if I choose to proceed.

The key element in scenario planning in my view is not the probability of a particular scenario--something which is impossible to calculate and can only be guessed at. The key element is the severity of the consequences of any one scenario. If the consequences are favorable or at least the harm is negligible, then we need to make few preparations. But if we judge that a possible scenario could result in catastrophic consequences--say, a complete loss of our livelihood or death for ourselves or our family members--and even if the probability seems small, it is well worth taking some precautions. And, in fact, most people already do take precautious for unlikely but high-impact events such as house fires. They buy fire extinguishers, plan escape routes and purchase homeowners insurance.

The next question is whether those precautions we might take to shield ourselves from extreme consequences might be useful in less extreme circumstances. Quite often this is the case. With our doomer colleagues we find that they advise such things as forming alliances with neighbors and friends; growing food, fiber and possibly fuel; learning food preservation techniques; becoming less car-dependent; and generating energy on premises with a wind generator, solar panels and possibly wood. All of these steps can be useful and even rewarding no matter what happens.

Another thing that becomes apparent as one peruses the peak oil preparation sites is that there is no clear line between a doomer and a sensible person thinking about preparations for a post-peak oil world. And there are, of course, plenty of sites about organic gardening and farming, local production of food and biofuels, solar and wind power, and myriad other sustainability related topics that make no mention of peak oil or an impending civilization-wide collapse.

What so-called doomers do is provide an imagination for the worst. If we are to consider the entire range of possible outcomes in a post-peak oil world, then we must consider the worst that could happen. That doesn't mean we need to assign a very high probability to such a scenario. But, in fact, one aspect of the most extreme peak oil scenarios is playing out right before our eyes: worldwide economic collapse. Whether one can attribute the collapse to the highest oil prices ever recorded last year or whether it is primarily a financial phenomenon, one thing that cannot be denied is that it is extremely severe. So already the doomers' vision is coming in handy though the most worrisome aspects of their various predictions--for example, a breakdown of the public health and food systems leading to plagues and widespread starvation--may be a long ways into the future or never materialize.

A friend of mine suggested to me that one simply cannot prepare for the swift and total collapse of civilization; one can only improvise in such circumstances. But it is still possible to prepare for something short of that, and in this quest the doomers remind us of just how far we might have to go to meet the challenges of a post-peak oil world.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Let the doomers have their say. They have plenty of good ideas. They think we should prepare for the worst, an attitude any boy scout would recognize. Perhaps the doomers might fare better in the eyes of the public if they also added more often that we should hope and work for the best possible outcome.

Having said all this, I recognize that those who hear the peak oil message from me for the very first time and listen to the possible implications may regard me as a doomer. And perhaps I am for I believe that the turbocharged, energy-intensive, consumer-oriented lifestyle of contemporary society is doomed. Whether we can replace it with something better and sustainable is the basis for a vigorous debate to which doomer porn has added a necessary and useful counterweight to the techno-optimism of the age.

Is thorium an energy alchemist's dream?

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:17:00 +0000

My latest column on Scitizen entitled "Is Thorium an Energy Alchemist's Dream?" has now been posted. Here is the teaser:

Advocates say that already existing thorium fuel and reactor technology could provide centuries and perhaps millennia of safe, abundant nuclear power. Are they right?......Read more

The return of the middleman

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:32:00 +0000

(Blogger failed to post this week's piece automatically in my absence. To my regular readers I apologize for the delay in posting.)

The middleman has gotten a terrible name.

Not too long ago I attended a meeting on food policy where I heard sharp comments about the negative role of middlemen. One farmer wanted a better and closer relationship with her customers and felt that the current system was working against her and against the very survivability of the small farm.

In this she is correct. The vast agribusinesses which now dominate our food economy tend to lock farmer and consumer alike into a system that forces high-cost inputs on farmers while giving them low prices for their produce and that pushes poisoned, unhealthy and overly packaged foods on the public.

But there are many different kinds of middlemen. Unfortunately, they have all been lumped together through years of advertising by companies that claim they have eliminated the middleman and so can bring you large savings. But the process by which those middlemen were eliminated and the effects of that process are rarely discussed.

Yes, it's true that costs for manufactured goods have come down greatly in the globalized economy. The giant retailers that include Wal-Mart and Costco have abetted the export of manufacturing to the Far East in a game of labor arbitrage that pits workers around the world against each other. But lower wages and lax labor rights and safety laws haven't been the only lure. Weak environmental laws have also made it cheaper to manufacture products in developing countries.

All of this is well known by those who've watch the process evolve. But perhaps less well-understood is the destruction of the dense network of "middlemen" who used to make up the bulk of the leadership in our communities. (Here I borrow generously from the thinking of James Howard Kunstler.) The man or woman who ran the local hardware store before it was obliterated by Home Depot was a "middleman." The man or woman who ran the local bookstore before it was obliterated by Barnes & Noble was a "middleman." The man or woman who ran the local grocery before it was bankrupted by Wal-Mart was a "middleman." These middlemen (and middlewomen) tended to be connected to a more regional or at least national supply network.

They were contributors to the softball league, the symphony and the school play. They sat on the city council, the school board and the county commission. They raised money for local charities and building projects.

Today, they've been replaced largely by minimum-wage clerks who know little about what they are selling and have difficulty meeting their own needs let alone making substantial contributions to the communities in which they live. It's not their fault. It's our fault for acquiescing to such a system--for being seduced by the lure of cheap prices without understanding the collateral damage we were inflicting on our communities.

But now as the globalized economy withers--never to return in its present form in my view--we are bereft of that dense network of local shopowners, brokers of all kinds of goods, hometown bankers, small equipment repairmen who can restore broken goods to useful work and so many others whom we will be needing in the future that is now unfolding.

Far from needing to eliminate the middleman, we are now going to be obliged to repopulate our communities with them for they were the glue that made our intricate regional and even national economies work. As we return to a more localized existence in the wake of a financial disaster brought on in part by energy stringency--stringency that is only temporarily in retreat--we have two related tasks ahead of us: First, to rebuild the network of middlemen that we will need for the future, and second, to rehabilitate the idea of the middlemen through both words that elevate their role and deeds that support their return to our communities.

We must make a lot of mistakes quickly

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 19:36:00 +0000

We often think of progress these days as coming from carefully planned research conducted by government- or corporate-funded laboratories with large staffs of scientists and technicians. As it turns out, many of the key innovations in history have arrived serendipitously or resulted from trial and error.

Most people know the story of Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin. He wasn't looking for antibiotics, but simply noticed that a certain area on one of his cultures was devoid of bacteria. He deduced that the mold he observed was producing a substance that inhibited bacterial growth.

As for trial and error, when we think of modern airplanes, we don't normally imagine that their current configuration is largely a product of trial and error. In fact, the Wright brothers spent much of their time testing models in wind tunnels to observe their performance. This method is still used today for modern aircraft design though computer simulations have made it possible to evaluate the most promising designs before going to the expense of building and testing actual models. Today, an occupation called test pilot still survives, proving that despite all of our vaunted technology, we must yet rely on trial and error even in the most technological of pursuits. The modern management argot for this is: "Fire, ready, aim."

It should come as no surprise then that efforts to create a sustainable society will require a lot of trial and error. This is true in part because we are still only starting to understand what practices in areas such as building, farming, transportation and energy production might be sustainable in the long run. (It is also true because people differ on what they mean by "sustainable" though that deserves a discussion all its own.)

The rather leisurely pace of early 20th century life in which the Wright brothers did their first experiments with aeronautical engineering has been replaced by the breakneck pace of modern 21st century society, a society which finds itself hurtling toward a rendezvous with limits in energy, water, soil and population. Hence, the admonition from Pat Murphy, the current executive director of what is now called the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions, that we must make a lot of mistakes quickly.

Murphy and his organization have been promoting German passive house design, a design that can reduce energy use by 80 to 90 percent. A builder by trade, he experimented with retrofitting a carriage house standing behind the offices of his organization. He said he used several types of insulation and made many mistakes. But his trial and error endeavor has advanced his thinking enormously about the problems of and solutions for passive house design in North America.

The "quickly" part of his admonition comes from his concern that world peak oil production is near or has already arrived, and that it will be followed by peak natural gas and peak coal production. That means that the trial and error process somehow needs to be speeded up in the area of sustainability.

Fortunately, many people around the globe are busy with wide-ranging experiments in building design, intentional communities, local food production, alternative energy, new forms of transportation, traditional neighborhood design, energy efficiency and the whole host of issues that fall under the rubric of sustainability for a lower-energy world.

It is important to keep in mind then that sustainability efforts are not likely to move from success to success, but as with every other endeavor will be marked by many useful failures and partial successes. That is why it is imperative that we "make a lot of mistakes quickly" so that successful formulas can be found soon in order to help others to avoid elementary mistakes that will slow our evermore urgent movement toward a sustainable society.

Complications

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 18:40:00 +0000

Some advocates for a sustainable future claim that the fulfillment of their vision will result in a simpler, healthier, happier existence when compared to our current consumption- and status-oriented unsustainable present. They may very well be right about healthier and happier. But will that sustainable future seem simpler to the individual?

The bright green high-tech globalized future imagined by some may result in lives that will seem no simpler than what we currently experience (that is, assuming we could achieve such as future). But a future characterized by a reversal of globalization and a return to more regional and local economic activity, or relocalization as it is often called, may actually make life suddenly much more complicated than we are used to. Let me explain.

Right now the relationship that most people have with their electricity and heat providers is simply a monthly bill. Their participation in the system amounts to flipping the light switch or adjusting the thermostat.

Their food is provided primarily by the chain grocery store, and their gasoline is available from ubiquitous service stations which sit on many corners of our cities and along every highway.

The software on their computers is neatly bundled to provide an all-in-one, ready-to-use solution acceptable to the vast majority of computer users.

Even the trash and recycling are hauled away on a regular schedule by a municipal or private hauler.

How might that change in a relocalized world? Currently, few people are involved very deeply in the provision of their most critical services: food, fuel, communication, waste disposal and recycling. But a relocalized world would probably mean a more complicated existence. Instead of having others simply take care of these things for us, we would have to become much more actively involved.

Take food. A relocalized food system means more food grown locally, of course. At a minimum that implies a different distribution system which would likely involve building a relationship with one or more local growers or at least the owners of the farmstands that service them. It might also mean growing food in one's own yard, a vastly complicated task for the uninitiated.

How about fuel? If your community installs its own wind or solar power, you may at the very least have to contribute funds in advance of actual power production. But you might also install solar panels on your house or in your yard. You might even be involved in installing a wind generator in your neighborhood or your subdivision. And, these sources of power require maintenance, of course. For example, the solar cells on your roof or mounted on your lawn would need periodic looking after as would batteries used to store that energy for later use.

What about communications? As the computer and the Internet become the avenues of most communication, how could mere mortals be called upon to maintain the infrastructure and programs that make them possible? This is actually already happening in a small way. Growing up alongside the multinational software behemoths are the "open source" and "free software" movements. The software produced by these related movements require the active collaboration of their users who do everything from suggest improvements and new features to actually writing the code for such improvements and features. It's a layer of complication that most computers users do not experience today.

As for trash and recycling, it is certainly conceivable that in the not-to-distant future composting could become obligatory in some communities. I can attest that it is not as simple as throwing garbage into a box. To successfully compost one has to understand how to achieve the proper carbon-nitrogen balance among others things. More complications!

What these complications really mean is that each person is taking on more responsibility for his or her own critical needs and the critical needs of the immediate community. That can have many positive effects as people in communities get to know and trust one another in a way not currently necessary or encouraged. It can also mean more resilience for every community as the production of the necessities of life become more decentralized and thus less vulnerable to disruption by, say, a crop failure in some distant place.

Implied in this decentralization is a rebuilding what James Howard Kunstler calls the local networks of retail and wholesale trade which existed before the devastation wrought on them by the national, big-box retailers. This is yet another complication that will require the active involvement of individuals in each community--not only those who seek to establish businesses based on slowly reviving local networks, but also from others who must make a conscious effort to patronize these establishments to help them succeed.

All of these things mean more, not less thinking. They are in some ways vastly more complicated than what most of us are used to. Up until now we have been largely content to let governments and large corporations fashion solutions for our basic needs, often without much input from us. This has led to a hugely complicated globalized system, but one which we rarely experience as such.

We have been sold the idea that a life filled with "low-maintenance" objects and processes is better than one filled with objects and processes that require our frequent attention. But as psychologist James Hillman has said, this is really an escape from care of the objects and processes most important to our existence. For it is in caring for things both animate and inanimate--the soil, the solar panel, the house we live in, the neighbor we live next to--that we come to love and understand their nature and experience them more fully. We also become connected to their pain or at least the pain we feel when even inanimate objects in our lives are in disarray.

In this way the complications which are about to enter our lives as the fossil fuel age winds down will move us away from the one-dimensional, disconnected, simplified life we now lead, and toward a richer life in which objects and people call upon us to care for them much more deeply than we have in the past.

Jeffrey Brown and the net oil exports crisis

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 15:20:00 +0000

My latest column on Scitizen entitled "Jeffrey Brown and the Net Oil Exports Crisis" has now been posted. Here is the teaser:

With peak oil comes peak oil exports. Why Texas oilman Jeffrey Brown thinks the world is headed for a drastic energy downsizing and soon.......Read more

Apollo 13: A Guilty Pleasure in the Age of Scarcity

noreply@blogger.com (Kurt Cobb) — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 16:03:00 +0000

I was watching the movie Apollo 13 recently for what was probably the fifth time, consuming it in the manner of a guilty pleasure. I say guilty pleasure because this movie is the paradigmatic technofix movie. And, I have little faith that the mounting challenges of resource depletion and climate change can be addressed by technology alone.

But still I revel in the technical mastery and the astonishing ingenuity of the NASA scientists portrayed in the film who saved a crippled spacecraft and brought its crew safely home. Perhaps, I think to myself, just maybe perhaps, these technofix advocates have a point. Maybe when circumstances get really, really desperate, we will somehow pull off an energy transition while at the same time addressing climate change and a host of other issues in one transformative ingenuity-filled marathon. They did it in Apollo 13, didn't they?

Unfortunately, that is precisely what many people believe. I've been having an exchange with someone who works in the computer industry about the potential supply problems for two key but rare metals used widely in electronics: gallium and indium. He rightly points out that the information we have about the reserves of both are sketchy and that the decline in the production of gallium in the last few years could be due to decreasing demand. It could also be the case, he says, that new technology will make gallium easier to get in the future and the decline will be reversed. (He makes the same argument for oil.)

He insists that indium simply can't be that scarce because--get this--there is indium in billions of electronic devices including cellphones and computer screens, in fact, in nearly everything that has a flat-screen display associated with it.

This is curious logic. It says that because we are using a resource ubiquitously and at an exponentially increasing rate, it must be plentiful. Now, I would conclude that such a situation would, in fact, be likely to result in the very scarcity I fear. Of course, it is always possible that everything will turn out all right with regard to the supply of critical metals and energy. But given the risks and uncertainty, is it wise to bet the future of civilization on the most optimistic assumptions?

I realized later that what this computer professional actually meant was that the corporate and government planners charged with thinking about resource supply issues couldn't possibly have made a colossal blunder which would lead to a catastrophic shortage of key metals in the electronics industry. He presumed, I think, that such an outcome was simply out of the question given the competence and intelligence of the people in his industry.

I think this is really the hardest kind of denial to cut through. If one admits this kind of incompetence is possible, then it implies that we could be hitting limits all over the place which have not been foreseen by corporate and government planners. That would mean a complete readjustment of one's world view and a concentrated dose of fear and uncertainty to boot.

Now, I feel that fear and uncertainty on a regular basis. And, I think that's why I occasionally take refuge in the technofix triumphalism found in such movies as Apollo 13 and in quite a few science fiction ones as well. Wouldn't it be nice to be cruising the galaxy with everything one needs at the touch of a button, or better yet, via voice command? Wouldn't it be nice never to have to even think about how much energy one uses?

Yes, it would be nice...and it is nice for a couple of hours to imagine such a life. But then, that's why such interludes are really a guilty pleasure. None of us who understand the real risks we face can afford more time than that lost in a fantasy that has so thoroughly crippled the thinking of even very intelligent people on the planet and which threatens to condemn us all to an unpleasant future.