The Triple Threat of Fossil Fuels

Fossil fuels impose a threefold tax on civilization: they destabilize the climate, empower geopolitical coercion, and corrode democracy—while a green transition offers the only credible path to resilience, sovereignty, and long-term national strength.

The future of coal

I am sidelined by illness today so I thought I'd spend some of my newfound free time exploring a topic I've considered before.

Although many of my friends and family would be sad to hear it -- and disbelieve me strongly -- the long-term trend for domestic coal looks bleak. Of course as gas begins to replace coal its price will go up, but coal is dirty. Yes, gas emits carbon dioxide too, and has some of its own challenges. However, burning coal emits more carbon dioxide, as well as harmful particulates, than any other choice to power our electric grid. Given the power of states and the federal government to limit harmful emissions from coal, I don't think that coal will ever recover from its current slump, and in fact the warming climate will push it into further obscurity.

Here's some EIA data showing the change in coal demand from 2011-2012:

What I did is took the numbers of millions of tons of coal demand by electric utilities for 2011 and subtracted 2012 to generate a "demand loss" bar for each month. I then divided this absolute change in tons by the 2011 amount of tons to generate a % loss in 2012. Coal prices have basically flatlined/held stable/declined slightly even as natural gas consumption spiked, which means that the price point for gas is still much more attractive than coal.

Coal prices are now back at 2005 levels:

Production is trending down, too, probably in an effort to increase prices. In January, production fell from 95 to 83.9 Mtons = 11.7% drop. In February 85.8 to 76.7 Mtons = 10.6% drop.

And yet no effect on prices yet. Probably without the drop in production the prices would have plummeted more.

So let's put the pieces of the puzzle together:

1. Power plants are demanding less coal due to two factors: weather and switching to gas
2. Overall demand/consumption of coal in 2011 was equal to 1996! (Table 6.1, page 93/211)
3. Coal prices are back at 2005 levels, a drop of 50% from 2008 prices.
4. Coal production is down, but the price of coal continues to flatline/fall
5. EPA regulations on power plant emissions will begin in 2015, which should further impact coal

Now that doesn't mean that international coal use will wane. Estimates I've seen predict an enormous increase in coal plants in India and China. So there will be a huge market for exporting coal, although this may be usurped by gas too (since Australia, Russia and the US will be exporting that too). And there has been a small uptick in exports lately, but not nearly enough to close the gap in falling domestic consumption (Fig. 6.1)

Testimony a few weeks ago in Congress about the good news from the drop in coal's fortunes:

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from energy consumption are down 13 percent since 2007. The economic downturn is part of the story. But the most significant part is the result of natural gas supplanting coal in electric generation at a rapid rate.

That's good news. But not to coal miners and their families...

the climate change non-scandal

So, if you watch Faux News I'm sure you've heard a lot about this:

Fake EPA Scandal Of The Day
from Environment and Energy by Brad Plumer

Earlier this year, when the EPA was putting together its finding that carbon-dioxide endangers the public health, an economist at the agency named Al Carlin drafted a short report disputing the scientific consensus on global warming and asked his bosses to consider it. The bosses politely asked Carlin to leave climate science to actual scientists and didn't incorporate his insights at all. And with good reason: As NASA's Gavin Schmidt explains, Carlin's "critique" makes a bunch of very basic errors—no surprise, given that he's not a climatologist and was mostly just parroting right-wing pseudoscience.

Anyway, you'd expect the story to die there. Alas, no: The rogue's gallery of climate deniers—from the Competitive Enterprise Institute to James Inhofe—is now shrieking that the Obama administration suppressed The Truth about global warming. Inhofe has ordered a full investigation. You know how it goes. Over at Grist, Jonathan Hiskes has the whole sordid tale if you're in the mood. Personally, I'm holding out for a better fake scandal—this one's a little disappointing.

--Bradford Plumer

Wilkins ice shelf note

Quote:

Anyway, it's the same story in Antarctica as you see pretty much anywhere else—the changes are happening more quickly than most scientists had expected...Turns out the skeptics were right. The models and forecasts were mistaken. They were just off in the wrong direction...[bold mine]

Indeed.

Michael Crichton dies at 66

Although I recently knocked him for his loony tripe about global warming, I grew up reading Crichton before most people knew who he was, and it is a sad day for fans of his writing.

The impact of meat on global warming

Time magazine has a great article on how meat makes global warming worse:

In a 2006 report, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) concluded that worldwide livestock farming generates 18% of the planet's greenhouse gas emissions — by comparison, all the world's cars, trains, planes and boats account for a combined 13% of greenhouse gas emissions.

I've written a few things on my experiment with complete meatlessness, and how one of my motivations is the environmental impact of raising cattle. As of a few months ago, I started eating white meat again. I never plan to eat pork or beef again regularly, although there will probably be times when I'm trapped somewhere and all they offer is BBQ or something. On the ethics, I suppose I just don't think that birds have the same sort of conscious awareness as mammals like pigs and cows do.

Time mag. asks, and I answer: Palin = disaster

Barack says that Bristol Palin's teenage pregnancy is off-limits:

MONROE, Michigan (CNN) – Barack Obama told reporters firmly that families are off-limits in this campaign, reacting to news that Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is five months pregnant.

“Let me be as clear as possible,” said Obama, “I think people’s families are off-limits and people's children are especially off-limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin’s performance as governor, or her potential performance as a vice president.”

Obama said reporters should “back off these kinds of stories” and noted that he was born to an 18 year-old mother.

“How a family deals with issues and teenage children, that shouldn't be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that’s off-limits.”

The Illinois senator became aggravated when asked about rumors on liberal blogs speculating that Palin’s fifth child - Trig - is actually her daughter Bristol’s. A Reuters report Monday quotes a senior McCain aide saying that Obama’s name is in some of posts, “in a way that certainly juxtaposes themselves against their 'campaign of change,’”

“I am offended by that statement,” Obama shot back, not letting the reporter finish his question. “There is no evidence at all that any of this involved us.”

“We don’t go after people’s families,” Obama said. “We don’t get them involved in the politics. It’s not appropriate and it’s not relevant. Our people were not involved in any way in this and they will not be. And if I ever thought that there was somebody in my campaign that was involved in something like that, they’d be fired.”

Although McCain's campaign insists that they knew about this, I remain skeptical, not the least reason being that they're now sending an army of lawyers to Alaska to try to contain this...which is something they should've done beforehand. Time magazine asks whether McCain's pick was "bold or disastrous?" I think that answer is becoming more clear. Let's have a run-down of the woman's baggage:

1. Late addition: She was a member of a fringe Alaskan political group that seeks its independence from the US, and was involved in their 2008 conference
   
2. Late addition: It looks like independent voters are seeing through the nonsense
   
3. She had a shotgun wedding as she got pregnant with her first kid out of wedlock
4. Her husband was arrested on a DWI
5. She's a staunch "abstinence-only" advocate whose teenage daughter got pregnant, the political fallout from which is still to be determined
   
6. Troopergate: She used her authority as governor to try to have her sister's ex-husband fired, then fired his boss when the boss refused, then lied about it [apparently the ex-husband was a dickhead, but the last two points are more important here]
7. She claimed in her first public appearance as VP candidate that she opposed the "Bridge to Nowhere" but this turns out to be a lie, and a bad one, at that
8. She claims to have opposed corruption in Alaska, but said that calling for Ted Stevens resignation would be "premature" after his arrest and received his endorsement, which she paid to run as an ad
9. She directed Ted Stevens' 527 group on his behalf and appeared with him in July after his indictment to appeal for him politically
10. A few months ago, she claims to have no idea what the VP does everyday
    
11. In a 2006 gubenatorial questionaire, she said that she opposed abortions for incest and rape, only giving an exception if it could be proven that the mother might die from childbirth. The Religious Right loves her. Re-read that.
12. From the same source, and many others, she claims that teaching creationism in science classes is the way to go, "teach both."
    
13. On the same anti-science note, she is a global warming denialist
14. She is to the right of McCain on drilling in ANWR, protecting polar bears and protecting the environment in general (yet another anti-science Republican)
15. On the same line of reasoning, she semi-opposed the surge in Iraq, hailed as one of the only things that McCain has not failed at in the past decade or so
16. There is zero national security experience involved in being governor, so quit repeating the "commander-in-chief of the national guard" line. Campbell Brown stumped Tucker Bounds today (H/T: Kos) who tried to equivocate on this -- she didn't command troops to go to Iraq. Not even close. I'm the "commander-in-chief" of my classroom, but that doesn't make me an education policy wonk.
    
17. She is clearly and unequivocally unqualified to be president should something happen to McCain, the oldest presidential candidate ever nominated for a first term whose four bouts with cancer should make everyone think twice

Go Obama-Biden '08! (pic source)

Meatlessness

Yesterday, Kristof of the NYT wrote a column about animal rights:

So, yes, I eat meat (even, hesitantly, goose). But I draw the line at animals being raised in cruel conditions. The law punishes teenage boys who tie up and abuse a stray cat. So why allow industrialists to run factory farms that keep pigs almost all their lives in tiny pens that are barely bigger than they are?

Defining what is cruel is, of course, extraordinarily difficult. But penning pigs or veal calves so tightly that they cannot turn around seems to cross that line.

More broadly, the tide of history is moving toward the protection of animal rights, and the brutal conditions in which they are sometimes now raised will eventually be banned. Someday, vegetarianism may even be the norm.

Perhaps it seems like soggy sentimentality as well as hypocrisy to stand up for animal rights, particularly when I enjoy dining on these same animals. But my view was shaped by those days in the barn as a kid, scrambling after geese I gradually came to admire.

So I’ll enjoy the barbecues this summer, but I’ll also know that every hamburger patty has a back story, and that every tin of goose liver pâté could tell its own rich tale of love and loyalty.

His colleague, Mark Bittman, gave a talk at TED that had a lot more moral force behind it:

I went for about a year eating very, very little meat. I gained a lot of weight. Although I wasn't 100% strict, since I would partake of fish and seafood on occasion, I certainly felt good about my decision. When people asked me why I was a vegetarian, I told them three reasons:

1. ethics -- I don't like to cause animals to suffer; they feel pain just like we do
2. health -- studies have been done showing that a plant-based diet is very good for your ticker, while red meat has been clearly linked to cancer and heart disease
   
3. the environment -- the amount of our resources diverted to raising animals for food is vast, and the efficiency of this system is low, compared to directly growing plants for human consumption

Now, none of those three things changes whether or not you choose to be a vegetarian, however, after reading Kristof I don't see how he can make the arguments he makes with a straight face while admitting to eating meat. He talks about the increasing role and rectitude of animal rights, and how his own experiences on a farm support that, but then admits to enjoying burgers and goose liver.

I guess it's like religion: they preach perfection while admitting to being imperfect with a straight face.

Back to me for a moment, this summer I've started eating some poultry again. For one thing, I am getting really tired of what we eat; for another thing, I've gotten really fat. Part of the problem is just eating too many damned carbs, but I think the bigger problem for me is the feeling of being full. High-protein foods are very filling to me, while low-protein foods leave my stomach rumbling an hour later.

Unlike Kristof, I'll not preach it if I'm not practicing it, but I don't know how much I did before.

The big issue for me is getting people to wake up to the environmental impact of raising cattle, but I am afraid that won't happen any time soon.

A few more words on solar and wind (and nuclear)

*UPDATE: I just saw this item regarding a breakthrough in solar storage using splitting water and fuel cells*

Round two!

I've double-indented his words and single-indented mine:

1. The problem with solar power is this thing called "night."

2. The problem with wind power is this thing called "no wind blowing today."

The problem with your two statements is this thing called "reading comprehension"...

I already pointed out, all by myself, that:

The particular barriers applying to solar and wind are storage and efficiency, and there are good solutions out there for both involving either: 1) compressed air storage of energy, or 2) pumping water uphill.

That is to say that there are already obvious and easy solutions to the issues of storage -- given that there is much more energy available than we need to harness, all we have to do is store it when there's extra and transmit it when it's needed.

I anticipate being hit with a straw man argument about being a global warmer denier, but I am not one of those people.

I don't do logical fallacies...at least not on purpose.

What I will say is that most of these apocalyptic scenarios are overblown, and that change in energy technology will come more rapidly and more unexpectedly than you realize.

Perhaps they are, and perhaps it will. Here is a good argument to consider.

But to embrace Gore's stupidity will only hamper the solution to the problem by killing our economy.

First, environmentalism is not a cult of personality. It reminds me of how creationists use the term "Darwinism" instead of evolution because it makes it an ideology (-ism) and makes it all about Darwin at the same time. Second, there are lots of really smart people out there who have looked at this and realize that spending $700B a year on foreign oil is killing our economy and that by taxing oil and giving tax incentives to move to renewables, we'll be relying on markets to use the now-cheaper energy sources (subsidized) and innovate. Also, the infrastructure, once built, is massively cheaper than oil. It's the initial investment that's expensive.

Free market innovation is the way to go not tyrannical dictates and embracing dubious technologies.

I don't see anyone saying that Uncle Sam should run factories to produce solar panels or windmills. We do argue that Uncle Sam ought to adjust tax rates on carbon-based fuels and offer tax incentives on non-carbon sources. It's about taxation and monetary policy. As of right now, Exxon has no incentive to invest in alternatives, so they invest a dismal 1% of their profits in alternative energy. (source)

I think we have the technology now to end most fossil fuel consumption, and it is called nuclear energy.

I'm actually in agreement with you that nuclear is a necessary part of the energy package that solves both the climate change and the foreign oil problems we currently face. MIT did a great study a while back. However, the issue of long-term storage of high-level waste has never been satisfactorily dealt with, although there are some promises in recycling the waste material using technology developed by a professor I worked with at UF (details).

Unfortunately, environmentalists have hamstrung this industry with their stupidity. But cheap electricity would be a boon to electric cars and mass transit. I think nuclear power would provide this if the regulatory hurdles could be eliminated.

On a general note, Charlie, I think we can have a productive and fruitful dialog, but it would be nice if you would refrain from disparaging all environmentalists as "stupid"...and as I said, I'm in agreement with you that nuclear power should be pushed more as a transition. In the long term, one downside is that Uranium is just like fossil fuels -- a finite resource.

In the short term, we have good reserves of Uranium, as do our friends, Australia and Canada. It has the potential to be cheaper than even coal, and already provides around 20% of US electricity. Both Barack and McCain promise to work to include nucelar in their energy proposals, although Barack doesn't support giving subsidies to them as McCain does. (more)

I'm all for clean water and clean air, but I'm not going to deify the planet or damn capitalism along the way.

I don't understand why it's socialistic to strategically place the long-term good of our economy and national security above short-term interests...?

The modern environmental movement bears little relation to the conservation movements of the past but are simply the last refuge of Marxists who saw a new way to castigate the free market by turning from Red to Green.

Do you have any evidence that there is a conspiracy amongst Communists in the USA to move us to solar and wind and other renewables?

On a sidenote, I think the Tesla Roadster is a great car, and I love that company. I think the future belongs to capitalist innovators like those behind Tesla.

The future belongs to capitalists, that's for sure.

PS: Republicans blocked a solar and wind tax credit for the fourth time this summer. They set a record for the number of filibusters during the first year of a two-year session. To repeat: they've filibustered more in one year than any Congress before filibustered in two.

This dialog was more respectful on his part, I think.

A few words on solar and wind

There's a particularly nasty person in our Godless Columbia group. I say this not because of what he thinks, but because of his arrogance and his obvious Randroid leanings. He thinks he's John Galt, I guess.

In a recent thread on our message board, he said Gore was an idiot and yada, yada, yada...I had to respond:

Carbon-based fuels are finite and contribute to climate change. These are two facts that no amount of spin or sarcasm can change. Thus, it doesn't really matter whether or not alternatives are expensive, since we have no choice but to adapt; it isn't a question of if, but how quickly it can be done.

There is no way that wind and solar will ever generate the energy an industrial/information society needs to function. This is the pipe dream of pantheistic environmentalists. Even Al Gore can't power his own life without resorting to fossil fuels and appeasing guilt with carbon offsets.

From Scientific American:
A Solar Grand Plan

A massive switch from coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power plants to solar power plants could supply 69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050.
...
The energy in sunlight striking the earth for 40 minutes is equivalent to global energy consumption for a year. The U.S. is lucky to be endowed with a vast resource; at least 250,000 square miles of land in the Southwest alone are suitable for constructing solar power plants, and that land receives more than 4,500 quadrillion British thermal units (Btu) of solar radiation a year. Converting only 2.5 percent of that radiation into electricity would match the nation’s total energy consumption in 2006.

This analysis completely ignores wind, geothermal and other alternatives like hydropower -- tidal and additional waterfall-based generators.

It also limits the cost to $400B total...when analysts are being realistic by pointing out that we're spending $700B a year on foreign oil, and to redirect a large piece of that will be necessary each and every year from here on out until we have the infrastructure in place.

From a study conducted at Stanford University:
Evaluation of global wind power

Global wind power potential for the year 2000 was estimated to be ~72 TW (or ~54,000 Mtoe). As such, sufficient wind exists to supply all the world's energy needs (i.e., 6995-10177 Mtoe), although many practical barriers need to be overcome to realize this potential.

Thus, approximately five times the amount of world demand for energy exists in the form of wind alone.

The particular barriers applying to solar and wind are storage and efficiency, and there are good solutions out there for both involving either: 1) compressed air storage of energy, or 2) pumping water uphill. To believe that we have the intellectual ability to go to the moon and build the Large Hadron Collider, but can't use wind farms and solar farms all over the country to eventually replace carbon-based sources is a bit credulous.

Basically, it isn't a question of if, but how quickly it can be done.

Environmentalism is a new religion with sacred spaces, a dogma, an object of veneration, an apocalyptic doomsday, and even a system of guilt and indulgences.

Environmentalism far pre-dates Gore, which I seriously hope you know, so who/what is the object of veneration? The earth? Since it is our sustaining force, I would say that may be justified...

Environmentalism is the recognition that our resources are finite, as well as rapidly changing; that our impact on those resources is both long-lasting and growing rapidly as the global population explodes and economies expand. From this, it is logical to conclude that our technology and innovation must adapt to these facts...however costly or inconvenient they may be.

This guy is busy calling another member of GC a coward for not being more open (angry?) about atheism at work, so he'll probably take a little while to respond.

Presidential politics and climate change

*UPDATE: (6/12) -- an excellent editorial in the Boston Globe covers the way that McCain falls far short on energy and environmental policy*

In the wake-up call issued by the report I mentioned yesterday, it is made clear that serious action must be taken to move America into a post-carbon (read: oil-free) future. Even Bush's own science advisor has broken ranks and admits the facts argue for a serious change in policy. Now that we're down to choosing between Obama and McSame in November, do we have a clear choice between presidential candidates in plans and priorities with respect to climate change? Yes, we do.

First, Democratic candidate Obama has promised serious action in the form of a market-based cap and trade solution to emissions and real investment in a clean energy infrastructure to improve our national security and environment simultaneously. The vicious cycle of empowering Iran and other rogue nations by sending them billions in oil wealth, then concomitantly fighting them and spending billions on national security in the Middle East, is desperately in need of change. Barack will change that broken record.

While John McCain's own website reports that he supports:

1. Climate Policy Should Be Built On Scientifically-Sound, Mandatory Emission Reduction Targets And Timetables.
2. Climate Policy Should Utilize A Market-Based Cap And Trade System.
3. Climate Policy Must Include Mechanisms To Minimize Costs And Work Effectively With Other Markets.
4. Climate Policy Must Spur The Development And Deployment Of Advanced Technology.
5. Climate Policy Must Facilitate International Efforts To Solve The Problem.

It turns out, that with a little digging, one can see that McCain has not voted to take any action whatsoever on climate change, often being the only Senator in Congress not to do so:

• On June 21, 2007, the Senate voted on the Baucus amendment to the energy bill, which would have removed some oil company subsidies in order to fund renewable energy. The amendment failed to pass. Where was McCain? He didn't vote.
• On the same day, the Senate held a cloture vote to overcome the standard Republican veto threat and pass the energy bill. The vote succeeded. Where was McCain? He didn't vote.
• On Dec. 7, the Senate held another cloture vote to overcome the standard Republican veto threat on the energy bill, which had become substantially bolder after being aligned with the House version. The vote failed. Where was McCain? He didn't vote.
• On Dec. 13, 2007, the Senate held another cloture vote to overcome the standard Republican veto threat and pass the energy bill, which had the Renewable Portfolio Standard stripped out of it but retained a measure that would shift oil company subsidies to renewables. The vote failed -- by one vote, 59-40. Where was McCain? He didn't vote -- the only senator not to do so.
• On Feb. 6, 2008, the Senate held another cloture vote to overcome the standard Republican veto threat and pass a stimulus bill containing a number of green energy incentives. The cloture motion failed, by one vote. Where was McCain? He didn't vote -- again, the only senator not to do so.

Of course, Barack was there and voted his principles. This pattern undercuts the supposed "green-ness" of the GOP candidate, whose claims to fame mainly rest on three past laurels:

• He voted against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and has sponsored or cosponsored the occasional, modest environmental protection bill (protecting whales; awarding tax credits for energy efficiency; boosting fuel efficiency). (Note, however, that his lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters is a measly 29 percent.)
• In 2003, he and Sen. Joe Lieberman introduced the first-ever climate bill to the Senate: the Climate Stewardship Act, which would establish a carbon cap-and-trade system to reduce U.S. emissions. It was introduced and voted down in 2003 and again in 2005.
• He acknowledges, without hedging, that anthropogenic climate change is real, and speaks eloquently about the need to address it. He has frequently criticized the Bush administration for inaction.

These years-old deviations from standard GOP orthodoxy have been undone by the weakness of his current proposals:

Relative to what's offered by other Senate cap-and-trade bills (and the plans of his Democratic rivals), the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act -- even in its 2007 incarnation -- is weak. Unlike other such bills, McCain's specifically sets aside massive and unnecessary subsidies for the nuclear industry. Its emissions targets are exceeded even by the lowest-common-denominator bill now heading to the Senate floor, the Lieberman-Warner America's Climate Security Act.

This is to say nothing of the Sanders-Boxer bill, the strongest extant climate legislation, which now boasts both Clinton and Obama as co-sponsors and includes even more aggressive targets. Beyond that, we have the plans offered by the leading Democratic campaigns, which offer bold targets, 100 percent auctioning of pollution permits, and detailed plans for how to allocate the auction revenue to boost the green economy.

McCain has never updated his position on cap-and-trade legislation, despite the steady advance in public opinion and climate science since he introduced his bill in 2003. He has not discussed, much less matched, the ambitious targets of his Dem rivals. He has not signed onto the Sanders legislation, or even Lieberman's new bill. He has not said whether he'll vote for it, and has hinted ($ub. rqd) that he'll vote Nay unless big buckets of nuclear pork are added.

In short, McCain's take on cap-and-trade legislation is now anachronistic, lagging well behind what's current, what's possible, and what's needed.

Basically, rather than update his position by voting new measures into law, he's avoiding confronting the right wing of his party by skipping every climate change vote. This portends poorly for the future. To summarize, a clear choice must be made by voters in November -- will we continue the same old, same old energy policies, those that send billions to the Middle East and Venezuela, only to turn around and spend billions more trying to fight and contain these countries? Or will we dry up the well that funds terrorist activity by moving towards a post-carbon future? One candidate has already shown courage and candor by opposing the gas tax, the other showed ignorance and political pandering.

You'll decide.

NSTC Global Warming Report

The National Science and Technology Council today finally released a report compiled four years ago that summarizes the evidence of global climate change and its already-occurring effects here in the US. The Bush administration pulled the report in 2004 before its release because it was filled with facts that didn't fit the conservative ideology that denies science in favor of $. A federal judge finally forced its release. Here's the full report.

The evidence is overwhelming.

The impacts of climate change on food prices

Paul Krugman writes today about the high prices of food, which severely injure poor people at home and denizens of third-world countries abroad. He mentioned in his article a few of the major points about how this has come to pass:

1. rising Chinese other foreign economies are producing a booming middle class, raising the demand for meat, which in turn lessens the availability of grain and corn for direct human consumption (something I've covered here and here)
2. this same factor (rising global incomes) has led to an increase in demand for oil, and oil prices directly affect food prices due to fertilizer, diesel fuel, preservation and transportation costs
3. biofuels like corn ethanol provide huge incentives for farmers to move away from other foodstuffs and raise the price of those commodities, even though biofuels are not a climate change solution in any real sense (see here, and I've provided the full-text of that article below)
4. climate change has caused severe droughts, and is itself exacerbated by the aforementioned problems (1-3), as more people clearcut forest to meet the demands for new cattle pastures, arable land and new acres of corn ethanol for biofuels
   

Even though he includes biofuels in his energy policy proposals, I am hopeful that Barack will wake up to these realities about ethanol and take serious action to reverse the issues discussed above.

Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008
The Clean Energy Scam
By Michael Grunwald

From his Cessna a mile above the southern Amazon, John Carter looks down on the destruction of the world's greatest ecological jewel. He watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. He sees fires wiping out such gigantic swaths of jungle that scientists now debate the "savannization" of the Amazon. Brazil just announced that deforestation is on track to double this year; Carter, a Texas cowboy with all the subtlety of a chainsaw, says it's going to get worse fast. "It gives me goose bumps," says Carter, who founded a nonprofit to promote sustainable ranching on the Amazon frontier. "It's like witnessing a rape."

The Amazon was the chic eco-cause of the 1990s, revered as an incomparable storehouse of biodiversity. It's been overshadowed lately by global warming, but the Amazon rain forest happens also to be an incomparable storehouse of carbon, the very carbon that heats up the planet when it's released into the atmosphere. Brazil now ranks fourth in the world in carbon emissions, and most of its emissions come from deforestation. Carter is not a man who gets easily spooked--he led a reconnaissance unit in Desert Storm, and I watched him grab a small anaconda with his bare hands in Brazil--but he can sound downright panicky about the future of the forest. "You can't protect it. There's too much money to be made tearing it down," he says. "Out here on the frontier, you really see the market at work."

This land rush is being accelerated by an unlikely source: biofuels. An explosion in demand for farm-grown fuels has raised global crop prices to record highs, which is spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon at an increasingly alarming rate.

Propelled by mounting anxieties over soaring oil costs and climate change, biofuels have become the vanguard of the green-tech revolution, the trendy way for politicians and corporations to show they're serious about finding alternative sources of energy and in the process slowing global warming. The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol--ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter--in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil's filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010, thanks to investors like Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group. Renewable fuels has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie catchphrases, as unobjectionable as the troops or the middle class.

But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it's dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.

Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.'s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn't exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.

Biofuels do slightly reduce dependence on imported oil, and the ethanol boom has created rural jobs while enriching some farmers and agribusinesses. But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple, given that researchers have ignored it until now: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon.

Backed by billions in investment capital, this alarming phenomenon is replicating itself around the world. Indonesia has bulldozed and burned so much wilderness to grow palm oil trees for biodiesel that its ranking among the world's top carbon emitters has surged from 21st to third according to a report by Wetlands International. Malaysia is converting forests into palm oil farms so rapidly that it's running out of uncultivated land. But most of the damage created by biofuels will be less direct and less obvious. In Brazil, for instance, only a tiny portion of the Amazon is being torn down to grow the sugarcane that fuels most Brazilian cars. More deforestation results from a chain reaction so vast it's subtle: U.S. farmers are selling one-fifth of their corn to ethanol production, so U.S. soybean farmers are switching to corn, so Brazilian soybean farmers are expanding into cattle pastures, so Brazilian cattlemen are displaced to the Amazon. It's the remorseless economics of commodities markets. "The price of soybeans goes up," laments Sandro Menezes, a biologist with Conservation International in Brazil, "and the forest comes down."

Deforestation accounts for 20% of all current carbon emissions. So unless the world can eliminate emissions from all other sources--cars, power plants, factories, even flatulent cows--it needs to reduce deforestation or risk an environmental catastrophe. That means limiting the expansion of agriculture, a daunting task as the world's population keeps expanding. And saving forests is probably an impossibility so long as vast expanses of cropland are used to grow modest amounts of fuel. The biofuels boom, in short, is one that could haunt the planet for generations--and it's only getting started.

Why the Amazon Is on Fire

This destructive biofuel dynamic is on vivid display in Brazil, where a Rhode Island--size chunk of the Amazon was deforested in the second half of 2007 and even more was degraded by fire. Some scientists believe fires are now altering the local microclimate and could eventually reduce the Amazon to a savanna or even a desert. "It's approaching a tipping point," says ecologist Daniel Nepstad of the Woods Hole Research Center.

I spent a day in the Amazon with the Kamayura tribe, which has been forced by drought to replant its crops five times this year. The tribesmen I met all complained about hacking coughs and stinging eyes from the constant fires and the disappearance of the native plants they use for food, medicine and rituals. The Kamayura had virtually no contact with whites until the 1960s; now their forest is collapsing around them. Their chief, Kotok, a middle-aged man with an easy smile and Three Stooges hairdo that belie his fierce authority, believes that's no coincidence. "We are people of the forest, and the whites are destroying our home," says Kotok, who wore a ceremonial beaded belt, a digital watch, a pair of flip-flops and nothing else. "It's all because of money."

Kotok knows nothing about biofuels. He's more concerned about his tribe's recent tendency to waste its precious diesel-powered generator watching late-night soap operas. But he's right. Deforestation can be a complex process; for example, land reforms enacted by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva have attracted slash-and-burn squatters to the forest, and "use it or lose it" incentives have spurred some landowners to deforest to avoid redistribution.

The basic problem is that the Amazon is worth more deforested than it is intact. Carter, who fell in love with the region after marrying a Brazilian and taking over her father's ranch, says the rate of deforestation closely tracks commodity prices on the Chicago Board of Trade. "It's just exponential right now because the economics are so good," he says. "Everything tillable or grazeable is gouged out and cleared."

That the destruction is taking place in Brazil is sadly ironic, given that the nation is also an exemplar of the allure of biofuels. Sugar growers here have a greener story to tell than do any other biofuel producers. They provide 45% of Brazil's fuel (all cars in the country are able to run on ethanol) on only 1% of its arable land. They've reduced fertilizer use while increasing yields, and they convert leftover biomass into electricity. Marcos Jank, the head of their trade group, urges me not to lump biofuels together: "Grain is good for bread, not for cars. But sugar is different." Jank expects production to double by 2015 with little effect on the Amazon. "You'll see the expansion on cattle pastures and the Cerrado," he says.

So far, he's right. There isn't much sugar in the Amazon. But my next stop was the Cerrado, south of the Amazon, an ecological jewel in its own right. The Amazon gets the ink, but the Cerrado is the world's most biodiverse savanna, with 10,000 species of plants, nearly half of which are found nowhere else on earth, and more mammals than the African bush. In the natural Cerrado, I saw toucans and macaws, puma tracks and a carnivorous flower that lures flies by smelling like manure. The Cerrado's trees aren't as tall or dense as the Amazon's, so they don't store as much carbon, but the region is three times the size of Texas, so it stores its share.

At least it did, before it was transformed by the march of progress--first into pastures, then into sugarcane and soybean fields. In one field I saw an array of ovens cooking trees into charcoal, spewing Cerrado's carbon into the atmosphere; those ovens used to be ubiquitous, but most of the trees are gone. I had to travel hours through converted Cerrado to see a 96-acre (39 hectare) sliver of intact Cerrado, where a former shopkeeper named Lauro Barbosa had spent his life savings for a nature preserve. "The land prices are going up, up, up," Barbosa told me. "My friends say I'm a fool, and my wife almost divorced me. But I wanted to save something before it's all gone."

The environmental cost of this cropland creep is now becoming apparent. One groundbreaking new study in Science concluded that when this deforestation effect is taken into account, corn ethanol and soy biodiesel produce about twice the emissions of gasoline. Sugarcane ethanol is much cleaner, and biofuels created from waste products that don't gobble up land have real potential, but even cellulosic ethanol increases overall emissions when its plant source is grown on good cropland. "People don't want to believe renewable fuels could be bad," says the lead author, Tim Searchinger, a Princeton scholar and former Environmental Defense attorney. "But when you realize we're tearing down rain forests that store loads of carbon to grow crops that store much less carbon, it becomes obvious."

The growing backlash against biofuels is a product of the law of unintended consequences. It may seem obvious now that when biofuels increase demand for crops, prices will rise and farms will expand into nature. But biofuel technology began on a small scale, and grain surpluses were common. Any ripples were inconsequential. When the scale becomes global, the outcome is entirely different, which is causing cheerleaders for biofuels to recalibrate. "We're all looking at the numbers in an entirely new way," says the Natural Resources Defense Council's Nathanael Greene, whose optimistic "Growing Energy" report in 2004 helped galvanize support for biofuels among green groups.

Several of the most widely cited experts on the environmental benefits of biofuels are warning about the environmental costs now that they've recognized the deforestation effect. "The situation is a lot more challenging than a lot of us thought," says University of California, Berkeley, professor Alexander Farrell, whose 2006 Science article calculating the emissions reductions of various ethanols used to be considered the definitive analysis. The experts haven't given up on biofuels; they're calling for better biofuels that won't trigger massive carbon releases by displacing wildland. Robert Watson, the top scientist at the U.K.'s Department for the Environment, recently warned that mandating more biofuel usage--as the European Union is proposing--would be "insane" if it increases greenhouse gases. But the forces that biofuels have unleashed--political, economic, social--may now be too powerful to constrain.

America the Bio-Foolish

The best place to see this is America's biofuel mecca: Iowa. Last year fewer than 2% of U.S. gas stations offered ethanol, and the country produced 7 billion gal. (26.5 billion L) of biofuel, which cost taxpayers at least $8 billion in subsidies. But on Nov. 6, at a biodiesel plant in Newton, Iowa, Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled an eye-popping plan that would require all stations to offer ethanol by 2017 while mandating 60 billion gal. (227 billion L) by 2030. "This is the fuel for a much brighter future!" she declared. Barack Obama immediately criticized her--not for proposing such an expansive plan but for failing to support ethanol before she started trolling for votes in Iowa's caucuses.

If biofuels are the new dotcoms, Iowa is Silicon Valley, with 53,000 jobs and $1.8 billion in income dependent on the industry. The state has so many ethanol distilleries under construction that it's poised to become a net importer of corn. That's why biofuel-pandering has become virtually mandatory for presidential contenders. John McCain was the rare candidate who vehemently opposed ethanol as an outrageous agribusiness boondoggle, which is why he skipped Iowa in 2000. But McCain learned his lesson in time for this year's caucuses. By 2006 he was calling ethanol a "vital alternative energy source."

Members of Congress love biofuels too, not only because so many dream about future Iowa caucuses but also because so few want to offend the farm lobby, the most powerful force behind biofuels on Capitol Hill. Ethanol isn't about just Iowa or even the Midwest anymore. Plants are under construction in New York, Georgia, Oregon and Texas, and the ethanol boom's effect on prices has helped lift farm incomes to record levels nationwide.

Someone is paying to support these environmentally questionable industries: you. In December, President Bush signed a bipartisan energy bill that will dramatically increase support to the industry while mandating 36 billion gal. (136 billion L) of biofuel by 2022. This will provide a huge boost to grain markets.

Why is so much money still being poured into such a misguided enterprise? Like the scientists and environmentalists, many politicians genuinely believe biofuels can help decrease global warming. It makes intuitive sense: cars emit carbon no matter what fuel they burn, but the process of growing plants for fuel sucks some of that carbon out of the atmosphere. For years, the big question was whether those reductions from carbon sequestration outweighed the "life cycle" of carbon emissions from farming, converting the crops to fuel and transporting the fuel to market. Researchers eventually concluded that yes, biofuels were greener than gasoline. The improvements were only about 20% for corn ethanol because tractors, petroleum-based fertilizers and distilleries emitted lots of carbon. But the gains approached 90% for more efficient fuels, and advocates were confident that technology would progressively increase benefits.

There was just one flaw in the calculation: the studies all credited fuel crops for sequestering carbon, but no one checked whether the crops would ultimately replace vegetation and soils that sucked up even more carbon. It was as if the science world assumed biofuels would be grown in parking lots. The deforestation of Indonesia has shown that's not the case. It turns out that the carbon lost when wilderness is razed overwhelms the gains from cleaner-burning fuels. A study by University of Minnesota ecologist David Tilman concluded that it will take more than 400 years of biodiesel use to "pay back" the carbon emitted by directly clearing peat lands to grow palm oil; clearing grasslands to grow corn for ethanol has a payback period of 93 years. The result is that biofuels increase demand for crops, which boosts prices, which drives agricultural expansion, which eats forests. Searchinger's study concluded that overall, corn ethanol has a payback period of about 167 years because of the deforestation it triggers.

Not every kernel of corn diverted to fuel will be replaced. Diversions raise food prices, so the poor will eat less. That's the reason a U.N. food expert recently called agrofuels a "crime against humanity." Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute says that biofuels pit the 800 million people with cars against the 800 million people with hunger problems. Four years ago, two University of Minnesota researchers predicted the ranks of the hungry would drop to 625 million by 2025; last year, after adjusting for the inflationary effects of biofuels, they increased their prediction to 1.2 billion.

Industry advocates say that as farms increase crop yields, as has happened throughout history, they won't need as much land. They'll use less energy, and they'll use farm waste to generate electricity. To which Searchinger says: Wonderful! But growing fuel is still an inefficient use of good cropland. Strange as it sounds, we're better off growing food and drilling for oil. Sure, we should conserve fuel and buy efficient cars, but we should keep filling them with gas if the alternatives are dirtier.

The lesson behind the math is that on a warming planet, land is an incredibly precious commodity, and every acre used to generate fuel is an acre that can't be used to generate the food needed to feed us or the carbon storage needed to save us. Searchinger acknowledges that biofuels can be a godsend if they don't use arable land. Possible feedstocks include municipal trash, agricultural waste, algae and even carbon dioxide, although none of the technologies are yet economical on a large scale. Tilman even holds out hope for fuel crops--he's been experimenting with Midwestern prairie grasses--as long as they're grown on "degraded lands" that can no longer support food crops or cattle.

Changing the Incentives

That's certainly not what's going on in Brazil. There's a frontier feel to the southern Amazon right now. Gunmen go by names like Lizard and Messiah, and Carter tells harrowing stories about decapitations and castrations and hostages. Brazil has remarkably strict environmental laws--in the Amazon, landholders are permitted to deforest only 20% of their property--but there's not much law enforcement. I left Kotok to see Blairo Maggi, who is not only the soybean king of the world, with nearly half a million acres (200,000 hectares) in the province of Mato Grosso, but also the region's governor. "It's like your Wild West right now," Maggi says. "There's no money for enforcement, so people do what they want."

Maggi has been a leading pioneer on the Brazilian frontier, and it irks him that critics in the U.S.--which cleared its forests and settled its frontier 125 years ago but still provides generous subsidies to its farmers--attack him for doing the same thing except without subsidies and with severe restrictions on deforestation. Imagine Iowa farmers agreeing to keep 80%--or even 20%--of their land in native prairie grass. "You make us sound like bandits," Maggi tells me. "But we want to achieve what you achieved in America. We have the same dreams for our families. Are you afraid of the competition?"

Maggi got in trouble recently for saying he'd rather feed a child than save a tree, but he's come to recognize the importance of the forest. "Now I want to feed a child and save a tree," he says with a grin. But can he do all that and grow fuel for the world as well? "Ah, now you've hit the nail on the head." Maggi says the biofuel boom is making him richer, but it's also making it harder to feed children and save trees. "There are many mouths to feed, and nobody's invented a chip to create protein without growing crops," says his pal Homero Pereira, a congressman who is also the head of Mato Grosso's farm bureau. "If you don't want us to tear down the forest, you better pay us to leave it up!"

Everyone I interviewed in Brazil agreed: the market drives behavior, so without incentives to prevent deforestation, the Amazon is doomed. It's unfair to ask developing countries not to develop natural areas without compensation. Anyway, laws aren't enough. Carter tried confronting ranchers who didn't obey deforestation laws and nearly got killed; now his nonprofit is developing certification programs to reward eco-sensitive ranchers. "People see the forest as junk," he says. "If you want to save it, you better open your pocketbook. Plus, you might not get shot."

The trouble is that even if there were enough financial incentives to keep the Amazon intact, high commodity prices would encourage deforestation elsewhere. And government mandates to increase biofuel production are going to boost commodity prices, which will only attract more investment. Until someone invents that protein chip, it's going to mean the worst of everything: higher food prices, more deforestation and more emissions.

Advocates are always careful to point out that biofuels are only part of the solution to global warming, that the world also needs more energy-efficient lightbulbs and homes and factories and lifestyles. And the world does need all those things. But the world is still going to be fighting an uphill battle until it realizes that right now, biofuels aren't part of the solution at all. They're part of the problem.

I am not a climate change fearmonger, but I grow increasingly concerned about my and my children's futures the more that I learn and see...

A few politics notes

W on climate change: Dumb president, or the dumbest president? We all know it's the latter.

It looks like the war's cost will continue to be stealing from our nation's crumbling infrastructure, until the failed occupation comes to an end. Barack has a plan to invest the war's capital into exactly this sector, establishing a national infrastructure bank.

One of the far-right's favorite hangouts, Town Hall, gets absurd (as usual) with "Would Jesus Carry Concealed?". Jesus' General has an intellectually-on-par response: of course! As I've pointed out before, "The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?" (1 Cor. 6:7 NIV) and Jesus said, "And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well." (Matt. 5:40, NIV). Jesus also talked about turning the other cheek, walking an additional mile...&c. How different religious ideals seem from their practice in reality.

Tangentially, this article reviewing the first four presidents' views on church-state separation is great:

I've pointed out many times the basic split among the first four presidents on such matters. Washington and Adams were what might be called non-coercive accommodationists, while Jefferson and Madison were strict separationists. Washington and Adams believed that the government should provide a general and rhetorical support to religion through proclamations of days of thanksgiving and prayer, but only if those proclamations were kept non-coercive (that is, no one was required to follow them) and they were worded very broadly so as to encompass almost any religious belief, not merely Christianity.

As the general election looms, hanging Bush around McCain's neck is quite easily done. See the new ad, "McSame as Bush":

More animal outrage

I just read the CNN article about the largest beef recall in American history, and watching the accompanying video made me want to cry and punch the slaughterhouse workers at the same time. They take these poor sick diseased animals that are unable to stand and jab them with electric prods, stab them with forklifts, drag them by ropes attached to one foot...

The animals literally scream in pain. It's horrible. If you can't see the ethical implications, you're not capable of rational thought.

If you want to see more animal abuse TV, see here. If you need rational arguments for becoming a vegetarian, or at least cutting meat down to a rare item in your diet, see here. As I said a few months ago, some people just don't understand the environmental impacts of the meat industry -- how much of our fresh water supplies are polluted and how much forest is burned simply to raise cattle. The toll is significant. It really can't be overstated. For those interested in sustainability and the relationship between oil and agriculture, the data is out there.

"Meet your Meat" (12:28), narrated by Alec Baldwin, follows below:

Oil industry conference

The question is not that at some point in the future, demand for oil will outstrip production. The question is whether it has already come.

Another CNN Money article examines the question of peak oil, which I've written on here and here within the past few months. There are a few eye-opening quotes from oil industry executives:

"An oil crisis is coming, and sooner than most people think," said John Hess, chief executive of Hess Corp (HES, Fortune 500)., the integrated oil and gas company with 2006 sales of $29 billion. "All oil producers are not investing enough today."

Rising income of consumers has propped up demand even as crude prices have spiked five fold in the past six years. Hess offered some perspective: On a unit-to-unit basis, oil is still about 10 times cheaper than a Starbucks latte.

Runaway growth in oil use in India and China - the two countries are expected to boast a combined 1.2 billion vehicles by 2050, up from 20 million a few years ago - is expected to push demand above supply sometime between 2015 and 2020, Hess said.

"It's not a matter of endowment, it's a matter of investment," he said.

A small but growing number of analysts disagree with Hess' assertion that there is enough oil in the ground. They say production of oil has peaked or will peak soon, followed by a slow but steady period of decline that could cause major social unrest.

Oil executives, while acknowledging that crude deposits are ultimately limited, said that new technologies should keep crude production rising for at least several decades.

"Many perceive the supply challenge as one of scarcity," said Mark Albers, a senior vice president at Exxon Mobil (XOM, Fortune 500). "There is no question oil is a finite resource, but it's far from finished."

Albers pointed to a U.S. government survey saying the world has three trillion barrels of oil left - compared to the one trillion used so far in history.

The question is how those three billion barrels are stored: are they heavy crude? Shale oil deposits? Far below conventional drilling limits at around 5 miles?

Many of these reserves would be more expensive to produce than the current price of oil would make profitable. Obviously, if we narrow our supply down to these reserves, the price would escalate further and make recovery economically feasible. However, at those same prices, producing energy from alternative and renewable resources would be morally, environmentally and economically superior.

Even as they claim that there is still plenty of oil left, they ignore the essential question of whether the rate of production can keep up with the rate of demand. The short and simple answer is...no.

Later in the article there are some admissions from executives that the oil industry will have to play a positive role in addressing climate change. They sound more realistic than the chimp-in-chief...whose days, by the way, are thankfully numbered:

Wake-up call for carnivores

My wife and I have been meatless for a long time now. It feels really good, and though we occasionally (once a month?) used to have fish/seafood, we are cutting that out entirely now. An eye-opening report in the NYT explains the global, environmental and economic impact of American's carnivorism.

Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.

To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.

Read it all.

Some people just don't understand the environmental impacts of the meat industry -- how much of our fresh water supplies are polluted and how much forest is burned simply to raise cattle. The toll is significant. It really can't be overstated. For those interested in sustainability and the relationship between oil and agriculture, the data is out there.

Deep Thoughts (with Jack Handey): Oil, v2

In the first installment of deep thoughts on oil, I tried to distance myself from a claim that we're on the right side of the Hubbert curve with respect to oil production.

Even the most optimistic scenarios have the right-side of the curve pushed out to 2040 or so:

Now, as I pointed out in the first installment, along with the higher price of oil comes new methodologies of extraction, like shale oil. These same sorts of development may push the availability of oil out for another 500 or 1000 years, but the question/problem is the rate of production versus rate of consumption. At the risk of sounding like cursed Cassandra, I now have a few more authoritative voices to back up my fears: consider The Economist's article this week on C. de Margerie, CEO of Total Oil.

Mr de Margerie's opinions also stand out, at least within the ranks of senior oilmen. Last year he declared that the world would never be able to increase its output of oil from the current level of 85m barrels per day (b/d) to 100m b/d, let alone the 120m b/d that energy analysts predict will be needed by 2030. That is in stark contrast with the view of Rex Tillerson, the chief executive of Total's larger American rival, Exxon Mobil, who argues that the world is neither short of oil, nor likely to be any time soon. It also contradicts the line of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which claims that the only thing that prevents its members from producing more oil is the fear that no one will buy it.
...
Mr de Margerie is careful to point out that he is not predicting “peak oil” in a geological sense. His definition of peak oil is “when supply cannot meet demand”. He believes that the fuel that the world needs to keep its cars and factories running may well be out there, somewhere. It is just getting harder and harder to extract, for technical as well as political reasons. For one thing, he points out, the output of existing fields is declining by 5m-6m b/d every year. That means that oil firms have to find lots of new fields just to keep production at today's levels. Moreover, the sorts of fields that Western oil firms are starting to develop, in very deep water, or of nearly solid, tar-like oil, are ever more technically challenging. There is not enough skilled labour and fancy equipment in the world, he believes, to ramp up production as quickly as people hope.
...
Perhaps the best measure of Mr de Margerie's gloomy outlook for the oil industry is his eagerness to get Total into nuclear power. Though he says he is not about to increase Total's token 1% stake in Areva, France's nuclear-engineering giant, he clearly sees nuclear energy as part of Total's future. Why would an oil firm want to enter such a controversial field, unless it feels that it is already out on a limb?

Although I doubt we'll see doomsday scenarios like this one playing out any time soon, it is necessary to be mindful of how many other predictions about oil have been wrong -- like how, back in August, experts declared it would never go up to $100/barrel. I'm ready to buy that Honda hydrogen car & power station now.

Thanks for the economic train-wreck, GOP

This is what we have to reap after 7 years of sowing "greed gone wild" laissez-faire economics:


From Chris at Americablog:

The greenback bounced on lows not seen since the Nixon years (the trend continues in 2008), the price of gas both per barrel and at the pump hit new highs, discrepancy between rich and poor increased, health care costs jumped yet again and housing collapsed to lows last witnessed under Bush I. As we enter 2008, the first day of trading on Wall Street was the worst in 25 years. On the same day, gold hit an all time high and oil crossed the critical $100 per barrel mark.

Does anyone trust Bush to fix this? Yeah, me neither.

My prediction: the DJIA will hit its lowest level since a year ago -- around 12,000. Of course, I'm no economist...but this guy is, and he sees big trouble ahead. Now it's Krugman's turn to chime in. If you want to vote on facebook on the state of the economy, click here.

This guy thinks there is a speculation bubble in alternative energy markets. He lays out more here. All I can say is, "I hope not," because I really want to see solar/wind/nuclear take off and soar.

The future is now

Honda has thrown down the gauntlet on H₂ fuel cell vehicles.

Availability of H₂ filling stations will hinder the distribution of the vehicle, although hydrogen infrastructure will eventually morph into existing gasoline stations. And, if it doesn't, no worries: the home power station Honda has been working on for years can solve that problem.

The idea is simple -- use solar cells to "split water" and form your own fuel at home, as shown in the figure below:


The most beautiful thing about this is that gas/oil/coal companies can't do a goddamned thing to stop people from buying these home units and choosing hydrogen. They can (and probably will) slow the distribution of hydrogen at filling stations by basically refusing to integrate the new technology at the rate at which they are capable. This compounds the already-noted issues with transitioning to a hydrogen economy.

I can't wait until oil goes the way of the dodo. Unfortunately, that won't probably happen for a loooooong time.

Kudos to Honda.