The future is Green

Egypt: A Foreshadowing of Things to Come.

2013-07-07T13:23:00.000-04:00

The math for Egypt is unrelenting. Along with other countries in the Middle East, Egypt is among the last to bring it's birthrate down close to replacement rates. With the ascendancy of a fundamentalist government, population planning programs have gotten lost in the shuffle. As a result, birth rates have soared, surpassing 32 for every 1,000 people, — a level last seen in 1991.

Egypt's population has risen from 28 million in 1960 to 84 million in 2012. With little fertile land, Egypt must import forty percent of its food and sixty percent of it's grain. For a while, Egypt was a modest oil exporter which helped raise money needed for these imports. But production peaked in 1996 and the country became a net importer by 2007.

With food and fuel increasingly difficult to import and prices relentlessly rising, it doesn't matter who rules the country--the unrest is likely to continue. Barring any international intervention to help right the country, the situation will continue to slide downhill.

Economics as if Survival Mattered

2011-06-28T15:44:00.002-04:00

John Michael Greer’s new book, “The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered” is an excellent look at a future of declining fossil fuels and the implications for our economic system. Greer draws heavily on E.F. Schumacher’s work, particularly “Small is Beautiful” which lays out the concept of “appropriate technology” as a way of planning for a future with less energy and different types of energy.

Greer sets up a three part framework for thinking about the economy. The primary economy includes all of the biological, hydrological, tectonic, and other processes of nature that create the natural recourses that the human economy uses. Without nature no human economy would exist. This much seems obvious, but no classical economist—from conservative to Marxist—assigns any real value to nature. All assume that nature is an inexhaustible resource for the human economy.

The secondary economy, according to Greer, consists of the human activities such as farming, mining, and manufacture that create physical goods from natural resources, “the conjunction of human labor and natural goods that produces the goods and services that Nature itself doesn’t provide.” The tertiary economy consists of monetary goods and financial services. These are goods that are produced neither by Nature nor by labor.

The tertiary economy, being removed from physical goods, can grow without limits since governments and banks have the ability to create money out of thin air. However, this ability for unlimited expansion by the tertiary economy can hide the limits of the primary and secondary economies. “Trillions of dollars in credit swaps and derivatives will not keep people from starving in the streets if there’s no food being grown and no housing being built.” A sign that our economy is reaching the limits of growth has been the enormous growth of the tertiary economy compared with the rest of the economy. In recent years the financial industry has accounted for as much as thirty percent of all profits in the U.S.

Of particular importance to the economy, as Greer points out, are fossil fuels which contain highly concentrated energy as a result of millions of years of heat and pressure. There is no alternative source that can deliver such concentrated energy. Renewable energy sources are much more diffuse. The thermodynamic costs of turning wind or solar energy into electricity and then turning the electricity back into a different form of energy is inherently inefficient and requires a high concentration of energy. Generating electricity from wind or solar requires a huge area and much equipment, all of which must be built and maintained using fossil fuels. A recent study even found that there’s a limit to the amount of energy that wind farms can extract from the atmosphere without changing the climate.

Technological fixes will not allow us to continue our profligate use of energy. This is where E.F. Schumacher’s work becomes important. Renewable energy has an important role to play in the future if the appropriate technology is used. Rather than a futile effort to concentrate enough solar energy to make electricity, more efficient uses such as passive solar heat or solar hot water make more sense. Rather than huge windmills requiring significant amounts of resources and energy to build and maintain, smaller windmills to provide electricity for individual homes, such as have been used in decades past, will be more sustainable, although they may require giving up a continuous supply of energy for an intermittent one. Mini-hydroelectric devices could provide power for neighborhoods with access to rivers.

Schumacher’s concept of appropriate technology has largely been ignored in the industrialized nations, but it has made gains in poorer nations that do not have the money for high tech solutions. Through organizations such the Center for Appropriate Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s D-Lab, people are working on simple technologies that can replace the tasks now performed by human labor.

Innovations such as replacing wood charcoal with charcoal made from corn cobs or sugar cane waste fibers can reduce pollution and save lives for the 800 million people who still rely on biomass for fuel. A pedal powered grain mill can replace the drudgery of the mortar and pestle. A simple plastic ring lined with ridges can shell corn kernels off the cob, a job that once took women hours.

Perhaps the irony of the appropriate technology movement is that while it provides simple technology to improve the lives of people in poor nations, it may soften the decline from peak energy in the wealthy nations and lead the way to a more sustainable economy.

Food Riots, 2011

2011-01-30T20:35:00.003-05:00

In 2008, a spike in food prices resulted in food riots around the world; the government in Haiti was toppled. Rice stocks were particularly hard hit and some exporting nations cut off their exports. The recession brought prices down while record crops allowed some stockpile rebuilding.

2010 saw a dramatic worsening of the situation. Severe droughts in China and India, Canada and Australia, record heat and fires in Russia and the Ukraine, and floods in Australia and Pakistan all cut crop outputs. Stockpiles plummeted. Russia and India reacted by banning grain exports to keep domestic prices down.

By December the global price of food hit a new record high. Corn prices climbed 94% since June, soybeans are up 51% and wheat was up 80%.

The result has been a fresh round of food riots in January. Food riots began in Algeria at the beginning of January and quickly spread to Tunisia where they became serious enough to force the president to flee the country.

Egypt has experienced the most dramatic riots, sparked by rising food prices—Egypt is the world’s largest importer of wheat--but fed by years of oppressive and corrupt rule. The riots in Egypt were followed by nationwide protests in Yemen demanding that their president step down. Other countries that have seen food riots include Morocco, Jordan, Mozambique and Chile.

The crisis may worsen through the year. Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, recently warned that rising food prices are “a threat to global growth and social stability,” and that, for the first time in living memory, the world is just “one poor harvest away from chaos.”

Even the United States faces rising prices. Dennis Conley, an agricultural economist at the University of Nebraska, claims that food reserves in the US are disturbingly low: “I haven’t seen numbers this low that I can remember in the last 20 or 30 years.”

Global Warming and climate change are likely to continue to hamper food production, meaning that the food crisis will become a chronic condition.

If there is to be an answer, it may come from a Worldwatch Institute report issued in January which argues that world hunger can only be cured by a move away from industrial farming toward local food projects. Small scale projects increase local self sufficiency and reduce food waste associated with industrial agriculture.

The report argues that the best way to ensure that everyone gets enough to eat is to change what kind of food is produced and improve its distribution: less meat production, use of more environmentally sustainable agricultural methods that do not rely on petrochemicals, and more local and regional production of food. Many of the farms and organizations highlighted in the report seemed to be having the most success reducing hunger and poverty with work that had little to do with producing more crops, and more to do with eliminating waste.

With populations continuing to grow and with industrial farming methods depleting the soil, these new innovative farming methods will be vital in the future.

Peak Fertilizer

2010-11-17T19:50:00.005-05:00

In his new book, The Coming Famine, Julian Cribb details the looming problems we face producing enough fertilizer to meet agricultural needs around the world. Increased fertilizer use was central to the “Green Revolution” of the Twentieth Century which increased food production by two and a half fold. Farmers worldwide now use seven times as much fertilizer as they did fifty years ago.

The need for fertilizer is magnified by modern farming techniques that allow nutrients to bleed from the soil at alarming rates, particularly in rice and wheat producing areas in Asia, Central and South America, and Africa. Poor use of fertilizers has lead to deficiencies of essential micro-nutrients in the soil. Lack of micro-nutrients can result in Vitamin A deficiency, iron deficiency anemia, and zinc deficiency which can result in increased probability of early death for children and women, and impaired IQ development in children. Vitamin A deficiency leads to approximately one million child deaths every year.

Ninety percent of fertilizers used today are derived from nitrogen (N), phosphorous (P), and potassium (K). More and more of these fertilizers are generated from artificial sources.

Ninety-seven percent of the world’s nitrogen fertilizer is made from synthetic ammonia produced by using hydrogen from natural gas. The International Energy Agency has predicted that global gas production will peak sometime in the decade from 2010 to 2020. As natural gas production declines, so will the industrially produced nitrogen fertilizer.

During the global food and energy price spike of 2007-8, some nitrogen fertilizer prices rose by 160 percent while phosphate prices soared 318 percent, a foretaste of things to come. Rising fertilizer prices caused farmers to cut back on their use of fertilizers which in turn led to a reduction in food output.

The world’s main food crops use an estimated 12 million tonnes of phosphorous a year while only 4 million tonnes of phosphorous are generated from natural weathering of rock or atmospheric deposition. The rest is created from phosphate mined from the ground.

Both phosphorous and potassium fertilizers are mined from rock. Although they are both in plentiful supply at the present, the supply is finite and will eventually run out. Estimates are that the world has an eighty year supply of rock phosphates at present level of use. As with all minerals, the highest quality phosphates are being mined first and as they deplete, production will drop and costs will rise.

In 2007, Canadian physicist Patrick Dery attempted to apply M. King Hubbard’s work on peak oil to rock phosphate and came to the conclusion that world production had actually peaked in 1989. Unlike gas and oil there are no readily available substitutes for rock phosphate. Without phosphorus, plants become “phosphorous limited,” constraining production no matter how many other nutrients can be supplied.

Additionally, most of the world’s phosphate production comes from China (37 percent), Morocco and the Western Sahara (32 percent), South Africa (8 percent), and the United States (7 percent). Potash is obtained by mining potassium salts primarily located in 4 countries, Canada (53 percent), Russia (22 percent), Belarus (9 percent) and Germany (9 percent). As demand outstrips supply these countries could form the fertilizer equivalent of OPEC, or even reduce their exports to save supplies for their own crops.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that the share of mineral fertilizers compared to all sources of nutrients will rise from 43% in 1960 to 84% in 2015. Farmers will be dependent on mineral fertilizers for the overwhelming source of mineral fertilizers just as those minerals reach peak production and begin to decline.

While there is presently a surplus supply of nutrients, increasing demand is outrunning the discovery of new resources, eerily similar to the history of oil discovery and production.

The world must start planning for peak fertilizers now. There is an alternative for nitrogen--fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere though the use of legume crops. Adoption of organic and permaculture farming methods would naturally recycle nutrients into the soil, as would greater use of composting and other methods of conserving and recycling nutrients. Sources of nutrients that are presently thrown away, such as urine--which is high in both N and P--could be harvested to return these nutrients to the soil.

Farmers of the future will need to adopt a very different attitude toward the conservation and recycling of the nutrients their crops require to thrive.

The Bottleneck

2010-08-11T19:27:00.000-04:00

When it comes to addressing the major sustainability issues of the day—peak oil, global warming, loss of arable land, dwindling fresh water supplies, overpopulation, there are two kinds of books: the kind that spend several hundred pages detailing the problems that face us in horrific detail, only to end with a “happy chapter” that explains how organic farming, conservation, and/or mass transit will save us; and the kind that outlines the complete collapse of human society—often in luxurious detail.

There is another model, somewhere between miraculous redemption and complete collapse; a model that I would call the bottleneck. The concept of a population bottleneck has an important place in human history. A population bottleneck is a significant reduction in the size of a population that causes the extinction of many genetic lineages within that population, thus decreasing genetic diversity. A population bottleneck in human history probably occurred around 130,000 years ago during the last interglacial period. A second bottleneck occurred around 70,000 years ago with the super-eruption of Toba, a volcano located in northern Sumatra causing an "instant ice age." Dramatic climate change undoubtedly decimated populations in most parts of Africa. Human population may have dropped as low as 5,000 females.

The concept of the bottleneck can be used in a wider context. Just as populations can lose genetic diversity, societies can lose knowledge, technology, even beliefs and ideals. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Europe’s population declined by about a quarter. The institutions of government and learning disappeared. Technological knowledge was lost. Even though Roman roads and aqueducts continued to be used, upkeep on them lapsed and they eventually fell into disrepair. The writings of the Greeks were lost to the West, although fortunately saved by the Moslem world.

Today the world is facing a population overshoot. We are using up non renewable resources, and depleting renewable resources faster than they can be replaced. Resource scarcity, most importantly peak oil, threatens major economic disruption in the short run while global warming will have a major impact in the long run.

On the other hand, humans have proven that they can live in the most extreme environments; and there will be enough resources and renewable energy to support a technologically advanced society of some size, albeit much smaller than today.

This raises the likelihood that the future will not be a complete collapse, but rather a bottleneck. The size of the bottleneck remains to be seen, as does the amount of time it will take to get to the narrowest point. It could be small enough, and quick enough that getting through will seem like a collapse or it could stretch out over time as a gradual decline. If human population returns to pre oil era levels, it would mean a loss of 80 to 90% of the present population.

It won’t happen all at once, peak oil theory envisions a slow decline over the next century. Some oil can be produced for much longer. Global warming will also unfold over many decades at the least. But the effects of both will continue inexorably.

We may be seeing the first signs of a bottleneck. $140 a barrel oil helped tip the economy into recession and the oil peak will likely prevent a normal recovery. The recovery that has happened has benefited only the most wealthy while the middle class continues to be mired in recession, defaults on home mortgages continue to rise, and the ranks of the poor continues to swell. We have an economic bottleneck.

Viewing the future as a bottleneck changes the questions that we should be asking. Much of the green movement is seeking ways to create a sustainable society, when such a thing is not be possible at present levels of population and consumption. Instead, we should be thinking about what we want to get through the bottleneck. Like the medieval monasteries that kept writing alive, we may need institutions to keep today’s knowledge, technology, and beliefs alive.

One of the most important, and perhaps one of the most fragile of those beliefs, is the innate value and sanctity of the individual—perhaps humankind’s greatest achievement. True acceptance of this belief has taken centuries of bloodshed and struggle. One only has to look back two centuries to the United States’ early years. At that time the U.S. was considered a radical experiment among Europe’s kingdoms. But even so, we considered women to be less than man’s equal and blacks and natives to be something so inferior that their rights need not be considered.

The struggle we undertook to reach today’s level of equality was long and painful. Today we take for granted that, as Martin Luther King said, the arc of history bends toward justice. Unfortunately this need not necessarily be true. In a future where only a small fraction of today’s population will survive, ideals could be the first casualty. In medieval times, people readily sacrificed their freedom for the safety that feudal hierarchies provided them. How much will we give up to achieve a similar measure of security in the future?

For those of us who revere these values, the question becomes: how do we form the monasteries of the future that will preserve that which is truly best about our great but flawed civilization?

Overpopulation, Resource Wars, Revolution and Genocide

2010-05-04T15:21:00.000-04:00

With the threat of resource scarcity looming many people are talking about the prospects for resource wars in the future. George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq raised speculation that the U.S. was seeking military domination over Middle Eastern oil. The Arab Israeli wars have often had water rights as one of their causes. The 1967 war had its roots in Lebanese efforts to divert water from a tributary of the Jordan, and the 2006 Lebanon war followed an Israeli warning that Lebanese water works on the Litani would be considered a Causa Belli.

However resource wars are not the only form of violence that face an overpopulated world that has outrun its resources. Complete social breakdown is another possibility. Jared Diamond’s book, “Collapse” presents numerous examples of cultures that overexploited their environment and faced horrendous consequences as a result. From the Easter Islanders to the Mayans, to the Anasazi Indians, ancient cultures have grown beyond the ability of their environment to support them and seen their civilizations crash as a result.

One of the most disturbing examples that Diamond uses is the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Typically portrayed as an ethnic conflict, the Rwanda killings display a good deal of evidence that population pressures were also a factor. Rwanda and Burundi were two of the most densely populated countries in Africa, and the population will heavily rural, relying on agricultural production for subsistence. The typical farm had shrunk to less than an acre per family—not enough to feed everyone, so that farmers needed to earn outside income to supplement their income. When the coffee market collapsed in the 1990s, it further aggravated economic conditions.

Although the killing began after a radical Hutu government seized control and implemented plans to kill moderate Hutus and Tutsis. The government took to the radio urging Hutus to kill all Tutsis. Estimates of the dead that resulted range as high as a million people.

Once the killing began, it expanded beyond simple ethnic killing, as in the most crowded province of Kanama where most people were impoverished, hungry and desperate. Although there was only one known Tutsi living in Kanama, an estimated five percent of the population was killed. A disproportionate number of the victims were older, larger land owners, or younger, impoverished men and children. The descent into violence provided an opportunity to settle old scores, to gain property, and to relieve the most extreme land pressures.

Rwanda is an extreme example of population pressure exploding into violence, but history records that population pressures have been a factor in many of the major revolutions and state collapses of the early modern era.

“Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World” by Jack Goldstone argues that population pressures are a major factor behind revolution and state collapses. Goldstone studies the English Revolution of 1640 and the French Revolution of 1789, as well as revolts in the Ottoman Empire and China during the same time periods.

Population increases preceded both the English Revolution of 1640 and the French Revolution of 1789. England after 1640 experienced stable or declining populations while France after 1789 much slower growth. Population in both the Ottoman Empire and China did not recover from the wars and plagues of the fourteenth century until the early sixteenth century, but in the next hundred years, population grew rapidly.

Population pressures contributed to state financial stresses brought on by a growing imbalance between revenues and the increasing obligations of a growing population. An increase in the upper classes resulted in severe divisions, including both alienation from the state and intra-elite conflicts, brought on by increasing insecurity and competition for elite positions. Among the general public, population pressures resulted in rising grievances such as high rents and food prices and low wages. At the same time population growth increased the proportion of youth who were most likely to act on revolutionary rhetoric.

The result was a wave of revolutions in the mid seventeenth century, followed by a century of relative stability, then a second wave of revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Stability returned in no small part because the coal powered industrial revolution allowed the incorporation of major new food producing regions into a world market so that a larger population could be supported. The twentieth century brought the oil economy which fueled the “green revolution” in farming and further brought the world’s markets together.

Now, however, we face a looming peak in oil production which will end the era of cheap energy and dramatically change our economy. As the world increasingly feels the pressures of resource scarcity, we face the prospect of violence on an unprecedented scale. The conditions that Goldstone outlined in the early modern era will emerge once again.

A foreshadowing of this came in 2008 when food price spikes resulted in food riots in thirty-seven countries, while hundreds of millions of people slipped into poverty. New prosperity in Asia means more competition among world elites, similar to the early modern period, while youthful populations throughout much of Asia and Africa and the growing number of failed states similarly echo past patterns.

Goldstone’s framework for understanding the waves of revolution and rebellion of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries offer an ominous warning for what we face in our own future.

Some Successful Energy Efficiency Programs

2010-03-28T17:48:00.001-04:00

The dilemma of any energy conservation programs is that increasing the efficiency of energy use generally leads to increased energy use. Jevons’ Paradox is named for William Jevons who wrote in 1865 that efficiency increases rather than decreases the amount of energy used. Homeowners with compact florescent light bulbs, efficient appliances, and well insulated homes will be tempted to use the money savings to leave the lights on longer or to turn the heat up higher in the winter. Energy conservation and efficiency programs must factor in this “rebound effect” in their long term planning.

Throughout the industrial era, economic growth has always been accompanied by increased energy use. As per capita GDP rises so does per capita energy use. So when people campaign for reductions in global warming gas emissions, critics complain that this will damage the economy, assuming that cuts in carbon based energy systems will inevitably result in economic decline. It is important that we find examples of countries that have been able to reduce energy consumption while still maintaining healthy economies.

Three countries, Japan, Denmark, and Switzerland, have implemented programs that have reduced per capita energy consumption while maintaining economic growth, breaking the traditional connection between the two.

In the 1980s, Japan’s per capita energy consumption declined as the oil crises forced them to pursue energy savings, just as in most industrial countries. In the early 90s, per capita energy consumption began to grow again along with the economy. But, since the mid 90s, Japan has broken the link between energy growth and economic growth. It has done so by implementing a set of comprehensive policies to promote energy efficiency and hard targets that must be reached.

Japan has tied responsibility for efficiency to all segments of the economy. As one example, vending machine owners typically aren’t concerned with the energy usage of their machines since the building owner pays the bills. The Japanese have mandated that the machine owner must now pay a portion of the electric bill along with the lease. As a result, efficiency of vending machines has increased by one third since the program was implemented.

The centerpiece of the Japanese program is a policy called the “Top Runner Program” which takes the most efficient make of machines as the standard for all others in the industry (including vehicles). When a new model increases efficiency, it becomes the base that all others must reach. Since the program was instituted energy efficiency improvement has been impressive, ranging from 20 percent among diesel freight vehicles to nearly 100 percent for computers.

Denmark also began an energy saving program after the 70s oil shocks, but unlike other countries that relapsed when prices dropped in the 80s, Demark persisted. Denmark has succeeded where others failed due to a combination of tough economic measures, taxes aimed at reducing energy use, and a push for creative energy savings innovations.

Danes pay the highest price for electricity of any industrialized country. As a result the average Dane uses less than half the electricity that the average American uses. Denmark also targets taxes on specific items to reduce energy use. For example, the registration fee for a new car is over 100 percent of the car’s value. In 1980 the Danish government began a policy of supporting combined heat and power, along with a strict new building code which is periodically tightened. This has led to a 20 percent reduction in the average Dane’s heating bill between 1975 and 2001.

As a result of these policies, the per capita energy use in Denmark has not increased since the 1970s while the per capita GDP has doubled.

Switzerland’s conservation program has been primarily voluntary although closely monitored. The government established a SwissEnergy Programme that aims to reduce fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions.

In the area of transportation, the SwissEnergy program consists of legally binding measures to promote efficiency, including a sliding scale of registration fees to favor fuel efficient vehicles. SwissEnergy promotes the refurbishment of buildings to meet standards that are twice as efficient as previous ones. The program is funded through carbon tax revenues. SwissEnergy has established feed-in tariffs to promote renewable energy and promotes the use of waste heat and biomass for heating in place of fossil fuels.

Switzerland had achieved the best performance over the last 20 years, showing close to a 20 percent per capita reduction of energy use while still maintaining a growing economy.

There are a variety of approached that can be used to forge a national energy efficiency policy, but it is an issue that must be addressed soon. The necessity of doing something about climate change combined with the looming peak of oil production leave us little choice other than formulating a national policy and reeling from crisis to crisis.

The Copenhagen Diagnosis

2009-12-15T19:15:00.000-05:00

The University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Center has put together a report surveying scientific papers that have been published since the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) completed its fourth Assessment Report over three years ago.

“The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Updating the World on Latest Climate Science” found that many climate indicators are worsening at a faster pace than predicted by the IPCC.

Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2008 were 40% higher than those in 1990 with a three fold acceleration over the past 18 years. This tracks near the highest scenarios considered by the IPCC. At the same time the fraction of CO2 emissions absorbed by the land and ocean appears to have decreased from 60% to 55%.

A wide variety of satellite and ice measurements show that both the Greenland and Arctic ice sheets are losing mass at an increasing rate. Glaciers in other parts of the world have been melting at an increased rate since 1990. Summer time melting of Arctic sea-ice has accelerated since 2007 far beyond any of the IPCC predictions; averaging 40% less than average IPCC predictions.

Satellite measurements of sea level rise also exceed IPCC predictions, rising 3.4 mm/yr over the past 15 years, about 80% above past IPCC predictions. At this rate, global sea level rise is likely to be twice as much as predicted by the IPCC, perhaps as much as 2 meters.

Rising temperatures are beginning to trigger positive feedback loops. It is believed that as one degree Celsius warming carries moderate risks of passing large scale tipping points and three degrees Celsius warming would bring substantial or severe risks.

The 2005 drought in Western Amazonia resulted in a massive release of carbon, and event that is expected to become more common. If a lengthening of the dry season continues and droughts increase in frequency or severity, the system could reach a tipping point resulting in a dieback of up to 80 percent of the rainforest and its replacement by a savannah.

Farther north, the southern boundary of the permafrost zone has shifted northward over North America, as well as higher on the Tibetan plateau. Similar observations in Europe have noted permafrost thawing. As the permafrost melts, organic materials decay, producing methane. This feedback has not been accounted for in any of the IPCC projections.

Some of the most concerning regions and tipping points include the Greenland ice sheet which may be nearing a tipping point where its melting is irreversible. The West Antarctic ice sheet may also be nearing a melting tipping point.

The Indian summer monsoon is probably already being disrupted. Some future projections show a doubling of drought frequency within a decade.

Global CO2 emissions will have to peak by 2020 and then decline rapidly in order to avoid catastrophic climate change. The fact that they have been accelerating in recent years makes this is an even more daunting challenge.

Governments are moving at a slow pace at best on global warming. Achieving significant reductions will involve massive investment plus changes in public behavior that governments are reluctant to enforce. For those concerned about global warming, the lifeboat strategy is becoming more imperative as time goes on: developing local, self sufficient communities that can survive a low energy future, and can adapt to the changes that are coming.

Defining Sustainability

2009-10-23T10:25:00.002-04:00

A recent article in Physics World Magazine by George Crabtree titled, "The Road to Sustainability", addresses the problem of sustainable energy production and sets out three criteria for sustainability. An energy technology must last a long time, do no harm, and leave the environment unchanged. In assessing these criteria the full life cycle of the energy process needs to be considered, including construction and disposal.

This analysis is right on target, but as the author notes, the immediacy of the problems facing us means that;

we do not have the luxury of achieving full sustainability for all of our next-generation energy technologies, we can use these definitions to select our strategic sustainability targets and track our progress toward achieving them.

The article discusses the relative merits of solar, wind, nuclear, biofuels and electric cars. For each of these, Crabtree argues, true sustainability requires significant technological advances. To achieve these, he looks to nanoscience for the answers;

Nanotubes offer versatile and promising opportunities for controlling energy conversion at the nano-scale. TiO2 nanotubes like those pictured above are inexpensive, chemically inert, photostable, provide high surface-to-volume ratio and have band gaps that support sustainable energy technologies like solar water splitting, dye-sensitized solar cells and transparent conducting electrodes. They can be prepared by a variety of electrochemical processes, doped to tune their band gaps and decorated to promote surface catalytic activity.

Crabtree has taken a "technology will save us" approach that promises much even as it relies on unknown and untested technologies. Missing from the article is any discussion of conservation, downsizing or localizing where truly significant savings can be achieved using technology that already exists.

Sustainability, then also requires an acknowledgment of the limits of growth, and that we must design our energy production and usage to fit within those limits.

Resiliant Cities

2009-08-28T10:46:00.002-04:00

Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak oil and Climate Change by Peter Newman, Timothy Beatley and Heather Boyer is an important book for anyone interested in transitioning from unsustainable, car based, suburbs to a lower energy, transit based system.

The authors identify seven key elements of a resilient city.

1. Urban areas will be powered by renewable energy technologies from the region to the building level.
2. Every home, neighborhood, and business will be carbon neutral.
3. Cities will shift from large centralized power, water, and waste systems to small-scale and neighborhood-based systems.
4. The potential to harness renewable energy and provide food and fiber locally will become part of urban green infrastructure.
5. Cities and regions will move from linear to circular of closed-loop systems, where substantial amounts of their energy and material need are provided from waste streams.
6. Cities and regions understand renewable energy more generally as a way to build the local economy and nurture a unique special sense of place.
7. Cities, neighborhoods, and regions will be designed to use energy sparingly by offering walkable, transit-oriented options for all supplemented by electric vehicles.

New Urbanism

New Urbanism has become quite popular among city planners, especially in “environmentally conscious” areas such as Montgomery County. The New Urbanists have promoted high density “walkable” communities as an effort to reduce reliance on automobiles. High density neighborhoods are springing up around every metro stop, and even where there is no easily accessibly metro stop.

But Resilient Cities has a warning for the New Urbanists. A study of New Urbanist developments in Perth, Australia, demonstrated some of the weaknesses of a New Urbanist approach. The study compared eleven New Urbanist developments with forty-six conventional suburbs. The New Urbanist developments had a 9 percent switch from cars to walking for local trips, which also came with a 7 percent reduction in obesity.

However the New Urbanist developments showed no difference in total fuel usage for transportation. Fewer car trips for local travel were balanced out by greater use of cars for longer trips and reduced car occupancy.

The quality of transit available was a significant factor. A typical transit trip to work would have taken over 80 minutes compared with 30 minutes for a car trip. None of the New Urbanist suburbs produced the density and mix of uses in their centers to be self sufficient, leaving them reliant on quality transit services to make any difference.

An analysis of transport fuel use across Australian cities has shown several strong relationships between transit quality and fuel use. The closer the development to the city center, the higher the density, and the higher quality of the transit service, the lower the fuel consumption. Quality transit service was defined as whether an area had a better than 15 minute service.

Highways

All of the available data shows that building more highways creates more traffic while tearing up highways and creating pedestrian and bicycle friendly cities decreases traffic.

Surveys show that the higher the average speed on freeways, the more fuel per capita is used. Cities with higher congestion have lower fuel use while cities with the least congestion use the most fuel. Increasing road capacity will cause car use to increase to fill the newly available space. A study by the Texas transportation Institute of US cities over the past thirty years shows no difference in the levels of congestion between those cities that invested heavily in roads and those that did not.

There is a growing awareness among some traffic engineers of this problem. Andy Wiley-Schwartz, from Project for Public Spaces says, “Road engineers are realizing that they in the community development business and not just in the facilities development business.” This new viewpoint has crystallized in the “slow road movement.”

Some cities are ahead of the curve on this development. For the past thirty years, Copenhagen has removed two percent per year of its parking space from the streets and squares and created pedestrian areas. Each year car use has declined while cycling and pedestrian use has increased.

In the US, the Complete Streets movement is attempting to create a similar shift, creating new public spaces in every community. The Project for Public Spaces has also sponsored many similar projects.

Examining what shape cities take in the future is vitally important to our ability to adapt to a lower energy economy.

Water Wars in the US Southeast

2009-08-16T16:55:00.002-04:00

The semi arid US Southwest has been accustomed to bitter conflicts over water rights, but now years of drought combined with rapid growth have sparked a fight between Georgia, Alabama and Florida over the rights to the use of water from the federal reservoir at Lake Sidney Lanier.

In July, a federal judge ruled that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers erred by putting drinking water for Atlanta before Lake Lanier's mandated purposes: hydroelectric power, navigation and flood control.

The judge gave Congress until 2012 to work out a water-sharing deal among Georgia, Alabama and Florida or most of metro Atlanta will have to scale back water withdrawals to 1970s levels.

Although the severe drought conditions that plagued the Southeast in recent years have lifted, Atlanta's rapid growth continues to strain the demand for water. Atlanta grew by roughly 890,000 between 2000 to 2006, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the fastest growth of any metro area in the U.S.

Some in Atlanta believe that the court case was a result of envy of Atlanta's growth. Charles Krautler, the director of the Atlanta Regional Commission, complained that, “The only motivation is political. We don’t have as good of spin doctors as they do. It’s easy to point the finger at big bad Atlanta.”

But Alabama Governor, Bob Riley replied that, “Atlanta has based its growth on the idea that it could take whatever water it wanted, whenever it wanted it, and that the downstream states would simply have to make do with less.”

Congress must now approve Atlanta's use of the Lake Lanier water for drinking water in the next three years, which may be a difficult task given that the Florida and Alabama delegations to Congress outnumber Georgia's

Water wars may continue to spread to other parts of the country. In his 2006 book, The Great Lakes Water Wars, Peter Annin looks at the past and present conflicts over the largest collection of fresh surface water on earth which may also become a battlefield for water for parts of the country straining the limits of their local supplies.

Our aging electric grid

2009-07-22T15:31:00.001-04:00

Electric power generation is biggest source of lost energy in absolute terms. Only 31% of the energy used to generate electricity ends up as distributed energy. When line losses, transfer stations, and the inefficiencies of the appliances and factories that use electricity are added, useable energy can drop as low as 2 percent.

Electricity represents a growing portion of total energy use. It is expected that electricity will constitute 16 percent of the total energy consumption in 2009 as compared to 9 percent about 20 years ago. While transportation accounts for 20% of our total greenhouse gas emissions, the electrical system accounts for 40%. But our transmission system is badly out of date; its infrastructure will need a huge investment to meet the expected future demand. According to The Brattle Group, a $1.5 trillion investment will be required between 2010 and 2030 to pay for new infrastructure.

The Department of Energy estimates that demand for electricity has increased by around 25 percent since 1990 while construction of transmission facilities dropped 30 percent. The resulting congestion has raised line losses, which have increased from a low as 5 percent of electricity transmitted in 1970 to 9.5 percent by 2001. This represents roughly and additional 3 quadrillion Btus lost to inefficiency.

Our aging electric infrastructure is one major reason why plans for a smart grid have been getting a lot of attention as the most efficient alternative to this problem. A smart grid would require less new capacity by saving more energy.

Smart grid technologies would transform the grid from a centralized, producer controlled network to a less-centralized, more consumer interactive network. Adding digital sensors and remote controls to the transmission and distribution system would improve efficient transmission of electricity. It would be able to cope with new sources of renewable power, allow for coordinated charging of electric cars, provide information to consumers about their usage and allow utilities to monitor and control their networks more effectively.

An important part of the smart grid would be smart meters that would give consumers real time price and usage information and allow them to make better decisions about when they use appliances. Studies have found that people using smart meters reduce their usage by about 7%. With added incentives people curtail their usage during peak demand by 15% or more. Eventually smart meters could automatically start appliances when demand and price are the lowest.

The Department of Energy claims that, while some of the technologies required for a smart grid can be deployed in the near future, a true smart grid is generally considered to be a decade or more away. Still, a few areas have gone ahead with a transition to a smart grid. A DOE demonstration project on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula set up a system that responded to simple instructions set in place by consumers in their preference profiles. Energy was managed on the consumers’ behalf to save money and reduce the impact on the grid. Consumers saved around 10% on their bills while peak load was reduced by 15%.

The European Union has an even more aggressive smart grid agenda, a major component of which includes having buildings function as power plants. However the EU has an advantage that it does not have as large and antiquated a legacy system as the US and therefore upgrading the grid has been easier.

In some cases the most efficient use of energy comes from going off the grid entirely. The USA Today reported that there were around 180,000 families living off-grid, a figure that had grown at a 33% a year rate for a decade. In 2002, Woking Borough Council in England adopted a new Climate Change Strategy that involved replacing the national grid with a local one using combined heat and power, fuel cells, renewable energy, and private wire systems. By 2009, the Council had delivered over 20 different Combined Heat and Power and photovoltaic projects, and was offering the service to private citizens of the Borough. In 2006, CO2 emissions had been reduced by 81% in the Council's property, with a 21% reduction in CO2 emissions achieved Borough-wide. Electricity consumption was down nearly 50% in areas covered by the local grid.

Microgrids are a halfway measure between being total reliance on the grid, and going completely off grid. Micro-grids are self sufficient grids that remain hooked into the larger national grid. Micro-grids can be run using whatever fuels are available and dependable in a local area. If the micro-grids produce more power than they need, they could sell it to the national grid at a profit. They would also be suitable to adopt renewable energy sources because the investment and conversion time would be smaller. Micro-grid networks would be modular, so if one failed others would stay in service, reducing the chance for region-wide outages. If the regional grid failed, each micro-grid could continue to function. Micro-grids would also be well suited to the use of cogeneration systems, adding to their efficiency.

Energy Conservation

2009-06-12T16:12:00.002-04:00

Reducing our use of fossil fuels is an urgent necessity. With ever more dire predictions for global warming over the coming century, reducing our consumption of fossil fuels is a necessity for the preservation of our society. Global warming will put increasing stress on our fresh water supplies, and food production, while threatening ever more severe storms. On the supply side, oil industry experts warn us that we are at or near the peak potential for world wide oil production and are headed for a period of irreversible decline in production. Similarly, estimates of U.S. coal reserves have seen a significant downward revision in recent years, while the energy content of the coal we mine declines as high quality anthracite, bituminous, and sub-bituminous coal reserves become depleted and we become increasingly reliant on low quality lignite reserves.

These two factors highlight how unsustainable our economy has become. We face major changes in the way we produce and consume energy—that much is unavoidable. Renewable energy will be an important part of a conversion to a more sustainable economy. But, perhaps even more important will be conservation.

The Energy Information Agency provides a bi-yearly review of the amount of energy consumed in the U.S. According to the most recent report, the U.S. consumed just under 100 quadrillion Btu’s of energy in 2008. Of this, 6.8% came from renewable sources or biofuels. Nuclear power accounted for 8.2%, and fossil fuels accounted for the remaining 85%.

The EIA projects that renewable energy sources will be the fastest growing energy sector, but that it will not grow enough to replace any existing fossil fuel sources. By 2020, renewables are projected to grow from 6.84 quads to 9.26 quads, nuclear power is projected to grow from 8.21 quads to 8.99 quads, while fossil fuels are projected to grow from 84.73 quads to 87.19 quads. While renewables show the biggest percentage growth, fossil fuels are still projected to grow by a slightly larger absolute amount. Additionally, the EIA projects that CO2 emissions will grow from 5814 million metric tons in 2009 to 5985 million metric tons in 2020.

The Obama administration has called for a 17% reduction in CO2 emission by 2020—a rather modest goal—but this would mean that, rather than the 2.46 quad increase in fossil fuel energy by 2020, that we would have to reduce fossil fuel use by 14.4 quads. Even this modest target is an enormous challenge, representing a more energy production than the EIA projects for all renewables in 2020. This goal can only be reached by increasing efforts to bring renewable energy online and by simultaneously pursuing conservation at every level possible.

Pollution in a crowded, toxic world

2009-05-22T19:37:00.003-04:00

Early gains in curbing pollution made after passage of legislation such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act are being challenged by an ever expanding use of toxic chemicals in all phases of our economy. Ever growing economies, expanding populations, and the waste generated by them are posing more and more health risks.

Recently a Center for Disease Control study found perchlorate, a chemical in rocket fuel, at potentially dangerous levels in powdered infant formula. At too high a level, perchlorate can damage the thyroid and hinder brain development in infants. The problem is magnified by the existence of perchlorate in many of the water systems in the country. Although there is debate over what constitutes a dangerous level of perchlorate, the CDC study estimated that 54% of infants drinking perchlorate contaminated formula would exceed EPA limits with water containing 4 parts per million or more—a level found in at least 26 states.

Another recent study found a group of chemicals used in coatings on food wrappers in human blood. Food wrapper coatings break down inside the human body into a chemical known as C8 which is linked to a variety of adverse health effects.

Another product recently found to be dangerously polluted is drywall imported from China. Studies have found that samples of some Chinese drywall contained sulfur compounds which gave a sulfurous odor when exposed to extreme heat and moisture, creating a corrosive environment in the home. Owners complained of headaches and respiratory problems while copper wiring became corroded. Although most of the drywall went to Florida, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is investigating complaints in , Alabama, Louisiana, Washington and North Carolina as well. Class-action lawsuits are lining up against Chinese manufacturers as well as suppliers and builders.

A significant source of pollution that has gone virtually unrecognized are the 90,000 cargo ships that ship exports around the world. The biggest of these ships have engines which weigh 2,300 tons and use a low grade fuel oil that has up to 20,000 times the sulphur content of diesel fuel used in automobiles. One giant container ship can emit the same amount of cancer and asthma causing chemicals as 50 million cars. The ships account for around 4% of the greenhouse gasses emitted in the world.

The US government only recently set up a 230 mile buffer zone along the entire US coast after research showed that pollution from the cargo ships leads to 60,000 deaths a year in the US alone, driving up health care costs by some $330 billion. The buffer zone will impose air quality standards that will require cutting sulphur in fuel by 98%, partulate matter by 85% and nitrogen oxide emissions by 80%. The UN’s International Maritime Organization and the EU are under pressure to follow suit.

Even efforts to recycle waste material have resulted in toxic effects from chemicals in the waste. In recent years, treated sewage sludge has been used as fertilizer on farms. As early as 2002 studies were showing that exposure to this sludge resulted in burning eyes and lungs, skin rashes and other symptoms. This year a lawsuit in Missouri alleges that sludge from a St. Joseph tannery containing hexavalent chromium, had been used as fertilizer in four counties, causing brain tumors in at least two patients. In Canada, some communities and environmental groups are fighting Ontario’s plan to allow sewage sludge to be spread on farmers’ fields without a waste-disposal permit.

The problems of waste disposal and pollution continue to grow as the amount of waste grows. Industrial chemicals are making their way into our bodies in ever greater amounts. People are very literally choking on the waste created by human society. As the world grows ever smaller, these problems can only continue to multiply.

The Great Transition

2009-04-10T14:28:00.002-04:00

The present economic crisis is widely acknowledged to be the worst since the Great Depression. Some have taken to calling the current downturn the Great Recession. But today’s crisis has important differences, including growing resource pressures, particularly with energy sources, as well as the effects of climate changes brought on by global warming. Unlike previous recessions, this downturn will require fundamental changes—a Great Transition to a more sustainable society.

Today’s recession and the Great Depression share some characteristics: a precipitous decline in the stock market, major bank failures caused by wave of deregulation, and a deflationary market (at least in housing) that worsened the position of debtors. Although today’s crisis has not yet reached the magnitude of the 1930s, millions of people have lost their jobs, millions have fallen into poverty, tent cities have appeared, reminiscent of the Hoovervilles of the 1930s.

Economists and politicians, like generals who prepare for the last war, have been determined not to make the same mistakes that were made 8 decades ago, and are flooding the market with liquidity while spending billions to create new jobs to bolster consumer demand.

Yet there are unique problems today not present in either the Depression, or any of the recessions since. Growing resource pressure played no small part in causing the present downturn. Worldwide production of oil has been flat for four years and is expected to soon roll over into permanent decline. Economist James Hamilton examined last year’s downturn and concluded that nearly all of it could be explained by the oil price shock. The housing boom saw home buyers moving ever farther out into the suburbs to buy cheaper homes. Then high energy prices helped burst the bubble by making these long commute suburbs unaffordable.

Food stockpiles have declined over the past decade causing prices to rise. Growing demand for bio-fuels aggravated the situation by taking acreage away from food production. While rising prices in the U.S. added to recessionary pressures, third world countries faced both price spikes and shortages of food and fuel, throwing people into poverty and sparking riots.

None of these problems will be solved by the economic policies of the 1930s. Energy and food prices have fallen due to the recession, but the underlying problems have not gone away. Long term solutions will require a major move away from fossil fuels; it will be a tremendous task. Our suburban/exurban way of life, with its ever bigger houses and ever more powerful cars, is inextricably bound up with oil. Our agribusinesses rely on fossil fuels for everything from fertilizer and pesticides to gas powered tractors and irrigation pumps. The typical food item is shipped some 1,500 miles or more before it is sold.

Although it would have been better if we had faced these problems before they brought the economy down, the recession has seen hints of a transition to a lower carbon lifestyle. Oil consumption has declined for the first time since the oil shocks of the 1970s. The total number of cars registered in the US is predicted to decline in 2009, the first time since World War II. Less driving and a slower economy have resulted in the first significant reduction in the amount of greenhouse gases emitted.

Another World War II phenomenon, the victory garden, is making a comeback, a small move toward more self sufficiency as well as lower energy use. The number of backyard farmers is increasing at a double digit rate; some seed companies are having difficulty keeping up with demand. Even those icons of suburbia, the McMansion and the big box store, are getting a makeover. Abandoned big box stores are no longer automatically torn down to make way for new development, but are being transformed into charter schools, health centers, a chapel, a library, even a spam museum. At least one developer of McMansions has subdivided the homes into “quartets;” four family homes offering the affordability of a condominium along with a smaller carbon footprint.

Thus far the transition to a lower energy/lower carbon future has been haphazard, in response to higher energy prices and the economic downturn. The cost to those who have been laid off or whose savings has disappeared has been tremendous. The challenge for Greens is to make this incipient transition permanent, and to create a new green economy to replace the old. Instead of bailing out the auto industry, we must transform it for the low carbon future. Instead of saving failed banks so that they can return to business as usual, we must reorient them away from speculative derivative trading toward funding smaller scale, sustainable, local businesses. Green jobs and a zero waste economy must replace our planned

Building a Sustainable Car Culture--Perils and Pitfalls

2009-03-14T21:12:00.001-04:00

Cars and light trucks now account for about 20 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions, and more than 40 percent of US oil consumption. This level of pollution comes not only from driving them, but from their construction—including the mining and manufacture of the metals involved which create similar levels of pollution as are created during the the lifetime of their use.

Building hybrid and battery powered cars will not completely solve the problem. There are some 250,000,000 cars in the United States. Replacing even a small portion of them would do very little to reduce the CO2 emissions from the industry. Furthermore, the present generation of hybrid cars are powered by nickel metal hydride batteries. Nickel is particularly energy intensive to mine and refine, adding to the carbon footprint of the hybrid car.

Today’s car culture is inherently inefficient. As a matter of safety, a car’s wheels must hug the road; but this causes a high level of friction that the engine must overcome (this is the reason that trains are more efficient than cars and trucks.) The second problem is the weight of the car. The average car or light truck is around two tons. Even the basic Prius is 2765 pounds—a great deal of weight to carry around one or two people. Cars sold in the U.S. have been getting steadily heavier and more powerful, resulting in lower fuel efficiency. The original Honda Civics build in the 1970s got 40 mpg with a gas engine. Hybrid cars hardly get better mileage today.

Former oil industry analyst, Jan Lunberg, has concluded that we need to “get rid of car dependency.” The present economic downturn has raised questions about whether the auto industry can continue. The $13.4 billion bridge loan given by the federal government to the auto industry in December was to give the industry time to restructure, but the details of that restructuring were not known, although the Obama administration has talked about a “new, hybrid economy.”

More fundamental changes are needed if we are to meet CO2 reduction goals and to reduce our dependency on oil. We will need smaller, less powerful cars, as well as living patterns that bring us closer to work and to shopping. These goals are not receiving serious discussion yet. In all probability they will require further price increases or even shortages before they become politically viable.

Recycling Reconsidered

2009-01-31T14:16:00.002-05:00

Recycling has become a almost unchallenged virtue of the environmental movement. Millions of people sort out their paper, plastics and metals for pickup at their curbside. Countries such as Austria, the Netherlands, and Germany recycle over half of their rubbish. However, recently some reservations have been expressed whether recycling always results in a net benefit.

China is a huge part of the market recycled paper and plastics. Shipping tons of refuse thousands of miles to China to be recycled might produce more CO2 than shipping them to a landfill. The recent economic downturn has lessened China's demand for recycled materials causing some of it to pile up on the docks.

Recently, some have argued that oil based materials such as plastics are more efficiently disposed of by incineration.

Some efforts are being made to process more recycled material locally, saving money and energy. Britain is building three new plastics reprocessing plants that will be able to handle most of the 180,000 tons of recycled plastic bottles recycled each year. An anaerobic digester will soon digest 80,000 tons a year of discarded food from the supermarkets in Sainsbury, England. The process generates a mixture of carbon dioxide and methane that is burnt for heat and power. The new process will save several million pounds a year in disposal costs.

The process of recycling is somewhat more complicated than first thought. Maximizing the benefits of recycling requires planning for how the materials will be used, and ultimately even planning when products are constructed to lessen the time and energy necessary to separate materials when the product is recycled.

The New Land Rush

2009-01-04T14:36:00.004-05:00

Last year's food crisis that saw record food prices and food riots around the world has touched off a rush by wealthy but food reliant nations to purchase farming land in poorer countries in South and Central Asia, Latin America, and East Africa. Countries such as China, Japan, South Korea and India have been buying up fertile farm land in order to secure their own food supplies.

China's serious water problems and creeping deserts led it to lease lands in Laos, Kazakhstan, Tanzania and Brazil. With $1.8 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, China has had ample funds to buy up land. Similar water problems in India led it to lease land in Burma which already supplies a quarter of its lentil imports. South Korea has secured farmland in Indonesia and Madagascar. South Korea is continuing to negotiate with Madagascar for a deal which would encompass half of Madagascar's arable land. Saudi Arabia has given up its efforts to feed itself and has plans to buy 400,000 hectares of land by early 2009 in Australia, Croatia, Egypt, Eritrea, India, Morocco, Pakistan, Philippines, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Ukraine and Vietnam.

The new land rush has sparked controversy in some of the selling countries. Calling the new land deals "neo-colonialism," the UN's top food expert Jaques Diouf has remarked that "Some negotiations [between host countries and the investors] have led to unequal international relations and short-term mercantilist agriculture." In Brazil, the government has become concerned that foreign groups' ownership of land was a "threat to sovereignty."

The possibility of resource wars has concerned many people who foresee growing shortages in coming years, but this new food colonialism has shown that there may be many ways that countries scramble to compete for scarce resources.

Revisiting "The Limits of Growth"

2008-12-13T20:01:00.003-05:00

The 1972 book, The Limits to Growth, was a pioneer in the use of computer modeling to predict the future. It ran a model using population, food production, industrial production, pollution, and consumption of non-renewable natural resources in an attempt to see how they would interact under a variety of different assumptions over the subsequent hundred years. It's essential conclusion was that continued growth in the global economy would lead to planetary limits being exceeded sometime in the 21st century, most likely resulting in the collapse of population and the economic system, though this was not a foregone conclusion if there were changes in behavior, policy or technology.

The book was bombarded with negative reviews, almost all of which seriously mis-characterized the book's argument. Reviews commonly made the false claim that The Limits of Growth had predicted that natural resources would be depleted and the world system collapse by the end of the 20th Century. These criticisms ignored the fact that the book made no specific predictions; it ran its computer model under a variety of different assumptions, some of which did not result in a collapse at all. Furthermore, the three main scenerios all showed the economy continuing to grow at the beginning of the 21st century.

More recently, a growing number of authors have taken a new look at The Limits of Growth and found that it's "business as usual" model, which assumed no major changes in behavior or policy, has been in remarkable agreement with the actual course of events. In 2000, oil industry analyst, Matt Simmons, published a paper asking, "Could the Club of Rome Have Been Correct After All?" in which he stated that the most amazing thing about the book was how accurate the basic trends it outlined were 30 years later. Just recently, Graham Turner published "A Comparison of The Limits of Growth with Thirty Years of Reality," which gives a more detailed comparison of book's "business as usual" scenario and the actual economic and environmental data of the past thirty years.

Why did critics of The Limits of Growth get it so wrong? Former World Bank economist, Herman Daily, sheds light on this by describing his efforts to get the ecosystem included in a World Bank report on sustainable development.

The first draft of its 1992 World Development Report, dedicated to sustainable development, contained a diagram labelled "the relation of the economy to the environment". It showed a rectangle labelled "economy", with an arrow entering it labelled "inputs" and an arrow exiting it labelled "outputs". That was it.

It was my job, as senior economist in the bank's environment department, to review the draft and offer suggestions. I said drawing such a picture was a great idea, but it really had to include the environment. As drawn, the economy was receiving inputs from nowhere and expelling outputs back to nowhere.

I suggested we draw a big circle around the economy and label it "ecosystem". Then it would be clear that the inputs represented resources taken from the ecosystem, and the outputs represented waste returned to it as pollution. This would allow us to raise fundamental questions, such as how big the economy can get before it overwhelms the total system.

When the second draft came back, a large unlabelled rectangle had been drawn around the original figure, like a picture frame. I complained that it changed nothing. In the third draft, the diagram was gone. The idea that economic growth should be constrained by the environment was too much for the World Bank in 1992, and still is today. The bank recognised that something must be wrong with that diagram - but better to omit it than deal with the inconvenient questions it raised.

The possibility that economic growth could end was a blind spot that traditional economics couldn't deal with. Daly writes that there is evidence that the global economy is approaching the limits of what our planet can cope with, and that, "As long as our economic system is based on chasing economic growth above all else, we are heading for environmental, and economic, disaster."

New Scientist magazine devoted its October, 2008 issue to the subject, "How Our Economy is Killing the Earth," arguing that science is telling us that, if we are serious about saving the Earth, we must fundamentally reshape our economy into a steady state economy. But an economic model with no growth heresy; nothing terrifies governments as much as the lack of economic growth.

Today the twin probelms of global warming and peak oil further challenge the idea that economic growth can continue indefinitely, and perhaps only for a very limited amount of time. The result is the rather grim conclusion that, although there are measures for us to take to avoid disaster, the specter of the end of growth still causes too much in denial for us to do the things necessary to change course.

Unconventional Natural Gas Sources Bring More Environmental Problems

2008-11-15T11:05:00.001-05:00

In 2004 and 2005 U.S. natural gas production went into decline as production at new wells could not keep up with depletion at older fields. Prices spiked causing plans for new gas fired power plants to be scrapped. Many observers thought that we had reach peak gas production in the U.S.

In the years since then, production has rebounded as more unconventional sources of gas have been exploited such as coal bed methane, and shale gas. According to the Energy Information Agency, unconventional gas sources have accounted for all of this growth.

But, while these new sources have allowed the supply of natural gas to grow, they have brought new problems of pollution with them. Another potential source of natural gas, methane hydrates, promises an even larger supply--if the technology can be mastered--but brings with it even larger dangers.

Coal bed methane requires pumping water from underground to release the methane. The process results in water high in salinity and sodium that is often dumped into nearby streams, where it can damage soil, crops and wildlife. In states such as Montana, coal bed methane production has caused controversy among farmers and ranchers who have their lands damaged by this water runoff.

Shale gas operations have caused even more problems because they require a process of hydraulic fracturing where large quantities of water, sand and chemicals are injected into the shale to break the rock up and release the gas. Serious episodes of water contamination near drilling sites has been documented in Alabama, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas and Wyoming, which has resulted in a conflict between gas companies and government regulators trying to find out what chemicals are being used in the process.

Even graver risks may result from exploiting methane hydrates which are frozen water molecules that trap methane gas molecules. Enormous amounts of gas could potentially be recovered from methane hydrates trapped in reservoirs beneath the sea floor. The danger lies in the potential for the methane to be thawed and released into the atmosphere. Since methane is also a global warming gas, many times more potent than CO2, such an inadvertant release could result in disastrous climate change. One of the largest extinctions in Earth's history came some 50 million years ago when undersea landslides resulted in the release of methane gas, contributing to global warming that lasted tens of thousands of years.

All of these new sources of energy demonstrate another aspect of resource depletion; it's not only about running out of raw materials, its also about shifting to dirtier, harder to get, and more dangerous resources. With energy sources, in particular, it may seem as though we are continuing to meet demand while the hidden costs continually mount. These costs need to be addressed if we are to find a path to a more sustainable economy.

Water Problems Worsten

2008-11-07T17:33:00.001-05:00

Water shortages around the world continue to worsen, compounded by growing demand and increasing ecological damage that is lessening supply.

An estimated one billion people lack enough clean water to drink, and at least two billion lack the water to drink, clean and eat. Lack of water is a one cause of the millions of deaths each year from disease and malnutrition, chronic hunger.

So far, many countries have held the problem at bay by overusing fresh water from lakes or aquifers, and by importing virtual water in the form of food imports.

Industrialized countries are also starting to experience tight water supplies. The most dramatic example of this has been Australia where a six year drought has decimated its rice production--once a major source of supply for Asia. Drought has plagued other areas from California to Spain.

Water is becoming a critical issue for industries that once took its availability for granted. Scott Noesen, director of sustainability and business integration at Dow Chemical, claims that, "Everyone shares this water model where it's cheap, cheap, cheap—then unavailable. It's huge because we're trying to grow around the world, and where we want to grow often has issues of fresh water."

In the U.S. power generation is a major consumer of using almost as much water as agriculture which uses almost 40% of the 345 billion gallons of fresh water used per day.

In South Asia, water has become weapon that India has used against Pakistan. With as many as twelve dams either built or projected for the Chenab River, a vital lifeline for Pakistan. Pakistanis charge that India is using water as a strategic weapon against Pakistan, a country already reeling from hyper inflation, critical shortages of basic food and the ever worsening energy crisis.

Water will continue to be a serious health problem for the poor, while at the same time being a geopolitical weapon between countries, and possibly--like oil-- becoming the focal point for future wars

Urban mining

2008-08-22T16:23:00.001-04:00

A tonne of cell phones contains more gold than a tonne of ore from a typical gold mine. An average gold mine produces 5 grams of gold per tonne of rock whereas cell phones contain 150 grams or more per tonne. In addition a tonne of cell phones contains 100 kg of copper and 3 kg of silver, as well as other valuable metals—all of which have been soaring in price.

The quantity of precious metals to be found in discarded electric devices has led to a new phenomenon—urban mining—which seeks to recover these increasingly valuable resources before they are sent to a landfill. The company Eco-Systems in Japan—which has few natural resources—is trying to recover these precious metals from the tens of millions of cell phones and other electronic gadgets that are thrown away every year. Says Nozumo Yamanaka, manager of Eco-Systems, “To some it’s a mountain of garbage, but for others it’s a gold mine.”

Hazel Prichard, a geologist at the University of Cardiff, is working on ways to collect platinum—which comes off of catalytic converters in cars—from the dust that is collected by street sweepers. "I get excited every time I see a street cleaner," she says. Platinum is a vital component not only of catalytic converters but also of fuel cells - and
supplies are running out. It has been estimated that if all the 500 million vehicles in use today were re-equipped with fuel cells, all the world's sources of platinum would be exhausted within 15 years.

The same goes for many other rare metals such as indium, which is being consumed in unprecedented quantities for making LCDs for flat-screen TVs, and the tantalum needed to make compact electronic devices like cell phones.

The metal gallium, which along with indium is used to make indium gallium arsenide, is the semi-conducting material at the heart of a new generation of solar cells that promise to be up to twice as efficient as conventional designs.

That is why the efforts of people like Hazel Prichard to find ways to urban mine these precious metals is of vital importance to any technological fix for the looming problems of peak oil and global warming.

Perennial Polyculture Farming

2008-07-01T20:44:00.000-04:00

For three decades, the Land Institute has been working to create a sustainable system of agriculture that is patterned after nature itself, that is, in the words of Director Wes Jackson, “more resilient to human folly.”

In Jackson’s eyes, modern agriculture wages war on nature. Every year erosion eats away 5.5 tons of soil for every acre of farmland in the U.S. Petrochemical based fertilizers and pesticides kill the soils fertility.

The land Institute’s Kansas farm is working to reverse this damage by developing cropping systems that mimic the prairie. Rather than planting annual crops, Jackson and the Institute are developing perennial crops that need no plowing or planting. A farm that looked like the prairie would require fewer inputs by farmers, allowing them to keep more of the profit. It would feature a mixture of crops that could be harvested from the early spring to late fall; and perhaps most importantly, it would regenerate the soil into a thriving ecosystem.

The main problem farming with perennials is that they must devote more energy into building a larger root system and have less energy for growing seeds, thus have a lower food yield. Researchers at the Land Institute and several universities are searching for varieties of perennials whose yields can compete with annual crops. The Land Institute has had some success with wheat, sorghum, and sunflowers by cross breeding perennial strains with annual strains. Some lines of wheat have been developed that yield 70% of the best annual varieties.

Perennials are hardier than annuals and more resistant to weeds once they are established. In addition they contain stronger resistance to disease. A polycrop field, imitating the prairie, further increases resistance to disease since each type of plant is further separated making the spread of disease more difficult.

Designing farms in the image of nature would be a second agricultural revolution. Wes Jackson believes that the first agricultural revolution was the beginning of our estrangement from nature, and claims that, “It is fitting then that the healing of our culture begin with agriculture."

A good write up on the Land Institute can be found in Biomimicry.

Water Footprints and Virtual Water

2008-06-02T21:58:00.000-04:00

Between increasing agricultural demand and changing climate patterns, water resources are increasingly coming under stress. Countries such as India and China pump more water for agriculture than is replenished. China has effectively run out of water. The Yellow River rarely reaches to the sea anymore, while hundreds of villages have had to relocate because their water supply disappeared. Indian farmers pump 250 cubic kilometers of water a year for irrigation while only 150 cubic kilometers is replaced by rainfall. In Australia, six years of drought have eliminated most of that countries ability to export foods. In the U.S. Southwest, a rapidly growing population combined with decreasing rainfalls has created great stress over the distribution of water supplies.

In order to get a better idea of the world’s water use, the concept of the water footprint was introduced in 2002 as a way of measuring the total volume of fresh water used to produce the goods and services consumed by a nation. The water footprint includes the water content of goods imported into the country minus goods exported. Water used to produced goods for export is called virtual water. Major water exporters include The United States, Canada, Austria, Argentina, and Thailand. Major importers of virtual water include Japan, Sri Lanka, Italy, South Korea, and the Netherlands. Trade in virtual water is estimated to be around a thousand cubic kilometers a year—the equivalent of 20 river Niles. Much of this trade is going to the wealthy nations from countries that are over pumping their ground water.

India and China and the U.S. have the largest water footprints, consuming 13%, 12%, and 9% respectively of the world total. The U.S. has the largest per capita footprint, at 2480 cubic meters of water per person per year, more than three times that of India and China. A major factor contributing to the U.S.’s high per capita foot print is its high level of meat consumption. One hamburger, for example, requires 2400 liters of water to produce. A pair of leather shoes uses 8000 liters. On the other hand, a slice of bread only requires 40 liters.

Climate change and overuse of ground water are impacting the water footprints of some countries. The amount of the earth’s surface that is suffering drought has more than doubled in the past 30 years, partially the result of rising temperatures. Severe droughts have plagued both in China and Australia. Before its six year drought began, Australia was a major rice exporter. Now its rice crop has declined by 90%. India, China and Pakistan pump an estimated 400 kilometers of water a year from the ground, about twice the amount that is replenished by rainfall. Even as India depletes its aquifers, it remains a major exporter of water, through its food exports.

At the same time, fresh-water consumption worldwide has more than doubled since World War II to nearly 4,000 cubic kilometers annually and set to rise another 25 percent by 2030, says a 2007 report by the Zurich-based Sustainable Asset Management group investment firm. Up to triple that is available for human use, so there should be plenty, the report says. But waste, climate change, and pollution have left clean water supplies running short.

India, which faces some of the worst water shortages, and which is still a net exporter of virtual water, has adopted some of the most innovative ways to increase its water supply by harvesting rainwater. India’s monsoon weather results in large amounts of evaporation and runoff so India has returned to an age old practice of harvesting the rainwater. By adopting the very simple technology of harnessing rainwater, some villages have solved the perennial problem of drought.

The village of Rajsamadhiya has used rainwater harvesting to turn a near-desert landscape with empty wells into a land of trees and ponds, full wells and abundant crops. While other nearby villages rely on government water tankers to provide drinking water, Rajsamadhiya has been self sufficient for more than 10 years.

Rajsamadhiya is an example for the rest of the world which will have to face the consequences of resource exhaustion. They have found their salvation in simple, energy efficient technologies, resurrected from older times and implemented on a community level. Less and local has rewarded them with a new abundance of food and prosperity.

The Food Crisis

2008-04-18T16:59:00.005-04:00

Reports of food shortages, food riots, and dwindling stockpiles have burst into the media in recent weeks, though warnings have been around for some time that diminishing farmland, climate change, and more recently the diversion of cropland to biofuels, would inevitably collide with growing populations, growing wealth, and the growth of grain intensive meat eating.

With consumption outstripping growth for six of the past seven years, grain stockpiles have fallen to their lowest levels since world wide record keeping began in 1960. In the United States, wheat stockpiles are at 60 year lows.

Rice has been particularly hard hit. Two years of severe drought in Australia, formerly a major rice exporter, have virtually eliminated the country's rice crop, while a plant disease has cut production in Vietnam. Since rice is the major source of food for many of the world's poor, these losses have had serious consequences.

Food riots have already toppled the government of Haiti. Shortages and price increases have caused unrest in India, Egypt, Indonesia, Peru, Haiti, Pakistan, Thailand, Burkino Faso, and Mauritania. The World Bank estimates that 33 countries face possible social unrest because of increasing food and energy prices. The U.N. proclaims that we are entering a new era of hunger.

The food and energy crises are unfolding in very similar ways; prices are rising in the world's richer countries while the poorer countries are experiencing shortages. Part of the problem comes from growing control over world food production by a handful of multinational corporations which is magnifying the problems in poorer countries. These corporations have chased indigenous peoples off their lands in South America, Indonesia and parts of the Far East, using tactics that range all the way up to murder. Jungle and rain forest land has been slashed and burned to make way for new plantations.

People in richer nations spend a smaller portion of their income on food so they are not as impacted by price rises. However they will not be immune from the problem indefinitely. The U.S. food supply is vulnerable in the event of disaster. Most of the nation's grain supply is shipped around the country on only two railroads, while little is stored in the event of disaster.

In both the cases of food and energy, the country has been asleep to the serious problems that loom ahead.