The Unwoven Rainbow

A long time ago (1995), Jared Diamond wrote a classic article that was published in Discover Magazine: Easter Island’s End.

I implore you to read this. Go do it, now. I don’t mind you leaving, and will be waiting patiently for you to return.

[And if you really cannot bring yourself to spend half an hour reading the whole article, then at least hit the most important part, which is the end: search on “All these strands of evidence” and go from there.]

Welcome back.

I remember seeing that article years ago, but back then it didn’t click with me; in light of things we (finally) understand now, it takes on a whole new meaning, doesn’t it?

The bottom line is that our society is consuming resources in a way that is completely unsustainable. We know from the history of other, long-dead civilizations what inevitably happens when resources are over-utilized; it is downright frightening. So far, all indications are that we are marching directly down this well-worn path. The really scary thing about this particular version of the nightmare is that, for the first time ever, we are doing this on a global scale.

We are depleting natural resources on so many fronts that the news is becoming numbing. Fish populations worldwide are crashing due to overfishing; extinction rates across the planet are unheard of in mankind’s history; we will very likely hit peak production of oil in this decade; there are impending production peaks of a number of other important resources over the next several decades (phosphorous, coal, some metals).

Even those of us in the ‘advanced’ world will soon experience food shortages stemming from soil depletion (due to agricultural misuse), fertilizer shortages (due to peak oil), and water shortages (due to overuse). We are witnessing a global financial meltdown that is due at least in part to rising energy costs. And our energy use is causing climate change that will, at the very least, exacerbate some of the above problems.

Now, with the onset of globally decreasing energy supplies, we are beginning a long (bumpy) ride down to a lower-consumption society. One implication of this is that a centuries-old economic assumption — growth in the long term — is no longer valid. There will be areas of growth, of course, but the days in which a long-term investment in a broad range of stocks will be profitable are drawing to a close.

Tied as it is to the depletion of the resources upon which we depend, Growth (as in global economic growth) will soon become a bad word. The decades-long trend of globalization is coming to an end, and everything about our lives will become much more local. The operational term of the coming centuries will be Sustainable.

What is most important now is to focus on the positive aspects of where we are headed and how to avoid the very possible catastrophes.

We need to face the fact that our children will have fewer material possessions than we have, and our grandchildren far fewer. In my opinion the overarching goal we should have as a society is to provide our descendants with the basics for a full life: water, food, shelter, personal safety, community, freedom, the opportunity for spirituality; and above all, the resources to pass on these opportunities to successive generations. That is ultimately what it means to be sustainable.

This means making some real sacrifices, now. The use of gasoline-powered vehicles has to drop dramatically. We need to eat more locally, and lower on the food chain. We each need to learn how to garden organically, and how to maintain the fertility of our land instead of wearing it out. We need to lower our thermostats in the winter and raise them in the summer, if we heat and cool at all. We need to travel long distances only rarely. We need to stop mindless consumption of goods. We need to live up to the adage “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without”. Awareness of our carbon footprint must go way up, as our footprints go way down.

We need to learn how to voluntarily limit our population (uhh, my bad, no more kids for me) or it will be limited for us in very undesirable ways (as it is already in some parts of the world).

Don’t kid yourself for a second that 1) politicians will lead the way out of this mess, or 2) technology will save us from it. On the first front, all politicians that have national exposure have exhibited complete ignorance of the reality or, to the extent that they understand the reality, will not participate in a discussion about it (because they understand that such a blunt discussion of the coming contraction is political death). On the second front: this is a complicated issue, and should be the subject of its own post. But it boils down to the fact that we will be running out of the very resources (especially energy) that could most help us manage a high-tech transition to lower energy. I’m convinced that the future is not one of mini-mansions powered by solar cells and everyone driving around in electric SUVs.

There is a saying: ‘We don’t inherit this world from our parents, we borrow it from our children.’ In less polite terms, to the extent that we don’t start radically conserving our resources, we are screwing over our own and our neighbors’ children and grandchildren. That doesn’t sound acceptable to me; how about you?

The positive aspects of where we’re headed? Yeah, there’s real potential. If we can learn to focus less on material possessions and more on the people, places, and nature around us, our lives (and those of our children) can become much more fulfilling.

But until we make some fundamental changes in our lifestyles, and stop using our resources in profoundly unsustainable ways, we should all consider ourselves

Honorary Graduates

of

The Easter Island School of Resource Management

Congratulations, everyone. And shame on us.

Now let’s get down to the hard individual and collective work of turning this situation around. The key word being NOW.

According to an energy audit I did last year, our hot water heater comes in (a distant) second in electricity consumption in our house, accounting for about 7% of our total use (our heat pump for central heating comes in first at ~40%, averaged over all seasons).

Since a timer to shut off a water heater during off-hours is pretty cheap (~$30), and I’ve read that using one of these is an effective way to cut energy consumption, I decided to get one. I got around to installing it this last weekend:

Right now it’s set to turn on a couple of hours before we get up, then turn off once everyone is out of the house in the morning. It turns on again in the evening for dishwashing and nighttime showers. All told, it will be on for about 8 hours a day. It has a manual switch that allows you to easily override the timer (say on the weekend, if you need a shower in the middle of the day); we just need to remember to hit the switch ahead of time.

Unfortunately, since the heater is on a 240 V circuit, I can’t trivially measure its consumption over long periods of time (like I can for appliances using a Kill-A-Watt). Yeah, I could wire something up to do this, but I’m not willing to put that much time into this investigation  ;-)  For the time being, I’ll have to judge effectiveness based on our total electricity consumption…

[My earlier audit was based on estimates of power consumption for the hot water heater and heater combined with measurements of most household appliances, tweaked to match actual consumption numbers from the power company.]

Something worth noting for the DIYer: I’ve done a modest amount of electrical work using 14 ga wire for typical circuits (ceiling fans, lights, etc.). This installation required 10 ga wiring, and the switch itself required working in some pretty tight areas. I had no idea how difficult it would be to wrestle this heavy wiring into place in those conditions… yikes!

A family member recently pointed me to a clip of Newt Gingrich advocating three ways to lower gas prices. Since I actually took some time to formulate a response, and it may be of broader interest, I thought I’d post it. Here goes:

Newt is a fairly smart guy, but I find some fault with his statements. And while some of his suggestions will pan out into long-term approaches, none of his Three Big Ideas will meaningfully lower the price of gas in the short term.

If you read any one article, it should be this one: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5326

Here’s a good synopsis of our current energy situation: http://energybulletin.net/node/45679

Big idea 1: Dump large amounts (~one third) of the Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPR) to punish speculators.

The short-term effect would be really interesting to see, but I don’t think there would be a big — or beneficial — long term effect.

I completely disagree with Newt’s assessment that speculation accounts for $50 / barrel of oil. I think that he fundamentally doesn’t understand how futures work.

I can’t explain the issue as well as an expert, so I won’t try. Here’s a good article from a guy (Samuelson) who knows the subject: http://www.newsweek.com/id/143786

That said, it’s an interesting idea (forget the fact that Newt is pooping on the concept of letting the market run freely — kinda surprising to hear anti-capitalist rhetoric from him)… But it is pissing in the wind.

As of 6/27 the SPR holds about 280 M barrels of sweet oil and another 420 M barrels of sour. Roughly speaking, 1/3 of this reserve is 10 days worth of US usage (the US consumes ~22 M barrels of crude per day).

Does Newt really believe that dumping a *10 day supply of crude* onto the market would have some kind of lasting effect on crude prices?? I suspect he’s smarter than that, and is just using this as a political gimmick.

Big idea 2: Look for oil where it is.

He has some points, but in these and some subsequent statements, Newt ignores (or maybe is ignorant of) some important facts surrounding shale oil and offshore / wilderness drilling.

In [shale oil reserves] we have three times the oil of Saudi Arabia.

This is the most interesting prospect for future development (but I wasn’t aware that anyone was attempting to stop this effort; last I knew, development was underway). Yes, there is a *lot* of potentially recoverable oil in the western US in shale (mostly Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming). This has been known for decades, but back in the early ’80s all the oil majors stopped trying to get this stuff because at the time it just wasn’t worth the effort. Now Shell has an experimental in-situ process that they think will make extraction economically feasible on a large scale. How environmentally damaging the process is remains to be seen (does oil leach into the groundwater?, etc.). Probably the biggest hurdle is that it requires a *lot* of water input; it would put significant additional strain on the Colorado, which western states are already over-taxing.

Claimed EROI (energy return on investment, or the ratio of energy out to energy expended getting it) for Shell’s new process is somewhere between 3:1 and 7:1. This used to mean it was not worth the trouble to extract (compared to, say, 35:1 for conventional oil at the turn of the century), but of course times have changed.

A government study estimates that we could get 2 M barrels per day of syncrude from shale by 2020. That’s 10% of the current US consumption. Shell’s production won’t scale up until ~2015 at soonest (right now they’re charging ahead with field tests), so it won’t provide any immediate relief. It certainly isn’t a return to lots of cheap oil, but it will help reduce our dependence on imports. And there is enough to supplement our supply for a long time (which sucks for climate change, but hey…). Apparently Shell owns a ton of patents on this new process, which could make for some nice profiteering 

New discoveries. Drilling off the shores of the US.

Yes, we’re occasionally finding new fields, but so far they are not compensating for the decline of the supergiant fields (Saudi Arabia, Mexico, North Sea) that have been keeping us going so far. And the EROI is much lower than existing fields, meaning the resulting product will be fairly expensive.

Whether opening up offshore US drilling would amount to much is the subject of plenty of debate. We just don’t know at this point, but it’s not likely to be more than 5% or maybe 10% of current US consumption.

The ‘huge’ new Brazilian discovery Newt mentions? If we could extract all of that oil, it amounts to *less than a three year supply* for the world at current consumption rates.

These new discoveries will probably be supplying some fraction of our energy over the longer term, but as far as short term relief goes, they aren’t much help. It typically takes anywhere from 10 to 30 years to bring these new discoveries on line. Of course if we head into a major global recession or depression, all bets are off.

Bottom line is that, while we will undoubtedly start leaning more and more on shale oil, new discoveries, and tar sands, they will not replace conventional crude as it is currently consumed. Nor will they bring back cheap gas. And we’re going to pay environmentally (both from extraction processes and from the resulting carbon emissions).

ANWR.

I think this one is a no-brainer. The relatively modest amount of crude available from there (enough to supply the US for about *5 months*) is not worth the environmental damage that will result. And it would be about 10 years before we brought these fields online, so no short-term relief anyway.

Here’s a quote from Roger Blanchard (from an article in the Energy Bulletin):

Desperate people do desperate things. As Americans become more desperate for oil, I expect that ANWR and offshore areas will be opened for oil development. It will be like burning the furniture to keep the house warm in mid-January. It will be a desperate move that won’t result in much.

IMO, we should be looking at these sources of hydrocarbons as a one-time gift to be used with some discretion, and only for meaningful purposes (manufacturing input to pharmaceuticals, important plastics, etc.). They should be something we try to keep around for our grandchildren, and not waste by powering our SUV down the road to the local 7-11. But humans as a whole have shown they don’t have that sort of self-restraint, so I don’t kid myself  :-/

That said, I’ve heard one interesting argument for drilling now as opposed to waiting: these operations to extract hard-to-reach oil require large, technically challenging infrastructure, and in a few decades we may no longer have the manufacturing capabilities necessary to *ever* extract the oil. Good point but IMO, at the end of the day we’re not going to store away those last wonderful hydrocarbons for future medical or food or life-saving purposes, they will just go into the gasoline tanks of the extremely wealthy. If that’s the case, I think we as a society should decide to keep them in the ground.

Tar sands (oil sands) (Newt didn’t mentioned this, but as long as I’m rambling…).

It is true that producing syncrude from tar sands (which is what Canada has so much of) is economically viable with crude prices where they are. EROI is between 5:1 and 6:1 according to most research. But producing it requires lots of natural gas and water (both will quickly become limiting factors in large-scale production), and it is *very* damaging to the environment (Canadians are increasingly calling for a stop to tar sands extraction, though I don’t think they have much of a chance there). Right now it looks like tar sands will be a small, very messy energy supplement, not a major source.

Here’s Al Gore on getting oil from the tar sands of Canada (Rolling Stone, July 2006):

For every barrel of oil they extract there, they have to use enough natural gas to heat a family’s home for four days. And they have to tear up four tons of landscape, all for one barrel of oil. It is truly nuts. But you know, junkies find veins in their toes. It seems reasonable, to them, because they’ve lost sight of the rest of their lives.

Big idea 3: Maximize use of alternative fuels.

Cool-o technology solutions (trash into fuel, etc.).

Good luck. I don’t have a lot of faith in these efforts. And as far as clever ways to manufacture syncrude, my enthusiasm is tempered by the realization that we are only doing our best to ensure that we cross a tipping point beyond which climate change is irreversible. Excellent.

Nuclear.

I generally agree that nuclear will be important in the next few decades, but remember two things: 1) New capacity takes something like 10 - 20 years to come online, and 2) Uranium supplies look like they are going to peak soon too.

Newt is correct that nuclear is a ’steady state’ (i.e., constant) source of power (as opposed to, say, wind or solar), but his comments about using excess in off hours to create hydrogen for energy storage implies that we will *have an excess* of electrical power. I seriously doubt that will be the case.

Newt is right that a transition to alternative energy is a huge, huge undertaking. My sense is that the energy crunch in the near term is going to hurt the US and global economies enough so that we may not make that massive transition before permanently ‘powering down’. But powering down may not be a bad thing. For one, it just may keep carbon emissions low enough to avoid crossing an environmental tipping point beyond which severe climate changes make things get very ugly. Though we may already be too late for that.

Or in powering down we may rely too much on coal, which may be the worst-case scenario.

Ugh. I dunno.