The future is Green

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.

Peak Minerals

2008-03-23T19:59:00.000-04:00

Peak oil is slowly seeping into the public consciousness, although it hasn't yet gotten the recognition that global warming has. Dramatic increases in food prices have brought the issues of food scarcity and trade offs between food and biofuels to the fore. But the production capacity for other minerals has not been studied extensively.

Now an Australian study by Dr Gavin Mudd in conjunction with the Mineral Policy Institute has taken an exhaustive look at Australain mining data and given some hard statistical evidence for peak production of minerals.

The report, the first to ever compile quantitative evidence on various mining trends, shows that ore grades continue to decline, solid wastes are increasing exponentially, and economic resources for many key strategic minerals such as coal and iron ore appear to have plateaued; some minerals such as gold and copper have gradually increased over time but this is proving harder to maintain as ore grades decline and deposits move deeper.

Another study by Ugo Bardi and Marco Pagani of the University of Florence, Italy, examined the world production of 57 minerals reported in the database of the United States Geological Survey. Of these, eleven has clearly reached peak production and are now declining. Several more may be peaking or be close to peaking. Furthermore the Hubbert model for peak oil seemed to fit these other minerals as well.

U.S. imports of these minerals continue to grow. Some alternative energy technologies such as fuel cells require rare minerals. Any planning for the future that does consider resource limitations is certain to fail. Conservation and recycling of these minerals--efforts that will need to be planned in to any future use--are the only ways around an otherwise disastrous collapse.

The Limits of Biofuels

2008-02-12T20:06:00.000-05:00

The use of biofuels as an alternative to fossil fuels has exploded in the last few years, as oil production has plateaued. In the past six years the amount of land devoted to biofuels has risen from 12 million hectares to 80 million hectares.

At the same time world population continues to grow by 70 million a year while countries like India and China are increasingly switching to a higher protein, meat diet that requires more grain. The result has been soaring commodity prices, threatening more vulnerable regions of the world with the risk of food shortages.

Demand for biofuels has also resulted in charges of human rights abuses. A report by Friends of the Earth and indigenous rights groups claims that millions of hectares of Indonesian forests have been cleared to meet the growing demand for palm oil. As many as 90 million indigenous peoples who rely on the forests are losing their land to the palm oil companies. The report charges that the companies often use violent tactics to force natives off their land.

The push for biofuels began with a laudable desire to decrease use of oil and reduce carbon emissions, but the results show that present methods of producing biofuels soon run into serious human and environmental costs. This alternative to oil is already reaching its limits.

Coal Supply Squeeze

2008-01-25T13:00:00.000-05:00

Recent cold weather around the world has put a squeeze on coal supplies, sending prices upward. The rare snowfall in Baghdad reflected a bitter cold snap across much of Asia and Europe. As a result, coal stocks in China have dwindled to emergency levels, possibly a foretaste of things to come. In spite of having massive coal reserves, China became a net importer of coal in 2007. China and India are expected to need 170 million metric tonnes of imports by 2030.

Power shortages in recently shut production at coal mines in South Africa, supplier of a quarter of Europe's energy coal, while rains disrupted mining in Australia, the world's biggest coal exporter, sending prices soaring. In addition, U.S. coal shipments were cut in the beginning of January when a pier in the Port of Baltimore partially collapsed.

These developments only highlight the limits of coal supply, which until recently had been expected to last for centuries. Estimates of global coal resources have been downgraded from 10 trillion tons in 1980 to around 4.5 trillion tons in 2005. In Germany and the U.K., estimates of coal reserves have been revised downward by 90%.

A paper by the Energy Watch Group earlier this year concluded that supply data was of poor quality, pointing to the regular downgrading of reserve estimates. In the United States, declining production of the highest quality coal has meant that, in terms of energy production, U.S. coal is already in decline. Production worldwide is expected to grow for another 10 to 15 years before going into permanent decline.

Rail Revival?

2007-12-21T16:24:00.000-05:00

Railroads are posed to stage a comeback. U.S. railroad miles peaked at 380,000 in 1920s, then went into decline as the interstate highway system and the motor carrier industry provided competition. By 2006, railroads had abandoned nearly 70% of its track, with only 120,000 miles of track left.

Recently, however, rail transport has been making something of a comeback, as rising fuel prices, concern over global warming and fuel supplies, and traffic congestion, have brought energy efficiency to the fore. A 2000 study by the Oak Ridge national Laboratory found that intercity rail was the second most efficient mode of passenger traffic, surpassed only by intercity bus service.

This month, the national Surface transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission recommended a $357.2 billion investment in rail by 2050 to significantly expand intercity passenger rail service by 2050, citing safety, energy efficiency, and as an alternative to driving.

At the same time, other countries are exploring even more energy efficient forms of rail travel. Earlier this year Japan unveiled a clean energy hybrid prototype that uses a battery powered motor at low speeds. Japan has plans to run a hybrid tram in Tokyo, although they are still trying to modify and improve the hybrid train's performance.

In the U.S., a popular program in recent years has been the rails-to-trails movement that has converted abandoned railway right of ways into bicycle and hiking trails. But with the resurgence of interest in rail traffic, rails-to-trails has come into conflict with possible future rail development. In California, a long planned coastal hiking a and biking trail, envisioned as an alternative to auto traffic, has run into a roadblock as the state transportation agency--trying to balance the demands on the rail corridor--waits for rail plans that could include a high speed train system reaching from Sacramento to San Diego.

Although these developments are largely under the radar now, rail transportation is very likely to become increasingly important in the future as an efficient alternative to highway traffic.

Rainwater Management and Harvesting

2007-11-23T10:31:00.000-05:00

With the increasing frequency and severity of droughts, compounded by growing population and urbanization, the issue of water management and rainwater harvesting are receiving more attention. Projections that two thirds of the world's population will be affected by water scarcity in coming decades make the issue particularly urgent.

A paper by the Stockholm International Water Institute divides water scarcity into three categories; demand driven (use to availability), population driven (water crowding), or temporary scarcity (drought).

Demand driven scarcity can be mitigated by reducing wasteful water use—cutting leaks in supply systems, losses in irrigation, reducing excessive household use, and cleaning up pollution.

Population driven scarcity requires reallocation, raw water transfers from other basins, water desalination, the use of groundwater through pipelines, and bulk water imports.

Temporary scarcity can be mitigated by water storage, resource allocation, rainwater harvesting, and the use of terracing in irrigated agriculture.

Water shortages around the world today tend to involve a combination of these factors as population increase, industrial development and climate change combine to stress existing water systems. Paved surface areas in growing urban areas increase the amount of water that flows directing into streams, reducing the amount refreshing aquifers. Demand increases while local supplies are stressed.

The situation in the U.S. Southeast and Southwest are slightly different. The Southeast, accustomed to plentiful rainwater, now finds itself in a record drought, having to cut back on traditionally higher levels of water usage. The Southwest, with fewer water resources, began with lower water usage per capita, but population growth and a stubborn drought, also finds its water resources strained. Urbanization aggravates the problem in both areas.

Urban runoff problems can be reduced through the use of raingardens and green roofs which reduce rainwater runoff by collecting and storing stormwater so that it can infiltrate the soil. These methods also reduce the amount of pollutants that are washed into rivers and lakes.

Rainwater harvesting collects rainwater in containers of various sizes, from rain barrels attached to gutter downspouts, to much larger containers geared toward supplying landscape irrigation needs.

In the southwest, rangelands of scrub brush, grasslands, marsh areas and deserts are common environments. Here, around forty percent of all rainwater evaporates directly back into the atmosphere, while only a little over one percent recharges aquifers. Proper management of the rangelands can have a major impact on the amount of water available for human use.

Worldwide, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), best known for its programs to help cities reduce their global warming emissions, launched a water campaign in June, 2000, to work with local governments to reduce water consumption, pollution, and systems loss. The campaign has been particularly successful in Australia, in response to the record droughts of recent years. Some localities now have extensive rainwater harvesting programs, expanding the use of collected water to toilets and other uses.

More public education is needed as water stresses continue to grow in coming years.

Resource exhaustion--the human price

2007-11-04T09:59:00.000-05:00

Richard Heinberg's new book, Peak Everything, expands on the widely discussed possibility that we are reaching the world's peak potential for oil production, suggesting that other critical metals are approaching peak as well, including copper, platinum, silver, gold, and zinc. At the same time, the U.S. has become ever more dependent on mineral imports, with the value of mineral imports increasing from $4 billion in 1993 to $29 billion in 2000.

Constant exploitation has exhausted the richest ore deposits. Just as one example, U.S. copper mines in the 1920s worked with copper ores as rich as 20 to 30%. By 2000, copper ores of 0.3% to 1% were being mined.

The combination of increasing demand with declining yields has resulted in an ever growing pressure on developing countries to open up potential mining areas to access by western companies--many of which are located in indigenous or tribal areas. Anthropologist John Bodley, quoted in Resource Rebels, bluntly states that;

The disappearance of tribal cultures over much of the world in the past 150 years can be seen as the direct result of government policies designed to facilitate the exploitation of tribal resources for the health of industrial civilization.

Last week, I visited a gold mine site in Honduras that exemplifies many of the problems resulting from the pressures to produce more ore from poorer deposits. The San Martin Mine in the Siria Valley, operated by the Canadian company, Goldcorp, has been producing around one gram of gold ore per metric tonne of rock mined. Achieving this requires blasting half of a mountain into rubble, grinding the rock into finer pieces and then pouring a solution of water and cyanide over the resulting piles to leach the gold from the rock.

Cyanide leach mining has a history of disastrous accidents. A spill in Romania in 2000 resulted in dead rivers and polluted lands. In 1995, a tailings pond at the Omai mine in Guyana, gave way, spilling more than 800 million gallons of wastewater laced with cyanide and heavy metals into Guyana's biggest river, resulting in a major environmental disaster. Accidents such as these have lead the state of Montana to outlaw cyanide leach mining, with other state and national governments attempting to follow suit.

None of this has stopped mining companies from pursuing new ventures, such as the San Martin Mine mine. The mine began production in 2000. Indigenous villages in the area were moved to other land owned by the company and given fake land titles. Health problems soon appeared due to the blasting which spread dust contaminated with heavy metals into nearby villages. Over the years the mine has been in operation, nearby inhabitants have experienced a variety of skin and bronchial ailments. The incidence of miscarriage and birth defects has risen.

On top of medical problems, the mine's tremendous demand for water has dried up streams in the area, forcing the natives to rely on drilled wells, many of which have proven to be contaminated by heavy metal residues from the mine.

Honduran activists who have worked for mining reforms have had their lives threatened and their investigations blocked. In January 2005, the Honduran Office of the Special Prosecutor on the Environment called for a judicial investigation of the company for environmental crimes, forest crimes and water usurpation, but nothing has come of this.

The Honduran mine is scheduled to be closed in a few years, however Goldcorp has opened a new mine in Guatemala that is already showing some of the same problems experienced by the San Martin Mine.

I think it is important for people in developed countries to put a human face on the sacrifices made by indigenous peoples in the mad scramble to feed the ever growing appetite for raw materials. It presents yet another reason to work for a more sustainable, less wasteful economy.

Climate Change and Drought in the U.S.

2007-10-23T13:31:00.000-04:00

Over the past five years the entire southern half of the United States has had to deal with record droughts, though the circumstances have varied by region. The Southwest has experienced a nearly continuous dry spell. Texas went through one of its worst droughts on record in 2005 and 2006 only to be inundated this year; and the Southeast, which was drenched by a record hurricane season in 2005, is now experiencing an exceptional drought that has left many areas with only a few months of water supply on hand. All of these droughts are aggravated by the population growth that the sunbelt has experienced in recent decades.

Unlike the Southwest, which where a desert conditions have always required water planning, the Southeast now finds itself with dangerously low water supplies and no backup plan should the drought continue. Only Florida has passed a water plan. Atlanta's population has tripled since 1960; Georgia's water use increased by 30 percent between 1990 and 2000 alone--but its response to the worst drought on record has been surprisingly slow, typified by the plans at one outdoor theme park to build a 1.2 million gallon mountain of snow on a day when temperatures reached 81 degrees.

The American Southwest, more accustomed to dry conditions, has a better track record of water management; but this region finds changing weather patterns rendering their old assumptions obsolete.

The great dam and reservoir projects of the twentieth century gave the region a half century of surplus capacity, allowing agriculture to flourish and cities to expand. Now that surplus is gone--every drop is already allocated--and a persistent drought is threatening to deplete existing supplies. At the same time global warming is melting the mountain snow packs that provide a major source of fresh water.

Cities in the Southwest are now scrambling to find ways to conserve and reuse water supplies. The city of Aurora, Colorado has pioneered a method of installing wells downstream from their wastewater plants to retrieve the water, purify it and reuse it the first such closed loop in the U.S.

In the long run, however, there is little that can be done to support ever increasing populations in the U.S. South especially when one considers that the South lies astride the 30th parallel, where many of the Earth's deserts exist, due to air currents that rise at the equator and descend at the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Climate models project that these areas will get even dryer. What we are seeing now may be the leading edge of that trend. In any event, the rapid population growth of the sunbelt states is likely to hit a roadblock in the imminent future.

Localization: Some Success Stories

2007-10-02T09:51:00.000-04:00

There are a number of important examples of economies going local, either out of necessity or desire. Most of these are in lesser developed countries but even in the U.S., quality local foods are making headway against the long distance food chains.

Perhaps the best known of these efforts was the adoption of urban agriculture in Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union cut off most of that country's oil and food imports. As seen in the movie The Power of Community, Cuba turned to urban farming, cleaning up idle land in the cities to use as gardens. Helped by Australian permaculturists, who set up the Foundation for Nature and Humanity, urban gardening quickly spread to rooftops, patios and raised garden beds on parking lots. The loss of oil forced them to turn to bio-pesticides and bio-fertilizers. Now Havana produces half of all the vegetables it consumes within the city limits, while other towns and cities produce all that they need. This produce is sold in newly allowed private markets that provide a thriving, year round business.

India has several examples of communal businesses that have spread across the country. Vanda Shiva describes an organization of women who make the Indian snack Lijjat Papad. Growing out of a small group of women in Gurgaum looking for a source of income, the organization now has 63 branches around the country, and 3 billion rupees in yearly sales. What is most remarkable is that the organization has no hierarchy or leadership, but rather considers itself a family and even a place of worship, built around the principles of common ownership, non-discrimination, voluntarism, autonomy, and ethical business practices.

Another self-organized business, the Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association, delivers 175,000 lunch boxes each day over 28 miles of public transportation. Raghunath Maharaj, its president, claims that, "No one in the association is an employee or employer, all are partners and all are co-owners." The delivery network consists of decentralized units of 15 to 25 individuals, which rely on a coding system that tells where each tiffin box was picked up, the originating and destination stations, and the address to which it is delivered. Once a month, the association holds a meeting to resolve disputes and problems.

In the U.S. the beginnings of a relocalization can be seen in the recent growth in the number of farmers markets, consumer supported agriculture, and in campaigns such as the "100 Mile Diet." While especially strong in California--the bay area alone has some 90 farmers markets--the growth of these markets is a nationwide phenomena. Nationwide, the number of markets has tripled in the last decade to nearly 4,500 with over a billion dollars in yearly sales.

The pressure of necessity has forces dramatic moves toward local, environmentally sustainable economies in some parts of the world. Even iU.S., where necessity is still a haunting future reality, a growing awareness of our limits is bringing the beginnings of a return to local economic organization.

Grain Stockpiles Shrink to 30 Year Low

2007-09-27T15:17:00.000-04:00

For most of this decade, grain production has failed to keep up with demand. Climate change, the growing affluence of the developing world, and, more recently, the demand for biofuels have all combined to steadily shrink stockpiles.

This year wheat production has taken a blow from bad weather that has resulted in a 30 percent reduction in the expected crop in Australia, and a 6 percent drop in Canada, two of the world's major exporters. As a result, wheat prices have climbed past $9 a bushel for the first time ever.

India which was self sufficient in wheat until 2006, expects to import 5 million tons this year.

The situation is likely to get worse in coming years. According to the World Bank, 15 percent of the world's food supplies, feeding 160 million people, depend on water being drawn from rapidly depleting underground sources or overused rivers that are drying up.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that climate change could cut the output from rain dependent agriculture in half by 2020. A study by Dalhouse University projects that present fishing levels will deplete all commercial species by 2048.

All of this will be aggravated by shrinking oil production and ever increasing energy prices.

"Less and local" will likely be forced upon us as the only sustainable path we have.

Less and Local

2007-09-24T09:25:00.000-04:00

A week ago, the International Forum on Globalization put on a three day teach in entitled "Confronting the Global Triple Crisis - Climate Change, Peak Oil, Global Resource Depletion & Extinction" in Washington, D.C. The teach-in also introduced the "Manifesto on Global Economic Transitions" by the IFG and the Institute for Policy Studies.

The Manifesto's theme was "less and local," stressing the need to turn aways from the consumer society; buy fewer things and buy locally made things.

"Less and local" is a direct challenge to the globalized economic system, rooted in continual, exponential growth, combined with unrestrained exploitation of natural resources. Globalization has given us a near universal culture of consumerism while destroying traditional societies that practiced more sustainable ways of living.

The corporate response to these growing concerns has been to market "green consumerism," selling items that pedal an environmental appeal by donating money to environmental groups which will offset the greenhouse gasses created in making the product.

The problem is that this solution does nothing to slow the exploitation of natural resources with its consequent devastation of the land.

In Europe, a new production analysis is gaining hold, called "life-cycle assessment" which examines the materials and processes that go into making a product to gain a true picture of its environmental footprint, and hopefully to reinvent the production cycle as a zero waste process.

The "less and local" philosphy is an important first step toward a powered-down, zero waste economy. It is a necessary replacement to the shopping mentality that reigns today.

Competition for Increasingly Scarce Resources

2007-09-06T23:06:00.000-04:00

The global warming induced effort to increase production of biofuels is helping to push grain prices to record highs. The International Monetary Fund recorded a 23% rise in world food prices during 2006 and the first half of 2007.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations is predicting a record cereal production this year, up by 5% over last year, however the largest portion of this increase is due to increased maize production "reflecting increased plantings in response to strong demand for ethanol production."

In Nebraska alone, an extra million acres of maize have been planted this year. The state expects to produce 1 billion gallons of ethanol. Across the US, 20% of the whole maize crop went to ethanol last year, even though that contributed only 2% of the fuel for US automobile use.

This picture is mirrored around the world. Indian government expects to plant 35 million acres of biofuel crops, Brazil as much as 300 million acres. Southern Africa already has as much as 1 billion acres of land ready to be converted to crops such as Jatropha curcas (physic nut), a tough shrub that can be grown on poor land. Indonesia has said it intends to overtake Malaysia and increase its palm oil production from 16 million acres to 65 million acres by 2025.

The demand for agrofuels is hitting the poor and the environment the hardest. The UN World Food Programme, which feeds about 90m people mostly with US maize, estimates that 850 million people around the world are already undernourished, and that this will only increase with the present soaring food price. Indian food prices have risen 11% in a year, the price of the staple tortilla quadrupled in Mexico in February and crowds of 75,000 people came on to the streets in protest. South Africa has seen food-price rises of nearly 17%, and China was forced to halt all new planting of corn for ethanol after staple foods such as pork soared by 42% last year.

The world's big farmers are pulling out of producing food for people and animals, while global population continues to rise by some 80 million people a year. At the same time developing countries such as China and India are switching to meat-based diets that need more land and more grain, and climate change is starting to hit food producers hard. Deserts are advancing while food sources are being depleted.

Recent reports in the journals Science and Nature suggest that one-third of ocean fisheries are in collapse, two-thirds will be in collapse by 2025, and all major ocean fisheries may be virtually gone by 2048. "Global grain supplies will drop to their lowest levels on record this year. Outside of wartime, they have not been this low in a century, perhaps longer," according to the US Department of Agriculture.

As alway the poorest are the canaries in the coal mine-- they will feel the affects of the food shortage first; but the developed world will not be long behind them.

Small is Beautiful in Nepal

2007-08-22T15:13:00.000-04:00

Nepal is developing small scale, affordable technologies--indigenously designed and based on traditional skillls--that are bringing renewable energy to many rural areas that have never had electricity before. Greater local control over resources is improving lives in Nepal while restoring natural resources.

Nepal has one of the highest per capital hydropower potentials in the world; and that potential is now being filled by micro-hydro plants with generating capacities varying from 5 to 500 kW. It is anticipated that by 2011, 15,000 kW will have been installed.

The micro-hydro project is being managed by the Alternative Energy Promotion Centre, Nepal. Their first alternative energy project was to establish village biogas plants. Today there are over 180,000 plants creating electricity from farm waste.

A third project, promoted by The Center For Renewable Energy, has been the introduction of solar-based household lighting, using solar tukis--portable solar lamps that use white light emitting diode bulbs. The spread of solar power has allowed villagers to abandon their traditional kerosene lamps, thus eliminating a source of CO2. The solar panels used by the lamps can also be connected to an AM/FM radio.

More readily available communication has allowed for the spread of better medical knowledge which, combined with better vaccination coverage, has cut the infant mortality rate in half since 1990.

Forest regeration across the mid Himalaya has been another success story since the parliament returned control over these forests to local communities 17 years ago.

Major dam projects still being constructed of the Kosi and Karnali rivers, driven in part by the tremendous energy demand growth in India, but for rural Nepal, small, local projects are improving lives while protecting the environment.

The 100 Mile Diet

2007-08-09T18:33:00.000-04:00

A study by Chris Goodall, author of How to Live a Low Carbon Life, purports to show that walking to a store three miles away actually contributes more to global warming than driving a car would, due to the carbon intensive system of food production we have developed--especially when it comes to beef.

While I'm a bit skeptical about the findings--he counts all of the inputs that go into creating and transporting food, but doesn't seem to count the energy required to build and transport cars--Goodall does raise an important point: our agricultural system is increasingly oil and gas dependent. Food sold in the U.S. is now shipped in from an average of 1,500 miles away--a 25% increase from 1980.

That's the impetus behind the 100 mile diet. Starting in 2005, Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon, of British Columbia decided to try to live for one year buying or gathering their food and drink from within 100 miles of their apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia. Within weeks of their announcement on their blog, word had spread around the world.

This year 80 Seattle residents signed on to an experiment to eat only food grown within 100 miles of home for the month of August. In addition to the desire to reduce fossil fuel use, the participants are finding that the food is fresher and better tasting, they are getting to know local farmers and businesses, and with stories of tainted food from China, they feel safer knowing where their food is coming from.

The Seattle project comes on top of the 10,000 people who have pledged to do their own 100 mile experiment.

Should a real oil crunch come, the 100 mile diet may become a necessity. As Cuba found out after the collapse of the Soviet Union cut off their oil supplies, locally grown food can literally be a life saver.

The Happy Planet Index

2007-07-21T13:37:00.000-04:00

The New Economics Foundation, a think tank whose aim is "to improve quality of life by promoting innovative solutions that challenge mainstream thinking on economic, environment and social issues," has issued a Happy Planet Index which combines a country's environmental impact with human well being to show the relative efficiency with which nations convert the planet’s natural resources into long and happy lives for their citizens.

The worst nations on the list include the United States, Russia, and most of Africa. The United States ranked 150th out of 178 countries. Europe did not fare much better. Excluding the former Soviet countries, Austria ranked the best, coming in 61st place. Portugal was the lowest, coming in 136th place.

The Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu ranked first. Some Central and South American countries also fared well. Columbia was ranked second, Costa Rice third, Panama fifth, Cuba sixth, Honduras seventh, and Guatemala eighth. The last two suggest a weakness in the index. Although I've visited their and loved the countries, many of the indigenous and poor peoples still face enormous prejudice and harassment from their governments.

Taking this weak point into account, the Happy Planet Index is a useful measure of our environmental well being and should be given wider notice.

You can calculate your own HPI here.

Peak Oil Is Seeping In Around the Edges

2007-07-06T07:32:00.000-04:00

We are into our third year of an oil production plateau, while consumption has continued to climb. To date, this has not resulted in any major crisis, but lately there have been a growing number of stories about countries suffering energy shortages, indicating that tight oil supplies may be squeezing the edges of the world's economy--countries that can't compete with richer nations for the supplies available.

In some countries, such as Iran, the shortages are aggravated by government policies. Iran has heavily subsidized gasoline prices causing demand to soar. With Iran's refineries unable to keep up with demand, resulting in imports approaching $5 billion a year. In an attempt to dampen demand, the government imposed rationing, setting off some violent protests. Iran is also experiencing a growing natural gas shortage forcing it to look to neighboring countries to fill its needs.

Energy price controls in Argentina helped fuel an economic boom for the last five years. But now, the country faces rationing and cutbacks in electricity and gas, threatening to bring the economy to a screeching halt.

In Pakistan, population growth combined with economic expansion has pushed demand for energy up, while IMF influenced privatization of power companies has hampered energy production. Efforts to build alternate and renewable sources of energy have been bogged down in bureaucratic delay. As a result, Pakistan's power shortages are reaching critical proportions.

On the other side of the subcontinent, Kathmandu is experiencing serious gasoline shortages. As in other Asian countries, the number of cars and trucks has grown dramatically. Lately they have been unable to import enough gas from India to keep up with demand, resulting in long lines of cars at gas stations, and strains on the economy.

Uganda's ongoing electricity shortages have been worsening recently, again due in part to World Bank privatization policies combined with heavy government subsidization of electricity. The government has considered developing thermal power, but it is expensive, and the government is burdened by the cost of maintaining diesel power.

Gas shortages have even returned to the U.S. for the first time since the 1970s as North Dakota dealers have had to scramble to find supplies. Minnesota and South Dakota have also begun to feel the shortages. The shortages, blamed on refinery slowdowns, have forced the governor to wave regulations on truckers in an attempt to bring in more supplies from other states. The recent flooding of an oil refinery in Kansas will only worsen the situation. Market demand in nearby Chicago has left the smaller states to compete for dwindling supplies. "South Dakota has only 750,000 people, compared to millions in Chicago," according the Dawna Leitzke, head of South Dakota's petroleum marketing association, "They get gasoline before we do."

Straws in the wind, each with its own local conditions contributing to the problem, but all taking place in the context of an ever tighter world market for oil and gas. Poorer and badly managed states are the first to feel the squeeze, but they will be followed by others.

Word Desertification Day

2007-06-20T13:28:00.000-04:00

Every June 17 is recognized as World Day to Combat Desertification by the United Nations. This year the day's theme was the linkages between climate change and desertification.

This past April, the UN's top scientific authority on global warming warned that higher global temperatures could significantly worsen desertification by changing rainfall patterns, melting glaciers and diminishing snow melt that the world's major rivers depend upon.

China, one of the world's worst hit countries, has seen thousands of Chinese villages disappear before its expanding deserts. The problem has been made worse by the legacy of Mao's Great Leap Forward, which sought to make China a self sufficient food producer by bringing marginal lands under cultivation. However, overuse of the land and over dependence on well water for irrigation have turned the land into desert. Duststorms from the ruined land cloud skies in South Korea and Japan and have even been linked to respiratory problems in California.

To try to control the problem, the Chinese are spending billions of dollars planting trees, moving farmers off of marginal land, and enforcing logging and grazing bans.

Even regions without advancing deserts are vulnerable. About 40 percent of the world's cultivated surface is considered drylands, where low rainfall and high evaporation make the land vulnerable to climate change. Even countries not typically known for their deserts, such as Argentina, Brazil and Chile are vulnerable to degredation of their drylands due to overuse aggrevated by climate change.

The U.S. is not immune either. Much of the West has experienced nearly a decade of drought conditions, including some of the states experiencing the fastest population growth. The water system in the U.S. Southwest is "on a slippery slope toward breaking point," according to climatologist Mark Svoboda of the U.S. National Drought Mitigation Center.

Only significant changes in water use will prevent a major catastrophe. The age of extravagance is over; the era of limits is upon us.

Oil Liquid Exports Have Peaked

2007-06-13T15:40:00.000-04:00

The most recent newsletter of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil has compiled data on oil exports for all kinds of liquids for the last five years. This data includes conventional, heavy, and extra heavy oil, oil shale, oil sands, natural gas liquids, lease condensates, gas-to-liquids and biofuesl.

Exports peaked toward the end of 2005. Exports amounted to 46.3 mbd in 2004, 47.1 in 2005, and 47 mbd in 2006. Early data from 2007 also show exports running around 47 mbd.

Total production of oil liquids increased by nearly 1 mbd between 2005 and 2006, but increased demand in the exporting countries have put a cap on total exports.

Increasingly, the numbers show us at the peak. Looking ahead it is easy to see the downhill roller coaster ride approaching.

China's National Climate Change Program

2007-06-04T15:28:00.000-04:00

The Chinese government has published its first national climate change program. The Chinese claim to place great importance to the issue of climate change, but as a "developing country," they will only address climate change within the overall context of "national sustainable development strategy."

The report estimated that global warming emissions in China have doubled between 1994 and 2004 from 3 trillion to 6 trillion tons of CO2 equivalent. However, they view these emissions in per capita terms, by which measure they are very low. Their immense population provides them the cover they need to avoid any mandatory emission caps.

The Chinese plan to deal with global warming emissions includes decreasing relative reliance on coal, developing renewable energy sources, a nationwide tree planting campaign, population control, and other regulatory and public education measures.

The problem, of course, is that in absolute terms, the Chinese economy is huge. Nominally, China now has the fourth largest economy in the world, after the U.S., Japan and Germany. After adjusting for China's deliberately undervalued currency, China is the second largest economy in the world, roughly eighty percent as big as the U.S. economy.

Estimates are that China is emitting about half the amount of global warming gasses as the U.S. and with its economy growing at ten percent a year, may overtake the U.S. by the end of the decade.

In short, the world's two biggest contributors to global warming are in denial about the problem, unwilling to make serious changes out of fear of harming their economies. Until these two countries realize the seriousness of the problem, there is little hope for any progress.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions Accelerate

2007-05-26T08:53:00.000-04:00

An Australian report released this week claims that greenhouse gas emissions have been increasing at a more rapid pace since 2000 than they were during the 1990s. Australia's peak scientific body, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, pegs the growth rate at 3 percent a year since 2000 as opposed to 1 percent a year during the 1990s.

According to lead author Mike Raupach, the driving factor for this change has been the fact that "we're burning more carbon per dollar of wealth created."

The report highlights the failure of the Kyoto agreement to have any significant impact. Both Australia and the U.S. refused to sign the treated, India and China were never part of the treaty, and even some of the countries that did sign have made only limited progress. Now, a decade after the treaty, we find the the problem is worsening at an accelerating pace.

On top to increasing levels of human caused global warming emissions, more and more positive feedback loops are being discovered. A study released by Brazilian scientists earlier this month reports that large dams emit nearly 115 million tons of methane every year from the decomposing organic materials in the reservoir. This would rank dams among the top contributors of human caused global warming gasses.

Forecasts for future warming will now have to be adjusted to take into account the increasing rate of global warming gas emissions. For people trying to plan for the future, incremental changes in our present lifestyle seem increasingly unlikely to be able to make a significant difference. We need to be thinking about a Plan B not only for our own lifestyle, but for the majority of the population that won't seriously consider change until the dramatic effects of climate change are upon them.

Gaia Hypothesis Theorist Foresees Crises

2007-05-10T20:54:00.000-04:00

James Lovelock is not optimistic about the Earth's future:

We are on the edge of the greatest die-off humanity has ever seen. We will be lucky if 20% of us survive what is coming. We should be scared stiff.

Lovelock became famous for the Gaia Hypotheses which maintains that life on Earth regulates its environment, keeping it in a remarkable state of balance, not unlike the way a body regulates its own metabolism. The atmosphere is a crucial circulating system that provides the chemicals needed for life to survive. Dead planets such as Venus or Mars have atmospheres that are over 90 percent inert gasses, such as CO2. By contrast, Earth's atmosphere is primarily Nitrogen and Oxygen, critical for plant and animal life. Oxygen is a particularly reactive element that would disappear from the atmosphere without living organisms constantly restoring it.

Now, Lovelock believes, human activities have set off reactions that will knock the biosphere out of it's present balance into one with substantially higher temperatures. The melting of permafrost above the arctic circle will release huge quantities of methane and carbon dioxide, while melting ice reduces the surface albedo and causes less sunlight to be reflected back into space.

Lovelock believes that earth's history has seen transitions between two basic stable states: the “icehouse”, when ice covers both poles, and periodic ice ages extend far into lower latitudes; and the “greenhouse”, when all the ice melts. Both have already happened many times in the Earth’s history.

Human outpourings of greenhouse gases have flicked the switch that turns the world from its colder to its warm state – and it is probably too late to stop it. The warming impact of the carbon we have already released is such that the Earth has taken over and our greenhouse gas emissions are being amplified by nature itself.

Lovelock predicts that most of Earth’s equatorial lands will be arid, empty, lifeless landscape by 2050. A few decades later Spain, Italy, Australia and much of the southern United States will similarly be uninhabitable desert. Much of the oceans' life will die from increased salinity.

But Lovelock still holds out a ray of hope:

We are not merely a disease; we are, through our intelligence and communication, the nervous system of the planet. Through us, Gaia has seen herself from space, and begins to know her place in the universe.
We should be the heart and mind of the Earth, not its malady. So let us be brave and cease thinking of human needs and rights alone, and see that we have harmed the living Earth and need to make our peace with Gaia. We must do it while we are still strong enough to negotiate, and not a broken rabble led by brutal war lords. Most of all, we should remember that we are a part of it, and it is indeed our home.

Lovelock holds out a stern challange for us. Even if he is overly optimistic, his words are a clarion call to get serious about climate change.

Australia faces climate change disaster

2007-04-25T16:26:00.000-04:00

A record drought–now in its sixth year–is forcing Australia to consider drastic action to preserve its dwindling water supplies. Two rivers that feed the Murray-Darling basin in south-eastern Australia are so low that they barely have enough water for drinking supplies.

The Murray-Darlin basin supplies 40 percent of Australia’s agricultural output, including rice cotton, wine, citrus, olive and almonds, along with livestock.

Prime Minister John Howard has announced that unless there is significant rainfall in the next six to eight weeks, irrigation will be banned in the basin, creating a disaster for the farmers and devastating the harvests.

Environmentalists have blamed the drought on the increasing frequency and severity of drought-causing El Nino weather patterns, caused by global warming. The recent UN climate planel predicted that droughts would be a growing problem for Australia.

Prime Minister Howard has until recently been a skeptic about global warming, but now says that he accepts the science behind climate change.

Oil Free Towns

2007-04-24T14:04:00.000-04:00

Spurred on by the looming threat of peak oil, a growing number of towns in Britain are moving toward an oil free future by "relocalizing" food, energy, transport, and their economies. Rural towns such as Totnes, Falmouth and Stroud led the way, but have since been joined by towns such as Forest Row, Bristol, and London's Brixton district have joined.

The towns are conducting workshops with local businesses to see how they can reduce their dependence on oil. Citizens are attending workshops that teach such skills as urban gardening, bread baking and sock darning.

The towns are drawing on their experiences during World War II when Britain endured a prolonged fuel shortage forcing people to become more self sufficient. Older residents who lived through the period are being interviewed to create an oral history archive of skills necessary for self sufficiency.

The towns maintain a Transition Towns Wiki site where the towns discuss ideas and pass on tips on making the transition work.

Comunity Supported Energy

2007-03-29T22:10:00.000-04:00

The latest energy idea to make it to the U.S. from Europe is Community Supported Energy. Similar to Community Supported Agriculture, where local residents combine to buy the produce of local farms, Community Supported Energy is a cooperative or community owned energy project. CSE has primarily been used with wind projects, although it could be applied to other renewable sources as well. CSE provides a needed alternative between huge wind farms and individual wind turbines.

Local power is also more efficient than grid based power. A study by the World Alliance for Decentralized Energy recently concluded that Britain's nation-wide grid is so inefficient that two thirds of the energy used is lost through wasted heat or through the grid. Local systems offer the possibility of capturing the heat of the generators for other purposes.

Community Supported Energy projects, being cooperatively owned, can overcome the nimby objections to new projects. According to a study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory for the Government Accountability Office they retain a greater amount of income in the local area and increase the economic benefits. NREL compared the effect of large corporate wind farms owned out of area with similar projects owned locally.

The study found local income averaged $4 million more than with the central wind farms while job creation was more than twice as large in the local model.

With local economic benefits, greater energy efficiency, and lower levels of pollution, CSE is about as close to free energy as is possible, and a welcome idea that can be widely implemented without waiting for any technofix tobe perfected.

Peak Coal

2007-03-25T20:54:00.000-04:00

The Energy Watch Group in Germany is set to release a report that concludes that the world's minable coal reserves are smaller than commonly thought and that a peak in world coal production may occur within ten to fifteen years.

Report authors Werner Zittel and Jorg Schindler cite the unreliability of reserve data. Just as OPEC countries have kept their proven oil reserves artificially high, major coal producers have failed to update their data to reflect consumption. Since 1986 most nations with significant coal reserves that have made the effort to update their reserve estimates have reported significant downward revisions. Among the most extreme, Germany and Great Britain downgraded their reserves by 90%.

Further complicating the picture is the fact that high quality coal--bituminous and anthracite--have been the most heavily mined. The U.S. has the world's largest reserves and is second in production, behind China. The U.S. has already passed its peak production of high quality coal. Growing production of sub-bituminous coal has kept total production growing. However, total energy content of the coal mined in the U.S. has declined since 1998.

Since coal has been the U.S.'s most often stated energy fall back--even if environmentally undesirable--this new analysis is deeply disturbing and highlights again the need to plan for a lower energy future.

Zero Waste

2007-03-24T21:17:00.000-04:00

In nature, there is no waste; everything cycles through the biosphere, endlessly. One organism's waste becomes another organism's food. Now after three centuries of an industrial system that produces wastes in such quantities that they can't be recycled by the biosphere, people are starting to try to imitate nature.

San Francisco now recycles 68% of its garbage--best in the nation--and has a goal of achieving 100% recycling. Other cities have adopted this goal as well, including Boulder, Buenos Aires, and Canberra, and businesses such as Toyota, Nike, and Xerox. San Francisco director of the environment department--Jared Blumenfeld--calls garbage "a design flaw," saying that "from our perspective, waste doesn't need to exist."

In recent years, however, recycle rates have leveled off as the economics won't support higher levels. It's cheaper just to throw the rest out.

The economics are different in Dharavi, a massive slum in Mumbai, India. Thousands of slum residents have created an industry recycling the discarded waste from Mumbai's 19 million citizens. Hundreds of children haul bundles of plastic, cardboard, or glass to workshops where aluminum cans are smelted, waste soap retrieved, car batteries, computer parts, flourescent lights, ballpoint pens, wire hangers, and other items are sorted for recycling.

Dharvai is spawning a new middle class of trash. But it comes at a price. Hi tech items such as computers or cell phones are not designed for easy recycle, containing heavy metals such as mercury that leak into the soil causing dangerous pollution.

A truly sustainable economy will only come when the zero waste philosophy is designed into products from the very start so that 100% recycling will be economically competitive and non toxic.

Global Warming Effects Being Felt Around the World

2007-03-03T19:32:00.000-05:00

North America is already feeling the affects of warmer temperatures in a variety of ways.

In New England, maple syrup production is declining because of warmer than usual winters. Farmers who used to begin tapping their trees in the beginning of March now must begin tapping in February. Last year some began tapping in mid-February and still missed much of the sap.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that temperatures have risen by 2.8 degrees in the Northeast since 1971. Tim Perkins, director of the Proctor Maple Research Center, calls the situation "dire." His data shows that over the last 40 years the maple sugaring season has moved steadily earlier and become steadily shorter.

In Northern Canada, warming temperatures are threatening the boreal forests, the "lungs of the world." Increasing drought and insect infestation are taking their toll. As the trees dry, forest fires increase, sending more carbon into the atmosphere. The number of forest fires doubled in the 1980s and 90s from the previous decade and are expected to double again this century.

Nearly half of the carbon that exists on land is contained in the boreal forests that stretch across the northern latitudes of North America, Europe and Asia. Steven Kallick, an expert on the boreal forests comments that; "We are taking risks with a system we don't understand that is absolutely loaded with carbon. The impact could be enormous."

In the U.S. Southwest, rapidly growing population and a seven year drought is stressing water supplies. The situation is only expected to get worse as temperatures warm. One study predicted as much as a 20 percent decline in water supply, greater than water saving measures could compensate for.

The Colorado River basin has seen faster temperature growth than other parts of the U.S. and are now 1.5 degrees warmer than in the 1950s. While local officials have taken measures to develop more local sources of water, climate change will inevitably collide with population growth.

Finally, a study on children's health has shown that warmer temperatures increase the number of sick children. A two year study at a major children's hospital showed that for every five degree rise in temperature, two more children under six were admitted with fever. The study showed that children are less able to regulated their bodies against climate change than adults, increasing their risk of fever and gastric diseases.

While the more profound effects of global warming may be decades or centuries away, climate change is already making itself felt in many ways around the globe.

New Report: Renewable Energy Can Curb Global Warming

2007-02-09T22:39:00.000-05:00

The American Solar Energy Society has just released a 200 page report detailing how concentrating solar power (CSP), photovoltaics (PV), wind power, bomass, biofuels, and geothermal power, along with increased energy efficiency, can reduce carbon emissions by some 1.2 billion tons a year by 2030.

The 200 page report, entitled "Takling Climate Change in the U.S." claims that renewable energy has the potential to provide 40% of the U.S. electric need projected for 2030. With energy efficiency measures, renewables could provide 50% of the 2030 need.

This magnitude of carbon emission reduction is needed to keep the CO2 levels in the atmosphere below 500 parts per million, the level scientists believe is necessary to prevent runaway tempeerature increase and environmental catastrophe.

The report has been adopted by the Sierra Club as its energy roadmap.

Subsidizing Our Destruction

2007-02-01T22:32:00.000-05:00

The Earth Policy Institute estimates that the world's governments subsidize environmentally destructive activities by $700 billion a year.

Iran provides an extreme example, providing $3.6 billion annually to keep oil prices low. The World Bank estimates that if this subsidy were phased out, it would cut Iran's carbon emissions by nearly half. Energy subsidies in Venezuela, Russia, India, and Indonesia increase carbon emissions between a tenth and a quarter. A study by the U.K. Green Party tabulated the subsidy to the country's airline industry at $391 per resident.

In the U.S., a 2002 study by Green Scissors, a coalition of environmental groups, calculated that subsidies for the energy industry totaled $33 billion over 10 years, with the oil and gas industry getting $26 billion, coal $3 billion and nuclear $4 billion. In 1999, Donald Lubick, U.S. Treasury Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy, claimed that the oil and gas industry "probably has a larger tax incentive relative to its size than any other industry in the country." A 2001 study by Redefining Progress showed that U.S. taxpayers were subsidizing auto use by $257 billion a year.

A few countries have started reducing their carbon subsidies. Belgium, France and Japan have phased out all subsidies for coal. Germany cut its coal subsidy inhalf between 1989 and 2002, lowering its coal use by 46%. China cut its coal subsidy by two thirds from 1993 to 1995, and more recently put a tax on high sulfur coals.

But these few examples are an inadequate beginning for a world faced with much sooner than expected global warming effects. These huge carbon subsidies must be transformed into subsidies for renewable energy and a sustainable economy. Only then will we begin to make progress in our efforts to ward off environmental catastrophe.

The Limits to Lithium

2007-01-29T09:24:00.000-05:00

Lithium-ion batteries have become a major focus of the effort to build electric or plug in hybrid cars. With General Motors' launch of its Volt plug-in hybrid prototype, lithium-ion batteries have become what USA Today called "the holy grail" of battery technology.

But a report by William Tahil, research director with Meridian International Research in France analyzed the world supply of lithium and concluded that replacing gasoline powered cars with lithium-hybrid cars would result in "even tighter resource constraints than we face today with oil."

Most lithium comes from a limited number of salt pans and salt lake deposits around the world, particularly in South America. Bolivia is believed to hold nearly half of the global lithium reserves. Switching the world's production of cars to lithium based cars would require six times the current production of lithium--and this doesn't include present production of lithium-ion batteries for portable electronic devices.

Tahil argues for more resources to be spent on new battery technologies that use common metals such as nickel or zinc. Examples of this are the sodium nickel choride or "Zebra" batteries and zinc air batteries. Zebra batteries have found some poularity in Europe and a Canadian company is considering licensing the technology to begin production in Canada.

Zebra batteries, Tahil argues, could be the dark horse battery technology of the future. Unfortunately, the buzz around lithium-ion batteries has been making it hard to get the investment to get Zebras off the ground.

Biofuels and the Limits of Growth

2007-01-24T18:28:00.000-05:00

Biofuels are all the rage lately--our ticket to oil independence. But in a world that is struggling to provide enough food for its population and, lately, losing the struggle, any significant biofuel prorgram will have to compete for resources with other agricultural pursuits. Already some of the more fragile ecosystems are being destroyed by the rush into biofuels.

In West Africa the biggest new cause of deforestation in many regions is the conversion of land into biofuel crop production. The land rush to establish biofuel plantations in developing nations is one of the most intense the world has ever seen. Millions of square miles could be turned into biofuel plantations in the tropics, and the impact this will have on global rainfall and global temperatures is incalculable.

Deforestation and drought are causing a steady advance of deserts in northern Africa. There is a clear link between deforestation and drought, particularly in West Africa, as cited in the MIT study “Desertification, Deforestation and Drought,” where they demonstrate that deforestation along the southern coast of West Africa (e.g., in Nigeria, Ghana and Ivory Coast) may result in complete collapse of monsoon circulation, and a significant reduction of regional rainfall. Connections between deforestation and drought are well established throughout the tropics.

Moreover, the rush to deforest the tropics to grow biofuel - cassava in Nigeria, sugar cane in Brazil, oil palms in Indonesia - is a form of neocolonialism that Greens should find horrifying. Tariff barriers are being streamlined to allow tropical developing nations to export biofuel to the industrial north, food crops are being crowded out, small farmers are unable to participate, and in 100 square mile increments, land ownership passes into the hands of energy multinationals. And weather patterns take a turn for the worse.

The limits of growth are real and unavoidable; and now it would seem that the international economic market--that has no way to quantify things like the environment or, more importantly, the future, is pursuing renewable energy in possibly the most self destructive manner possible.

Ultimately we must reconcile ourselves to the reality of a low energy future.

Global Warming Smoking Gun

2007-01-23T20:39:00.000-05:00

Yhe Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will release a report next week that is said to feature an "explosion of new data" on observations of current global warming.

U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who reviewed all 1,600 pages of the first segment of a giant four-part report called the results "compelling."

Global warming is "happening now, it's very obvious," said Mahlman, a former director of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab who lives in Boulder, Colo. "When you look at the temperature of the Earth, it's pretty much a no-brainer."

The February report will have "much stronger evidence now of human actions on the change in climate that's taken place," Rajendra K. Pachauri told the AP in November. Pachauri, an Indian climatologist, is the head of the international climate change panel.

In spite of this, the Democratic congress faces an uphill battle to pass any global warming legislation. Carbon-reliant industries including coal, oil, agriculture and manufacturing will resist any strong legislation, a position that will pose serious dilemmas for Democrats in districts where those industries and their unions hold sway. Some representatives of low-income minority districts are also concerned that a climate bill would slap heavy energy costs on their constituents.

Even if Pelosi manages to finagle a bill through the House, there is the problem of the Senate, where global-warming skeptic James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) has lost his chairmanship to climate-conscious Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) but has threatened a filibuster. And President Bush seems unlikely to sign anything too far-reaching.

That is why some environmentalists want Pelosi to delay until she can send a bill to a more sympathetic president in 2009, and why some Democrats want her to delay so they can use the issue against Republicans in 2008.

Bu, with the tipping point looming ever closer, there may not be that much time to spare.

Global Warming Comes Into Focus

2006-12-31T16:56:00.000-05:00

2006 will be remembered by climatologists as the year in which the potential scale of global warming came into focus. And the problem can be summarised in one word: feedback.

During the past year, scientific findings emerged that made even the most doom-laden predictions about climate change seem a little on the optimistic side. And at the heart of the issue is the idea of climate feedbacks - when the effects of global warming begin to feed into the causes of global warming. Feedbacks can either make things better, or they can make things worse. The trouble is, everywhere scientists looked in 2006, they encountered feedbacks that will make things worse - a lot worse.

Climate feedbacks could turn the Earth into a very different planet over a dramatically short period of time. It has happened in the past, scientists say, and it could easily happen in the future given the unprecedented scale of the environmental changes caused by man.

There are two types of feedback that can play a role in the future direction of the Earth's climate. The first is a "negative" feedback, which is largely good for us, because it works against things getting worse. The classic example of a negative feedback is the fertilising effect of carbon dioxide. As concentrations rise, then so does the amount of carbon absorbed by the higher growth rate of plants. The result is a negative feedback that tends to check rising levels of carbon dioxide.

A "positive" feedback makes things worse by adding to the existing problem. It brings about a vicious circle, in which a rise in carbon dioxide or global temperatures causes some change in the climate system which, in turn, leads to further rises in carbon dioxide or temperatures.

A classic example of a positive feedback is the melting sea ice of the Arctic. As temperatures rise, the ice floating on the Arctic sea melts, exposing dark ocean where once there was white ice that reflected sunlight, and heat, back into space. The newly revealed dark ocean absorbs more sunlight and heats up, causing more ice to melt, and so reinforcing the positive-feedback cycle.

But even this simple description belies the true complexity of life on Earth. In fact, there is a negative feedback at work as well with Arctic sea ice, which insulates the underlying ocean and keeps it warmer during the cold, dark northern winters. However, on balance, it is the positive feedback that dominates here, as it does in several other instances investigated by scientists in 2006.

"The main concern is that the more we look, the more positive feedbacks we find," says Olivier Boucher, a climate scientist at the Met Office. "That's not the case when it comes to negative feedbacks. There seems to be far fewer of them." The sentiment is echoed by Chris Rapley, the director of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge: "When we look at the list of all the feedbacks in the climate, the list of positive feedbacks is worryingly long - a lot longer than the negative feedbacks. To be honest, it's a wonder that the climate has remained so stable."

The Oil Plateau

2006-12-06T13:09:00.000-05:00

Oil production has been nearly flatnearly flat for the last two years, raising fears that we have hit peak oil. There has been a growing divergence between the numbers put out by the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), but the overall picture is one of very little growth.

Oil stockpiles in the industrial nations continue to grow, indicating that there are no imminent dangers of shortages, however demand for oil continues to grow at a faster pace than even the more optimistic numbers on production. It seems likely that supplies with begin to tighten up in the future and that oil prices will go higher.

Climate Change Will Theaten Crop Yields

2006-12-05T10:12:00.000-05:00

"Climate change is not just in the future. It's happening now," according to Cynthia Rosenzweig, a NASA scientist and cochair of an international panel on climate change.

Groups around the world are concerned that climate change will drastically affect crop growth. The International Rice Research Institute warms that shorter growing seasons in the tropics will reduce yields. Another research group forecasts a 51% decline in India's cropland available for wheat growing by 2050 due to hotter and drier weather.

Countries closest to the equater will likely suffer the most. Places like Tanzania and Mozambique will have more drought and shorter growing seasons. Flooding in coastal areas will hurt countries such as Bangladesh and Colombia.

On the other hand, more northerly countries could benefit from increased cropland in areas that were previously frostbound.

Researchers are developing crops that are more resistant to heat, drought and flooding, but there are limits to the ability of new varieties to counteract teh effects of heat, drought and submergence.

Researchers and meteorologists are working with farmers to make better planting decisions to maximize yields and minimize their impact on the environment. But the challanges of global warming remain daunting.

Carbon Trading, A Shell Game

2006-11-17T21:53:00.000-05:00

Carbon trading schemes use neo-liberal logic and coporate self-interest to pervert the aim of reducing carbon emisssions according to Kevin Smith, a researcher with Carbon Trade Watch, a project of the Transnational Institute.

Carbon trading schemes rely on a cost-benefit analysis which reduces the complex issue of climate change down to a discussion about numbers and graphs, ignoring unquantifiable variables such as human lives lost, species extinction and widespread social upheaval.

Cost-benefit analysis can be a useful tool for making choices in relatively simple situations. But as Tom Burke, visiting professor at Imperial College London, has observed: "The reality is that applying cost-benefit analysis to questions such as [climate change] is junk economics... It is a vanity of economists to believe that all choices can be boiled down to calculations of monetary value."

In the current neo-liberal economic environment, trading rules inevitably succumb to the pressures of corporate lobbying and deregulation in order to ensure that governments do not "interfere" with the smooth running of the market. We have already seen this corrosive influence in the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), when under corporate pressure, governments massively over-allocated emissions permits to the heaviest polluting industries in the initial round.

Market analyst Franck Schuttellar estimated that in the scheme's first year, the UK's most polluting industries earned collectively £940m ($1,792m) in windfall profits from generous ETS allocations. Given all we know about the link between pollution and climate change, such a massive public concession to dirty industries borders on the obscene.

There is a groundswell of opinion that the "invisible hand" of the market is not the most effective way of facing the climate challenge. The Durban Declaration of Climate Justice, signed by civil society organisations from all over the world, asserts that making carbon a commodity represents a large-scale privatisation of the Earth's carbon cycling capacity, with the atmospheric pie having been carved-up and handed over to the biggest polluters.

There is, unfortunately, no "win-win solution" when it comes to tackling climate change and maintaining an economic growth based on the ever increasing extraction and consumption of fossil fuels. Market-based mechanisms such as carbon trading are an elaborate shell-game of global creative accountancy that distracts us from the fact that there is no viable "business as usual" scenario.

Deserts Advancing at an Increasing Pace

2006-11-15T22:07:00.000-05:00

A report by the U.S. Embassy in China entitled "Desert Mergers and Acquisitions" describes satellite images showing the two deserts in Mongolia and Gansu provinces China expanding and merging to form a single, larger desert. To the west in Xinjiang Province, two even larger deserts, the Taklimakan and Kumtag, are also expanding toward each other. To the east, the Gobi Desert is now withing 150 miles of Bejing.

The deserts are expanding at an increasing rate; up from 600 square miles a year between 1950 and 1975 to nearly 1,400 square miles by 2000.

Over the last half-century some 24,000 Chinese villages have been abandoned or depopulated by advancing deserts.

In Afghanistan, a U.N Environment Program team has been tracking the advance of the Registan Desert. Up to 100 villages have been submerged by sand and roads have been blocked by 60 foot sand dunes.

In Iran, sand storms have buried 124 villages in the province of Sistan-Baluchistan, and covered grazing areas.

Nigeria is losing 1,355 square miles of rangeland and cropland. In Mexico, the degredation of cropland forces 700,000 Mexicans off the land each year, many coming to the U.S. searching for jobs. Even tropical Brazil is experiencing advancing deserts.

With 70 million more people in the world each year, the growth of human and livestock populations continue to degrade the land and hasten desertification.

Food production declines again in 2006

2006-10-13T19:35:00.000-04:00

Thirty years ago people warned us against the dangers of overpopulation and the limits of growth. Now their predictions are coming true and it may be too late to avoid a catastrophe. Global warming, overpopulaton/overconsumption, and peak oil are all upon us--each one aggravating the other.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has issued it's October resvision of estimates of world grain production for 2006/2007, and has revised its estimates downward. It now looks as if production will be about 2% lower than last year and that consumption will run about 50 million tons greater than production. This will be the fourth year out of the last five that production has been less than consumption. Grain stocks have now dropped 25% below their 2002 levels.

Stocks have fallen low enough that grain future prices have started to skyrocket. Corn futures are 80% higher than last year. Wheat futures are 50% higher.

Droughts in the US West, Western Europe, Australia, and China are depressing production. Overuse of fresh water supplies are depleting aquifers; and gobal warming is melting mountain glaciers--a major source of fresh water.

Thousands of small lakes and rivers have disappeared across Asia from overuse. The Colorado, Indus, and Yellow rivers no longer make it to the sea year round. The Ogallala Aquifer in the US West is being delpeted faster than it can be renewed.

The worst part is that many of the ecological problems that face us have not penetrated into the general consciousness. Global warming has become generally accepted. Peak oil is gaining ground. But the food and water problems that face us are still under the radar.

It may already be too late for political solutions. We may need to look to our own neighborhoods and towns to work for ways to survive the coming end of growth.

October 9: Eating the Earth Day

2006-10-10T09:52:00.000-04:00

By October 9, worldwide economic activity had consumed all the resources that the earth could produce in a year. From then until the end of the year we are, in effect, eating the earth--depleting the ability of the planet to produce.

Two ecological think tanks, Global Footprint Network and the New Economics Foundation compiled the data for this conclusion. The ecological debt day has been occuring earlier and earlier each year. It was first calculated in 1987 as occuring on December 19. By 2000, it fell on November 1. Last year it was October 11.

We now use about 30% more in one year than nature can regenerate. This ecological overshoot of means that it takes one year and about three months for the Earth to regenerate what is being used by people in one year, creating an ecological deficit.

We are only able to maintain this level of consumption by liquidating the planet’s natural resources. The consequences of this ecological overshoot can be seen in our rapidly warming climate, in deforestation, the collapse of fisheries, species extinction, insecure energy supplies, water shortages and crop failure.

Planet temerature warmest in the last 12,000 years

2006-09-26T15:46:00.000-04:00

A research team led by NASA's James Hansen has concluded that the Earth's surface temperature has reached its highest point of the current interglacial period which began about 12,000 years ago. Global temperature is now within about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit--1 degree Celsius--of it's highest point in the last million years.

The earth has been warming at about a third of a degree Fahrenheit--0.2 degrees Celsius--per decade for the last three decases.

A report in the journal Nature found some 1,700 plant, animal and insect species that are moving poleward at an average of about 4 miles per decade in the last half of the 20th century.

In a public statement, Hansen commented that, "This evidence implies that we are getting close to dangerous levels of human-made pollution."

Darkening the near term future is the prediction by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research that the next sunspot cycle will be 30-50% stronger than the last. Both sunspots, which indicate increased solar activity, and global warming gasses are believed to influence Earth's temperature. Since the 1960s, however, temperatures have climbed during peak sunspot activity but, at best, only leveled off during inactive periods.

The sun is now at the bottom of its 11 year sunspot cycle. An especially strong sunspot peak, combined with accelerating accumulations of global warming gases could result in even more rapid temperature increases.

Advocates of sustainability may be strained to find a level of human activity that can truly be sustained. "Sustainable growth" will no longer be possible. The best option may be what Gaia Hypothesis author James Lovelock calls a "sustainable retreat."

The World Is Changing

2006-09-19T19:39:00.000-04:00

Climate change has become a global phenomenon.

Barley is growing in Greenland for the first time since the Middle Ages. Warmer waters have brought jellyfish in record numbers to Europe's shores.

Holland, recognizing the inevitable, will strategically flood 500,000 hectares and the people living there will be moved to floating homes.

Last summer Spain and Portugal experienced record tempuratures and searing drought; this year that drought expanded into central and Northern Europe.

In the Horn of Africa droughts have culled theregion's wildlife and disrupted the migrations across the Masa Mara and the Serengeti. Herdsmen in Kenya have been driven to war over the few cattle that have survived the drought.

Alaska has suffered millions of dollars of damage to buildings and roads caused by permafrost melting. Rising sea levels have forced the relocation of Intuit villages, while the region has seen the world's largest outbreak of spruce bark beatles, normally confined to warmer climates.

Most distubing of all may be the record drought in the Amazon basin. Last year the Amazon was reduced to a tricle by unprecedented drought. The Amazon's rain forests, the world's largest carbon sink, are in danger.

In Asia, rivers are disappearing from drought and overuse. In the Himalayas, melting glaciers threaten to dry up major rivers as far away as China, India and Vietnam.

Climate changes is here, now. We have precious little time to do anything about it.

Rate of Decline in Arctic Ice Increasing

2006-09-14T19:12:00.000-04:00

The amount of ice being formed in the Arctic winter has declined sharply in the past two years.

For years, scientists have reported a steady decrease in summertime Arctic ice, but they had never before found a similar reduction in the amount of ice being created during the frigid and dark Arctic winter.

But a new paper by Josefino Comiso, a senior research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, found precisely the reduction in wintertime ice over the past two years that the model had predicted. The past two winters each produced 6 percent less ice than the average amount measured for almost three decades.

Comiso yesterday called the new data from satellite imaging of ice formation and temperatures "the strongest evidence of global warming in the Arctic so far. ... The abnormally low winter ice maximum extent and area and enhanced surface temperatures in 2005 and 2006 . . . may just be the beginning of these trends which have been more apparent in other seasons."

10 years left to stop global warming

2006-09-05T15:43:00.000-04:00

Peter Smith, a professor of sustainable energy at the University of Nottingham, told a British Association gathering that the world had ten years to develop and implement technologies to generate clean electricity before climate change reaches a point of no return.

The scientific opinion is that we have a ceiling of 440 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric carbon before there is a tipping point, a step change in the rate of global warming. The rate at which we are emitting now, around 2ppm a year and rising, we could expect that that tripping point will reach us in 20 years' time. That gives us 10 years to develop technologies that could start to bite into the problem.

Professor Smith faulted the British government's recent energy assesment for failing to adequately address the problem. He was not optimistic that the government would make policy changes without some major weather event to bring the problem home.

What will overcome [government apathy] is when there's a 2 metre rise in the Thames so that the House of Commons is underwater. The tragedy is that there needs to be a fairly catastrophic event to motivate politicians to take action then they feel confident that the public will vote for them next time.

Northern Forests Dying From Global Warming

2006-08-31T15:00:00.000-04:00

Forests in northern climates from Alaska to Oregon are dying off as warmer temperatures create heat stress for trees accustomed to a cooler climate.

In the North Cascades in Washington state the forest is dying near the top; the trees are turning red. Similar reports of dying forests are coming from Mt. Ranier, Glacier Peak Wilderness, and down to central Oregon.

Huge expanses of forest in central British Columbia have died and turned red. Millions of acres of lodgepole pine have been killed by warming temperatures.

In northern Canada, satellite data shows a wide swath of forests getting browner. A massive Alaska yellow cedar die-off on 500,000 acres of land in ALaska has been documented by the US Forest Service. Scientists have ruled out any possible cause for the die-off other than global warming.

As these forests die, they will no longer convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, adding another possative feedback loop to the global warming process.

It may just be that by the time we recognize the seriousness of what's happen it will be too late to change it.

Melting Glaciers Threaten South American Water Supply

2006-08-29T14:22:00.000-04:00

The .glaciers of the Andean mountains are melting so fast that they could disappear in the next 15 to 25 years, taking with them a major source of fresh water for Colombia, Peru, Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina and Bolivia.

The Chacaltaya glacier in Bolivia has lost over 3,000 acres of ice, about 40% of the area it covered 30 years ago. The glacier is the source of fresh water for the cities of La Paz and El Alto. At it's present rate of melt, it will be gone in 15 years.

The president of Peru's water management institute notes that, in the short run, the faster rate of melt could cause overflows of reservoirs and trigger mudslides, while in the longer run it will cut off water supplies.

South American countries are not the major source of greenhouse gasses and can only urge richer countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Juan Maldonado, former Colombian environment minister and president of the UN convention on biological diversity comments that; "The only option we have, apart from demanding that developed countries take responsibility for the damages that climate change is causing, is to try to neutralise the adverse impacts that are [already] upon us. It is time to rethink the model of international aid."

First "Certified Marketer" of Biodiesel

2006-08-29T13:58:00.000-04:00

Sprague Energy, Inc. has become the first petroleum distributer to earn a certified marketer designation under the voluntary biodiesel quality program, BQ-9000.

BQ-9000 is a quality assurance certification program that includes procedures for fuel storage, handling and management aimed at ensuring fuel quality throughout distribution. There are two categories: certified marketer and accredited producer. Although there are more than a dozen accredited producers, Sprague Energy is only the second company to become a certified marketer. The other is Peter Cremer, an Ohio-based biodiesel manufacturer.

The New Hampshire based company recently opened a rack-blended biodiesel terminal in Albany, New York. The terminal helps home heating and diesel fuel retailers throughout Upstate New York, Vermont and Western Massachusetts supply a precisely blended biofuel product to their customers. Sprague’s Albany terminal, which also stores approximately 40 million gallons of traditional petroleum fuels, stores 40,000 gallons of pure biodiesel. The B100 is blended with diesel fuel for over-the-road applications and #2 heating oil for residential and commercial heating applications.

A Third of the World Faces Water Shortages

2006-08-17T18:06:00.000-04:00

Water scarcity around the world was increasing faster than expected, with agriculture accounting for 80 percent of global water consumption, the world authority on fresh water management told a development conference in Canberra.

Globally, water usage has increased six fold in the past 100 years and would double again by 2050, driven mainly by irrigation and demands by agriculture, said Frank Rijsberman, the International Water Management Institute director-general.

We will not run out of bottled water any time soon but some countries have already run out of water to produce their own food. Without improvements in water productivity ... the consequences of this will be even more widespread water scarcity and rapidly increasing water prices.

A report on global water by environment group WWF released on Wednesday warned that rich nations, like Australia, were not immune to the coming water crisis. It said Sydney was using more water than could be replenished and Australia had among the highest water usage in the world. Each day, urban Australians use an average of 300 litres of water each, compared with Europeans who consume about 200 litres, while people in sub-Saharan Africa existed on 10-20 litres a day, said the report.

Prudhoe Bay shuts down

2006-08-07T07:42:00.000-04:00

Last night, BP Exploration Alaska, Inc. announced that it was shutting down Prudho Bay due to extensive corrosion of the pipelines and oil leaks. This move will shut in some 400,000 barrels per day of production, roughly half of what Hurrican Katrina took offline last year. It will take several days just to shut down production completely. Some have speculated that prices could rise $10 a barrel as a result. In early trading this morning, prices are up nearly $2 a barrel.

Aggravating matters is the fact that the world is starting from a weaker postion than last year. Worldwide oil production is down about half a million barrels a day from last year. Mexico's production has rolled over into decline since last year, as well as Kuwait's largest oil field. Nigeria has lost about 300,000 bpd due to unrest in the country, Iran's production is in decline and most ominously of all, Saudi production has dropped by half a million bpd in the last year. Overall, total OPEC production is down by over a million bpd in a year, despite the fact that Iraq has regained something close to prewar production.

The Saudis have so far denied that their production capacity is in decline, explaining the drop to "declining demand." The next few months will be a serious test for the Saudis. If they cannot stem the decline in the face of the Prudhoe Bay shut in, then they are almost certainly past peak production--and likely so is the world.

Mexico City looks for solutions to water problems

2006-08-05T22:28:00.000-04:00

Mexico City is fast draining the aquifer underneath it as demand for water grows. So fast that the entire city sinks by about a foot a year.

At the same time the city gets 27 inches of rain; but most of the water runs off paved over surfaces into drainage systems and then stright into the sea.

Now a group of Mexican engineeers believe they have a solution to the problem; water periable concrete.

The porous concret was discovered by accident in 1996, by chemist Jamie Grau, who considered it a faulty piece of work. But his friend, architect Nestor de Buen immediately realized that this paving tile could be the solution to rainwater runoff problems around the world. De Buen convinced Grau to patent the procuct, whcihc they called Ecocrete, and together they began selling to the Mexican and US construction industry.

Many have realized the potential benefit of this product, but so far its use has been minor, with city officials preferring to use cheaper, traditional materials. But as water problem intensify, Ecocrete may see a boom in popularity.

The limits of Ethanol

2006-08-04T16:50:00.000-04:00

According to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, if all of last year's corn crop had been used to make ethanol, it would only have provided 12 percent of U.S. gasoline demand.

Ethanol contains about one third less energy than gasoline, limiting its benefit.

Some experts doubt the wisdom of giving ethanol the prominent role itwas given in the 2005 energy bill.

A naging doubt that has yet to be put to rest is whether ethanol delivers more energy than tha which is used to make it. Researchers in Minnesota recently concluded that corn based ehtanol provides 25% more energy than is required to produce it; but most of that gain came from a byproduct that is used for animal feed.

Contrast this with the 100 to 1 return on energy invested in the early days of the oil boom and you get some idea of the "limits of growth" we face in the future.

Department of Energy to Create Bioenergy Research Centers

2006-08-03T14:22:00.000-04:00

The U.S. Department of Energy announced yesterday that it will spend $250 million to establish and operate two new bioenergy research centers to accelerate basic research in developing cellulosic ethanol and other fuels derived from plant byproducts.

DOE Secretary Samuel Bodman stated that; “This is an important step toward our goal of replacing 30 percent of transportation fuels with biofuels by 2030.”

The centers’ will "accelerate research that leads to breakthroughs in basic science to make biofuels a cost-effective alternative to fossil fuels.”

A PDF factsheet about the centers is here.

Study predicts a much hotter, drier California

2006-08-01T20:32:00.000-04:00

California will become significantly hotter and drier by the end of the century, causing severe air pollution, a drop in the water supply, melting of 90 percent of the Sierra snowpack and up to six times more heat-related deaths in major urban centers, according to a sweeping study compiled with help from respected scientists from around the country.

The weather expected to be up to 10.5 degrees warmer by 2100. If industrial and vehicle emissions continue unabated, there could be up to 100 more days a year when temperatures hit 90 degrees or above in Los Angeles and 95 degrees or above in Sacramento. Both cities have about 20 days of such extreme heat now.

The good news: If emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are significantly curtailed, according to the report released Tuesday, the number of extremely hot days might only increase by half that amount.

Climactic changes will only aggravate population pressures on the environment. Already, grain production has been flat for the last five years while consumption has grown. Water demand has caused the disaapearance of thousands of streams and lakes.

The federal government has taken a head in the sand attitude toward environmental problems; the solurions--how to live on less-- may very well have to come from the local level

New Processes Promise Cheaper Ethanol

2006-07-11T10:11:00.000-04:00

A major drawback to replacing gasoline with ethanol is that ethanol, especially when made from corn, has a very low rate of energy return against energy invested. But now researchers are working on multistep process that produce ethanol more eficiently and also generate useful byproducts.

Y.H. Percival Zhang, an assistant professor at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Virginia Tech, has developed one cost-effective process for creating lignocellulous ethanol. The process integrates three technologies in a multistep process that does not require the high pressure system, high temperature system presently used. In addition the new process can utilize the entire corn plant rather than just the kernels.

The byproducts from this process include lignin, hemicelluose sugars, amorphous cellulose, and acetic acid, which have numerous industrial uses, making the process more profitable.

Demand for Organic Food Outstrips Local Supply

2006-07-10T22:12:00.000-04:00

In an ironic twist for the sustainability community, the demand for organic foods in the U.S. has grown so rapidly--15 to 20 percent a year--that it has outstripped the ability of existing organic farms to produce. As a result, organic manufacturers have had to import ingredients from places like Europe, Bolivia, Venezuela and South Africa.

So, while the the organic movements is promoting healthier farming practices, it now has to rely on the ever more expensive fossil fuel transporation industry.

With the approach of peak oil, real sustainability will require a much greater effort to localize the production of food, which may be a difficult transition.

New Water Battleground: Bottled Water vs. Public Interest

2006-06-30T21:16:00.000-04:00

Maine has become a battleground in a growing fight that pits environmentalists against an industry that has become rich by selling the purity of nature: the bottlers of spring water.

The water in Lovewell Pond in Fryeburg, Maine, has turned from clear and sandy to dark and weedy in the past year. The problem is a cutback in clean water from a nearby natural spring, which used to dilute the murky flow coming in from the Saco River. Now, though, millions of gallons of the spring's water are pumped into tanker trucks bound for a Poland Spring bottling plant.

In a series of lawsuits and statehouse debates that reached critical mass in the past year, activists and lawmakers have questioned whether bottling companies have become too greedy about the water they take from the ground, and -- in some cases -- what gives them the right to take it at all.

This year two Eastern states, New Hampshire and Vermont, have tightened their restrictions on large-scale water withdrawals, both with bottlers in mind, and another such bill has been proposed in Michigan. In California, Michigan and New Hampshire, local groups opposed to new water wells have filed suit.

Last year in Maine, a citizens group proposed a measure thought to be the first of its kind: to tax every gallon of water extracted. That effort failed, but now the group is pushing a proposal that declares, "The citizens of the State collectively own the State's groundwater." It would create a system in which companies would have to bid against one another to tap prime water aquifers, with the proceeds going to the state.

Resource wars are upon us, and the are not necessarily of the military kind.

World's Largest Solar Plant to be Built in California

2006-06-28T07:44:00.000-04:00

Seeded by money from the founders of Google, the new company, Nanosolar, plans to build the world's largest solar power cell factory.

The plant will make paper-thin, flexible solar cells, and hopes to produce enough each year to generate 430 megawatts of electricity. By comparison, all other solar manufacturing plants in the U.S. combined only produce 153 megawatts a year.

Demand for solar cells has grown so rapidly that there is a shortage of the highly refined silicon that is required to make them. Nanosolar will move to a new technology that prints photovoltaic cells onto flexible plastic and foil, using a copper alloy that absorbs light and creates electricity.

Nonosolar will choose a location for it's plant in San Jose, Santa Clara, or San Francisco. They hope to begin production in 2007.

This new technology is a promising development, but it too may face supply limitations in the future. Copper prices have tripled in the last four years as world demand has soared and stockpiles dwindled. The dominant copper producing regions, such as the south western US and Chile, are maturing with few new projects projected to come online.

"Alternative Fools: E85"

2006-06-20T18:57:00.000-04:00

The Truth About Cars has a critical analysis of the limits of ethanol as an alternative fuel.

As with most alternative fuels, ethanol faces limits to growth. Bush wants ethanol production to double by 2012, but even if gas consumption were to stop growing, it would only be enough to turn U.S. gas supplies to E05. Double again by 2018 and U.S. gas would be E10--the same as the gasahol sold now that any car can use. Furthermore, to be economicly viable gasahol needs to be sold close to the cornfields where it is produced because it has such a low EROEI.

But the Auto industry has jumped on the ethanol craze and will design new E85 capable cars and new E85 pipelines and pumps. A great publicity stunt, but not a real solution.

Green Living Writing Contest

2006-06-17T21:10:00.000-04:00

Greenlight Financial Services, has launched an essay contest to create awareness and promote healthy and sustainable living. The winner will receive a $2,500 cash.

Greenlight is inviting consumers to write about why it's "Good To Live Green" as it relates to protecting the environment in the home, office, school or auto. Entries of 500 words or less will be judged on creativity, articulation and strength of theme. The essays must be submitted through www.greenlightloans.com by July 20, 2006, and winners will be announced the week of August 7, 2006.

We would like to drive awareness to environmental issues and use a platform that is not only beneficial to our community but also for our earth. "It has always been a priority of Greenlight's to give back to the community," said Joann Pham, CEO of Greenlight Financial Services. "It's important to us to take a leadership role and create a dialogue with our customers on this very important issue of the environment. Positive change comes through the flow of ideas and we hope that all our customers will submit an essay."

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion

2006-06-06T15:22:00.000-04:00

It is estimated that the amount of solar energy absorbed by the oceans per year is 4,000 times the amount currently consumed by humans.

Proposals to turn this energy into electricy date back to Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" published in 1870. Eleven years later French physicist Jaques-Arsène d'Arsonval proposed using the relatively warm surface water of the tropical oceans to vaporize pressurized ammonia and use the resulting vapor to drive a turbine-generator. D'Arsonval's proposal was finally demonstrated in 1979.

Now several islands are considering plans to build
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) plants, including Saipan, Taiwan, and Hawaii. Last Friday
Ocean Engineering & Energy Systems announced plans to build the world's two largest power plants making electricity from sea-water heat. In addition, the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii will build a 1-megawatt OTEC power plant.

An additional benefit of OTEC power is the production of fresh water as a by-product, something that is increasingly in short supply in many parts of the world.

MIT researcher looking into old solar PV technology

2006-05-26T10:33:00.000-04:00

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers are looking to improve the efficiency of photovoltaic cells and apply them to cars by applying new materials and technologies to an old concept, thermophotovoltaic conversion of light into electricity.

The new TPV system would burn a little fuel to create super-bright light. Efficient photodiodes would then harvest the energy and send the electricity off to run the various lighting, electrical and electronic systems in the car.

The research is partly funded by Toyota and would mesh nicely with hybrid automobile technology, in which fuel is saved by shutting down the engine when the car is stopped. TPV-generated power might also be ideal for uses in remote places, distant from power lines, similar to what is being done now with solar collectors and fuel cells.

Green Chicago

2006-05-14T20:07:00.000-04:00

Mayor Richard Daley would like to make Chicago, the greenest city in the U.S.

The city hopes to become the leader in environmental design and manufacturing of componenets for alternative energy. The city will invest in millions of solar panels; it has planted or is planning over 2 million square feet of green roofs (more than all other U.S. cities combined); it is repaving alleys with a water absorbant asphalt; and buying a greener fleet of vehicles, among other measures.

Chicago's environmental commissioner, Sadhu Johnston, says that "This is about quality of life. What we're talking about is creating a city that exists in harmony with the world, a place that can be a model."

It's a bold vision. Here's hoping it succeeds.

How to Reduce Foreign Oil Dependency

2006-04-07T16:09:00.000-04:00

A report by Professor Daniel M Kammen and the U.C. Berkeley Renewable and Apporpriate Energy Laboratory claims that the U.S. could reduce oil imports by more than 30% by 2025.

The report urges increased fuel economy standards, the use of biofuels, a push to develope plug in hybrid vehicles, and a general expansion of the use of hybrids.

The transportation sector accounts for over 70% of U.S. oil use so this is the obvious area that we must concentrate on.

The plan is hopeful, but I think that a comprehensive energy efficiency program would have to include a move away from the car-centered suburb toward the development of more walkable neigborhoods with mixed use areas that would provide many of the residents' needs.

What Are Two Texas Billionaires, Richard Rainwater & T. Boone Pickens, Saying About Peak Oil & Why Aren’t You Listening?

2006-04-04T14:53:00.000-04:00

An open letter to Texas newspapers about peak oil

I certainly don’t speak for either Richard Rainwater or Boone Pickens, but my impression of these two gentlemen--along with Matt Simmons and Jim Kunstler--is that they are American patriots, in the truest sense of the word, who are trying to warn their fellow Americans about the dangers posed by Peak Oil.

In the Fortune interview, Mr. Rainwater was quoted as follows, “I believe in Hubbert’s Peak. I came out of Texas. I watched oil fields reach peak and go over, and I’ve watched how people would do all they could, put whatever amount of money into the field, and they couldn’t do anything about it.”

The current American way of life consists of driving $50,000 SUV’s on 50 mile roundtrips to and from $500,000 mortgages. It's days are limited.

From fossil fuel and nuclear sources, the world currently uses the energy equivalent of a billion barrels of oil (Gb) every five days. The mighty East Texas Oil Field, the foundation of so many Dallas fortunes, the largest oil field in the Lower 48, and the field that was largely responsible for providing the oil to power the Allies victory over the Axis powers in World War II, made about 5.5 Gb. The field is currently producing 1.2 million barrels of water per day, with a 1% oil cut. It took about 75 years to pretty much fully deplete the East Texas Field. In terms of oil equivalent, the Barnett Shale Gas Play in North Texas should ultimately produce, over several decades, on the order of 4-5 Gbe.

I realize that US media companies are facing severe economic pressures, and I realize that you are heavily dependent on advertising revenues from the housing/auto industries and from related companies. However, in my opinion we have hit the iceberg. The US media can lash themselves to the sinking ship, by failing to face reality, or you can face the reality of finite energy resources and start heading for the lifeboats.

In my opinion, the US media have two choices regarding the Peak Oil issue. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, you can now have either your honor or the status quo. If you do nothing regarding Peak Oil, you will soon have neither the status quo nor your honor.

The Death of the World's rivers

2006-03-12T08:28:00.000-05:00

A United Nations report to be released this week will reveal thathalf of the world's 500 biggest rivers are seriously depleted.

The Nile and Indus are greatly reduced by the time they reach the sea; the Colorado and Yellow River rarely reach the ocean at all; the Jordan and Rio-Grade are dry for much of their length.

This week's UN report will officially warn the world's governments of an "alarming deterioration" in the planet's rivers,lakes and other freshwater systems, a "Disaster in the making" according to the report.

Hybrid-Air Car To Be Unveiled

2006-03-08T17:55:00.000-05:00

The Scuderi Group will unveil its air-hybrid engine at the world congress of the Society of Automotive Engineers next month in Detroit.

The air-hybrid engine supplements its gasoline engine with compressed air. Compressed air is a very efficient way of storing energy and has been suggested for intermittent sources such as solar and wind. A French company announced last year that they would be unveiling a compressed air driven car this year, but so far, no word on that.

The Scuderi Group claims its engine achieves 60% fuel efficiency, almost double the standard gasoline engine, and cuts toxic emmissions by 80%. The company hopes to license the engine to interested companies to get it into production more quickly.

Dupont Moving Toward Bio-Chemicals

2006-03-03T15:05:00.000-05:00

DuPont is forging ahead of other companies by actively researching bio-based raw materials. The company has allocated nearly 10 percent of its $1.3 billion research budget to extracting ingredients from carbohydrates — things that grow and can be infinitely replaced — rather than from hydrocarbons, which are mined or drilled and readily depleted.

DuPont already makes 10 percent of its products from nonpetrochemical substances, and expects to increase that to 25 percent by 2010. By then Dupont hopes to bring in $3 billion in revenue from bio-chemistry.

The new program can insulate DuPont from rising in gas and oil prices. It will play well with shareholders who worry about the harmful effect of extracting and burning oil. Bio-based products can also have advantages over petrochemical products. The corn-based propane diol, a product used in carpet fibers that DuPont will begin selling this spring, offers better dye absorption and stain resistance than the petrochemical version DuPont now sells.

Ogallala aquifer under stress

2006-02-14T20:36:00.000-05:00

The Ogallala aquifer is the largest underground water system in the world, providing drinking and irrigation water for Colorqado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming.

But heavy usage combined with persistant drought have made parts of it the fastest disappearing aquifers in the world.

In parts of Kansas, the water table has dropped 25 feet in the last ten years. Streams disappeared years ago while rivers are drying to gravel.

In some areas, farmers are no longer allowed to irrigate their crops, saving the water for growing population needs. Some farmers have switched from corn to cotton which needs less water.

Unlike energy, there is no solar or wind alternative to water.

Canada Has 8 Years of Natural Gas Left

2006-02-10T08:29:00.000-05:00

Dave Hughes, who works for Natural Resoruces Canada, has been speaking out about the coming energy crisis. At a recent speach, hosted by The University of Calgary's Geology Department, Hughes described the "resource pyramid," with high quality resources at the top and more abundant but lesser quality resources at the bottom. The farther down the pyramid you go, the more energy it takes to extract the resources, until you reach a point where you are using more energy than you are getting back.

Hughes claimed that North America is on an "exporation treadmill" when it comes to natural gas. More and more gas wells need to be drilled each year just to keep production steady. The number of new wells drilled in Canada has increased steadily from 4,842 in 1997 to 15,126 in 2004. Production peaked at 17.4 Bcf/d in 2001 and 2002, then fell to 16.9 Bcf/d in 2003 and 17.0 Bcf/d in 2004.

Worldwide, energy production is being strained by the dramatic growth in demand from emerging economies. Since the 1960s, China's energy consumption has grown 600%, India's has grown 600%, and Indonesia's has grown 1,400%.

Awareness of our energy limitations is becoming mainstream. What is still lacking is a serious program to conserve our remaining energy resources and bring renewable sources online.

Greece is becoming a desert

2006-02-06T20:59:00.000-05:00

When we think about advancing deserts, we don't normally think about Greece, but a conference in Thessalonika revealed that 84 percent of Greece's land is at risk of desertification and another 8 percent is already arid but is still being cultivated by farmers reluctant to lose their subsidies.

The hardest hit areas are believ4ed to cover a large section of mainland Greece, most of the Peloponese, mountainous parts of the Ionian islands, eastern and central Crete as well as parts of Thessaly, Macedonia and Thrace.

Areas in greatest danger are hilly land where soil erosion drasticly reduces depth, fertility and productivity of the earth. Agricultural machines are also a major culprit; they are believed to have caused a loss of about 40 centimeters of earth in the hilly sections of the Thessaly plain.

Desertification is another factor in the equation that pits growing population and economies against increasingly stressed resources. We must find ways out of this equation and find them soon.

Resource Pressures

2006-01-28T20:52:00.000-05:00

Back in 1980 Paul Ehrlich made a famous bet with Julian L. Simon. They bet $1,000 that five resources (of Ehrlich’s choosing) would be more expensive in 10 years. Ehrlich lost: 10 years later every one of the resources had declined in price by an average of 40 percent.

The wager reached legendary proportions among conservative economists and pundits. Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute gloated that "Julian Simon’s views on population and natural resources are so triumphant that they are almost mainstream. No one can rationally look at the evidence today and still claim, for example, that we are running out of food or energy."

But now it appears that Ehrlich was not wrong, only two decades too early. Since 2000, the price of energy and metal resources have been soaring. Prices for copper, iron ore, lead, crude oil, and uranium have more than doubled in five years. Others have shown significant gains as well. The markets are signalling that we are reaching the limits of growth.

	Aluminum, US$/ton	Coal, US$ /ton	Copper, US$/ton	Iron Ore, US cts /ton	Lead, US$ /ton	Nickel, US$ /ton	Crude Oil US$/bl	Tin, US$ /ton	Uranium, US$/lb	Zinc, US$ /ton
1/80	2054	39.6	2592	28.1	1111	6584	35.63	16973	40	773
1/90	1528	38	2365	32.5	707	7056	20.59	6592	9	1294
1/00	1679	25	1843	28.8	471	8315	25.20	5926	9.5	1178
12/05	2250	39.4	4577	65	1120	13,490	56.47	6762	35	1819
% incr over 1980	9.5	-0.5	76.6	131	0.8	104	58	-60	-13	135
% incr over 2000	34	58	148	125	137	62	120	14	268	54

As Stephen Moore notes,

Among the many prominent converts to the Julian Simon world view on population and environmental issues were Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II. Despite howls of protest from the international population control lobby, in 1984 the Reagan administration adopted Simon’s position—that the world is not overpopulated and that people are resource creators, not resource destroyers—at the United Nations Population Conference in Mexico City. The Reaganites called it "supply-side demographics." Meanwhile, in the late 1980s, Simon traveled by invitation to the Vatican to explain his theories on population growth. A year later Pope John Paul II’s encyclical letter urged nations to treat their people "as productive assets."

While I would contend that it is not so much population growth that is driving the problem as it is consumption, and therefore very much a western problem, the almost unbelievable naivety of the "supply side demographics model is going to come back to haunt us soon.

A Spectre Is Haunting Europe

2006-01-21T13:53:00.000-05:00

Enduring a record cold wave, facing cutbacks in natural gas supplies from Russia (wherre the temperature hit a record minus 30C, and with North Sea production in decline, Europe faces the possibility ofan acute, civilisation-changing energy crisis.

Britain is down to 11 days reserves of gas and facing business shutdowns if that disappears.

Author Jeremy Leggett says that part of him looks at the potential crisis and thinks "Bring it on." Such a crisis might stir the British government into doing something serious about getting off of hydrocarbons. But then he thinks about all the elderly who would die from the cold and he just feels sad. And angry at the government that talks a good game but does very little.

Ocean Energy Surges in 2005

2006-01-15T19:23:00.000-05:00

On January 14, 2005, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) issued a report that claimed that ocean generated electricity may be feasible in the very near future. This represented a significant step for wave technology as EPRI's membership comprises many of the nation's largest electric utilities which have had little interest in renewables in the past.

In April 2005, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), agreed to provide limited waivers from licensing to Verdant Power, developer of the nation's first hydrokinetic project in the East River, New York, so that it could install six project units and provide power to customers in order to test the project's capabilities in real-world conditions.

Both FERC and the Department of Energy have tried to explore ways to streamline permitting for hydrokinetic technologies in rivers, streams and oceans. In April 2005, at the behest of the National Hydropower Association, FERC convened a meeting of small hydro and ocean developers, resource agency representatives and other stakeholders to figure out how to expedite permitting without compromising environmental protection.

In February and March 2005 FERC issued several preliminary permits to two different companies to study tidal energy sites in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Florida. Also, the AquaEnergy Group, located in Washington state, continued to advance through the licensing process for its proposed Makah Bay Project, which will be located in the Olympic Coast Marine Sanctuary in the Makah Bay off the coast of Washington state.

Ocean technologies continued to advance beyond the United States as well. In May 2005, Ocean Power Delivery (OPD) announced a deal with an electric company in Portugal to construct the world's first commercial wave farm. The 2.25 MW project will be comprised of three of OPD's distinctive, orange sausage-shaped, Pelamis units. And in December 2005, Marine Current Technologies announced that it had received additional funding of 2 million pounds for its SeaGen project, which that same month obtained approval needed to move forward with deployment.

It was quite a year for new initiatives in wave power.

Report: China and India May Set the Stage for clean growth

2006-01-14T18:53:00.000-05:00

A report by Worldwatch Institute claims that China and India may set the stage for a cleaner and greener earth. Christopher Flavin, director of the environmental research group suggested that;

China and India are positioned to leapfrog today's industrial powers and become world leaders in sustainable energy and agriculture within a decade. We were encouraged to find that a growing number of opinion leaders in China and India now recognize that the resource-intensive model for economic growth can't work in the 21st century.

China's world leading solar-industry already provides water heating for 35 million buildings, and India's pioneering use of rainwater harvesting brings clean water to tens of thousands of homes, according to the 244-page report.

Zjeng Bijian, head of China Economic Reform, an academic group, called in the report for "a new path of industrialization based on technology, low consumption of resources, low environmental pollution and the optimal allocation of human resources."

Flavin challanged the U.S. to improve its efforts;

Americans wondering why the price of oil is so high need only to look in the mirror. A new economic path is at least as crucial for the United States as it is for China or India."

New Record for Organic Photovoltaic Cell

2006-01-08T19:30:00.000-05:00

Global Photonic Energy Corporation, developer of organic photovoltaic technology for ultra-low cost high power solar cells, announced that the company's research partners at Princeton University and the University of Southern California have achieved a new record in an organic solar cell that is responsive to light in the near infrared range of the solar spectrum. NIR radiation is invisible to the human eye.

Organic semiconductors contain the ubiquitous element carbon and are capable of achieving ultra-low cost solar power generation that is competitive with traditional fossil fuel sources. Organic materials have the potential to achieve ultra-low cost production costs and high power output. The materials are ultra-thin and flexible and can be applied to large, curved or spherical surfaces. Because the layers are so thin, transparent solar cells can be applied to windows creating power-generating glass that retains its basic functionality.

Under only NIR radiation, the Princeton solar cell would appear to be generating power in the dark -- as the human eye is only sensitive to visible light.

"This latest device demonstrates that significant power can be harvested from the IR and near-IR portion of the solar spectrum.", said Dr. Stephen R. Forrest. "In fact, this novel approach has the potential to double the power output of organic solar devices with power harvested from the near-IR and IR portion of the solar spectrum. With this approach we are well on our way to power levels exceeding 100 watts per meter."

Architecture 2030

2006-01-03T17:38:00.000-05:00

A new group called Architecture 2030 has launched a website calling for all new buildings, developments and major renovation projects be designed to use 1/2 the fossil fuel energy they would typically consume.
That this fossil fuel reduction standard for all new buildings must be increased to 60% in 2010, 70% in 2015, 80% in 2020, 90% in 2025 and carbon-neutral by 2030 (meaning they will use no fossil fuel energy to operate).

The group is sponsored by New Energy Economy, a non-profit, non-partisan and independent organization. Their mission is to conduct research, and provide information and innovative solutions in the fields of architecture and planning, in an effort to address global climate change.

Britain lists top 10 green projects of 2005

2005-12-31T09:50:00.000-05:00

The British Department of Trade and Industry has named the top 10 new green projects of 2005.

The list includes three wind farms, three solar-power projects, and two examples of microgeneration (mini power plants.) The other projects are a biomass plant in Northern Ireland that produces a new wood pellet bio fuel created by burning sawdust and woodchips, and a wave buoy project off the north Cornwall coast.

Britain has set a goal of generating 10 percent if its electricity from renewable energy by 2010.

The Plug-In Hybrid Development Consortium Grows

2005-12-23T14:24:00.000-05:00

Plug-in hybrids are attracting more and more attention. Southern California Edison has now joined a consortium of automotive suppliers, manufacturers and other organizations working together to accelerate the commercial production of Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles.

Another new member joining the Consortium recently is Enax, makers of advanced Lithium batteries from Japan. Enax is also known for their high power battery technology capable of 5 minute rapid recharge and robotic manufacturing techniques.

The Consortium was organized to help reduce the R&D gap between component suppliers and OEMs; and to coordinate and accelerate the development of critical new solutions while reducing the development time for the next generation hybrid vehicles. The members of this growing Consortium plan to develop compatible components and cost-effective working designs, that would enable a plug-in hybrid that achieves 100-200 total mpg petroleum economy by driving its first 25 - 50 miles in all electric zero emission mode. This "Dual Mode" PHEV will then continue to operate in a high-efficiency hybrid electric mode to achieve conventional range of operation.