Energy Crash & The Limits to Growth

The NEW Oil Age Poster (Dec 2010)

2011-02-02T09:20:00.000-08:00

This is the newly updated December 2010 edition of The Oil Age Poster. Oil forms the basis of our industrial age, powering everything we know as modern, from automobiles to airplanes to power plants to plastics. Colorful and authoritative, this poster traces the history of the Oil Age from its beginnings in the hills of western Pennsylvania to its rise as the engine of global industrial economies.

Two hundred years of the Oil Age are depicted in the poster's main chart, which features a colorful year-by-year rendering of Colin Campbell's Depletion Model. Historical annotations as well as detailed data on production, trade and reserves make this poster a versatile tool for presenting the realities and implications of global oil production and its impending peak.

The Best of The Oil Drum 2005-2010

2010-11-23T09:23:00.000-08:00

During the past 5 years ToD have had a continuing stream of energy-related content. In the busiest of times, with a staff of over 20 volunteers, ToD were posting two articles or analyses per day. Oft times 50-60 hours of work (or more) on a post resulted in only 12 hours live on the main page.Here is a list containing, in the opinion of each author, the 'Best of The Oil Drum' from the past 5 years. The meta-list is in alphabetical order, by author last name. Much if not most of this material is still highly relevant today. If you are interested in learning about energy and society, please consider bookmarking this archive as a resource.

The End of Growth by Richard Heinberg

2010-11-15T10:33:00.000-08:00

Excerpt from MuseLetter #222 / November 2010 by Richard Heinberg

Download printable PDF version here (PDF, 132 KB)

This is the second Museletter containing an excerpt from the upcoming book which has the working title 'The End of Growth'. The book is set for publication in July 2011.

The End of Growth

Introduction: The New Normal

The central assertion of this book is both simple and startling: Economic growth as we have known it is over and done with.

The “growth” we are talking about consists of the expansion of the overall size of the economy (with more people being served and more money changing hands) and of the quantities of energy and material goods flowing through it.

The economic crisis that began in 2007-2008 was both foreseeable and inevitable, and it marks a permanent, fundamental break from past decades—a period during which most economists adopted the unrealistic view that perpetual economic growth is necessary and also possible to achieve. There are now fundamental barriers to ongoing economic expansion, and the world is colliding with those barriers.

This is not to say the U.S. or the world as a whole will never see another quarter or year of growth relative to the previous quarter or year. However, when the bumps are averaged out, the general trend-line of the economy (measured in terms of production and consumption of real goods) will be level or downward rather than upward from now on.

Nor will it be impossible for any region, nation, or business to continue growing for a while. Some will. In the final analysis, however, this growth will have been achieved at the expense of other regions, nations, or businesses. From now on, only relative growth is possible: the global economy is playing a zero-sum game, with an ever-shrinking pot to be divided among the winners.

[via MuseLetter read full article there]

The Coming Oil Crisis & Why You Should Care

2010-11-12T09:23:00.000-08:00

On the Financial Sense Newshour this week, Jim Puplava is pleased to have Dr. Colin Campbell on the program. Dr. Campbell, a pioneer in the field of peak oil, believes the effects of peak oil are coming sooner than expected, and the warnings from experts around the globe are largely being ignored by the politicians.

Dr. Campbell is now a Trustee of the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre ("ODAC") in the United Kingdom, a charitable organisation in London that is dedicated to researching the date and impact of the peak and decline of world oil production due to resource constraints, and raising awareness of the serious consequences. He has published extensively, and his recent articles have stimulated lively debate. His views are provocative yet carry the weight of a wide international experience.

A Brief History of Fossil Fuels - THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER RIDE

2010-11-10T11:07:00.000-08:00

THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER RIDE: A Brief History of Fossil Fuels
by Richard Heinberg

Fossil fuels have powered human growth and ingenuity for centuries. Now that we're reaching the end of cheap and abundant oil and coal supplies, we're in for an exciting ride. While there's a real risk that we'll fall off a cliff, there's still time to control our transition to a post-carbon future.

And now, for your viewing and sharing pleasure we bring you 300 YEARS OF FOSSIL FUELED GROWTH IN 5 MINUTES:

Written and narrated by PCI Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg.
Animated by the wonderful team at MONSTRO DESIGN.

[via postcarbon.org]

The Next Oil Shock? - Report

2010-10-22T08:36:00.000-07:00

The Economics and Industry Team of New Zealand Parliamentary Library has published a new research paper: The Next Oil Shock?

The Conclusion of the report

The global economy is heavily dependent on affordable oil.

It may seem counter-intuitive that, when oil reserves and production capacityare higher than ever, the future of the oil market appears bleak. The problem is that production capacity is not expected to keep up with demand. That fact leads to severe economic consequences.

To replace the declining production from existing oil wells and increase production, oil companies are forced to extract oil in more difficult and expensive conditions (deep-water, oil sands, lignite to liquids) from smaller, less favourable reserves. The marginal (price-setting) barrel of oil costs around US$75-$85 a barrel to produce. This will continue to rise with higher demand and exhaustion of reserves.

Although there remain large reserves of oil which can be extracted, the world’s daily capacity to extract oil cannot keep increasing indefinitely. A point will be reached where it is not economically and physically feasible to replace the declining production from existing wells and add new production fast enough for total production capacity to increase. Projections from the IEA and other groups have this occurring, at least temporarily, as soon as 2012.

The difference between the global capacity to produce oil and global demand is the supply buffer. When the supply buffer is large, oil prices will be low. When the supply buffer shrinks - due to demand rising faster than production capacity or production capacity falling - prices will rise as markets add in the risk that supply will not be available to meet demand at any given point in time.

When a supply crunch forces oil prices beyond a certain point, the cost of oil forces consumers and businesses to cut other spending, inducing a recession. The recession destroys demand for oil, allowing prices to drop. Major international organisations are warning of another supply crunch as soon as 2012.

The world may be entering an era defined by relatively short periods of economic growth terminating in oil price spikes and recession.

New Zealand is not immune to the consequences of this situation. In fact, its dependency on bulk exports and tourism makes New Zealand very vulnerable to oil shocks.

The End of Oil as We Know It - 2010 ASPO-USA Conference

2010-10-18T09:34:00.000-07:00

Global Energy Experts Agree: We are Facing the End of Oil as We Know It WASHINGTON (October 12, 2010): Economists, activists, technical experts and policymakers from across the political spectrum gathered here, October 7-9, to discuss the global energy crisis. After 150 years of oil extraction; most major oil exporting nations are well past their supply peaks, defined by scientists as “Peak Oil.” At the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas’ (ASPO-USA) sixth annual conference speakers offered a single, coherent picture of a world unprepared to encounter energy limits, petroleum scarcity and the inevitable—and possibly unprecedented—rise in prices. “We are on the brink of a major energy crisis,” stated Jim Baldauf, President of ASPO-USA. “The era of low-cost, easy to get oil has come to an end. Yet, our society is heavily dependent on oil and we have no contingency plan. It is our goal every year to bring together the world’s best global energy experts to grapple with solutions to this catastrophic situation and discuss the future.”

The presentation files of the 2010 World Oil Conference have been posted on the aspo-usa web site including:

The Impending World Energy Mess Keynote Presentation by Robert L. Hirsch
Economy & Energy by Chris Martenson
Energy and Financial Crisis by Nicole Foss of The Automatic Earth
The End of Investment by John Michael Greer of The Archdruid Report
Where are we now? by André Angelantoni of postpeakliving.com
& more

Can Oil Production Meet Rising Global Demand?

2010-10-15T07:35:00.000-07:00

On October 7, 2010, the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) held a briefing on challenges facing the oil industry to keep pace with rising global demand, and the potential implications for oil prices, national security, and the world economy. Numerous sources project demand for liquid fuels to rise to historically unprecedented levels once the global economy recovers from the recent recession. Global oil production, meanwhile, has leveled off since 2005, real oil prices have roughly doubled, and spare capacity has tightened, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Potential constraints on global oil production have raised concerns among industry observers, military leaders, and policymakers. This briefing examined the economic, technical, and political factors that influence the rate at which oil is extracted and processed, and how patterns of global oil production are changing.

Can Oil Production Meet Rising Global Demand?

Some Highlights from Speaker Presentations

The challenge facing world oil production is not a problem of how much oil is in the ground (i.e. resources), but rather the rate at which oil can be economically recovered from proven reserves. That rate is constrained by a complex combination of economic, technical, geologic, and geopolitical factors.
The International Energy Agency projects that production of conventional oil from currently developed fields will decline by 20-30 million barrels per day by 2020. Meanwhile, global demand is projected to rise from approximately 85 million barrels per day at present to nearly 100 million barrels per day by 2020.
To date, growth in estimated world oil reserves has kept up with growth in global consumption. Most of this increase, however, has been from adjustments in the estimates of existing reserves. The rate of discovery of new oil fields has been dropping steadily since the 1960s, and is now well below the rate of global consumption.

The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future Of Our Economy, Energy, And Environment

2010-10-12T08:03:00.000-07:00

Chris Martenson is now dedicating his life to educating people, or giving them a "Crash Course" on the three E's: the Economy, Energy, and the Environment, so they can make better choices in the future. He wants people to understand:

How completely dependent the 3e’s are on each other
The unsustainable current trajectory they are on
The changes that could have on our future (not just another housing crisis or recession, but also things like food supply shortage due to contamination, like the one we recently experienced with eggs, but on a larger scale, or the likelihood of more big natural disasters or disease outbreaks because of environmental shifts caused by global warming, etc.)
How to recognize those changes ahead of time and prepare yourself, BEFORE it happens

Chris first introduced this Crash Course as a video series which he offers on his website for free.

Tim Jackson's economic reality check

2010-10-07T08:10:00.000-07:00

A new TED Talk Video by Tim Jackson

As the world faces recession, climate change, inequity and more, Tim Jackson delivers a piercing challenge to established economic principles, explaining how we might stop feeding the crises and start investing in our future.

About Tim Jackson

Tim Jackson studies the links between lifestyle, societal values and the environment to question the primacy of economic growth.

The Impending World Energy Mess with Robert L. Hirsch

2010-09-28T01:24:00.000-07:00

Apogee Prime has released a series of video interviews with Robert L. Hirsch the author of the new book: The Impending World Energy Mess.

The Impending World Energy Mess with Robert L. Hirsch Pt 01

The Impending World Energy Mess with Robert L. Hirsch Pt 02

The Impending World Energy Mess with Robert L. Hirsch Pt 04

The Impending World Energy Mess with Robert L. Hirsch Pt 09

The Impending World Energy Mess with Robert L. Hirsch Pt 15

The Impending World Energy Mess with Robert L. Hirsch Pt 20

The Impending World Energy Mess with Robert L. Hirsch Pt 21

The economy can’t grow forever

2010-09-27T04:15:00.000-07:00

Commentary: The whole planet must live within its means
By Rex Nutting, MarketWatch

This is an excerpt. Read the full article here.

Those of us who believe that the economy should serve us instead of the other way around are conflicted.

We know that the only way to end unemployment at home and poverty around the world is to make the economy grow faster. But we also know that nothing can grow forever, that the faster the global economy grows, the sooner we’ll run out of essential resources, including fossil fuels, water, arable land, healthy ecosystems and moderate climate.

Economists and politicians can’t admit it, but the laws of physics apply, no matter what the latest polls tell us. The Earth has finite resources that will someday limit our economic growth.

World leaders gather at the United Nations, where tackling global poverty is high on the agenda. Video courtesy of Reuters.

The Earth cannot forever support 7 billion people consuming as much as Americans consume. And yet we’ve staked our future — individually, nationally, and maybe even as a species — on that impossible dream.

An Interview with Chris Martenson on the Survival Podcast

2010-09-23T08:16:00.000-07:00

Jack Spirko of The Survival Podcast had interviewed Chris Martenson who is the creator of “The Crash Course”. They had a meaty exploration of the core tenets of the Three Es in light of recent developments, then delved pretty deeply into strategies for building personal resilience, which is the main focus of the regular podcasts.

The first “E” is the economy, which is the lens through which the Crash Course looks at everything, specifically exponential money, the first-ever collapse of a global credit binge, an aging population, and a national failure to save.

The second “E” is energy. The Crash Course explores what Peak Oil implies for an economic system that is based on continual expansion.

The third “E”, the environment, will be exerting its own unknowable but certainly significant economic burdens due to shrinking resources and other systemic pressures while the other two “E”s are clamoring for your money and attention.

Listen to the full inverview here.

Peak Oil and the Second Great Depression

2010-09-20T14:38:00.000-07:00

Peak Oil and the Second Great Depression (2010-2030): A Survival Guide for Investors and Savers After Peak Oil

Peak Oil is the point of maximum global oil production. In Peak Oil and the Second Great Depression (2010-2030), the author argues that the likely peak in global oil production occurred in the period 2005-2008, due to the peaking of Saudi Arabian oil production during that time. The evidence of a peak in Saudi crude oil production in 2008 is presented and discussed in some detail. The most significant piece of evidence of a Saudi peak in production in 2008 was the inability of Saudi oil ministers to increase production in the period 2005 to 2008 despite record crude oil prices and the drilling of thousands of new wells in Saudi Arabia's seven major oil fields. Because it could not increase production in the face of rising global demand, Saudi Arabia was unable to prevent a spike in the price of oil to around $150 a barrel. A dramatic economic contraction in the developed economies ensued.

In the years ahead, it is argued, continued economic growth in the developing world including China will put upward pressure on the price of oil, which will create severe economic difficulties for the indebted developed economies such as the US which rely on imported energy. The book examines the likely policy responses of American statesmen and central bankers to the economic difficulties created by very high prices for petroleum. Oil at very high and indeed painful prices in the face of already historic levels of personal and governmental indebtedness, it is argued, will create large scale unemployment on levels not seen since the (First) Great Depression as expenditures for foreign oil dramatically reduce spending available for the domestic economy.

The author argues that the policy response to the economic difficulties will be to create a general rise in the price level to reduce the burden of the existing debt on households, businesses and governmental entities. As prices, and especially wages, rise, domestic spending will recover and unemployment will be reduced, although this process could take several decades. Very significant inflation will likely be necessary to prevent an even more severe drop in employment and output in the economy than that we are already experiencing given the magnitude of the shock to the economy created by continued declines in global oil production.

The inflation thus created, as well as the other dramatic changes in the economy as a result of Peak Oil, will alter the approach that would optimally be taken by investors and those wishing to preserve savings. The issues of asset allocation and sector weighting are explored together with alternative investments in commodities and real estate. The focus is primarily on domestic equities, but a rather unusual sector weighting strategy is proposed as most likely to produce positive results during two decades that will otherwise be most disappointing for the investing public.

Peak Oil will also create opportunities for speculation which are explored in the final chapters of the book.

Listen to the related interview on FSN In Depth: Kenneth D Worth, Peak Oil and the Second Great Depression (2010-2030) by James J Puplava

The Impending World Energy Mess - Book

2010-09-20T08:37:00.000-07:00

The Impending World Energy Mess will help educate readers about the realities of energy in general and oil in particular.

The book ranks already #6 in Business & Investing > Economics > Natural Resources

The reader will be able to cut through the smokescreens that various self interests have, and are, promulgating and understand that there are a number of credible studies that clearly demonstrate that world oil production is close to going into decline, which will create long-term world oil shortages.

The huge economic impacts associated with impending oil shortages are brought into sober, balanced perspective and readers are given tools to minimize the impending negative impacts on their personal lives.

Finally, The Impending World Energy Mess provides a balanced discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of a number of electric power production technologies, and in particular, the inherent weaknesses in solar and renewable technologies. The Impending World Energy Mess provides a practical basis for understanding and personal action.

Included in this book is a special Foreword from Dr James Schlesinger - First US Secretary of Energy, Director of Central Intelligence, Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

In the next five years, world oil production will begin to decline - which means less and less oil will be available each year. The result will be annually deepening worldwide economic damage.

There will be no quick fixes. Even crash program mitigation will take more than a decade to impact.

Societal priorities will change dramatically. Compromises will be required. Years of energy hopes and fantasy will have to yield to pragmatism.

Oil and energy issues are complicated. You need to understand the situation in order to make intelligent choices for yourself and those close to you.

To be forewarned is to be forearmed. With over a hundred years of combined experience in energy and economics, the authors provide you the straight story, including realities that others have been reluctant to discuss.

Check out this exclusive interview with the author Robert Hirsch by Matthieu Auzanneau:

‘Peak Oil’ : Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Energy sounds the alarm: part 1, part 2

[via Energy Bulletin]

Johan Rockstrom - Planetary Boundaries Video

2010-09-02T08:39:00.000-07:00

Human growth has strained the Earth's resources, but as Johan Rockstrom reminds us in his TED talk, our advances also give us the science to recognize this and change behavior. His research has found nine "planetary boundaries" that can guide us in protecting our planet's many overlapping ecosystems.

If Earth is a self-regulating system, it's clear that human activity is capable of disrupting it. Johan Rockstrom has led a team of scientists to define the nine Earth systems that need to be kept within bounds for Earth to keep itself in balance.

Johan Rockstrom is a leader of a new approach to sustainability: planetary boundaries. Working with a team of 29 leading scientists across disciplines, Rockstrom and the Stockholm Resilience Centre identified nine key Earth processes or systems -- and marked the upper limit beyond which each system could touch off a major system crash. Climate change is certainly in the mix -- but so are other human-made threats such as ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, chemical pollution.

"Rockstrom has managed in an easy, yet always scientifically based way, to convey our dependence of the planet's resources, the risk of transgressing planetary boundaries and what changes are needed in order to allow humanity to continue to develop."

Anna Ritter, Fokus magazine

Interview: Heinberg on Peak Oil and Economic Growth

2010-08-26T06:04:00.000-07:00

Author Richard Heinberg's nine books include The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies and Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines. He discusses what we know about peak oil, as well as its connection to the end of economic growth. His views are explained in his chapter in the forthcoming Post Carbon Reader, some chapters of which are already available for free download.

Heinberg also mentioned Searching for a Miracle, a recent report from the Post Carbon Institute available for free download at the link. It examines the question, "Can any combination of known energy sources successfully supply society’s energy needs at least up to the year 2100?"

Listen to the audio interview at Equal Time Radio here.
[via Energy Bulletin]

US Minerals Databrowser

2010-08-24T07:39:00.000-07:00

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) is the administrative branch in charge of managing information regarding mineral resources within the United States. Its minerals information function that collects, analyzes, and disseminates data that describe current production and consumption of about 100 mineral commodities, both domestically and internationally for approximately 180 countries.The goal of the US Minerals Databrowser is to make it easier to extract meaningful information from this valuable dataset. The US Minerals Databrowser provides several different visualization styles, each tailored to answer a specific set of question regarding the USGS Minerals dataset.

US Production / Exports

This visualization uses the production, apparent consumption, imports and exports fields from the dataset. Net exports are calculated as exports - imports. This plot highlights how sustainable US use of a particular mineral is.

World Production / Price

This visualization plots both US and world annual production of each mineral. The nominal price per ton as well as the inflation adjusted price (in 1998 dollars) are overlain. This plot highlights the interplay between price and production as anticipated by basic economics -- high prices should bring about increased production for globally fungible commodities.

Price Evolution

Plotting inflation adjusted prices against global production create interesting plots that give insight into how well the price signal works for a particular mineral.

Usage History

Usage patterns for any mineral will change as new uses are found and older applications are discontinued. The Usage History plots historical timelines of consumption in all the major usage categories.

Usage Pie

Pie charts provide a quick, intuitive view of relative consumption in each category for a single year to answer the question: "What is this mineral used for?"

Wilberforce: Endless Growth is not Sustainable

2010-08-19T08:08:00.000-07:00

Armed with a suitcase full of cash and more blonde beauties than Richard Branson, businessman Dick Smith announced his Wilberforce award at the FEX Market Site in Sydney on Wednesday 11 August 2010.

The award is designed to give a one million dollar prize to anyone under 30 who can impress Dick by becoming famous through his or her ability to show leadership in communicating an alternative to our population and consumption growth-obsessed economy.

Dick Smith is one of Australia’s most recognised individuals. After a successful business career in retailing and publishing, Dick has become well known as a restless adventurer, making many pioneering and record breaking flights by helicopter, aeroplane and balloon.

The $1 Million Wilberforce Award

It has become obvious to me that my generation has over exploited our wonderful world – and it’s younger people who will pay the price. Like many people my age, I’ve benefited from a long period of constant economic and population growth – we are addicted to it. But sooner or later this consumption growth will have an end. We appear to be already bumping against the limits of what our planet can sustain and the evidence is everywhere to see.

Right now I believe we could be sleepwalking to catastrophe because we are failing to both acknowledge that there are limits to growth in a finite world and to prepare for a more sustainable way of organising our economy. In the 19th Century, empires were built on the labour of slaves, and it was believed economies would collapse if slavery was abolished. But brave people like William Wilberforce fought to end the slave trade – and economies still flourished. We need brave people like Wilberforce today, and I want to encourage a new generation of clear-thinking and inspiring young leaders.

So today I am announcing Dick Smith’s Wilberforce Award – $1 million to go to a young person under 30 who can impress me by becoming famous through his or her ability to show leadership in communicating an alternative to our population and consumption growth-obsessed economy. I will be looking for candidates whose actions over the next year show that they have what it takes to be among the next generation of leaders our incredible planet so badly needs.

Candidates will need to have a firm belief that we can have a viable and strong world economy that is no longer obsessed with growth for its own sake, but instead encourages both a stable population and sustainable consumption of energy and resources. They must be able to communicate that we cannot continue to squander the resources that will be needed by future generations, and they must also be able to communicate a plan that offers an alternative to our growth addiction.

Like the Nobel Prize, you will not apply for the Wilberforce Award. Over the next twelve months I will be following the media throughout the world to see who is the most outstanding individual in not only making a significant contribution to this important issue, but who also becomes famous through his or her contribution to the debate.

One year from now I will announce the winner of the $1 Million Wilberforce Award. The Award will go towards advancing the momentum the winner will have already achieved.

Beyond the Limits to Growth

2010-07-30T04:04:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from the Post Carbon Reader Series: Foundational Concepts
Beyond the Limits to Growth by Richard Heinberg

In 1972, the now-classic book Limits to Growth explored the consequences for Earth’s ecosystems of exponential growth in population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion. That book, which still stands as the best-selling environmental title ever published, reported on the first attempts to use computers to model the likely interactions between trends in resources, consumption, and population. It summarized the first major scientific study to question the assumption that economic growth can and will continue more or less uninterrupted into the foreseeable future.

The idea was heretical at the time, and still is: During the past few decades, growth has become virtually the sole index of national economic well-being. When an economy grows, jobs appear, investments yield high returns, and everyone is happy. When the economy stops growing, financial bloodletting and general misery ensue. Predictably, a book saying that growth cannot and will not continue beyond a certain point proved profoundly upsetting in some quarters, and soon Limits to Growth was pilloried in a public relations campaign organized by pro-growth business interests. In reality, this purported “debunking” merely amounted to taking a few numbers in the book completely out of context, citing them as “predictions” (which they explicitly were not), and then claiming that these predictions had failed. The ruse was quickly exposed, but rebuttals often don’t gain nearly as much publicity as accusations, and so today millions of people mistakenly believe that the book was long ago discredited.

In any case, the underlying premise of the book is irrefutable: At some point in time, humanity’s ever-increasing resource consumption will meet the very real limits of a planet with finite natural resources.

The co-authors of The Post Carbon Reader believe that this time has come.

The Pivotal Role of energy

During the past two centuries, an explosion in population, consumption, and technological innovation has brought previously unimaginable advances in health, wealth, transport, and communications. These events were largely made possible by the release of enormous amounts of cheap energy from fossil fuels starting in the mid-nineteenth century.

Increased consumption of fossil fuels has produced both economic growth and population growth. However, a bigger population and a growing economy lead to more energy demand. We are thus enmeshed in a classic self-reinforcing (“positive”) feedback loop. Crucially, the planet on which all of this growth is occurring happens to be limited in size, with fixed stores of fossil fuels and mineral ores, and with constrained capacities to regenerate forests, fish, topsoil, and freshwater. Indeed, it appears that we are now pushing up against these very physical limits:

The world is at, nearing, or past the points of peak production of a number of critical nonrenewable resources—including oil, natural gas, and coal, as well as many economically important minerals ranging from antimony to zinc.
The global climate is being destabilized by greenhouse gases emitted from the burning of fossil fuels, leading to more severe weather (including droughts) as well as melting glaciers and rising sea levels.
Freshwater scarcity is a real or impending problem in nearly all of the world’s nations due to climate change, pollution, and overuse of groundwater for agriculture and industrial processes.
World food production per capita is declining and the maintenance of existing total harvests is threatened by climate change, soil erosion, water scarcity, and high fuel costs.
Earth’s plant and animal species are being driven to extinction by human activities at a rate unequaled in the last 60 million years.

[via the Post Carbon Institute]

Fossil Fuel Production with Supply and Demand Interactions

2010-07-21T08:42:00.000-07:00

Steve Mohr has published his Thesis at the University of Newcastle, Australia:
Projection of world fossil fuel production with supply and demand interactions

Abstract

Historically, fossil fuels have been vital for our global energy needs. However climate change is prompting renewed interest in the role of fossil fuel production for our energy needs. In order to appropriately plan for our future energy needs, a new detailed model of fossil fuel supply is required. It is critical to know if fossil fuels will still be able to supply most of our energy requirements and meet the ever increasing energy demand in the future. Answering these questions is critical in order to identify potential periods of energy shortages; so that alternative energy resources can be utilised in a timely way. The aim of this study was to develop a model to predict fossil fuel production for the long term based on historical production data, projected demand, and assumed ultimately recoverable reserves for coal, gas and oil. Climate change is an important issue confronting society, and it is hoped that the work contained in this thesis will aid climate change modeling by focusing attention to realistic fossil fuel production projections. Fossil fuels are currently an essential component in the global economy and the growth of the human population. The fossil fuel production projections from this study suggest that many of the IPCC fossil fuel projections appear overly optimistic. Based on the assumed URR values, it is predicted that global fossil fuel production will peak before 2030. For this reason, it is imperative that appropriate action be taken as early as possible to mitigate the effects of fossil fuel decline, to avoid energy shortages in the near future.

Conclusions (excerpt)

The combined supply and demand model includes the capability that demand and production could be influenced by each other, i.e. if production could not meet demand then future demand for that energy source was reduced. In this study, three options were considered. Firstly, the STATIC option resulted in demand and production acting independently of each other at all times. Secondly, the DYNAMIC option allowed both total demand and total production to change from the STATIC situation when there was a difference between the two. Finally, the INDEPENDENTLY DYNAMIC option was an extension to the DYNAMIC situation, but treated each fuel source individually when applying the supply and demand interaction, with both demand and production being able to vary.

The model requires estimates of Ultimately Recoverable Resources (URR) for coal, gas and oil. Following a critical review of the literature, included in this study, three cases were adopted. CASE 1 and CASE 3 being lowest and highest recent estimates, respectively, and CASE 2 being author’s best guess based on the information available. The URR values for CASE 2 were, total (60,800 EJ), coal (19,350 EJ), gas (17,680 EJ) and oil (23,780 EJ).

Oil: For CASE 2, peak production year remained almost constant at 2011-12 for STATIC, DYNAMIC and INDEPENDENTLY DYNAMIC options, with peak production varying only marginally between 179–188 EJ/y. Similarly, for CASE 1, peak production year was the same at 2005 for all three supply and demand interaction options. For CASE 3, peak production year varied only slightly at 2019, 2011 and 2016 for STATIC, DYNAMIC and INDEPENDENTLY DYNAMIC options, respectively. The important outcome was that for all scenarios the maximum peak year was 2019.

Combined fossil fuels: For CASE 2, peak production year remained almost constant at 2016–18 for STATIC, DYNAMIC and INDEPENDENTLY DYNAMIC options, with peak production varying only marginally between 509–525 EJ/y. Similarly, for CASE 1, peak production year was essentially same at 2012–13 for all three supply and demand interaction options. For CASE 3, peak production year varied from 2021 to 2029 across the three supply and demand options. In all scenarios it was found that natural gas offers the biggest future potential, and not coal.

[via Energy Bulletin]

Ocean Energy Institute and Energy Systems

2010-07-20T06:38:00.000-07:00

The Ocean Energy Institute, founded in 2007 by Matthew R. Simmons, is a think-tank and venture capital fund addressing the challenges of U.S. offshore renewable energy. OEI approaches energy R&D and investment from a systems point of view; not just generation, but usage, storage and transmission all together as an interdependent set of opportunities and the next driving force of the international economy.

Grand Opening - Ocean Energy Institute Offices

Rockland, Maine (July 20) -- The Ocean Energy Institute will be hosting a VIP celebration today for the grand opening of its new office headquarters.

Energy as a Complete System

OEI's "GUST" model (generation, usage, storage and transmission) proposes how the offshore wind resource can be efficiently tapped into and used, and the electricity intelligently stored and transmitted.

This model addresses two of the biggest challenges to the reliability of wind power: seasonality (the wind blows strongest in the winter, when energy demand is historically lower) - and intermittency (the wind blows less strongly during the daytime, when energy demand is highest).

The System Solution

Use the energy in a way that the seasonal match is great (e.g., winter heating)
Use the energy for the 90% of the family energy budget that is NOT "electricity"
Use the energy in applications where energy storage is easy
Construct a North American Supergrid to balance out intermittency
Develop NH3 (ammonia) fuel as a way to seasonally shift energy generation vs. use
Exploit Smart Grids to dynamically balance generation and demand
Stop handcuffing ourselves to a 20 percent renewable "penetration" limit

The "Pickens Plan Plus" a.k.a the Simmons Plan

The Ocean Energy Institute has published an updated version of the original Pickens Plan. The Simmons Plan is outlined in a pdf presentation here.

Book: The Post Carbon Reader

2010-06-29T02:09:00.000-07:00

The Post Carbon Reader
Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises

Edited by Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch
In the 20th century, cheap and abundant energy brought previously unimaginable advances in health, wealth, and technology, and fed an explosion in population and consumption. But this growth came at an incredible cost. Climate change, peak oil, freshwater depletion, species extinction, and a host of economic and social problems now challenge us as never before. The Post Carbon Reader features articles by some of the world’s most provocative thinkers on the key drivers shaping this new century, from renewable energy and urban agriculture to social justice and systems resilience. This unprecedented collection takes a hard-nosed look at the interconnected threats of our global sustainability quandary—as well as the most promising responses. The Post Carbon Reader is a valuable resource for policymakers, college classrooms, and concerned citizens.

Table of Contents

Preface Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch, Editors
Foreword Asher Miller

Part I - Introduction
1. Foundation Concepts

Richard Heinberg: "Beyond the Limits to Growth"
Richard Heinberg: "What is Sustainability?"
Bill Rees, "Thinking 'Resilience'"

Part II - Planet
2. Climate

Bill McKibben, selection from Eaarth
Richard Douthwaite, "The international response to climate change "
Mark Sandler, SIDEBAR: "Cap and Dividend in the U.S."
David Orr, selection from Down to the Wire

3. Water

Sandra Postel, "Water: Adapting to a new normal"

4. Biodiversity

Stephanie Mills, "Peak Nature?"

Part III - Civilization
5. Food

Michael Bomford, "Energy and the food system"
Wes Jackson, transcript from 1/25/10 presentation at Univ. of California - Berkeley
Erika Allen, transcript from 1/24/10 conversation: "Growing community food systems"

6. Population

Bill Ryerson, "Population: The Multiplier of Everything Else"

7. Culture & behavior

Peter Whybrow, "Dangerously Addictive"
Gloria Flora, "Remapping Relationships: Humans in nature"
Bill Rees, "The Human Nature of Unsustainability"

Part IV - Modern Society
8. Energy

Daniel Lerch, selection from Post Carbon Cities
David Hughes, "Hydrocarbons in North America"
David Fridley, "Nine Challenges of Alternative Energy"
Tom Whipple, "Peak Oil and the Economy"

9. Economy

Josh Farley, "Ecological Economics"
Richard Douthwaite, SIDEBAR: "Money and Energy"
Michael Shuman, "The Competitiveness of Local Living Economies"

10. Cities, towns, and suburbs

Warren Karlenzig, "The Death of Sprawl"
Deborah Popper and Frank Popper, "Smart Decline in Post-Carbon Cities"
Hillary Brown, "Buildings"
John Kaufmann "Local Government in a time of Peak Oil and Climate Change"

11. Transportation

Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl, "Post-carbon mobility"

12. Waste

Bill Sheehan and Helen Spiegelman, "Climate Change, Peak Oil and the End of Waste"

13. Health

Cindy Parker and Brian Schwartz, "Human Health and Well-Being in an Era of Energy Scarcity and Climate Change"

14. Education

Zenobia Barlow and Michael Stone, "Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability"
Nancy Lee Wood, "Community Colleges"

Part V - Next Steps
15. Building resilience

Chris Martenson, "Personal preparation"
Rob Hopkins "Transitioning community"

16. Vision for a post-carbon century

Asher Miller, "What Now? The Path Forward Begins with One Step"

World3 in Modelica: System Dynamics Models

2010-06-28T08:49:00.000-07:00

World3 in Modelica: Creating System Dynamics Models in the Modelica Framework

This paper and presentation by F. E. Cellier introduces a new release of the System-Dynamics library of Modelica and shows how it is being used by discussing a fairly large application code: Meadows’ World3 model.

Meadows’ only talked in Limits to Growth about the results obtained with the model. The model itself, originally coded in Dynamo, was described in a separate book.

Meadows’ World3 model has seen two major upgrades since its original inception, one in 1992, i.e. after 20 years, and the second in 2002, i.e., after 30 years. The World3 application code contained in SystemDynamics 2.0 implements the 2002 version of the World3 model. In the code, we offer not only the basic model, but also all 10 scenarios that Meadows and co-workers are talking about in Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update.

Future Research

What future additions are in the works? In today’s world of dwindling fossil fuel reserves, it becomes important to track how much energy we are actually using. Whereas classical System Dynamics is designed to track material flows, it does not track energy flows. This is a major drawback of the methodology.

For this reason, a second version of the System Dynamics library has also been released as a sublibrary of BondLib, our bond graph library. In that version, all material flows are represented internally by bond graphs. A bond graph naturally tracks energy flows. Each energy flow, in that version of the library, is represented as the product of a specific enthalpy and a mass flow. Hence we can track material flows and energy flows simultaneously.

When I drive my car from home to work, I am not only spending energy in the form of the gas that my car consumes. Some energy was also spent in producing the car, and more energy will be spent in discarding it at the end of its lifecycle and in recovering those materials from it that can be recycled.

The accumulated energy that accounts for all of those indirect uses of energy is called emergy. The specific enthalpy can be used to encode in the model the specific emergy, i.e., the emergy per unit of mass.

I plan on porting examples of emergy modeling, as described in the publications by Howard Odum, over to the bond graph implementation of the System Dynamics library, but this work has not yet been completed.

Check out the full paper and presentation by Prof. Dr. François E. Cellier here.

Making Sense of the Financial Crisis in the Era of Peak Oil

2010-06-17T06:57:00.000-07:00

Nicole Foss of the Automatic Earth has delivered a very interesting presentation at the Transition Network Conference 2010 in the UK.

Peak Oil and the collapse of global Ponzi finance are a “perfect storm” of converging phenomena that threaten to sink our age of prosperity through wealth destruction, social discontent, and global conflict. Nicole will describe how our current financial system is an unsustainable credit bubble grounded in “Ponzi dynamics,” or the logic of the pyramid scheme. She warns that most people are woefully unprepared to face the consequences of the devastating deflation that is now unfolding.

Check out the following comments about Making Sense of the Financial Crisis in the Era of Peak Oil

My Conference – Shaun Chamberlin on Stoneleigh’s peak oil/finance talk
Nicole Foss: A Century of Challenges

President Obama on the Oil Spill and Alternative Fuel Sources

2010-06-16T05:46:00.000-07:00

Watch the full video or read the full transcript of Remarks by the President to the Nation on the BP Oil Spill.

Lloyds Report - Sustainable Energy Security: Strategic Risks and Opportunities for Business

2010-06-14T04:20:00.000-07:00

Chatham House-Lloyd's 360 Risk Insight White Paper
by Antony Froggatt and Glada Lahn, June 2010

As the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has amply demonstrated, growing global energy demand and the anticipated restricted availability of some conventional fossil fuels pose an escalating threat to the security of energy supply for global businesses. Sustainable Energy Security: Strategic Risks and Opportunities for Business, produced jointly by Chatham House and Lloyd's, reveals multiple vulnerabilities in our current energy system and urges both business strategists and government policy-makers to take into account a range of encroaching risks and be bold in making plans for a more resilient and low carbon energy future.

This report, jointly produced by Lloyd’s 360 Risk Insight programme and Chatham House, should cause all risk managers to pause. What it outlines, in stark detail, is that we have entered a period of deep uncertainty in how we will source energy for power, heat and mobility, and how much we will have to pay for it.

Is this any different from the normal volatility of the oil or gas markets? Yes, it is. Today, a number of pressures are combining: constraints on ‘easy to access’ oil; the environmental and political urgency of reducing carbon dioxide emissions; and a sharp rise in energy demand from the Asian economies, particularly China.

Executive Summary

Businesses which prepare for and take advantage of the new energy reality will prosper - failure to do so could be catastrophic
Market dynamics and environmental factors mean business can no longer rely on low cost traditional energy sources
China and growing Asian economies will play an increasingly important role in global energy security
We are heading towards a global oil supply crunch and price spike
Energy infrastructure will become increasingly vulnerable as a result of climate change and operations in harsher environments
Lack of global regulation on climate change is creating an environment of uncertainty for business, which is damaging investment plans
To manage increasing energy costs and carbon exposure businesses must reduce fossil fuel consumption
Business must address energy-related risks to supply chains and the increasing vulnerability of 'just-in-time' models
Investment in renewable energy and 'intelligent' infrastructure is booming. This revolution presents huge opportunities for new business partnerships

[via Transition Culture]

"Better than Growth" released by Australian Conservation Foundation

2010-06-11T07:14:00.000-07:00

Arguing for something beyond economic growth

Australian Conservation Foundation has published an outstandingly well produced paper on how we can redesign our ways of living based on something other than economic growth and all its attendant troubles.

"Most australians don’t agree that their only goal in life is to increase their financial wealth and consumption – but too often our economic policy treats us as if we do. in reality, our quality of life depends on having time for family and friends, a strong sense of community, and a healthy natural environment. our economy should help us achieve those goals.

We can do better than a narrow vision of economic growth, and this report shows us how. Better than Growth explores the best practical thinking from around the world about how to improve economic measurements and align our economies to long-term environmental and social wellbeing."

[via Transition Network]

BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2010

2010-06-10T06:25:00.000-07:00

For 59 years, the BP Statistical Review of World Energy has provided high-quality, objective and globally consistent data on world energy markets. The Review is one of the most widely respected and authoritative publications in the ﬁ eld of energy economics, used for reference by the media, academia, world governments and energy companies. A new edition is published every June.

BP Statistical Review of World Energy June 2010 is available online at bp.com/statisticalreview. The website contains all the tables and charts found in the latest printed edition, plus a number of extras, including:

Historical data from 1965 for many sections.
Additional data for natural gas, coal, hydroelectricity, nuclear energy, electricity and renewables.
An energy charting tool, where you can view predetermined reports or chart speciﬁ c data according to energy type, region and year.
An oil, natural gas and LNG conversion calculator.
PDF versions and PowerPoint slide packs of the charts, maps and graphs, plus an Excel workbook of the historical data.

Top Energy Crisis Resources

2010-06-08T07:06:00.000-07:00

In this 125th Best of the Energy Crash & Limits to Growth blog post I have collected the top links on the topic of energy crisis and resource depletion.

Books

Movies

Research Reports

Global Oil Depletion Report 2009 (UKERC)
Growth isn't Possible
Planetary Boundaries
Project Discovery: Energy Market Scenarios (Ofgem)
Searching for a Miracle: ‘Net Energy’ Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society
The Oil Crunch - a wake-up call for the UK economy
Tipping Point: Near-Term Systemic Implications of a Peak in Global Oil Production
Top Ten Things to Know about Oil Supply

Videos

Recommended further resources

Bogotá: Building A Sustainable City

2010-06-07T09:19:00.000-07:00

Bogota: Building a Sustainable City - documentary by PBS e2 series. Narrated by Brad Pitt. During his tenure as mayor of Bogota, Colombia, Enrique Penalosa was both revered and scorned for his urban planning and transportation policies. His public works projects, which largely favored the pedestrian experience, were unlike anything previously built in Bogota. Penalosa describes the environmental and social importance of minimizing automobile culture.

Conference on Ecomonic Degrowth Presentations

2010-06-03T06:12:00.000-07:00

From Friday 26 to Monday 29 March 2010 the Second International Degrowth Conference took place at the historic building of ‘Universidad de Barcelona'. 500 scientists, civil society members and practionners from more than 40 countries attended the conference.

Thirty years ago, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen published a book in French with the title “Demain la Décroissance” (Degrowth Tomorrow) (1979). The organizers of the Economic Degrowth Conference says, “Aujourd’hui la Décroissance” (Degrowth today). The economic crisis of 2008-09 brings a new perspective. Economic degrowth can be good for the environment but it must be socially sustainable.

The 2nd international conference on economic degrowth for ecological sustainability and social equity followed from the first international conference (Paris, April 2008), that took place with the support of the European Society for Ecological Economics, Club of Rome (Brussels/Europe), Telecom Sud-Paris and SERI (Sustainable Europe Research Institute)

Conference Presentations

Managing degrowth: Employment, Security and the Economy under a Degrowth trajectory

Blake Alcott: Degrowth and ‘unemployment’; Guaranteed jobs?
Gjalt Huppes & Ruben Huele: Degrowth with an aging population; increasing leisure for improving the environment. The key role of pensions and their funding
Richard Douthwaite: Why the global debt burden means there will be no recovery
Colin C.Williams & Richard White: Transcending the depiction of market and non-market labour practices; implications for degrowth

Beyond Sustainable Development: Sustainable Degrowth towards a Steady-State Economy

Brian Czech: The Chicken/Egg Spiral; "Reconciling" the Conflict Between Economic Growth and Environmental Protection with Technological Progress
Daniel W. O’Neill: Measuring progress towards a steady state economy
Ernest Garcia: Sociology and de-growth: social change, entropy and evolution in a way-down era
Nicholas A. Ashford: Pathways to Sustainable Development; Co-optimizing Economic Welfare, Employment and Environment
Ernest Garcia: Sociology and de-growth; social change, entropy and evolution in a way-down era
Jacques Lauriol: L’Economie de la Fonctionnalité; Une voie nouvelle pour une décroissance soutenable

Degrowth, Capitalist Institutions and Democracy

Pascal van Griethuysen : Implementing Degrowth; Evolutionary Economic Perspectives:
Barbara Muraca: Growth, Degrowth, and Justice; A scrutiny of ethical and anthropological assumptions in growth and degrowth

Growth is unsustainable. Long live degrowth?

E. Bilancini & S. D’Alessandro: Happy Degrowth vs Unhappy Growth
Joaquim Sempere: Degrowth; Proposals and Questions

Making it real. Practical transformations towards degrowth

Jørgen Stig Nørgård: Sustainable degrowth through more amateur economy
Dick Urban Vestbro: Saving by Sharing – Collective Housing for Sustainable Lifestyles
David Barkin: Constructing alternative degrowth strategies; Experience from rural communities in Latin America

Water vs Energy - Special Report by IEEE Spectrum

2010-06-02T07:19:00.000-07:00

The Coming Clash Between Water and Energy

Our thirst for water competes with our hunger for energy. Only radical new ideas will get us out of this mess

Consider a giant sponge, with limbs and tentacles that reach to the horizon. It dips into distant rivers, it delves for deep waters, it digs ditches to catch the rain—all to slake its insatiable thirst.

Clearly, this is no ordinary sea creature quietly snuffling the currents. We have met this sponge, and it is us. We humans are the thirstiest of creatures, and we’ve developed a nearly insatiable taste for this simple but delectable arrangement of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. But we need more. So much more.

We’re not talking about just drinking or bathing. Without water, we’d have practically no energy. Without energy—and therefore cars, planes, laptops, smartphones, and lighting—we wouldn’t be doing much.

In almost every type of power plant, water is a major hidden cost. Water cools the blistering steam of thermal plants and allows hydroelectric turbines to churn. It brings biofuel crops from the ground and geothermal energy from the depths of the Earth. Our power sources would be impotent without water.

Podcast

IEEE Spectrum's June Special report is about “The Water-Energy Nexus.” It sounds wonky, but it’s a subject about which you’ll inevitably be hearing more and more. In coming years, we’ll undoubtedly face the quandaries of the Water-Energy Nexus because many renewable technologies come with big water tradeoffs. IEEE Spectrum’s Senior Editor, Sam Moore, is with us to discuss the special report in this podcast, and acquaint us with some of the stories.

Check out the rest of the special report: Water vs Energy.

Is Humanity Unsustainable?

2010-06-01T08:28:00.000-07:00

The co-inventor of "the ecological footprint" now calls for a planned contraction of the economy, to save the biosphere and promote world fairness. How our primeval brains work against us.

Powerful speech on Radio EcoShock [mp3, transcript by Alex Smith] by Canadian biologist Dr. Bill Rees, April 15, 2010.

At a meeting of the World Federalists, guest speaker Dr. William Rees gave this speech standing, without notes. It shines with clarity, developed form decades of lecturing, in the field of his passion, which he himself developed – the “ecological footprint.” Rees is a professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada – and a Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute.

Rees begins with an early warning, following the 1992 United Nations Conference on the Environment. It is a statement by the Union of Concerned Scientists issuing a warning to humanity.

"Many of the Nobel Laureates in science signed on to this particular document but the bottom line is pretty clear: 'A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and our life on it, is required if vast misery is to be avoided, and our global home is not to be irretrievably mutilated.'"

Dr. Rees says this warning had no effect whatsoever. He moves to a more recent statement, from the Millennium Ecosystem Summary Report, in which Rees participated, along with 10,000 other scientists. It was the largest study ever taken of the world's ecosystems. It warned that:

‘human activity is putting such a strain on that the natural functions of the Earth that 'the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain human endeavor can no longer be taken for granted.'

It is no exaggeration to say that Bill Rees has taught and inspired at least two generations of students, ecologists, and environmentalists around the world. Here he outlines the condition of humanity on a small planet, with thoughts on how both can survive.

[via Energy Bulletin]

Peak Oil and Resource Depletion

2010-05-31T05:36:00.000-07:00

Anatoly Karlin is the author of the Sublime Oblivion Blog on the geopolitics of limits to growth has assembled many links to relevant articles on Peak Oil and Resource Depletion to provide a foundation for the those interested in exploring these very important concepts. It includes these top links on these issues:

Basic Summaries

The Coming Oil Crisis (Lionel Badal)
Hubbert’s Peak Mathematics (Luís de Sousa)

Core Books on Resource Depletion

Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update (Meadows et al)

Peak Oil Projections

Analysis of Decline Rates (Sam Foucher)
Insights Regarding Future World Oil Production (Rembrandt)

Energy & the Economy

Oily Origins of the Economic Crisis (Anatoly Karlin)
Accounting for Growth: The Role of Physical Work (Robert Ayres)

Renewables

Renewable Energy Outlook 2030 (Energy Watch Group)
Renewable Transition: Targets & Troubles & EROEI Uncertainty (Jeff Vail)
Renewable Fuel Contenders, Pretenders and Niches (Robert Rapier)

In his new post AK collects Emerging Technologies: Limits to Growth vs. Moore’s Law.

Running on Empty - Video

2010-05-28T06:38:00.000-07:00

What if tomorrow, everyone’s car disappeared.

A Video by Ross Ching inspired by Matt Logue’s Empty LA photographs.

Check out the details here.

America's Energy Future and PickensPlan

2010-05-26T05:51:00.000-07:00

Milken Institute Global Conference Panel:
Ted Turner and T. Boone Pickens on America's Energy Future

Speakers:

T. Boone Pickens, Entrepreneur and Philanthropist; Founder, BP Capital
Ted Turner, Chairman, Turner Enterprises Inc.

Moderator:

Michael Milken, Chairman, Milken Institute

Ted Turner didn't mince words: "We've gotta get off the Titanic before it sails." He and T. Boone Pickens argued passionately that America has to start weaning itself off foreign oil imports — and do it now.

Their session began with a recap of how president after president has pledged to achieve energy independence, while the percentage of U.S. oil imported from foreign sources in volatile regions has continued to climb. Today the nation imports some two-thirds of its oil.

"We're paying for both sides of the war," said Pickens, insisting that oil money sent to the Middle East is paying for terrorists and the Taliban. He expressed optimism that President Obama has pledged to end oil imports from the Middle East within 10 years, but was quick to add: "We have to remind him." Pickens pointed out that the U.S. represents about 4 percent of world's population but consumes 25 percent of the world's oil, an equation that's just not sustainable. He called for transitioning the nation's fleet of 18-wheelers to natural gas immediately.

The big question of the day is whether Washington has the political will to effect a fundamental change in America's energy consumption. Turner expressed worry about the influence of special interests and argued that the U.S. has to end oil and coal subsidies to level the playing field for renewables.

Pickens pointed out that China is already moving to ensure its energy independence, and the United States can, too. He believes strongly that we will see a strong energy bill passed this year or next, noting how many millions had signed onto the Pickens Plan online. He believes the grassroots effort can make something happen — and "scare the hell out of those politicians."

Both men agreed that time is of the essence and acting is crucial to our children's livelihoods and lives. Reducing America's reliance on foreign oil, transitioning to natural gas and turning to renewable sources will be a win all around, in terms of national security, economic stability, jobs, cleaning up the environment and fighting climate change.

"We have to go to wind and solar eventually," said Turner. "Why not now? . . . Let's do the right thing and we'll all get rich!"

Watch the full panel discussion online at Milken Institute's web page.

The Crisis

Our dependence on foreign oil forms the intersection of the three most critical issues America currently faces: the economy, the environment and our national security.

The Pickens Plan

America is blessed with the world's greatest wind power corridor and enormous reserves of clean natural gas. The Pickens Plan utilizes these tremendous resources to build a bridge to the future — a blueprint to reduce foreign oil dependence by harnessing domestic energy alternatives and buying time for us to develop even greater new technologies and distribution systems.

The Plan calls for building new wind generation facilities that will produce 20% of our nation's electricity while using our abundant domestic natural gas supply as a transportation fuel as well as for power generation. The combination of these domestic energies can replace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports. And we can do it all in 10 years.

Exergy Evolution of the Mineral Capital on Earth

2010-05-25T06:06:00.000-07:00

Dr. Alicia Valero is a lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Zaragoza and works in the Centre of Research for Energy Resources and Consumption (CIRCE).

Her main scientific research areas are exergoecology and energy efficiency. In particular, she has had extensive involvement in the application of the exergy analysis in the global assessment of mineral resources on earth.

Download her PhD thesis (English): Exergy Evolution of the mineral capital on Earth

Abstract

The 20th century has been characterized by the economic growth of many industrialized countries. This growth was mainly sustained by the massive extraction and use of the earth’s mineral resources. The tendency observed worldwide in the present, is that consumption will continue increasing, especially due to the rapid development of Asia, the desire for a higher living standard of the developing world and the technological progress. But the physical limitations of our planet might seriously restrain world economies. In fact, many mineral commodities such as oil or copper are already showing signs of scarcity problems, and consequently their prices are increasing sharply.

Our society is based on an inefficient use of energy and materials, since there is a lack of awareness of the limit. If resources are limited, their management must be carefully planned. But it is impossible to manage efficiently the resources on earth, if we do not know what is available and at which rate it is being depleted.

Therefore, the aim of this PhD has been the assessment of the physical stock on earth and the degradation velocity of our mineral resources due to human action. This has been accomplished through the exergy analysis under the exergoecological approach. This way, the resources are physically assessed as the energy required to replace them from a complete degraded state to the conditions in which they are currently presented in nature. The main advantage of its use with respect to other physical indicators is that in a single property, all the physical features of a resource are accounted for. Furthermore, exergy has the capability of aggregating heterogeneous energy and material assets. Unlike standard economic valuations, the exergy analysis gives objective information since it is not subject to monetary policy, or currency speculation.

Examples of scientific contributions

With the relative abundance of the substances in each of the earth’s outer spheres obtained in this PhD, and the thermochemical information, we were able to calculate for the ﬁrst time, the average Gibbs free energy, enthalpy of formation and chemical exergy of the atmosphere, hydrosphere and upper continental crust. Furthermore, since the mass of each layer of the earth is well known, we have obtained the ﬁrst estimation of the earth’s speciﬁc chemical exergy: 1,22E9 Gtoe.

This study has obtained an inventory of the most important renewable and non-renewable resources on earth measured in exergy terms. The main novelty introduced in the inventory is the combined assessment of energy resources with non-fuel minerals. Since exergy is an additive property, we have been able to obtain the total exergy of the non renewable energy resources, including nuclear, fossil fuels and non-fuel mineral reserves. Furthermore we could estimate for all renewable resources, the rate of current consumption with respect to the available potential use.

Similarly, for non-renewables, we estimated the resource to production ratio. We came to the important conclusion that vast amounts of energy resources are available on earth, especially of renewable nature. However, we are currently using less than 2% of its potential. On the other hand, we have estimated that the reserves of concentrated fuel and non fuel minerals, which can be practically used by man, represent only 0,01% of the chemical exergy of the earth. Furthermore, their global R/P ratio excluding nuclear materials, is less than 100 years. Hence, humankind is not facing an energy crisis, as many claim, but rather a material’s scarcity.

This PhD has applied for the ﬁrst time the Hubbert model to non-fuel minerals, with the aim of estimating the year were the peak of production is reached. It has been stated that the bell-shape curve is better suited to non-fuel minerals if it is ﬁtted with exergy over time, instead of mass over time. This way, we take into account the concentration factor, which is very important for the case of solid minerals. Consequently, we have developed the required equations for estimating the Hubbert’s peak for all kinds of minerals in exergy terms.

With the available information about world mineral historic statistics and available reserves, we have carried out the ﬁrst diagnosis of the state of non-renewable minerals on earth. This PhD has estimated through the exergy analysis, the degradation degree of the mineral commodities, detecting the ones being degraded at the highest rates, and the ones facing important scarcity problems.

We have stated that iron and aluminium are the most extracted commodities but not the most depleted ones, due to their crustal abundance. On the contrary, copper, which is also being extracted at very high rates, is already suffering scarcity problems, with more than 50% of its world reserves depleted. Other commodities such as mercury, silver, gold, tin, arsenic, antimony or lead are even more degraded, with more than 70% of their reserves depleted.

Natural Regression Film on the Energy Crisis

2010-05-23T12:50:00.000-07:00

Natural Regression is a short independant documentary that focuses on the energy crisis and how much impact it has on the economy. With interviews from Colin Campbell and Chris Skrebowski, this gives us an insight on the nature of the financial crisis. The financial consequences are so overwhelming that this subject should be at the heart of political debate everywhere.

Watch the full Natural Regression movie here.

Google's Clean Energy Initiatives

2010-05-21T07:04:00.000-07:00

Powering a Clean Energy Revolution @ Google

RE C

Business as usual will not deliver low-cost, clean, renewable energy soon enough to avoid devastating climate change. In fact, even producing large amounts of electricity from renewable sources won't make a difference unless we can find a way to make it cheaper than electricity from coal. That's why in 2007 Google.org launched RE C, an initiative aimed at creating utility-scale renewable electricity that is cheaper than coal.

RechargeIT
Google.org's RechargeIT initiative is aimed at accelerating the adoption of plug-in vehicles and "smart charging" applications. Transportation related greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for roughly one third of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States and at least 20% globally. We believe that plug-in hybrids capable of running on electricity are the best near term option for significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector.

Google PowerMeter
Google believes consumers have a right to access detailed information about their home electricity usage throughout the day - to help them save money and make smart energy decisions. Google is developing a prototype product called Google PowerMeter that allows people to see detailed home energy information in near real-time right on their computer.
Combined with their first device partner the TED 5000 - The Energy Detective device from Energy Inc. can help you understand your electricity usage to save energy and money.

Clean Energy 2030
The U.S. has a real opportunity to transform our economy from one running on fossil fuels to one largely based on clean energy. The energy team at Google has been crunching the numbers to see how we could greatly reduce fossil fuel use by 2030. Our analysis suggests a potential path to weaning the U.S. off of coal and oil for electricity generation by 2030 (with some remaining use of natural gas as well as nuclear), and cutting oil use for cars by 40%. Over 22 years this plan could generate billions of dollars in savings and help create millions of green jobs.

Solar Panels
In the summer of 2007, with an eye toward bringing solar power into the mainstream, Google switched on one of the largest corporate solar installations in the United States at our Mountain View headquarters. Their 9,212 solar panels produce 1.6 MW of electricity, which is enough to power approximately 1,000 average California homes. It reduces their carbon emissions and makes good business sense too; the installation will pay for itself in about 7.5 years.

Agriculture as Provider of Both Food and Fuel

2010-05-20T05:47:00.000-07:00

The new research paper "Agriculture as Provider of Both Food and Fuel" has been published in AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment by Kesti Johansson, Karin Liljequist, Lars Ohlander and Kjell Aleklett

Abstract

A database of global agricultural primary production has been constructed and used to estimate its energy content. The portion of crops available for food and biofuel after postharvest losses was evaluated. The basic conditions for agriculture and plant growth were studied, to ensure sustainable scenarios.

The net energy contents for the world and EU27 was found to be 7200-9300 and 430 TWh respectively, to be compared with food requirements of 7100 and 530 TWh. Clearly, very little, or nothing, remains for biofuel from agricultural primary crops. However, by using residues and bioorganic waste, it was found that biofuel production could theoretically replace one fourth of the global consumption of fossil fuels for transport.

The expansion potential for global agriculture is limited by availability of land, water and energy. A future decrease in supply of fossil energy and ongoing land degradation will thus cause difficulties for increased biofuel production from agriculture.

A related blog entry has been published by Aleklett which has also appeared on EnergyBulletin.net.

Volvo: "We all know that oil is running out"

2010-05-07T13:33:00.000-07:00

Demand for oil to outstrip supply within two years
A new article on Perth Now by Paul Syvret

Rising oil prices pose a grave threat to global economic recovery, according to experts. The fear has been expressed by the automobile industry. This week in Perth, Volvo's head of product planning, Lex Kerssemakers, said "we all know that oil is running out".

"We need to find alternative solutions and though we are aware of the alternatives - LPG, CNG, ethanol, electric and so on - we have to introduce these to the market, he said. "If we don't do it now, we won't be ready in five years when oil may be prohibitively expensive".

Mr Kerssemakers said Volvo would have an electric car on the world market in 2012 that would use less than 1.5 litres/100km of fuel - about one-tenth of that used by a current V8-engined sedan. Volvo is not alone in the race to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles - all car companies are either developing alternative engined or fuelled vehicles by themselves or in partnership with other car companies that, in many cases, were once their fierce rivals.

[via peakoil.net]

Transition in Action: Energy Descent Action Plan of Totnes and District

2010-05-06T12:35:00.000-07:00

‘Transition in Action’ is the UK’s first comprehensive Energy Descent Action Plan designed for and by a local community. It sees the changes necessitated by climate change, peak oil and the UK’s debt crisis not as a crisis, but as a huge opportunity for entrepreneurship, creativity, community, enhanced resilience and a greater quality of life. In these pages you will find not just a vision of a more resilient world, but practical steps to reach it, key research, inspired ideas and a glimpse into the town’s recent past and what we can learn from it. The online version of the Totnes and District Energy Descent Action Plan is available here.

What is an Energy Descent Action Plan?

An Energy Descent Action Plan is a guide to reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and reducing our carbon footprint over the next 20 years, during which we expect many changes associated with declining oil supplies and some of the impacts of climate change to become more apparent. In this EDAP we have built a picture of this future scenario based on visions of a better future. What we have tried in the process to invite the community to dream how the future could be, and to then work out the practical pathways by which we actually get there.

"Transition in Action, Totnes 2030, an Energy Descent Action Plan" by Transition Town Totnes has been scripted & edited by Jacqi Hodgson with Rob Hopkins

The Best Peak Oil Investments Series by Tom Konrad

2010-04-28T06:58:00.000-07:00

Tom Konrad is posting a new series of investment advise on the Alternative Energy Stocks blog which has also appeared on Seeking Alpha. Here is a collection of his Best Peak Oil Investment articles so far:

Peak Oil Investments I'm Putting My Money On: Part I, Biofuels
Peak Oil Investments I'm Putting My Money On: Part II, Hydrogen and Vehicle Electrification
Peak Oil Investments I'm Putting My Money On: Part III, Natural Gas Vehicles
Peak Oil Investments I'm Putting My Money On: Part IV, Converting Coal, Natural Gas to Liquids
Peak Oil Investments I'm Putting My Money On: Part V, Algae
Peak Oil Investments I'm Putting My Money On: Part VI, Barriers to Substitution
Peak Oil Investments I'm Putting My Money On: Part VII, Peak Substitutes?
Peak Oil Investments I'm Putting My Money On: Part VIII, Alternative Fuel Report Card
Peak Oil Investments I'm Putting My Money On: Part IX, The Methadone Economy

Energy Export Databrowser

2010-04-27T08:08:00.000-07:00

Access to fossil fuels is one of the most important issues of our time. The world's largest economies are extremely dependent upon imported supplies of oil and gas. Understanding who produces and consumes oil, coal and natural gas is critical today and will remain so in the years ahead.

The Energy Export Databrowser hosted by Mazama Science uses data from the 2009 BP Statistical Review and displays coal, oil & natural gas production and consumption timelines for each country in the database and several political and geographic groupings of nations. Users can dynamically plot import/export curves to get a sense of who the major fossil fuel producers and consumers are and how this has changed in the last four decades.

Interpreting Results

Various interesting patterns appear in the data graphics. A few interpretations are provided here.

Peak ProductionUninterrupted by war or political upheaval and developed with the latest technology, the North Sea provides a very good example of a 'normal' (almost gaussian) production curve that is now past 'peak' production. It is anticipated that annual production volumes will continue to decline barring a dramatic new discovery.

Export Land ModelThe 'Export Land Model' proposed by Jeffrey Brown and Samuel Foucher describes how developing nations, enriched by oil profits, will grow economically and increase their own consumption of energy resources. Declining production and increasing consumption can rapidly turn an exporting nation into one that requires imports as exemplified by ex-OPEC member Indonesia.

The Outlook for Energy in Eastern Europe and the FSU

2010-04-22T09:23:00.000-07:00

Lights Out? The Outlook for Energy in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union

This new report has been recently published by the World Bank. Download the pdf version to read the full Lights Out? The Outlook for Energy in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union paper. A short excerpt:

Foreword

Before the current economic crisis hit the Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region in 2008, energy security was a major source of concern in Central and Eastern Europe and in many of the economies in the former Soviet Union. Energy importers were experiencing shortages
leading to periodic brownouts and blackouts. An energy crisis seemed imminent.

Summary

Emerging Europe and Central Asia, the region made up of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), is a major energy supplier to both Eastern and Western Europe. However, the outlook for both primary and derivative energy supplies is questionable, with a real prospect of a significant decline during the next two decades.
Western Europe is heavily dependent on energy imports from this region. It will therefore be affected by declines in primary energy supplies. But Western Europe has the financial capacity to secure the energy supplies it needs (albeit at the expense of others). In contrast, the region’s energy-importing countries are caught between Western Europe, which has increasing import needs, and the region’s exporters, whose exports will likely decline. These countries face the prospect of being squeezed both financially and in terms of energy access.
This difficult prospect is compounded by the deterioration of the region’s energy infrastructure, including power generation and district heating. Although the public sector will have to finance a portion of these investments, it will not have the capacity to meet the full investment needs. It is therefore essential that countries in the region move quickly to put in place an enabling environment to support investment in the sector.
Overlaying all of this are environmental concerns, in particular concern about climate change. Member states of the European Union (EU) and those with EU ambitions will need to meet the challenging EU greenhouse gas emissions targets. At the same time, a number of countries in the region will face the temptation to use environmentally unfriendly technology to meet their immediate energy needs.
Policy responses need to emphasize demand-side management and the use of energy efficiency measures. The Russian Federation, as the region’s major energy exporter, needs to direct additional resources to energy production over the longer term if export levels are to be maintained. Incentives need to be devised and implemented to encourage countries to avoid environmentally unfriendly solutions.

[via The Oil Drum's daily Drumbeat news]

Earth Day 2010

2010-04-21T08:20:00.000-07:00

Earth Day is a day designed to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth's environment. It was founded by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in held on April 22, 1970 and is celebrated in more than 175 countries every year. Earth Day is celebrated in spring in the Northern Hemisphere and autumn in the Southern Hemisphere. Many communities celebrate Earth Week, an entire week of activities focused on environmental issues. While the first Earth Day was focused entirely on the United States, an organization launched by Denis Hayes—the original national coordinator in 1970—took it international in 1990 and organized events in 141 nations.

Earth Day 2010

Earth Day 2010 will coincide with the World People's Conference on Climate Change, to be held in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and with the International Year of Biodiversity.

The World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, better known by its Spanish acroynm CMPCC, is a conference organized by the Bolivian government to be held in Cochabamba, Bolivia April 19-22, 2010. Its objectives are the following:

Analyze the structural and systemic causes of climate change and propose substantive measures that facilitate the well-being of all mankind in harmony with nature.
Discuss and agree the draft Universal Declaration of rights of Mother Earth.
To agree on proposals for new commitments to the Kyoto Protocol and projects for a COP Decision under the United Nations Framework for Climate Change that will guide future actions in those countries that are engaged with life during climate change negotiation
Work on the organization of a people’s world referendum on climate change.
Analyze and draw up a plan of action to advance the establishment of a Climate Justice Tribunal;
Define strategies for action and mobilization in defense of life against climate change and for mother earth rights.

Building a Green New House

2010-04-20T08:04:00.000-07:00

In a short, funny, data-packed talk at TED U, Catherine Mohr walks through all the geeky decisions she made when building a green new house -- looking at real energy numbers, not hype. What choices matter most? Not the ones you think.

Catherine and Paul Mohr live in Silicon Valley with their daughter Natalie and cats Loki and Tia. In addition to building a green house, they both work on designing and building surgical robots at Intuitive Surgical.

Their 301 Monroe blog has entries about our house building process including:

“Energy” for posts that are particularly concerned with energy calculations and energy savings
“Sustainability” spans many subjects and includes many of the energy and water and strawbale posts, but also includes posts about sustainability of other materials

The Embodied energy calculations discussed in Catherine’s TED talk can be found on the Embodied Energy Blog post.

A Green New Deal for Europe

2010-04-16T05:56:00.000-07:00

The Green European Foundation (GEF) is the political foundation of the aisbl Green European Institute. It is one of the newly created political foundations on European level, and is funded on an annual basis by the European Parliament. GEF is publishing the Green New Deal series.
In the face of the current multiple crisis (financial, economic, social, environmental), the need for sustainable policies is self-evident. The Green New Deal is the integrated policy approach that Greens in Europe are putting forward as a solution to the crisis. The Towards Green Modernization in the face of Crisis report by the Wuppertal Institute analyzes in depth the climate, environment and energy aspects of this proposal.

Over the past year, billions of Euros have been spent in Europe, the US and other industrialised countries on so-called ‘recovery packages’ to overcome the economic crisis. However, these unprecedented amounts of public money could also be focused on fostering an ecological transformation of our economies, and not on safeguarding the economic patterns that brought about the crisis in the first place. Needless to say, this is no easy task. The present report by the Wuppertal Institute is meant to take stock of the current situation and identify the most suitable areas, the most effective instruments and the best practices for promoting this transformation.

Greening recovery packages

The report gives an overview of the “recovery packages” introduced by governments around the globe and reveals that the European Union is lagging behind the United States and Asia in terms of the Green share of those recovery plans. The authors show the economic and employment potential of a Green New Deal and that the EU has the possibility of leading the way.The report takes a pragmatic approach in the sense that it focuses primarily on how to ‘green’ immediate recovery activities in specific economic areas, and how to support the creation of framework conditions which initiate a dynamic for ecological modernisation and structural change. It also identifies key elements for the implementation of a Green New Deal.

Policy recommendations

The report ends with a series of recommendations that urge the European Union and its Member States to focus their programmes on investments that will kick-start a Green economy and provide sustainable ways out of the crisis.

Green New Deal series
The next volume of the series has also been published: Green New Deal and a European Response to the Crisis: towards ambitious macroeconomic governance of the EU

In this second volume, Francisco Padilla argues in favor of the idea of transforming the Stability and Growth Pact into a Sustainable Stability and Growth Pact.

In this recent article published by the Green European Foundation, the author argues that apart from the reforms of financial regulation that have already been announced, the European Union has to respond to the global crisis by pursuing a double objective. On the one hand, it should focus on economic reorganization, centered around eco-efficency and low carbon economy as engines of job creation. On the other hand, attention must be paid to the fight against unsustainable (public and private) debt and to the alarming increase in poverty rates, fostered in turn by wage deflation. The article maintains that only by focusing on these two conditions at the same time the European Union will be able to tackle the structural causes of systemic economic instability, exacerbated by the past 30 years of financial liberalisation.

This latter publication is so far only available in French on the GEF web page.

Energy Intensity of Countries Visualized

2010-04-14T09:43:00.000-07:00

Gapminder World shows the world’s most important trends. The following Visualization from Gapminder World shows the energy intensity of different countries around the world, powered by Trendalyzer from www.gapminder.org. Check out the live web chart here.

Gapminder is a non-profit venture – a modern “museum” on the Internet – promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

35.5 MPG by 2016 - New US Milage Standards

2010-04-13T08:12:00.000-07:00

U.S. Issues Limits on Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Cars

[via The New York Times]

The federal government took its first formal step to regulate global warming pollution on Thursday by issuing final rules for greenhouse gas emissions for automobiles and light trucks.

The move ends a 30-year battle between regulators and automakers but sets the stage for what may be a bigger fight over climate-altering emissions from stationary sources like power plants, steel mills and refineries.

The new tailpipe rules, jointly written by the Transportation Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, set emissions and mileage standards that would translate to a combined fuel economy average for new vehicles of 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016. Most drivers will see lower mileage figures in actual driving.

The rules are expected to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases about 30 percent from 2012 to 2016.

Officials said the program would save the owner of an average 2016 car about $3,000 in fuel over the life of the vehicle and eliminate emissions of nearly a billion tons of greenhouse gases over the lives of all regulated vehicles.

Reaching the new efficiency figure will add about $1,000 to the cost of the average new car by 2016, according to industry and government estimates.

The tailpipe rule reflects a truce between the auto industry and state and federal governments, which have been feuding over emissions and mileage standards since the 1970s. It is the first time the federal Clean Air Act has been applied to carbon dioxide and other global warming pollutants.

Online World Simulation

2010-04-07T06:47:00.000-07:00

This online Simgua World simulation predicts the macro-level development and change of the entire world. There are six main sectors in it: a food system, a population system, a pollution system, a nonrenewable resource system, and an industrial system.

You may experiment with several variables of the model including the initial level of nonrenewable resources, the start year for the implementation of a high-tech improvement policy, and the delay between technology development and its implementation.

You may download the model to control many more variables. This world simulation is based on the World3 model developed by the Club of Rome. This model was used in the original Limits to Growth publication in 1972.

Simgua is a next-generation, no-nonsense modeling application that helps you develop powerful models and simulations.

Our Future and the End of the Oil Age: Building Resilience in a Resource-Constrained World

2010-04-01T05:13:00.000-07:00

A new presentation from ClubOrlov by Dmitry Orlov:

In conclusion

Many people can't be persuaded by either fact or reason. Let's hope you are not one of them.
Running out the clock on our current living arrangement is a bad idea: the longer you wait, the fewer options you will be left with
A rather exciting time to be alive, wouldn't you say?

Feasta Tipping Point Report and the New Emergency Conference

2010-03-22T03:20:00.000-07:00

Feasta aims to identify the characteristics (economic, cultural and environmental) of a truly sustainable society, articulate how the necessary transition can be effected and promote the implementation of the measures required for this purpose.

Feasta has released a new report Tipping Point: Near-Term Systemic Implications of a Peak in Global Oil Production, by David Korowicz of Feasta and the Risk/Resilience Network, is now available for download. The report argues that the defining dynamic of our civilisation is the withdrawal of energy from a complex and integrated system adapted only to growing. A managed "de-growth" is impossible; what is required is rapid emergency planning coupled with a plan for longer-term adaptation.

Feasta organized The New Emergeny Conference last year. The videos of all of the presentations from the conference can now be viewed for free on the conference website.

This conference, marking Feasta's tenth anniversary, analysed the systems and the mindsets that have steered the world onto its grotesquely unsustainable current path. Discussions focussed on the new systems (financial, energy, food) and ways of thinking that are urgently required to correct the situation and bring about a rapid transition to a more secure future. Many of the ideas explored were Feasta's. Others were presented by international speakers who broadly share Feasta's analysis of what needs to be done to build a truly sustainable world.

That's it for the 100th post on the Energy Crash blog.

Global Wind Power Boom Continues Despite Economic Woes

2010-03-18T08:09:00.000-07:00

China doubles installed capacity for fifth year running – Global markets up 31%

Brussels, 3 February 2010. The Global Wind Energy Council today announced that the world’s wind power capacity grew by 31% in 2009, adding 37.5 GW to bring total installations up to 157.9 GW. A third of these additions were made in China, which experienced yet another year of over 100% growth.

“The continued rapid growth of wind power despite the financial crisis and economic downturn is testament to the inherent attractiveness of the technology, which is clean, reliable and quick to install. Wind power has become the power technology of choice a growing number of countries around the world,” said Steve Sawyer, GWEC’s Secretary General. “Copenhagen didn’t bring us any closer to a global price on carbon, but wind energy continued to grow due to national energy policy in our main markets and also because many governments in prioritised renewable energy development in their economic recovery plans,” he said.

Wind energy is now an important player in the world’s energy markets. The global wind market for turbine installations in 2009 was worth about 45 bn EUR or 63 bn US$. GWEC estimates that around half a million people are now employed by the wind industry around the world.

The main markets driving this significant growth continue to be Asia, North America and Europe, each of which installed more than 10 GW of new wind capacity in 2009.

China was the world’s largest market in 2009, nearly doubling its wind generation capacity from 12.1 GW in 2008 to 25.1 GW at the end of 2009 with new capacity additions of 13 GW.

“The Chinese government is taking very seriously its responsibility to limit CO2 emissions while providing energy for its growing economy. China is putting strong efforts into developing the country’s tremendous wind resource. Given the current growth rates, it can be expected that the even the unofficial target of 150 GW will be met well ahead of 2020,” said Li Junfeng, Secretary General of the Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association.

Newly added capacity of 1,270 MW in India and some smaller additions in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan make Asia the biggest regional market for wind energy in 2009, with more than 14 GW of new capacity.

However, the US continues to have a comfortable lead in terms of total installed capacity. Against all expectations, the US wind energy market installed nearly 10 GW in 2009, increasing the country’s installed capacity by 39% and bringing the total installed, grid-connected capacity to 35 GW. In early 2009, some analysts had foreseen a drop in wind power development of as much as 50%, but the implementation of the US Recovery Act with its strong focus on wind energy development in the summer reversed this trend.

“The U.S. wind energy industry shattered all installation records in 2009, chalking up the Recovery Act as a historic success in creating jobs, avoiding carbon, and protecting consumers,” said AWEA CEO Denise Bode. “But U.S. wind turbine manufacturing is down compared to last year’s levels, and needs long-term policy certainty and market pull in order to grow.”

Europe, which has traditionally been the world’s largest market for wind energy development, continued to see strong growth, also exceeding expectations. In 2009, 10.5 GW were installed in Europe, led by Spain (2.5GW) and Germany (1.9 GW). Italy, France and the UK all added more than 1 GW of new wind capacity each.

“It is a remarkable result in a difficult year” said Christian Kjaer, CEO of the European Wind Energy Association. “The figures, once again, confirm that wind power, together with other renewable energy technologies and a shift from coal to gas, are delivering massive European carbon reductions, while creating much needed economic activity and new jobs for Europe’s citizens.”

“Wind energy is already making a significant contribution to saving CO2 emissions. The 158GW of global wind capacity in place at the end of 2009 will produce 340 TWh of clean electricity and save 204 million tons of CO2 every year,” concluded Sawyer. “As we see in Europe and the US, wind power is now often the most attractive option for new power generation, both in economic and environmental terms, and for improved supply security.”

Twin Threats to Resource Scarcity: Oil & Water by Matthew Simmons

2010-03-16T10:29:00.000-07:00

Matthew R. Simmons had a recent speech at Marsh’s National Oil Companies’ Conference 2010. The presentation: Twin Threats to Resource Scarcity: Oil & Water is available online on the web page of Simmons & Company International.

A post on The Business Insider called it Matthew Simmons' Awesome Presentation On The Coming Oil & Water Shortage.

Energy Solution Ideas of the Buckminster Fuller Challenge

2010-03-12T06:07:00.000-08:00

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge

Each year a distinguished jury will award a $100,000 prize to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.

A Design Science Revolution

Buckminster Fuller's prolific life of exploration, discovery, invention and teaching was driven by his intention “to make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or disadvantage of anyone.”

Fuller coupled this intention with a pioneering approach aimed at solving complex problems. This approach, which he called “comprehensive anticipatory design science”, combined an emphasis on individual initiative and integrity with whole systems thinking, scientific rigor and faithful reliance on nature's underlying principles. The designs he is best known for (the geodesic dome, the Dymaxion house, car, and map, and the global electric grid) were part of a visionary strategy to redesign the inter-related systems of shelter, transportation and energy.

After decades of tracking world resources, innovations in science and technology, and human needs, Fuller asserted that options exist to successfully surmount the crises of unprecedented scope and complexity facing all humanity – he issued an urgent call for a design science revolution to make the world work for all.

Answering this call is what the Buckminster Fuller Challenge is all about.

Energy Solutions in the Idea Index

The Idea Index serves as a tool to educate, network, and help solve problems. As an educational tool, the Index is full of hopeful, exciting ideas and solutions to pressing problems. As a networking tool, the Index allows site visitors to contact the project leaders, leave a constructive and/or encouraging comment and connect with one another. It presents a fully searchable database of socially-responsible initiatives, in all stages of development, in need of further funding and support.

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge Idea Index currently lists 38 projects related to Energy problems and solutions. Some examples:

Comprehensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World: The Challenge of Appalachia
Oregon Wind Helyx™ Vertical Axis Wind Turbine, a.k.a. "The Urban Turbine"
Now House™: a replicable model for reducing energy and greenhouse gas emissions in millions of existing homes

Forecasting World Crude Oil Production Using Multicyclic Hubbert Model

2010-03-11T08:28:00.000-08:00

A new oil forecast research from Kuwait

The year 2008 has witnessed unprecedented fluctuations in the oil prices. During the first three-quarters, the oil price abruptly increased to $140/bbl, a level that has never been reached before; then because of the global economic crisis, the price dramatically plunged to less than $50/bbl by the end of the year losing more than 64% of the maximum price in less than three months period. The supply of crude oil to the international market oscillated to follow suite according to the law of supply and demand. This behavior affected oil production in all exporting countries. Nonetheless, the demand for crude oil in some developing countries, such as China and India, has increased in the past few years because of the rapid growth in the transportation sector in addition to the absence of viable economic alternatives for fossil fuel. The rapid growth in fuel demand has forced the policy makers worldwide to include uninterrupted crude oil supply as a vital priority in their economic and strategic planning.

Even though forecasting should be handled with extreme caution, it is always desirable to look ahead as far as possible to make an intellectual judgment on the future supplies of crude oil. Over the years, accurate prediction of oil production was confronted by fluctuating ecological, economical, and political factors, which imposed many restrictions on its exploration, transportation, and supply and demand. The objective of this study is to develop a forecasting model to predict world crude oil supply with better accuracy than the existing models. Even though our approach originates from Hubbert model, it overcomes the limitations and restrictions associated with the original Hubbert model. As opposed to Hubbert single-cycle model, our model has more than one cycle depending on the historical oil production trend and known oil reserves. The presented method is a viable tool to predict the peak oil production rate and time. The model is simple, accurate, and totally data driven, which allows a continuous updating once new data are available. The analysis of 47 major oil producing countries estimates the world’s ultimate crude oil reserve by 2140 BSTB and the remaining recoverable oil by 1161 BSTB. The world production is estimated to peak in 2014 at a rate of 79 MMSTB/D. OPEC has remaining reserve of 909 BSTB, which is about 78% of the world reserves. OPEC production is expected to peak in 2026 at a rate of 53 MMSTB/D. On the basis of 2005 world crude oil production and current recovery techniques, the world oil reserves are being depleted at an annual rate of 2.1%.

Life After Growth - Managing our Way to a Desirable Future

2010-03-10T07:54:00.000-08:00

What if the economy doesn't recover?

Richard Heinberg has a new article about the limits to growth on the Post Carbon Institute and shorter version on The Oil Drum. The main part of it is summarized in the following four propositions.

1. We have reached the end of economic growth as we have known it. The “growth” we are talking about consists of the expansion of the overall size of the economy (with more people being served and more money changing hands) and of the quantities of energy and material goods flowing through it. The economic crisis that began in 2008 was both foreseeable and inevitable, and it marks a permanent, fundamental break from past decades—a period in which economists adopted the unrealistic view that perpetual economic growth is necessary and also possible to achieve.

As we will see, there are fundamental constraints to ongoing economic expansion, and the world is beginning to encounter those constraints. This is not to say the U.S. or the world will never see another quarter or year of growth relative to the previous year. Rather, the point is that when the bumps are averaged out, the general trend-line of the economy (measured in terms of production and consumption of real goods) will be level or downward rather than upward from now on.

2. The basic factors that will inevitably shape whatever replaces the growth economy are knowable. To survive and thrive for long, societies have to operate within the planet’s budget of sustainably extractable resources. This means that even if we don’t know exactly what a desirable post-growth economy and lifestyle will look like, we know enough to begin working toward them.

3. It is possible for economies to persist for centuries or millennia with no or minimal growth. That is how most economies operated until recent times. If billions of people (cumulatively) through countless generations lived without economic growth, we can do so as well—now and far into the future. The end of growth does not mean the end of the world.

4. Life in a non-growing economy can be fulfilling, interesting, and secure. The absence of growth does not imply a lack of change or improvement. Within a non-growing or equilibrium economy, there can still be a continuous development of practical skills, artistic expression, and technology.

In fact, some historians and social scientists argue that life in an equilibrium economy can be superior to life in a fast-growing economy: while growth creates opportunities for some, it also typically intensifies competition—there are big winners and big losers, and (as in most boom towns) the quality of relations within the community can suffer as a result. Within a non-growing economy it is possible to maximize benefits and reduce factors leading to decay, but doing so will require pursuing appropriate goals: instead of more, we must strive for better; rather than promoting increased economic activity for its own sake, we must emphasize whatever increases quality of life without stoking consumption. One way to do this is to reinvent and redefine growth itself.

You can read the full article linked at the top of this post.

Economic Growth And Climate Change — No Way Out?

2010-02-24T09:36:00.000-08:00

Dave Cohen has posted a new entry on his Peak Watch blog on Economic Growth And Climate Change — No Way Out? I recommend you to check out the full article. Here is a short excerpt:

Humankind has reached a fork in the road. The business-as-usual path implies robust economic growth with a rise in the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to anthropogenic climate change. The other path, whatever its actual form turns out to be, shuns business-as-usual in an attempt stabilize greenhouse gas levels (mainly carbon dioxide CO2) in the Earth's atmosphere (e.g. at 450 ppmv, parts-per-million-by-volume) to avoid catastrophic warming (e.g. > 2°C). Considered alternatives invariably lay out a vision of the future in which emissions steadily decline while economies continue to grow. Is such a vision realistic? This essay questions standard assumptions underlying this "have your cake and eat it too" view.

Conclusions

The main conclusions of this essay subvert standard views of how the future looks if humankind chooses to make a serious effort to mitigate anthropogenic climate change.

For now, and in the "foreseeable" future, putting the breaks on economic growth appears to be the only practical way out of the climate dilemma. Unfortunately, this solution is politically impossible, a circumstance which is reinforced by economists' incontestable, unshakable belief that economic growth will continue in all future emissions (energy) scenarios. This conclusion rests upon the equally incontestable, unshakable Assumption of Technological Progress.

The inescapable conclusion in 2010 is that continued economic growth at near 20th century rates in the 21st century is incompatible with taking positive, effective steps to mitigate anthropogenic climate change. Moreover, such assumptions are not compatible with a near-term peak in the conventional oil supply.

Our species faces unprecedented challenges in this new century. Our response to those challenges will define Homo sapiens in ways we never had to come to grips with during the Holocene (roughly the last 10,000 years) or before that in the Pleistocene. The problems we face in this century are unique, even on geological time-scales extending far into the past beyond the 200,000-year-old Human experience on Earth.

Both our limitations and our abilities, such as they are, will be displayed in the bright, harsh light of the energy & climate outcomes in the 21st century. Regardless of who we pretend to be, our response to these challenges will tell us who we really are.

21 Hours - Why a Shorter Working Week Can Help Us All to Flourish in the 21st Century

2010-02-23T04:15:00.000-08:00

A ‘normal’ working week of 21 hours could help to address a range of urgent, interlinked problems: overwork, unemployment, over-consumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being, entrenched inequalities, and the lack of time to live sustainably, to care for each other, and simply to enjoy life.

This new report by nef sets out arguments for a much shorter working week. It proposes a radical change in what is considered ‘normal’ – down from 40 hours or more, to 21 hours. While people can choose to work longer or shorter hours, we propose that 21 hours – or its equivalent spread across the calendar year – should become the standard that is generally expected by government, employers, trade unions, employees, and everyone else.

The shape of the report
The report first describe the way people use their time today. Next, it looks at experiments with shorter working hours and some of their effects. It considers how our notions of ‘normal’ working hours emerge, and then set out reasons why a move towards 21 hours could help meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. Finally, it explores the main problems that arise and how these might be addressed.

In conclusion
We are at the beginning of a national debate. This report makes the case for a substantial reduction in paid working hours, aiming towards 21 hours a week as the norm. The current norm of a nine-to-five, five-day week in paid employment does not reflect the way most people use their time. Unpaid work is generally overlooked and undervalued. A much shorter working week offers very considerable benefits to the environment, to society, and to the economy. There are serious problems to confront in the transition from where we are to where we want to be: they are mainly concerned with the impact on earnings and on employers’ balance sheets. We have set out suggestions for addressing these problems, acknowledging that an important pre-condition is a strong democracy and an effective and accountable government. Our suggestions include ways of incentivising employers, compensating lost earnings, sharing unpaid time more equally between women and men, and changing the climate of opinion. None of these options will work on its own and there are doubtless many more possibilities. The next step is to make a thorough examination of the benefits, challenges, barriers, and opportunities associated with moving towards a 21-hour week over the next decade. This will be part of the ‘Great Transition’ to a sustainable future.

Check out the full report on the web site of the new economics foundation. It is available for download in pdf.

Infrastructure: Priorities and painful decisions

2010-02-22T08:27:00.000-08:00

Christine Patton is a former risk and process management consultant; and currently Co-chairs the Transition Town OKC initiating group. She has a nice blog "Peak Oil Hausfrau". Check out her blog entry on the difficult decisions we need to face to maintain the most important infrastructure we built. Here is a short extract:

When cheap energy reigned, we built acres of infrastructure, without giving too much thought to the energy, materials, and money that we would need to maintain and operate these constructions. Now, we have come to completely depend on these systems, most of which did not exist in their current form one hundred years ago:

Roads, highways and bridges,
Water and sewage systems,
Housing and buildings (schools, hospitals),
Electric grid and power plants,
Landfills and hazardous waste disposal systems,
Dams and canals,
Public transit (including subways, buses and railways),
Internet and communications, and
Energy extraction, processing, and delivery systems.

The crumbling of this legacy of infrastructure is one of the many day-to-day living problems that we face over the next fifty to a hundred years. Unlike our natural systems, which can regenerate themselves (if not destroyed completely), and which are self-perpetuating and self-healing, our built infrastructure requires regular maintenance and investment. Maintenance depends on a base of knowledgeable personnel with access to information about the systems, affordable materials and energy, factories that produce needed parts, and regular investment to fix what's broken or decaying.

Things break. Water lines crack, electric lines snap, and potholes appear magically overnight. Infrastructure is especially vulnerable in severe weather and during natural disasters, but also from lack of regular maintenance and from accidents, and of course from willful malfeasance. We currently have the capacity to come in after a disaster, clean up, and repair the damage. Will we be able to do so when everything costs twice as much and when state, municipal and corporate revenues have been cut in half?

This is reality. With a future of decreasing energy supplies, we will have less and less available to maintain the systems that support our globalized, high-energy, consumer lifestyle, on top of the resources we need to meet our daily needs. We will need to decide where to spend our money, our materials, our energy, and our manpower. How will we prioritize? Will it be haphazardly, fixing whatever is broken, patching things together until the point that resources are no longer available? Will we only maintain systems in the places of the rich and powerful?

Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero!

2010-02-19T06:53:00.000-08:00

At TED2010, Bill Gates unveils his vision for the world's energy future, describing the need for "miracles" to avoid planetary catastrophe and explaining why he's backing a dramatically different type of nuclear reactor. The necessary goal? Zero carbon emissions globally by 2050.

Today Bill Gates talked about the nuclear reactor project, TerraPower, at TED 2010. As an investor in several promising energy projects, Gates said it is our responsibility to pursue technologies that achieve cheap energy with “zero carbon” emissions.

TerraPower determined a new type of traveling-wave reactor would be the best approach to meeting the world’s energy demand. Our team decided to pursue nuclear energy after investigating many different technologies and solutions. With advances in computing power in just the past few years, we are able to make radical contributions to science that weren’t possible a few years ago. We believe the traveling-wave reactor concept provides the kind of innovation that society needs.

This video explains the traveling-wave reactor and how it works.

[via Intellectual Ventures Lab]

Ecological Economics - Revaluing the Environment

2010-02-18T06:41:00.000-08:00

Growth for growth’s sake is no longer an option. Ecological economists are calling for a ‘green’ revision of incentives and investments, as the starting point for achieving societies that are sustainable in environmental, social as well as economic terms.

Peter May, past president of the International Society for Ecological Economics, has written an excellent summary of the role of ecological economics in the transition to a sustainable economy (appearing in the current issue of The Broker). He contrasts the principles of ecological economics (EE) with those of mainstream economics and points out the key fundamental difference — EE practitioners recognize that the economy is a subsystem of the biosphere, while mainstream economists tend to view the economy as the whole and the environment as the subsystem.

Principles of ecological economics

EE takes as its starting point the notion that the economy is situated within the biosphere (in contrast with mainstream economic theory in which environmental problems are considered only as external reflections of the larger economic system). Resources such as air, water, food, wood, fibre, minerals and energy sources are the foundation of the economy. The economy also draws on the Earth as a sink for its wastes, such as carbon dioxide, toxic chemicals and chloro-fluorocarbons.

Facing reality

What does all this imply for the green economy? From an EE perspective, business as usual is no longer an option. A return to the expectation that a bull market will allow us to ‘grow our way out’ of crisis would mean we have learned nothing.

Rather, it is time to face the reality of biophysical limits and to find institutional and behavioural responses to the underlying contradictions that have brought the global economy to its knees, and that have degraded biodiversity and overheated the planet.

[via SteadyState.org]

Environment, power, and society for the twenty-first century

2010-02-11T06:08:00.000-08:00

"Get a rare, fresh, enlightening glimpse of the Big Picture of our environmental and energy problems - Highly recommended." -- Choice

Howard T. Odum possessed one of the most innovative minds of the twentieth century. He pioneered the fields of ecological engineering, ecological economics, and environmental accounting, working throughout his life to better understand the interrelationships of energy, environment, and society and their importance to the well-being of humanity and the planet.

Environment, Power and Society for the Twenty-First Century: The Hierarchy of Energy is a major modernization of Odum's classic work on the significance of power and its role in society, bringing his approach and insight to a whole new generation of students and scholars. For this edition Odum refines his original theories and introduces two new measures: emergy and transformity. These concepts can be used to evaluate and compare systems and their transformation and use of resources by accounting for all the energies and materials that flow in and out and expressing them in equivalent ability to do work. Natural energies such as solar radiation and the cycling of water, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen are diagrammed in terms of energy and emergy flow. Through this method Odum reveals the similarities between human economic and social systems and the ecosystems of the natural world. In the process, we discover that our survival and prosperity are regulated as much by the laws of energetics as are systems of the physical and chemical world.

The Book Environment, Power and Society for the Twenty-First Century: The Hierarchy of Energy is available on Google Books with limited preview.

Climax and Descent (Chapter 13)

The growth of civilisation on the nonrenewable reserves of the earth is surging to a climax of information miracles, stormy economics, turbulent populations, concentrated wealth, and bewildering complexity. Although the future is always masked by the oscillations of smaller scale, the empower of society may be at climax in transition to times of receding energy. This last chapter uses principles of energy hierarchy and pulsing to anticipate the future, suggest adaptive policies, and seek a prosperous way down.

...

By developing explanations and plans now for making descent prosperous, we can be ready when the shocks of change galvanize the attention of society. Some can have faith in the future from understanding energy principles. Other will find faith in religions that adapt the necessary commandments for once again fitting culture to the earth. The people of Easter Island disappeared, leaving only their monuments as an example to the world of what happens when culture cannot downsize to fit its environmental production.

The Oil Crunch - A wake-up call for the UK economy

2010-02-10T05:18:00.000-08:00

Taskforce warns Britain is unprepared for significant risk to companies and consumers
Poorest to be hit hardest by price rises for travel, food, heating and consumer goods
New policies must be priority for whoever wins the General Election
Recommended packages include legislation, new technologies and behaviour-change incentives
Fundamental change in demand patterns triggered by emerging economy countries

London, 10 February, 2010: A group of leading business people today call for urgent action to prepare the UK for Peak Oil. The second report of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security (ITPOES) finds that oil shortages, insecurity of supply and price volatility will destabilise economic, political and social activity potentially by 2015. Peak Oil refers to the point where the highest practicable rate of global oil production has been achieved and from which future levels of production will either plateau, or begin to diminish. This means an end to the era of cheap oil.

The report, “The Oil Crunch - a wake-up call for the UK economy”, urges the formation of a coalition of government, business and consumers to address the issue.

The Taskforce states the impact of Peak Oil will include sharp increases in the cost of travel, food, heating and retail goods. It finds that the transport sector will be particularly hard hit, with more vulnerable members of society the first to feel the impact. The Taskforce warns that the UK must not be caught out by the oil crunch in the same way it was with the credit crunch and states that policies to address Peak Oil must be a priority for the new government formed after the election.

Having assessed the systemic changes caused by the global economic recession, coupled with the projected growth from non-OECD countries, ITPOES predicts Peak Oil will occur within the next decade, potentially by 2015 at less than 95 million barrels per day. (In 2008, production levels were 85 million barrels per day.) The study finds that the recession has delayed the oil crunch by two years. This provides invaluable time to plan for a future which will see structural increases in oil prices coupled with shortages and increased market volatility. The UK will be particularly badly hit by these factors with a tightening of supply leading to greater oil import dependency, rising and volatile prices, inflationary pressures and the risk of disruption to the transport system.

Key recommendations from the report include the acceleration of the “green transport revolution” to see the ongoing introduction of lower carbon technology and trials of sustainable bio fuels. This would cover private vehicles, but also extend to the general transport network, with the government urged not to cut investment in public transport. A focus on new clean technologies should be combined with wide scale behavioural change promoted through incentives and education to produce a modal shift to greener modes of transport.

ITPOES’ membership includes Arup, Foster + Partners, Scottish and Southern Energy, Solar Century, Stagecoach Group and Virgin Group. The report will be launched at an event at the Royal Society with presentations from Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin Group; Philip Dilley, Chairman of Arup; Ian Marchant, CEO of Scottish and Southern Energy; Jeremy Leggett, Chairman of Solarcentury; Brian Souter, CEO of Stagecoach Group; and Will Whitehorn, President of Virgin Galactic.

The Taskforce recognises that oil demand in the OECD area (developed countries) is now flat or declining but also recognises that demand in non-OECD (developing countries) continues to expand rapidly, having already recovered from the recession. Demand in the non-OECD areas already accounts for 45% of global oil demand and is expected to reach 50% by the middle of the decade.

The report issues a range of recommendations including:

General policies:

Government, local authorities and business must face up to the Peak Oil threat and put contingency plans in place
A package of policies are required to deal with the economic, financial and social impact of potential high oil prices
There is a need to accelerate the green industrial revolution

Transport:

Government support should be boosted for alternative technological solutions and associated infrastructure, such as electric vehicles
Policies and fiscal measures to support and incentivise a shift from the traditional car to more fuel- and carbon-efficient modes of transport to be established
Government investment in public transport must be maintained

Power generation and distribution policies:

Government must provide a stable pro-investment regulatory and political climate
The nation’s power generation and transmission distribution infrastructure must be changed to adapt to new demand patterns, price spikes and supply interruption

Retail and agriculture:

Measures must be taken to protect the public, particularly the most disadvantaged, from the impact of rising fuel costs on food and other consumer goods prices

Publications by the new economics foundation

2010-02-03T10:37:00.000-08:00

nef (the new economics foundation) is an independent think-and-do tank that inspires and demonstrates real economic well-being.

Growth isn't Possible

Four years on from nef's Growth isn’t Working, this new report goes one step further and tests that thesis in detail in the context of climate change and energy. It argues that indefinite global economic growth is unsustainable. Just as the laws of thermodynamics constrain the maximum efficiency of a heat engine, economic growth is constrained by the finite nature of our planet’s natural resources (biocapacity).

The Cuts Won't Work

Why spending on a Green New Deal will reduce the public debt, cut carbon emissions, increase energy security and reduce fuel poverty.

The Great Transition

Creating a new kind of economy is crucial if we want to tackle climate change and avoid the mounting social problems associated with the rise of economic inequality. The Great Transition provides the first comprehensive blueprint for building an economy based on stability, sustainability and equality.

The Consumption Explosion

Overconsumption, not overpopulation, is the real threat to the environment. Even the recession has had little impact on our burgeoning ecological debt.

Ecological Debt

This book explores a great paradox of our age: how the global wealth gap was built on ecological debts, which the world's poorest are having to pay for.

A Green New Deal

The global economy is facing a ‘triple crunch’: a combination of a credit-fuelled financial crisis, accelerating climate change and soaring energy prices underpinned by encroaching peak oil. It is increasingly clear that these three overlapping events threaten to develop into a perfect storm, the like of which has not been seen since the Great Depression, with potentially devastating consequences.

Hooked on Oil

How fossil fuel profits could be taxed to fund a clean energy economy.

Oil demand has peaked in developed world: IEA

2010-01-29T07:01:00.000-08:00

LONDON (Reuters) - Oil use in rich industrialized countries will never return to 2006 and 2007 levels because of more fuel efficiency and the use of alternatives, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency said on Thursday.

The bold prediction, while made previously by some analysts, is significant because the IEA advises 28 countries on energy policy and its oil demand forecasts are closely watched by traders and policymakers.

Is it demand or is it suppy which has peaked?

Environmental and Energy Policy Challenges in the EU

2010-01-18T09:11:00.000-08:00

The website of the President of the European Parliament has two key documents on some of the forward policy challenges and choices that are likely to face the European Union in the coming decade from 2009-2019.

The first document is a compendium of papers on policy challenges and choices. These papers provide a valuable overview of multiple issues which the EU in general is likely to confront over coming years, together with a series of useful pointers as to how the EU institutions might choose to respond.

The second document is much shorter, and is a synoptic 'EU Policy Challenges', which is a check-list of 69 possible areas for future policy work. These challenges include the following three areas related to the environment and energy.

Tackling climate change effectively

The European Parliament will need to work towards reaching the 20-20-20 target (20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (possibly 30%), 20% improvement in energy efficiency and 20% renewables in the energy mix) by 2020. The following four steps of the climate energy package of December 2008 will be on the agenda:
1) revision of the directive on EU emission Trading System;
2) creation of a directive for pilot projects on carbon storage;
3) creation of a directive on renewable energy in electricity, transportation and heating and cooling;
4) setting binding national targets for CO2 reduction.
A future financial framework will need to be created so that EU budget lines can be adapted in line with the requirements of climate policy. The European Parliament can no longer redistribute existing resources but could propose the creation of new resources to finance the cross-sectoral nature of the fight against climate change.
The Parliament could consider using 'green diplomacy', by regularly raising the issue of the EU climate targets, and defending those targets, in its contacts with parliamentarians from other countries. In addition, it could prompt the Commission and the Member States to construct a foreign policy on climate change and repeatedly draw attention to the EU climate targets in the EU's and the Member States' diplomatic missions.
International cooperation is crucial. Building an effective global carbon market will help achieve sustainable globalization. Also, the Parliament could push for placing climate change at the core of the development policy. The EU will need to give assistance to developing countries to draw up targets, to adopt new technologies and to stop deforestation.
Mitigation and adaptation policies will lead to a new model of sustainable development, where the social character could be promoted in order to secure the necessary social consensus. Thus the European Parliament could fully involve citizens in the process of combating climate change.

Shaking up EU biodiversity policy

The European Parliament could push for the development of a more coherent European integrated approach for halting the biodiversity loss. A clear post 2010 target could be set by the Member States and new funding opportunities could be established under the Common Agriculture Policy, the Common Fisheries Policy, and the Cohesion and Structural Funds.
The Parliament could take the global initiative of proposing the creation, based on the model of IPCC, of an Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity Loss, which would be responsible for the coordination of the activities of the Member States and for the monitoring of the progress made in this area.

Transforming the EU into a sustainable and efficient energy system

The European Parliament can encourage Member States to devise a forward-looking common energy policy both within the EU and in external relations, so as to ensure a high level of security of energy supply. The proposal of the Parliament to form solar energy partnerships with third countries in the Mediterranean region could be taken forward.
The Parliament will need to promote further research and pilot projects in this field, as well as the development of the grid so as to allow for the optimal integration of renewable energy resources.
The transformation of the energy system will require the adjustment of the fiscal and market instrument. The Parliament could call on the Member States and the other institutions to introduce reduced rates of VAT for renewable energy and for energy-saving goods and services and to create incentives to modernisation by means of VAT reductions.
The growing energy dependence on fossil fuels will have to be limited and managed through diversification. The Parliament could stimulate investments in renewables and upgraded energy infrastructure, whilst developing a common approach towards Russia's influence on the gas market.
It could be important that the Parliament supports the restructuring of the industrial system (buildings, transport and manufacturing) with reinforced innovation. This includes strengthening existing measures, continuing public intervention and the increasing of financial resources for eco-innovation.

State of the World 2010: Transforming Cultures

2010-01-15T06:18:00.000-08:00

State of the World 2010: Transforming Cultures: From Consumerism to Sustainability (State of the World)

"Worldwatch has taken on an ambitious agenda in this volume. No generation in history has achieved a cultural transformation as sweeping as the one called for here…it is hard not to be impressed with the book’s boldness "
—Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank

"If we continue to think of ourselves mostly as consumers, it’s going to be very hard to bring our environmental troubles under control. But it’s also going to be very hard to live the rounded and joyful lives that could be ours. This is a subversive volume in all the best ways!"
—Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

"This year’s State of the World report is a cultural mindbomb exploding with devastating force. I hope it wakes a few people up ."
—Kalle Lasn, Editor of Adbusters magazine

Like a tsunami, consumerism has engulfed human cultures and Earth’s ecosystems. Left unaddressed, we risk global disaster. But if we channel this wave, intentionally transforming our cultures to center on sustainability, we will not only prevent catastrophe, but may usher in an era of sustainability—one that allows all people to thrive while protecting, even restoring, Earth.

In State of the World 2010: Transforming Cultures: From Consumerism to Sustainability, sixty renowned researchers and practitioners describe how we can harness the world’s leading institutions—education, the media, business, governments, traditions, and social movements—to reorient cultures toward sustainability.

About the State of the World Series

Worldwatch's flagship publication, State of the World, has educated a broad audience of students, journalists, policymakers, and concerned citizens about trends in sustainable development for a quarter century. The book has been published in 36 languages, and over the years it has authoritatively assessed issues ranging from population, energy, and agriculture to materials use, health, and trade policy. Topics are covered from a global perspective, with an emphasis on innovation and problem-solving. State of the World is recognized as a classic of environmental literature, having attracted luminaries from Kofi Annan to Mikhail Gorbachev to write forewords for the book. News media, policymakers, and NGOs worldwide cite the book for its cutting-edge analysis, reliability, and careful documentation of its arguments, all marshaled to speed the global transition to a sustainable world.

(Fly Around) The World Without Fossil Fuels

2010-01-07T06:10:00.000-08:00

Bertrand Piccard circumnavigated the Earth in a hot-air balloon. Now he wants to circle it in an airplane powered only by solar energy.

For the dawn of a new decade, adventurer Bertrand Piccard in this TED Talk offers us a challenge: Find motivation in what seems impossible. He shares his own plans to do what many say can't be done -- to fly around the world, day and night, in a solar-powered aircraft.

Bertrand Piccard was born in a family of firsts. His father, Jacques, together with Dan Walsh of the US, was the first man to reach the deepest point of the world's oceans, the Mariana Trench, in 1960. Almost 30 years earlier, his grandfather, Auguste, first ballooned into the stratosphere. While they went up and down, Bertrand went horizontal and in 1999, together with Brian Jones of Britain, completed the first-ever nonstop balloon circumnavigation of the globe, flying more than 45,000 km in 20 days.

Now, in a hangar near Zurich, a team of scientists and engineers around Piccard and co-pilot André Borschberg is building Solar Impulse, an unconventional aircraft designed to circumnavigate the Earth powered by solar energy, flying day and night (yes, when the Sun is "off"). The just-unveiled prototype has the weight of a car but the wingspan of an Airbus. Piccard hopes for test flights in the first half of 2010, and possibly a long flight in 2011, before attempting to fly around the Earth.

In a world depending on fossil energies, the Solar Impulse project is a paradox, almost a provocation: it aims to have an airplane take off and fly autonomously, day and night, propelled uniquely by solar energy, right round the world without fuel or pollution. An unachievable goal without pushing back the current technological limits in all fields...

Economic Dynamics - And the Real Danger

2009-12-19T07:47:00.000-08:00

George Mobus has published a new summary paper on his blog Question Everything that he have written to explain the findings from his computer model of an abstract economy's dynamics when it is run mostly on fixed, finite fuel sources such as fossil fuels.

His model describes an abstract economy in which work processes use energy and raw materials to produce assets, some of which are consumed by processes that constitute the major body of the system, some of which will be reinvested in the work processes.

The dynamics of asset production and decay are governed by the laws of thermodynamics. The general conservation law applies to both matter and energy. But the second law, in particular, has ultimate influence over the efficiency and effectiveness of work processes as well as the entropic decay of all forms of assets.

A key question that needs to be addressed is: given our current heavy reliance on fossil fuels for more than 80% of our energy inputs, what happens in an economy that is growing when the resources are depleting?

Many people have realized, either intuitively or logically, that what matters insofar as economic activity is concerned is the net energy — the energy available after extraction of the gross energy (in this case crude oil) and refinement or conversion to a form useful in doing work. Energy must be reinvested in energy extraction, transportation, and refinement in order to gain net energy that can be available for asset production (other than assets needed for energy extraction). Thus there is an energy return on energy invested (EROI or EROEI) that must be taken into account in determining if an economy is viable, stable, or growing.

Check out the very interesting full post on the Question Everything blog.

Life at the End of Empire Movie - What a Way to Go

2009-12-15T09:11:00.000-08:00

A middle class white guy comes to grips with Peak Oil, Climate Change, Mass Extinction, Population Overshoot and the demise of the American Lifestyle.

What is it doing to us as thoughtful human beings as we face the overwhelming challenges of:

Peaking fossil fuel flow rates?
Critically degraded ecosystems?
A changing climate?
An exploding global population?
Teetering global economies?
An unstable political climate?

And what is it doing to the rest of the life on this planet?

The Movie What a Way to Go - Life at the End of the Empire features interviews with Daniel Quinn, Derrick Jensen, Jerry Mander, Chellis Glendinning, Richard Heinberg, Thomas Berry, William Catton, Ran Prieur and Richard Manning, What a Way to Go looks at the current global situation and asks the most important questions of all:

How did we get here?
Why do we keep destroying the planet?
What do we truly want?
Can we find a vision that will empower us to do what is necessary to survive, and even thrive, in the coming decades?

Writer/Director
Timothy S. Bennett

Producer
Sally C. Erickson

Consultant
Barbara Trent, Producer and Director of the
1993 Oscar® winning feature documentary, The Panama Deception.

TEQs - Tradable Energy Quotas

2009-12-11T04:23:00.000-08:00

TEQs - An effective and fair response to both climate change and resource depletion?

TEQs (Tradable Energy Quotas) would reduce our reliance on fossil fuels fast, guarantee that we meet our agreed emissions obligations and empower communities to address the challenges of our times, allowing us to move into a happier, thriving future.

All nations need to develop a common purpose in response to two problems. There is the climate problem: oil, gas and coal produce the greenhouse gases that are changing our climate. This is already killing many species and 150,000 people each year, and is only getting worse, with the potential to hit unstoppable runaway conditions within a decade.

And there is the supply problem: reserves of fossil fuels in the ground are being used-up rapidly; in the coming years, there will be deepening scarcities with profound economic, political and social impacts.

We therefore need to manage an energy-descent, cooperating in solutions and alternatives as we go, maintaining a fair distribution of the energy on which we all depend, and starting as soon as we can. We call this the transition to Lean Energy.

TEQs provides the framework that enables a nation to do this, ensuring fair access to energy for all. It supplies the incentive for citizens, organisations and Government to work now on achieving the necessary rapid transformation in the way we use fuel into the future, and it provides time to plan ahead. It empowers localities and individuals to be able to make a tangible difference. It is fair, simple and practical, and it gets results by uniting the nation in a common purpose.

This website, and the booklet Energy and the Common Purpose explain how.

-----

To find out more, take a look at the brief summary, or for a comprehensive view of how the system works, explore our booklet Energy and the Common Purpose, now in a revised and expanded third edition.

You may also be interested to see the Parliamentary report on TEQs (Aug 2009), read more in our TEQs In Depth section, come to an event, or join the discussions in our TEQs forum (hosted by PowerSwitch).

For links to relevant documents, articles and the work of other organisations in this field see the TEQs links page.

Other names for Tradable Energy Quotas include: Domestic Tradable Quotas (DTQs), Personal Carbon Allowances (PCAs), Personal Carbon Trading, Carbon Quotas, Personal Carbon Rationing and Tradable Permits.

In Transition 1.0 Movie - From Oil Dependence To Local Resilience

2009-12-09T08:18:00.001-08:00

‘In Transition’ is the first detailed film about the Transition movement filmed by those that know it best, those who are making it happen on the ground. The Transition movement is about communities around the world responding to peak oil and climate change with creativity, imagination and humour, and setting about rebuilding their local economies and communities. It is positive, solutions focused, viral and fun.

‘In Transition’ has been shown in communities around the world to enthusiastic audiences, and is now available as a special edition 2 disc DVD set, beautifully packaged in entirely compostable packaging, featuring the film itself (with subtitles in Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano,and Nederlands) and an embarrassment of outtakes and extras, with interviews, films about Transition you’ve been searching high and low for quality copies of, and other gems. It is a must-have for anyone with an interest in this new take on responding to the challenges of the 21st century. You can watch the film, in full, here:

The United Nations Climate Change Conference Launched

2009-12-07T06:42:00.000-08:00

Historic United Nations climate change conference kicks off in Copenhagen with strong commitment to clinch ambitious climate change deal and unprecedented sense of urgency to act

(Copenhagen, 7 December 2008) The United Nations Climate Change Conference -
Copenhagen, 2009 kicked off today with a strong sense of confidence that countries can seal a comprehensive, ambitious and effective international climate change deal in Demark and with an unprecedented sense of urgency to act on climate change.

The highly anticipated conference marks an historic turning point on how the world confronts climate change, an issue with profound implications for the health and prosperity of all people.

Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen announced that 110 heads of state and government will attend the conference at its conclusion.

The Prime Minister pointed to the fact that climate change knows no borders. It does not discriminate, it affects us all, he said. And we are here today because we are all committed to take action. That is our common point of departure the magnitude of the challenge before us is to translate this political will into a strong political approach, he added.

The two-week meeting, the fifteenth Conference of the 193 Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the fifth meeting of the 189 Parties to the Kyoto Protocol, is the culmination of a process set in motion in Bali, where Parties to the UNFCCC agreed to conclude negotiations on a new global deal in Denmark in 2009.

The urgency to act was underscored by Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who told the conference that global emissions would need to peak by 2015 for the world to stay below a two degrees Celsius temperature rise. The costs of responding to climate change will become progressively higher as time goes on, therefore we must take action now, he said.

We have reached the deadline and there is no going back, said newly elected COP President and Danish COP 15 Minister Connie Hedegaard. Copenhagen will be the city of the three Cs: Cooperation, Commitment and Consensus. Now is the time to capture the moment and conclude a truly ambitious global deal. This is our chance. If we miss this opportunity, we will not get a better one, she said.

UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer said there was unprecedented political momentum for a deal.

World leaders are calling for an agreement that offers serious emission limitation goals and that captures the provision of significant financial and technological support to developing countries, he said. At the same time, Copenhagen will only be a success if it delivers significant and immediate action that begins the day the conference ends.

According to the UNs top climate change official, negotiators must focus on solid and practical proposals that will unleash prompt action on mitigation, adaptation, finance, technology, reducing emissions from deforestation in developing countries and capacity-building.

Yvo de Boer spoke of three layers of action that governments must agree to by the end of the conference: fast and effective implementation of immediate action on climate change; ambitious commitments to cut and limit emissions, including start-up funding and a long-term funding commitment; and a long-term shared vision on a low-emissions future for all.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an aggregate emission reduction by industrialised countries of between minus 25% and 40% over 1990 levels would be required by 2020 in order to stave off the worst effects of climate change, with global emissions falling by at least 50% by 2050. Even under this scenario, there would be an only a 50% chance of avoiding the most catastrophic consequences.

Industrialised countries meeting under the Kyoto Protocol need to raise the level of ambition of developed countries with regard to individual targets and the need to make rapid progress on the tools and rules that developed countries can use to reach their targets, such as carbon market mechanisms, land use and land use change and new gases,î said Yvo de Boer.

The UNFCCC working groups starting Monday will have six days to conclude negotiations before the Ministerial High Level Segment starts 16 December. Ministers will then in turn have two days to take any unresolved issues forward before the more than 100 world leaders arrive the evening of 17 December. This means a total of eight negotiating days to prepare a workable package that consists of both immediate and long-term components which leaders can endorse on 18 December.

More than 15,000 participants, including government delegates from 193 Parties to the UNFCCC and representatives from business and industry, environmental organizations and research institutions, are attending the two-week gathering.

UNFCCC Press Office contacts
http://unfccc.int/meetings/cop_15/media/items/5070.php

About the UNFCCC

With 193 Parties, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has near universal membership and is the parent treaty of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol has been ratified by 190 of the UNFCCC Parties. Under the Protocol, 37 States, consisting of highly industrialized countries and countries undergoing the process of transition to a market economy, have legally binding emission limitation and reduction commitments. The ultimate objective of both treaties is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system.

Rob Hopkins: Transition to a world without oil

2009-12-04T06:46:00.000-08:00

In his new TED talk Rob Hopkins reminds us that the oil our world depends on is steadily running out. He proposes a unique solution to this problem -- the Transition response, where we prepare ourselves for life without oil and sacrifice our luxuries to build systems and communities that are completely independent of fossil fuels.

Rob Hopkins is the founder of the Transition movement, a radically hopeful and community-driven approach to creating societies independent of fossil fuel.

Rob Hopkins leads a vibrant new movement of towns and cities that utilize local cooperation and interdependence to shrink their ecological footprints. In the face of climate change he developed the concept of Transition Initiatives -- communities that produce their own goods and services, curb the need for transportation and take other measures to prepare for a post-oil future. While Transition shares certain principles with greenness and sustainability, it is a deeper vision concerned with re-imagining our future in a self-sufficient way and building resiliency.

Transforming theory to action, Hopkins is also the co-founder and a resident of the first Transition Initiative in the UK, in Totnes, Devon. As he refuses to fly, it is from his home in Totnes that he offers help to hundreds of similar communities that have sprung up around the world, in part through his blog, transitionculture.org

Hopkins, who's trained in ecological design, wrote the principal work on the subject, Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience, a 12-step manual for a postcarbon future.

Peak Oil: Adapting for Big Changes Ahead

2009-12-03T06:13:00.000-08:00

Peak Moment Episode 155: Peak Oil: Adapting for Big Changes Ahead
by Yuba Gals Independent Media

With a long-time eye to declining energy resources, Bart Anderson envisions a very different society in five years. The former editor of Energy Bulletin.net offers advice for post-oil living: Understand the problem. Prepare psychologically for big shifts and the unexpected. Find your niche and get good at it. See what your great grandparents did as a model for living well within limits. "Live poor and learn to do it well" as Bart did as a graduate student. Things will be very different, he said, but we'll make it through.

Is Global Warming Unstoppable?

2009-11-30T02:09:00.000-08:00

Theory Also Says Energy Conservation Doesn't Help

Nov. 22, 2009 - In a provocative new study, a University of Utah scientist argues that rising carbon dioxide emissions - the major cause of global warming - cannot be stabilized unless the world's economy collapses or society builds the equivalent of one new nuclear power plant each day.

"It looks unlikely that there will be any substantial near-term departure from recently observed acceleration in carbon dioxide emission rates," says the new paper by Tim Garrett, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences.

Garrett's study Are there basic physical constraints on future anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide? was panned by some economists and rejected by several journals before acceptance by Climatic Change, a journal edited by renowned Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider. The study will be published online this week.

The study - which is based on the concept that physics can be used to characterize the evolution of civilization - indicates:

Energy conservation or efficiency doesn't really save energy, but instead spurs economic growth and accelerated energy consumption.

Throughout history, a simple physical "constant" - an unchanging mathematical value - links global energy use to the world's accumulated economic productivity, adjusted for inflation. So it isn't necessary to consider population growth and standard of living in predicting society's future energy consumption and resulting carbon dioxide emissions.

"Stabilization of carbon dioxide emissions at current rates will require approximately 300 gigawatts of new non-carbon-dioxide-emitting power production capacity annually - approximately one new nuclear power plant (or equivalent) per day," Garrett says. "Physically, there are no other options without killing the economy."

Getting Heat for Viewing Civilization as a "Heat Engine"

Garrett says colleagues generally support his theory, while some economists are critical. One economist, who reviewed the study, wrote: "I am afraid the author will need to study harder before he can contribute."

"I'm not an economist, and I am approaching the economy as a physics problem," Garrett says. "I end up with a global economic growth model different than they have."

Garrett treats civilization like a "heat engine" that "consumes energy and does 'work' in the form of economic production, which then spurs it to consume more energy," he says.

"If society consumed no energy, civilization would be worthless," he adds. "It is only by consuming energy that civilization is able to maintain the activities that give it economic value. This means that if we ever start to run out of energy, then the value of civilization is going to fall and even collapse absent discovery of new energy sources."

Garrett says his study's key finding "is that accumulated economic production over the course of history has been tied to the rate of energy consumption at a global level through a constant factor."

That "constant" is 9.7 (plus or minus 0.3) milliwatts per inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar. So if you look at economic and energy production at any specific time in history, "each inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar would be supported by 9.7 milliwatts of primary energy consumption," Garrett says.

Garrett tested his theory and found this constant relationship between energy use and economic production at any given time by using United Nations statistics for global GDP (gross domestic product), U.S. Department of Energy data on global energy consumption during1970-2005, and previous studies that estimated global economic production as long as 2,000 years ago. Then he investigated the implications for carbon dioxide emissions.

"Economists think you need population and standard of living to estimate productivity," he says. "In my model, all you need to know is how fast energy consumption is rising. The reason why is because there is this link between the economy and rates of energy consumption, and it's just a constant factor."

Garrett adds: "By finding this constant factor, the problem of [forecasting] global economic growth is dramatically simpler. There is no need to consider population growth and changes in standard of living because they are marching to the tune of the availability of energy supplies."

To Garrett, that means the acceleration of carbon dioxide emissions is unlikely to change soon because our energy use today is tied to society's past economic productivity.

"Viewed from this perspective, civilization evolves in a spontaneous feedback loop maintained only by energy consumption and incorporation of environmental matter," Garrett says. It is like a child that "grows by consuming food, and when the child grows, it is able to consume more food, which enables it to grow more."

Is Meaningful Energy Conservation Impossible?

Perhaps the most provocative implication of Garrett's theory is that conserving energy doesn't reduce energy use, but spurs economic growth and more energy use.

"Making civilization more energy efficient simply allows it to grow faster and consume more energy," says Garrett.

He says the idea that resource conservation accelerates resource consumption - known as Jevons paradox - was proposed in the 1865 book "The Coal Question" by William Stanley Jevons, who noted that coal prices fell and coal consumption soared after improvements in steam engine efficiency.

So is Garrett arguing that conserving energy doesn't matter?

"I'm just saying it's not really possible to conserve energy in a meaningful way because the current rate of energy consumption is determined by the unchangeable past of economic production. If it feels good to conserve energy, that is fine, but there shouldn't be any pretense that it will make a difference."

Yet, Garrett says his findings contradict his own previously held beliefs about conservation, and he continues to ride a bike or bus to work, line dry family clothing and use a push lawnmower.

An Inevitable Future for Carbon Dioxide Emissions?

Garrett says often-discussed strategies for slowing carbon dioxide emissions and global warming include mention increased energy efficiency, reduced population growth and a switch to power sources that don't emit carbon dioxide, including nuclear, wind and solar energy and underground storage of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning. Another strategy is rarely mentioned: a decreased standard of living, which would occur if energy supplies ran short and the economy collapsed, he adds.

"Fundamentally, I believe the system is deterministic," says Garrett. "Changes in population and standard of living are only a function of the current energy efficiency. That leaves only switching to a non-carbon-dioxide-emitting power source as an available option."

"The problem is that, in order to stabilize emissions, not even reduce them, we have to switch to non-carbonized energy sources at a rate about 2.1 percent per year. That comes out to almost one new nuclear power plant per day."

"If society invests sufficient resources into alternative and new, non-carbon energy supplies, then perhaps it can continue growing without increasing global warming," Garrett says.

Does Garrett fear global warming deniers will use his work to justify inaction?

"No," he says. "Ultimately, it's not clear that policy decisions have the capacity to change the future course of civilization."

References

The global economy and its carbon dioxide emissions as a simple heat engine

Garrett, T. J., 2009 Are there basic physical constraints on future anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide? Climatic Change doi:10.1007/s10584-009-9717-9 HTML PDF

The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Climate Science Report

2009-11-26T07:49:00.000-08:00

Climate change accelerating beyond expectations, urgent emissions reductions required, say leading scientists

Global ice-sheets are melting at an increased rate; Arctic sea-ice is disappearing much faster than recently projected, and future sea-level rise is now expected to be much higher than previously forecast, according to a new global scientific synthesis prepared by some of the world’s top climate scientists.

In a special report called ‘The Copenhagen Diagnosis’, the 26 researchers, most of whom are authors of published IPCC reports, conclude that several important aspects of climate change are occurring at the high end or even beyond the expectations of only a few years ago.

The report also notes that global warming continues to track early IPCC projections based on greenhouse gas increases. Without significant mitigation, the report says global mean warming could reach as high as 7 degrees Celsius by 2100.

The Copenhagen Diagnosis, which was a year in the making, documents the key findings in climate change science since the publication of the landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report in 2007.

The new evidence to have emerged includes:

Satellite and direct measurements now demonstrate that both the Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets are losing mass and contributing to sea level rise at an increasing rate.
Arctic sea-ice has melted far beyond the expectations of climate models. For example, the area of summer sea-ice melt during 2007-2009 was about 40% greater than the average projection from the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.
Sea level has risen more than 5 centimeters over the past 15 years, about 80% higher than IPCC projections from 2001. Accounting for ice-sheets and glaciers, global sea-level rise may exceed 1 meter by 2100, with a rise of up to 2 meters considered an upper limit by this time. This is much higher than previously projected by the IPCC. Furthermore, beyond 2100, sea level rise of several meters must be expected over the next few centuries.
In 2008 carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels were ~40% higher than those in 1990. Even if emissions do not grow beyond today’s levels, within just 20 years the world will have used up the allowable emissions to have a reasonable chance of limiting warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius.

The report concludes that global emissions must peak then decline rapidly within the next five to ten years for the world to have a reasonable chance of avoiding the very worst impacts of climate change.

To stabilize climate, global emissions of carbon dioxide and other long-lived greenhouse gases need to reach near-zero well within this century, the report states.

The full report is available at download.copenhagendiagnosis.org

If Nothing Else, Save Farming

2009-11-19T07:57:00.000-08:00

It’s probably too late to prepare for peak oil, but we can at least try to salvage food production.

A new blog post by George Monbiot. Go to the original full article here: If Nothing Else, Save Farming

I don’t know when global oil supplies will start to decline. I do know that another resource has already peaked and gone into freefall: the credibility of the body that’s meant to assess them. Last week two whistleblowers from the International Energy Agency alleged that it has deliberately upgraded its estimate of the world’s oil supplies in order not to frighten the markets. Three days later, a paper published by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden showed that the IEA’s forecasts must be wrong, because it assumes a rate of extraction that appears to be impossible. The agency’s assessment of the state of global oil supplies is beginning to look as reliable as Mr Greenspan’s blandishments about the health of the financial markets.

If the whistleblowers are right, we should be stockpiling ammunition. If we are taken by surprise; if we have failed to replace oil before the supply peaks then crashes, the global economy is stuffed. But nothing the whistleblowers said has scared me as much as the conversation I had last week with a Pembrokeshire farmer.

Wyn Evans, who runs a mixed farm of 170 acres, has been trying to reduce his dependency on fossil fuels since 1977. He has installed an anaerobic digester, a wind turbine, solar panels and a ground-sourced heat pump. He has sought wherever possible to replace diesel with his own electricity. Instead of using his tractor to spread slurry, he pumps it from the digester onto nearby fields. He’s replaced his tractor-driven irrigation system with an electric one, and set up a new system for drying hay indoors, which means he has to turn it in the field only once. Whatever else he does is likely to produce smaller savings. But these innovations have reduced his use of diesel by only around 25%.

According to farm scientists at Cornell University, cultivating one hectare of maize in the United States requires 40 litres of petrol and 75 litres of diesel. The amazing productivity of modern farm labour has been purchased at the cost of a dependency on oil. Unless farmers can change the way it’s grown, a permanent oil shock would price food out of the mouths of many of the world’s people. Any responsible government would be asking urgent questions about how long we have got.

Instead, most of them delegate this job to the International Energy Agency. I’ve been bellyaching about the British government’s refusal to make contingency plans for the possibility that oil might peak by 2020 for the past two years, and I’m beginning to feel like a madman with a sandwich board. Perhaps I am, but how lucky do you feel? The new World Energy Outlook published by the IEA last week expects the global demand for oil to rise from 85m barrels a day in 2008 to 105m in 2030. Oil production will rise to 103m barrels, it says, and biofuels will make up the shortfall. If we want the oil, it will materialise.

The agency does caution that conventional oil is likely to “approach a plateau” towards the end of this period, but there’s no hint of the graver warning that the IEA’s chief economist issued when I interviewed him last year: “we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau … I think time is not on our side here.” Almost every year the agency has been forced to downgrade its forecast for the daily supply of oil in 2030: from 123m barrels in 2004, to 120m in 2005, 116m in 2007, 106m in 2008 and 103m this year. But according to one of the whistleblowers, “even today’s number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this.”

The Uppsala report, published in the journal Energy Policy, anticipates that maximum global production of all kinds of oil in 2030 will be 76m barrels per day. Analysing the IEA’s figures, it finds that to meet its forecasts for supply, the world’s new and undiscovered oil fields would have to be developed at a rate “never before seen in history.” As many of them are in politically or physically difficult places, and as capital is short, this looks impossible. Assessing existing fields, the likely rate of discovery and the use of new techniques for extraction, the researchers find that “the peak of world oil production is probably occurring now.”

Are they right? Who knows? Last month the UK Energy Research Centre published a massive review of all the available evidence on global oil supplies. It found that the date of peak oil will be determined not by the total size of the global resource but by the rate at which it can be exploited. New discoveries would have to be implausibly large to make a significant difference: even if a field the size of all the oil reserves ever struck in the USA were miraculously discovered, it would delay the date of peaking by only four years. As global discoveries peaked in the 1960s, a find like this doesn’t seem very likely.

Regional oil supplies have peaked when about one third of the total resource has been extracted: this is because the rate of production falls as the remaining oil becomes harder to shift. So the assumption in the IEA’s new report, that oil production will hold steady when the global resource has fallen “to around one-half by 2030″ looks unsafe. The UKERC review finds that just to keep oil supply at present levels, “more than two thirds of current crude oil production capacity may need to be replaced by 2030 … At best, this is likely to prove extremely challenging.” There is, it says “a significant risk of a peak in conventional oil production before 2020.” Unconventional oil won’t save us: even a crash programme to develop the Canadian tar sands could deliver only 5m barrels a day by 2030.

As a report commissioned by the US Department of Energy shows, an emergency programme to replace current energy supplies or equipment to anticipate peak oil would need about 20 years to take effect. It seems unlikely that we have it. The world economy is probably knackered, whatever we might do now. But at least we could save farming. There are two possible options: either the mass replacement of farm machinery or the development of new farming systems, which don’t need much labour or energy. There are no obvious barriers to the mass production of electric tractors and combine harvesters: the weight of the batteries and an electric vehicle’s low-end torque are both advantages for tractors. A switch to forest gardening and other forms of permaculture is trickier, especially for producing grain; but such is the scale of the creeping emergency that we can’t afford to rule anything out.

The challenge of feeding 7 or 8 billion people while oil supplies are falling is stupefying. It’ll be even greater if governments keep pretending that it isn’t going to happen.

The Challenges: Food Insecurity and Climate Change - Summary Presentation for Plan B 4.0

2009-11-18T07:35:00.000-08:00

COULD FOOD SHORTAGES BRING DOWN CIVILIZATION?

“In early 2008, Saudi Arabia announced that, after being self-sufficient in wheat for over 20 years, the non-replenishable aquifer it had been pumping for irrigation was largely depleted,” writes Lester R. Brown in his new book, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.

“In response, officials said they would reduce their wheat harvest by one eighth each year until production would cease entirely in 2016. The Saudis then plan to use their oil wealth to import virtually all the grain consumed by their Canada-sized population of nearly 30 million people,” notes Brown, President and Founder of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based independent environmental research organization.

“The Saudis are unique in being so wholly dependent on irrigation,” says Brown in Plan B 4.0. But other, far larger, grain producers such as India and China are facing irrigation water losses and could face grain production declines.

A World Bank study of India’s water balance notes that 15 percent of its grain harvest is produced by overpumping. In human terms, 175 million Indians are being fed with grain produced from wells that will be going dry. The comparable number for China is 130 million. Among the many other countries facing harvest reductions from groundwater depletion are Pakistan, Iran, and Yemen.

“The tripling of world wheat, rice, and corn prices between mid-2006 and mid-2008 signaled our growing vulnerability to food shortages,” says Brown. “It took the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression to lower grain prices.”

“Past decades have witnessed world grain price surges, but they were event-driven—a drought in the former Soviet Union, a monsoon failure in India, or a crop-withering heat wave in the U.S. Corn Belt. This most recent price surge was trend-driven, the result of our failure to reverse the environmental trends that are undermining world food production.”

These trends include—in addition to falling water tables—eroding soils and rising temperatures from increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Rising temperatures bring crop-shrinking heat waves, melting ice sheets, rising sea level, and shrinking mountain glaciers.

The number of hungry people, which was declining for several decades, bottomed out in the mid-1990s at 825 million. It then climbed to 915 million in 2008 and jumped to over 1 billion in 2009. With world food prices projected to continue rising, so too will the number of hungry people, leaving millions of families trying to survive on one meal per day.

“We know from studying earlier civilizations such as the Sumerians, Mayans, and many others,” says Brown, “that more often than not it was food shortages that led to their demise. It now appears that food may be the weak link in our early twenty-first century civilization as well.

“The world is entering a new food era, one marked by rising food prices, growing numbers of hungry people, and an emerging politics of food scarcity. As grain-exporting countries restrict or even ban exports to keep domestic food prices from spiraling out of control, importing countries are losing confidence in the market’s ability to supply their needs. In response, the more affluent ones such as Saudi Arabia, China, and South Korea are leasing and buying large tracts of land in developing countries on which to grow food for themselves.”

Our early twenty-first century civilization is showing signs of stress as individual countries compete not only for scarce food but also for the land and water to produce it. People expect their governments to provide food security. Indeed, the inability to do so is one of the hallmarks of a failing state. Each year the list of failing states grows longer, leaving us with a disturbing question: How many failing states before our global civilization begins to unravel?

“Will we follow in the footsteps of the Sumerians and the Mayans or can we change course—and do it before time runs out?” asks Brown. “Can we move onto an economic path that is environmentally sustainable? We think we can. That is what Plan B 4.0 is about.”

Plan B aims to stabilize climate, stabilize population, eradicate poverty, and restore the economy’s natural support systems. It prescribes a worldwide cut in net carbon emissions of 80 percent by 2020, thus keeping atmospheric CO2 concentrations from exceeding 400 parts per million. “In setting this goal,” says Brown, “my colleagues and I did not ask what would be politically popular but rather what would it take to have a decent shot at saving the Greenland ice sheet and at least the larger glaciers in the mountains of Asia.”

Cutting carbon emissions will require both a worldwide revolution in energy efficiency and a shift from oil, coal, and gas to wind, solar, and geothermal energy. The energy efficiency revolution will transform everything from lighting to transportation.

The shift to renewable sources of energy is moving at a pace and on a scale we could not imagine even two years ago. Consider the state of Texas. The enormous number of wind projects under development, on top of the 9,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity in operation and under construction, will bring Texas to over 50,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity (think 50 coal-fired power plants) when all these wind farms are completed. This will more than satisfy the needs of the state’s 24 million residents.

Nationwide, new wind generating capacity in 2008 totaled 8,400 megawatts while new coal plants totaled only 1,400 megawatts. The annual growth in solar generating capacity will also soon overtake that of coal. The energy transition is under way.

The United States has led the world in each of the last four years in new wind generating capacity, having overtaken Germany in 2005. But this lead will be short-lived as China appears set to blow by the United States in new wind capacity added in 2009.

China, with its Wind Base program, is working on six wind farm mega-complexes with generating capacities that range from 10,000 to 30,000 megawatts, for a total of 105,000 megawatts. This is in addition to the hundreds of smaller wind farms built or planned.

“The soaring investment in wind, solar, and geothermal energy is being driven by the exciting realization that these renewables can last as long as the earth itself,” says Brown. “In contrast to investing in new oil fields where well yields begin to decline in a matter of decades, or in coal mines where the seams run out, these new energy sources can last forever.”

The combination of efficiency advances, the wholesale shift to renewable energy, and expansion of the earth’s tree cover outlined in Plan B would allow the world to cut net global carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020. In contrast to today’s global electricity sector, where coal supplies 40 percent of electricity, Plan B sees wind emerging as the centerpiece in the 2020 energy economy, supplying 40 percent of all electricity.

We are in a race between political tipping points and natural tipping points. Can we cut carbon emissions fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet and avoid the resulting rise in sea level? Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save at least the larger glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau? Can we stabilize population by lowering birth rates before nature takes over and halts population growth by raising death rates?

“Yes,” affirms Brown. “But it will take something close to a wartime mobilization, one similar to that of the United States in 1942 as it restructured its industrial economy in a matter of months. We used to talk about saving the planet, but it is civilization itself that is now at risk.

“Saving civilization is not a spectator sport. Each of us must push for rapid change. And we must be armed with a plan outlining the changes needed.

“It is decision time,” says Brown. “Like earlier civilizations that got into environmental trouble, we have to make a choice. We can stay with business as usual and watch our economy decline and our civilization unravel, or we can adopt Plan B and be the generation that mobilizes to save civilization. Our generation will make the decision, but it will affect life on earth for all generations to come.”

Worrying Trends

The new summary presentation of Plan B 4.0 outlines worrying trends:

As levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide continue to increase, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted that Earth’s average temperature will rise 1.1-6.4˚C during this century.
Our current trajectory is already outpacing these projections.
For every 1˚C rise in temperature above the norm, yields of wheat, rice, and corn drop 10 percent.
The glaciers feeding rivers like the Yellow, Yangtze, Ganges, and Indus, which provide critical irrigation water, are disappearing at accelerating rates.
The United States has been converting more and more corn into fuel for cars; yet the grain needed to fill an SUV’s 25 gallon tank once with ethanol could feed one person for an entire year.
World grain and soybean prices tripled from mid-2006 to mid-2008, causing riots and unrest in dozens of countries.
More than 1 billion people in the world are suffering from hunger.
In an effort to ensure their own food security, some affluent food importing countries, such as Saudi Arabia, China, and South Korea, have begun buying or leasing land abroad to grow their own food.
It was food shortages that led to the collapse of several ancient civilizations.

The Landscape of Oil - Photos by Edward Burtynsky

2009-11-17T09:37:00.000-08:00

In stunning large-format photographs, Edward Burtynsky follows the path of oil through modern society, from wellhead to pipeline to car engine -- and then beyond to the projected peak-oil endgame.

In his new TED Talk Edward Burtynsky photographs the landscape of oil:

To describe Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky's work in a single adjective, you have to speak French: jolie-laide. His images of scarred landscapes -- from mountains of tires to rivers of bright orange waste from a nickel mine -- are eerily pretty yet ugly at the same time. Burtynsky's large-format color photographs explore the impact of humanity's expanding footprint and the substantial ways in which we're reshaping the surface of the planet. His images powerfully alter the way we think about the world and our place in it.

With his blessing and encouragement, WorldChanging.com and others use his work to inspire ongoing global conversations about sustainable living. Burtynsky's photographs are included in the collections of many major museums, including Bibliotèque Nationale in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A large-format book, 2003's Manufactured Landscapes, collected his work, and in 2007, a documentary based on his photography, also called Manufactured Landscapes, debuted at the Toronto Film Festival before going on to screen at Sundance and elsewhere. It was released on DVD in March 2007.

When Burtynsky accepted his 2005 TED Prize, he made three wishes. One of his wishes: to build a website that will help kids think about going green. Thanks to WGBH and the TED community, the new site, Meet the Greens, debuted at TED2007. His second wish: to begin work on an Imax film -- and this work is now ongoing. And his third wish, wider in scope, was simply to encourage "a massive and productive worldwide conversation about sustainable living." Thanks to his help and the input of the TED community, the site WorldChanging.com got an infusion of energy that has helped it to grow into a leading voice in the sustainability community.

"One possible rap against his portfolio -- it prettifies the terrible. Burtynsky calls his images 'a second look at the scale of what we call progress,' and hopes that [they] acquaint viewers with the ramifications of our lifestyle."

Washington Post

‘Net Energy’ Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society

2009-11-16T05:35:00.000-08:00

The new Searching for a Miracle: ‘Net Energy’ Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society report by Richard Heinberg and Jerry Mander is intended as a non-technical examination of a basic question: Can any combination of known energy sources successfully supply society’s energy needs at least up to the year 2100? In the end, we are left with the disturbing conclusion that all known energy sources are subject to strict limits of one kind or another. Conventional energy sources such as oil, gas, coal, and nuclear are either at or nearing the limits of their ability to grow in annual supply, and will dwindle as the decades proceed—but in any case they are unacceptably hazardous to the environment. And contrary to the hopes of many, there is no clear practical scenario by which we can replace the energy from today’s conventional sources with sufficient energy from alternative sources to sustain industrial society at its present scale of operations. To achieve such a transition would require (1) a vast financial investment beyond society’s practical abilities, (2) a very long time—too long in practical terms—for build-out, and (3) significant sacrifices in terms of energy quality and reliability.

Perhaps the most significant limit to future energy supplies is the “net energy” factor—the requirement that energy systems yield more energy than is invested in their construction and operation. There is a strong likelihood that future energy systems, both conventional and alternative, will have higher energy input costs than those that powered industrial societies during the last century.We will come back to this point repeatedly.

The report explores some of the presently proposed energy transition scenarios, showing why, up to this time, most are overly optimistic, as they do not address all of the relevant limiting factors to the expansion of alternative energy sources. Finally, it shows why energy conservation (using less energy, and also less resource materials) combined with humane, gradual population decline must become primary strategies for achieving sustainability.

***

The world’s current energy regime is unsustainable. This is the recent, explicit conclusion of the International Energy Agency1, and it is also the substance of a wide and growing public consensus ranging across the political spectrum. One broad segment of this consensus is concerned about the climate and the other environmental impacts of society’s reliance on fossil fuels.The other is mainly troubled by questions regarding the security of future supplies of these fuels—which, as they deplete, are increasingly concentrated in only a few countries.

To say that our current energy regime is unsustainable means that it cannot continue and must therefore be replaced with something else.However, replacing the energy infrastructure of modern industrial societies will be no trivial matter. Decades have been spent building the current oil-coal-gas infrastructure, and trillions of dollars invested. Moreover, if the transition from current energy sources to alternatives is wrongly managed, the consequences could be severe: there is an undeniable connection between per-capita levels of energy consumption and economic well-being.2 A failure to supply sufficient energy, or energy of sufficient quality, could undermine the future welfare of humanity, while a failure to quickly make the transition away from fossil fuels could imperil the Earth’s vital ecosystems.

Nonetheless, it remains a commonly held assumption that alternative energy sources capable of substituting for conventional fossil fuels are readily available—whether fossil (tar sands or oil shale), nuclear, or a long list of renewables—and ready to come on-line in a bigger way. All that is necessary, according to this view, is to invest sufficiently in them, and life will go on essentially as it is.

But is this really the case? Each energy source has highly specific characteristics. In fact, it has been the characteristics of our present energy sources (principally oil, coal, and natural gas) that have enabled the building of a modern society with high mobility, large population, and high economic growth rates. Can alternative energy sources perpetuate this kind of society? Alas, we think not.

While it is possible to point to innumerable successful alternative energy production installations within modern societies (ranging from small homescale photovoltaic systems to large “farms” of threemegawatt wind turbines), it is not possible to point to more than a very few examples of an entire modern industrial nation obtaining the bulk of its energy from sources other than oil, coal, and natural gas. One such rare example is Sweden, which gets most of its energy from nuclear and hydropower. Another is Iceland, which benefits from unusually large domestic geothermal resources, not found in most other countries. Even in these two cases, the situation is more complex than it appears.The construction of the infrastructure for these power plants mostly relied on fossil fuels for the mining of the ores and raw materials, materials processing, transportation, manufacturing of components, the mining of uranium, construction energy, and so on. Thus for most of the world, a meaningful energy transition is still more theory than reality. But if current primary energy sources are unsustainable, this implies a daunting problem. The transition to alternative sources must occur, or the world will lack sufficient energy to maintain basic services for its 6.8 billion people (and counting).

Thus it is vitally important that energy alternatives be evaluated thoroughly according to relevant criteria, and that a staged plan be formulated and funded for a systemic societal transition away from oil, coal, and natural gas and toward the alternative energy sources deemed most fully capable of supplying the kind of economic benefits we have been accustomed to from conventional fossil fuels.

By now, it is possible to assemble a bookshelf filled with reports from nonprofit environmental organizations and books from energy analysts, dating from the early 1970s to the present, all attempting to illuminate alternative energy transition pathways for the United States and the world as a whole.These plans and proposals vary in breadth and quality, and especially in their success at clearly identifying the factors that are limiting specific alternative energy sources from being able to adequately replace conventional fossil fuels.

It is a central purpose of this document to systematically review key limiting factors that are often left out of such analyses.We will begin that process in the next section. Following that, we will go further into depth on one key criterion: net energy, or energy returned on energy invested (EROEI).This measure focuses on the key question: All things considered, how much more energy does a system produce than is required to develop and operate that system? What is the ratio of energy in versus energy out? Some energy “sources” can be shown to produce little or no net energy. Others are only minimally positive.

Unfortunately, as we shall see in more detail below, research on EROEI continues to suffer from lack of standard measurement practices, and its use and implications remain widely misunderstood. Nevertheless, for the purposes of large-scale and long-range planning, net energy may be the most vital criterion for evaluating energy sources, as it so clearly reveals the tradeoffs involved in any shift to new energy sources.

This report is not intended to serve as a final authoritative, comprehensive analysis of available energy options, nor as a plan for a nation-wide or global transition from fossil fuels to alternatives. While such analyses and plans are needed, they will require institutional resources and ongoing reassessment to be of value.The goal here is simply to identify and explain the primary criteria that should be used in such analyses and plans, with special emphasis on net energy, and to offer a cursory evaluation of currently available energy sources, using those criteria.This will provide a general, preliminary sense of whether alternative sources are up to the job of replacing fossil fuels; and if they are not, we can begin to explore what might be the fall-back strategy of governments and the other responsible institutions of modern society.

As we will see, the fundamental disturbing conclusion of the report is that there is little likelihood that either conventional fossil fuels or alternative energy sources can reliably be counted on to provide the amount and quality of energy that will be needed to sustain economic growth—or even current levels of economic activity—during the remainder of the current century.

This preliminary conclusion in turn suggests that a sensible transition energy plan will have to emphasize energy conservation above all. It also raises questions about the sustainability of growth per se, both in terms of human population numbers and economic activity.

Download the full pdf report from the PostCarbon.org website.

World Energy Outlook 2009 Edition

2009-11-10T06:41:00.000-08:00

The time has come to make the hard choices needed to combat climate change and enhance global energy security, says the latest IEA World Energy Outlook

Since WEO-2008, the economic downturn has led to a drop in energy use, CO2 emissions and energy investment. Is this an opportunity to arrest climate change or a threat that any economic upturn might be stifled at birth?

What package of commitments and measures should the climate negotiators at Copenhagen put together if they really want to stop global temperatures rising? How much would it cost? And how much might the developed world have to pay to finance action elsewhere?

How big is the gas resource base and what is the typical pattern of production from a gas field? What does the unconventional gas boom in the United States mean for the rest of the world? Are we headed for a global gas glut? What role will gas play in the future energy mix? And how might the way gas is priced change?

All these questions and many others are answered in WEO-2009. The data are extensive, the projections more detailed than ever and the analyses compelling.

The past 12 months have seen enormous upheavals in energy markets around the world, yet the challenges of transforming the global energy system remain urgent and daunting.
How we rise to that challenge will have far-reaching consequences for energy markets.
The scale and breadth of the energy challenge is enormous — far greater than many people realise. But it can and must be met.
Households and businesses are largely responsible for making the required investments, but governments hold the key to changing the mix of energy investment.

World Running Out of Oil?

2009-11-10T03:32:00.000-08:00

(via Guardian) Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure, says whistleblower

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.

The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.

The allegations raise serious questions about the accuracy of the organisation's latest World Energy Outlook on oil demand and supply to be published tomorrow – which is used by the British and many other governments to help guide their wider energy and climate change policies.

In particular they question the prediction in the last World Economic Outlook, believed to be repeated again this year, that oil production can be raised from its current level of 83m barrels a day to 105m barrels. External critics have frequently argued that this cannot be substantiated by firm evidence and say the world has already passed its peak in oil production.

Read the full report here.

The Peak of the Oil Age - The Uppsala Energy Outlook

A new study has been accepted for publication in the journal of Energy Policy. The article performs an analysis of the oil production forecast done by the International Energy Agency in 2008 and highlights several shortcomings as well as confirms other parts.

Abstract:
The assessment of future global oil production presented in the IEA's World Energy Outlook 2008 (WEO 2008) is divided into 6 fractions; four relate to crude oil, one to non-conventional oil and the final fraction is natural-gas-liquids (NGL). Using the production parameter, depletion-rate-of-recoverable-resources, we have analyzed the four crude oil fractions and found that the 75 Mb/d of crude oil production forecast for the year 2030 appears significantly overstated, and is more likely to be in the region of 55 Mb/d. Moreover, analysis of the other fractions strongly suggests lower than expected production levels. In total, our analysis points to a world oil supply in 2030 of 75 Mb/d, some 26 Mb/d lower than the IEA predicts.

The connection between economic growth and energy use is fundamental in the IEA's present modelling approach. Since our forecast sees little chance of a significant increase in global oil production, our findings suggest that the "policy makers, investors and end users" to whom WEO 2008 is addressed should rethink their future plans for economic growth. The fact that global oil production has very probably passed its maximum implies that we have reached the Peak of the Oil Age.

The study is available online as PDF here.

Economies Evolve by Energy Dispersal

2009-11-09T10:35:00.000-08:00

(PhysOrg.com) -- Terms such as the "invisible hand," laissez-faire policy, and free-market principles suggest that economic growth and decline in capitalist societies seem to be somehow self-regulated. Now, scientists Arto Annila of the University of Helsinki and Stanley Salthe of Binghampton University in New York show that economic activity can be regarded as an evolutionary process governed by the second law of thermodynamics. Their perspective may provide insight into some fundamental economic questions, such as the causes of economic growth and diversification, as well as why it’s so difficult to predict economic growth and decline.

Abstract: Economic activity can be regarded as an evolutionary process governed by the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The universal law, when formulated locally as an equation of motion, reveals that a growing economy develops functional machinery and organizes hierarchically in such a way as to tend to equalize energy density differences within the economy and in respect to the surroundings it is open to. Diverse economic activities result in flows of energy that will preferentially channel along the most steeply descending paths, leveling a non-Euclidean free energy landscape. This principle of 'maximal energy dispersal‘, equivalent to the maximal rate of entropy production, gives rise to economic laws and regularities. The law of diminishing returns follows from the diminishing free energy while the relation between supply and demand displays a quest for a balance among interdependent energy densities. Economic evolution is dissipative motion where the driving forces and energy flows are inseparable from each other. When there are multiple degrees of freedom, economic growth and decline are inherently impossible to forecast in detail. Namely, trajectories of an evolving economy are non-integrable, i.e. unpredictable in detail because a decision by a player will affect also future decisions of other players. We propose that decision making is ultimately about choosing from various actions those that would reduce most effectively subjectively perceived energy gradients.

Read the full research here: Economies Evolve by Energy Dispersal by Arto Annila and Stanley Salthe.

Collapse - The Movie

2009-11-06T09:22:00.000-08:00

Americans generally like to hear good news. They like to believe that a new president will right old wrongs, that clean energy will replace dirty oil and that fresh thinking will set the economy straight. American pundits tend to restrain their pessimism and hope for the best. But is anyone prepared to the worst?

Meet Michael Ruppert, a different kind of American. A former Los Angeles police officer turned independent reporter, he predicted the current financial crisis in his self-published newsletter, From the Wilderness, at a time when most Wall Street and Washington analysts were still in denial. Director Chris Smith has shown an affinity for outsiders in films like American Movie and The Yes Men. In Collapse, he departs stylistically from his past documentaries by interviewing Ruppert in a format that recalls the work of Errol Morris and Spalding Gray.

Sitting in a room that looks like a bunker, Ruppert recounts his career as a radical thinker and spells out the crises he sees ahead. He draws upon the same news reports and data available to any internet user, but he applies a unique interpretation. He is especially passionate about the issue of "peak oil", the concern raised by scientifists since the seventies that the world will eventually run out of fossil fuel. While other experts debate this issue in measured tones, Ruppert doesn't hold back at sounding an alarm, portraying an apocalyptic future. Listening to his rapid flow of options, the viewer is likely to question some of the rhetoric as paranoid or deluded, and to sway back and forth on what to make of the extremism. Smith lets viewers form their own judgements.

Collapse also serves as a portrait of a loner. Over the years, Ruppert has stood up for what he believes in despite fierce opposition. He candidly describes the sacrifices and motivators in his life. While other observers analyze details of the economic crisis, Ruppert views it as symptomatic of nothing less than the collapse of industrial civilization itself.

Thom Powers, Toronto International Film Festival

Economic Scenarios for an Age of Declining EROIs

2009-10-30T09:23:00.000-07:00

One of the most interesting presentations on the ASPO USA Peak Oil Conference 2009 was delivered by Charlie Hall (ESF) and Hannes Kunz (IIER). This is a short overview of their research.

They suggests that a fundamental change in economic dynamics requires a new approach to macroeconomics. Instead of the traditional "Growth" paradigm their research has lead to a much wider system definition which includes

Financial systems (money supply, credit, prices, etc.)
Resource systems (energy, human labor, other natural resources)
Global flows of goods, energy and funds (exports, imports, balances)
Population development

The New Paradigm: Decline is as much part of a human ecosystem as is growth

Energy and GDP

Economic Scenarios for an Age of Declining EROIs describes consistent correlations of Energy use and GDP:

GDP$ per Energy Unit Consumed is defined as Total Global GDP (in US$ PPP) divided by the sum of Human Labor and External Primary Energy Inputs.

Primary Energy inputs and economic output are highly correlated, even before eliminating distortions from globalization. Mining, agricultural inputs, raw materials and manufacturing contain a significant amount of “energy accounted for elsewhere”, which is not included in traditional energy efficiency reviews. Most differences can be explained from energy transfers from industrial processes. The result is a rough average of 133 US$ purchasing power parity of GDP produced per GJ of energy input.

The first conclusion of the presentation is that most of our increased “productivity” comes from replacing human labor with fuel and machinery. The “productivity increase” leads to immediate gains for an economy and rising standards of living.

The Energy Squeeze-Out

Over the past decades, our fossil energy sources have become less efficient. Independent of the arrival of “Peak Oil”, increasing amounts of upfront energy are required to explore the next new units of energy. The concept of EROI (Energy Return on (Energy) Investment) describes this as: Energy Units Gained from one Energy Unit Used.

A change of EROIs from 80:1 to 20:1 (current estimate for global oil production) equals a “salary increase” of physical work from oil by a factor of almost 4, significantly reducing benefits to our economy. Higher energy cost quickly reverses previous gains from increased “productivity”.

Looking at EROIs and expected changes shows significant trouble ahead. Transportation will be highly affected by declining EROIs (and thus higher cost). The highest impact however will be seen in agricultural production.

High contribution of energy to food production (4-5% of global non-renewable energy consumption goes into food); in OECD countries, another 10-15% is used for processing and transporting food. With rising energy prices, farming and food processing will have to reduce input and thus output directly with higher fuel prices (less fertilizer equals less crop). Food prices will still rise both due to shortages and higher production cost and squeeze out poorer countries.

Lower EROIs will start squeezing out low-efficiency applications of energy. A significant number of industrial transportation and production chains will become unmanageable.

Cost of commodity transportation becomes significant
Global arbitrage of labor cost for low-cost/high-volume goods will become unattractive over long distances
A substantial portion of global trade (the lower cost bracket) will be unattractive
Food production and processing will no longer work on todays levels, with more local food and less processing
Results might be very different compared to most people’s expectations

Download the full presentation in pdf to learn more.

Export Land Model Predicts Rapid Oil Decline

2009-10-28T09:13:00.000-07:00

The Export Land Model (ELM) presented in these slides at ASPO Denver by Jeffrey J. Brown, Samuel Foucher, PhD, Jorge Silveus predicts rapidly declining net oil exports:

Three Primary Factors That Control Net Export Declines

Consumption as a percentage of production at final production peak
Rate of change in production
Rate of change in consumption

Three Primary Characteristics of Net Export Declines:

The net export decline rate tends to exceed the production decline rate
The net export decline rate tends to accelerate with time
Net export declines tend to be “Front-end loaded,” with the bulk of post-peak net exports being shipped early in the decline phase

Check out the full presentation on the Export Land Model and the other proceedings of ASPO2009 here.

How food shapes our cities

2009-10-27T08:06:00.000-07:00

Every day, in a city the size of London, 30 million meals are served. But where does all the food come from? In this new TED video Architect Carolyn Steel discusses the daily miracle of feeding a city, and shows how ancient food routes shaped the modern world.

Food is a shared necessity -- but also a shared way of thinking, argues Carolyn Steel. Looking at food networks offers an unusual and illuminating way to explore how cities evolved.

Top Ten Things to Know about Oil Supply

2009-10-26T11:27:00.000-07:00

A new Global Witness Report - Heads in the Sand: Governments Ignore the Oil Supply Crunch and Threaten the Climate

The report argues that governments have failed to acknowledge a looming oil supply crunch. Their collective failure means we have lost a decade in which action could have been taken. Recognition of the oil supply crunch would also have injected a sense of urgency and increased ambition into climate change negotiations.

Rising demand and falling supply means a growing gap: ten things you ought to know about oil supply

Many of these facts have been staring us in the face for some time. In some cases, they have been obvious for decades, and yet depressingly, they seem not to have been acted upon. When taken together, the sheer scale of the imminent oil supply crunch, and the extent of missed opportunity and failed leadership become apparent.

1965 was the year in which the largest volume of oil was discovered. Since then, the trend in the number and average size of discoveries has been in decline.
In 1984 global conventional crude oil production exceeded the volume discovered, and the gap has continued to increase since then
In 2007, just over half the world’s crude oil production came from 110 oil fields, with approximately one quarter from just 13 fields. There are 70,000 smaller oil fields which account for just under half of the world’s conventional crude oil production
By 2007, out of the world’s 20 largest producing oil fields, 17 were over 40 years old. The volume of oil production from 16 of this group of 20 largest fields was below their historical maximum
The rate of decline in oilfields can be rapid. By 2007 the average post-peak production rate of decline was 6.7% per year
Between 2005 and 2008 conventional oil production ceased to grow, despite massive investment, increasing demand and prices. This failure to increase conventional oil production, despite all the right incentives, is unprecedented in the history of the oil industry.
By 2015, the IEA projected a potential 7m bpd gap between supply and demand.8 A gap of this size represents 7.7% of projected world demand of 91m bpd (barrels per day) in 2015.9 It is also the equivalent to over 60% of China’s projected demand, and 39% of that of the USA
Between 2008 and 2020, the IEA projects conventional crude oil production from existing fields to drop by almost 50%
To provide for its forecast demand for oil in 2030, the IEA stated that the world would require “Some 64 mb/d [million barrels per day] of additional gross capacity – the equivalent of almost six times that of Saudi Arabia today – needs to be brought on stream between 2007 and 2030.”
As if replacement of lost volumes of oil was not a big enough problem, the ratio of units of energy input required to produce each unit of energy output (EROI) from oil is also decreasing. In the USA for example, EROI has shrunk from approximately 100:1 in the 1930s to 14:1 today. Estimates for the EROI of tar sands production vary between 10:1 (a very optimistic figure) and 2:1. This means that, in energy content terms, each new barrel of oil is worth less than its predecessors.

Recommendations of the report

The priority recommendation is the need for international recognition of the underlying fundamental problems that equate to an imminent oil supply crunch. It is hard to see how effective solutions can be developed until there is widespread
recognition of the problem.

Governments and appropriate multilateral agencies should publicly recognise the imminence of an oil supply crunch.
Governments must act urgently to fast-track the development and the building of a sustainable set of safe energy provision systems and implement energy conservation measures.
To that end, and as a matter of national security, global leaders should commit to dialogue about energy both within and between countries at the highest level.
Transparency is required for global petroleum reserves and exploration data, on a field-by-field basis. This transparency should be extended to other key primary energy sources, such as gas, uranium and coal.
Promising technologies must receive sufficient investment as a matter of priority; reliance only on market solutions is insufficient. These should then be rolled out to achieve economy-of-scale price reductions.
The Copenhagen targets need to reflect a precautionary approach based on up-to-date scientific evidence and findings.

International Day of Climate Action

2009-10-24T07:27:00.000-07:00

Today, on 24 October, people in 181 countries are coming together for the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet's history. At over 5200 events around the world, people are gathering to call for strong action and bold leadership on the climate crisis.

350.org is coordinating a distributed day of events for 24 October, uniting the world around a common call to climate action.

From seabeds to mountaintops, people around the world were staging a day of demonstrations Saturday to call for urgent action on climate change.

The events were being coordinated by a group called 350.org, whose name refers to the parts per million of carbon dioxide it considers the safe upper limit for our atmosphere.

The group said it wants to "inspire the world to rise to the challenge of the climate crisis" ahead of the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December.

Community Resilience Toolkit

2009-10-21T10:33:00.000-07:00

If your neighborhood association, church organization, city planning office, or community-based organization is interested in building a more resilient community, the Community Resilience Toolkit by Bay Localize is for you.

The Bay Localize Community Resilience Toolkit guides groups in leading workshops to plan for resilience in their communities while decreasing reliance on fossil fuels. It is designed for community groups that would like to get involved in making a difference in their neighborhood, city, or county. The Toolkit offers Bay Area-specific resources and action ideas in six key sectors: food, water, energy, transportation and housing, jobs and economy, and civic services.

Why Resilience?

We live in interesting times, with far-reaching tangible impacts on our communities. Many Bay Area communities struggle to meet their basic needs even in the best of times. Now we are facing three additional major threats to our well-being:

Economic downturn has led to high levels of job loss and foreclosures. With lower tax revenue cities and counties are cutting back services, just when more people need a social safety net.
Climate change will directly impact communities in the Bay Area as well as throughout the world. Our region will face rising sea levels (a danger if you live or work near the Bay), heat waves, decreased air quality, and long-term decreased availability of water and food. Impacts in other parts of the world are likely to be catastrophic due to widespread hurricanes, flooding, drought, and famine. We need to do all we can do decrease greenhouse gas emissions that make climate change worse.
Peak oil means that we are nearing or have already passed the point at which we have used the majority of easily accessible oil in the world. As the global economy is so reliant on oil, rising oil prices makes everything else more expensive. Increased oil prices are predicted to spur higher inflation, economic contraction, growing unemployment, increased poverty, and increased violence at home and around the world.

We need creative ways to make sure our communities can meet the basic human needs of all residents, while reducing reliance on fossil fuels and protecting the health of our environment for our children. This is especially true for communities that are already struggling. In order to meet the human needs of all in our communities, we need to examine and change patterns of power and distribution of resources that contribute to inequities in our society.

Fortunately, we already have local resources to face these challenges in our communities. These assets include our knowledge and creativity, relationships, institutions, infrastructure, and natural resources. We can nurture, grow, and connect these resources in creative ways to make our communities strong and resilient enough to weather these challenges.

The Community Resilience Toolkit is available free of charge for registered users.

Ofgem: Project Discovery - Energy Market Scenarios Report

2009-10-19T06:49:00.000-07:00

Project Discovery is Ofgem’s investigation into whether or not future security of supply can be delivered by the existing market arrangements over the coming decade.

Eearly 2009 Ofgem launched Project Discovery with the objective of examining the prospects for secure and sustainable energy supplies over the next 10-15 years. This investigation is wide ranging and uses scenario analysis to put the debate regarding UK energy in the wider global and environmental context. The purpose of the Project Discovery: Energy Market Scenarios report is to consult across all stakeholders on these scenarios.

Ofgem has drawn up four scenarios for the next decade and beyond. Each scenario shows that energy supplies can be maintained, but the analysis exposes real risks to supplies, potential price rises and varying carbon impacts.

Retirements of older nuclear plant and closures of coal and oil plant by the end of 2015 under European environmental legislation could pose a threat to security of supply. Increasing gas import dependency could be exacerbated by growth in gas-fired power generation. Significant changes in the way in which we generate and consume power may be needed to manage the variability associated with increasing reliance on wind power.

High levels of investment are likely to be needed to secure energy supplies and meet carbon targets – up to £200 billion may be required over the next 10-15 years. This would more than double the recent rate of investment.

Consumer bills rise in all scenarios due to the levels of new investment required and increasing costs of carbon, and especially so if oil and gas spot prices spike sharply or continue their underlying rise since 2003. Existing regulatory and market arrangement may well be seriously tested.

Project Discovery team is currently conducting an assessment of these arrangements given the challenges that they have identified, and are considering what policy responses may be required.

Energy Literacy: Power to Choose

2009-10-16T04:53:00.000-07:00

EnergyLiteracy.com is a new website to accompany a new book “Power to Choose” by the two bloggers here, Saul Griffith, and Jim McBride, of www.otherlab.com.
You hear about climate change.
You hear about energy independence.
You might have thought about your carbon footprint.
Even used an on-line tool like www.wattzon.com to measure it.
You hear about people’s “Energy Plans.”

But how do you fit in? How does the rest of the world fit in? You should have questions like: “how do we solve the climate problem and the energy challenge at the same time?”
“Are the proposed solutions I’m hearing about good enough and ambitious enough to avoid the worst aspects of climate change?”

In order to think about these questions for yourself it’s useful to have a framework for thinking about climate, carbon, energy, and their complex and fascinating relationships.

We have found that the framework we built here to understand the problem for ourselves is useful to people because it allows us to see ourselves, the individuals, in the larger global perspective. Hopefully this will give you a logical approach to make the right personal choices, and to lobby for the right energy and climate plans from your government and the corporations you patronize.

EnergyLiteracy.com has interesting posts on our energy future such as:

Crude Oil Price Above $75 at Record High

2009-10-15T09:40:00.000-07:00

Crude rises after data show big drop in gasoline inventories

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Crude oil and gasoline futures rose Thursday after government data showed a surprisingly big drop in gasoline inventories as refineries cut production to the lowest level in more than a year.

Gasoline inventories fell by 5.2 million barrels in the week ended Oct. 9, the Energy Information Administration reported. Analysts polled by Platts had expected a modest build-up. Gasoline production fell to 8.45 million barrels a day last week, the lowest level since last September.

On the New York Mercantile Exchange, crude oil for November delivery rose 66 cents, or 0.9%, to $75.84 a barrel, after rising to a new one-year high of $76.27. November reformulated gasoline rose 3.85 cents, or 2.1%, to $1.8961 a gallon.

In the weekly update, the EIA also reported a build-up of 400,000 barrels in crude inventories.

Refineries used less crude oil in their fuel production, with crude input down 510,000 barrels a day from a week ago. That put refinery utilization rate at 80.9%, the lowest level since April.

Crude imports fell 367,000 barrels from a week ago. Inventories at Cushing, Okla., the delivery point for Nymex crude futures, rose 400,000 barrels to 25.5 million.

Distillate inventories, which include diesel and heating oil fell 1.1 million barrels.

The EIA data also showed petroleum demand still remained week in the biggest consuming country, with gasoline demand falling to 9.26 million barrels a day, down slightly from a week ago.