A Three Way For The Real Third Way
By Jeff Berg
15 October, 2007
Countercurrents.orgYou know how politicians are always talking about a third way? Bill Clinton and “Triangulation”, Tony Blair & “The Third Way”, even the Bush’s had “Compassionate Conservatism” as their third way. And we all know how sex sells. Which is why I call this piece written especially for you here today:
A THREE WAY FOR THE REAL THIRD WAY
“Science – Sustainability & Distributed Generation in the Information Age”
Two things to start: the first being, that by every measure we humans can agree on, moving as quickly as possible to get off of fossil fuels will leave ourselves and future generations the richest of all possible lives.
The 2nd is that i am not an environmentalist or even a socialist per se.
Now don’t get me wrong i completely accept that the weight of scientific evidence proves that anthropogenic factors are a major contributor to climate change & I too think Tommy Douglas was the greatest Canadian.
I also accept the consensus among marine biologists that states that if we don’t change our fishing practices we are going to collapse fish stocks so thoroughly that all commercial fisheries will be wiped out by 2048! And i do see how this problem is being generated by the economic distortions known as net present value, future discounting & the maximization of shareholder profit and so is a social issue.
So yes in the sense that i believe the scientists’ information I’m an environmentalist & a socialist. Or at least i am when these movements are in alignment with the best available information. This point notwithstanding the subjects that i write about aren’t so much about what’s coming out of the tailpipe in terms of emissions as they are about what’s going into the industrial engine in terms of fossil fuels.
And the message that i am involved in massaging for the purpose of increasing its general consumption is about the increasingly strong consensus that is taking place in the field of resource geology and petroleum and mining engineering about the future of coal, oil, gas and even uranium.
-In a word ENERGY is my bailiwick-
And speaking about the future of energy how many of you here feel you have a strong understanding of the term peak oil or peak gas? Please raise your hands (less than half did)
One last question how many of you believe that oil and gas are finite? Please raise your hands if you think oil is finite. (all but one did)
Exactly!
Which is why I prefer the term fossil fuel finitude over peak oil. Everyone gets that this stuff is finite. And once you dispose of that fact the whole rest of the sound and fury surrounding the peak oil & gas & coal & uranium debate is about nothing more than timing and urgency.
Not that timing and urgency are unimportant by any means. They are after all near and dear to my heart very precisely because i know how little understood are the necessary lead times for the ramp up to sustainable systems and how pressing is the urgency that we do everything possible in this direction now!
Fossil fuel finitude has been shall we say misunderestimated. Unsurprisingly it is also one of the few things that GW jr. Has not been guilty of doing.
My favourite line concerning the reams of “Is peak oil just a theory?” literature was actually told to me by a climate scientist. U of T's very own dr. Danny Harvey, a lead author of the IPCC's AR4. What he said was: "Peak Oil is a just theory in the same sense that Round Earth is just a theory."
On the other extreme from those like me who are studying fossil fuel finitude and peak energy are the environmentalists who think the whole peak oil debate is pointless.
In fact one of the best environmental minds in Ontario, now a Toronto city councillor, Gord Perks, said just that this summer to myself and Greg Greene the director of two documentaries on peak oil and gas, The End of Suburbia and Escape from Suburbia.
What Mr. Perks said verbatim was, “Peak oil’s a crock!” And yes he did say it with a smile and with an intention to rile. Still why he said it is for the very same reasons a lot of environmentalists say it. Which basically comes down to two reasons. Reason #1.
1) To them if we burn what we have we’re cooked anyway, so what does peak oil matter? &
2) Because they think to themselves, even if only privately, “we’re running out of cog? Good can’t happen soon enough!”
COG is by the way how I refer to the trinity of fossil fuels Coal, Oil and Gas as they are the cog to our industrial wheel. Whether it be a holy or unholy trinity I leave to you.
And even after five years of banging my head against the wall of indifference on the issue that I have chosen to specialize in still I say. I hear you and you are not wrong.
But! Yes the proverbial but.
The thing is energy matters! For one thing people want it. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard say, “Ya, ya, the greenies. All they care about is the planet; they don’t care about the people!” This is of course not a socialists’ problem but people nonetheless wonder where is the guts and the nuts and bolts of the NDP's energy plans?
People want the services that fossil fuel energy today provides and I got to say on this one I side with the people. Because if you don’t care deeply about energy & fully attend to all it does negative and positive then you are not truly caring about the people in an effective and responsible way. Point finale, full stop!
It truly is that profoundly and fundamentally simple in this global warming and fossil fuel finitude parmetered world of ours.
And yes if we were to stop using all COG tomorrow the planet would be happier ; and the plants and the animals would be happier, and more abundant, and prolific which has a certain amount of attraction to it. But at the same time if we stopped using cog tomorrow a whole lot of people would die prematurely as well.
How many? Well I’m no expert in this area but I can tell you since the start of the oil part of COG in 1856 we have gone from 1.2 billion to 6.7 billion.
Beyond that straightforward fact I am as I say no expert. And in any case we don’t have time to today to go into this aspect of the energy, sustainability and carrying capacity debate. Suffice to say if you don’t make energy a centrepiece of whatever sustainability and social justice programs you’d like to see implemented then you are economically and therefore politically and culturally dead from the get go.
Now there is no doubt that this fact has begun to penetrate deeply into the environmental community. The NDP’s energy platform this past provincial election here in Ontario (thank you peter Tabuns), the work of Pembina, WWF, sierra, Greenpeace, Environmental Defence, ICF International and Science for Peace among others, including our government staff researchers and scientists who were part of the national round table on economy and the environment are very clear proof of this.
And speaking of proof I could have talked to you today about geoscience, linearization curves, creaming curves, pool size distribution, tectonic plate theory and what the fractal law of self similarity tells us about the possible range of extraction rates that we can expect as we make our way to “Ultimate Recoverability.”
I could have talked about the various forecasts that are being made for the end in the growth of supply of hydrocarbons and even uranium and sought to prove to you that the consensus among resource geologists is now for all intents and purposes as strong and meaningful to the future of humanity as the consensus that exists among climatologists.
I could have prattled on about why ASPO’s & EWG'S and IFE's analysis is more reliable than the EIA and the IEA and even the EIEIO. I could have explained why production is a better indicator of the future of reserves than reserves are of future production .
I could have talked to you about the findings of Dr. Stuart Staniford and the data gnomes at the oil drum and throughout the U.S. and what Mathew Simmons study of over 200 technical papers from the society of petroleum engineers and his book ‘Twilight in the Desert’ says about global oil production.
But these are not the facts that matter to you. These are merely the means necessary to vanquish the deniers. You all know that we have to get off oil and you all know that 95% of all transportation is today wholly dependent on oil. That’s why you have added this section to your conference. You are ready to move on the next stage of the energy discussion and the why doesn’t matter so much anymore.
The facts you need to know are that the U.S. General Accounting Office’s most recent finding is that if the U.S. pushes hard in the direction of biofuels it might get up to 4% of current liquid fuel consumption by 2015. In numerical terms this translates to less than 1 MMb/d. In other words no matter what you think of biofuels they are no silver bullet for business as usual.
To my mind in any case Fidel Castro got it right in an essay published on the internet a few months ago when he called the biofuel revolution the ‘Internationalization of Genocide’. This summer saw corn riots among Mexican peasants because they now have to economically compete with the biofuel market for their corn flower tortillas.
Another fact you need to know as we battle to get off the sauce and save our transportation system is that the hydrogen transportation economy is an impossibility from the basic standpoint of the fundamental laws of physics.
Not to mention the fact that virtually all hydrogen today in North America is made by burning natural gas. The techno “solution” being proposed for this problem? Nuclear fired electricity.
How ruinous would a hydrogen economy diversion be? Let me count out for you just one of the ways.
If you start with a 100 barrels of natural gas energy and convert it into electricity for the electrolysis needed to create hydrogen; and then you store that hydrogen in a fuel cell; and then you step on what is still very much your gas pedal powered car; you will have lost more than 50% of the energy you started with to unavoidable physical laws. Much better to heat or cook with this non-renewable fuel. Or at the very least use it for a source point heat purpose.
To instead now start entirely new industries that will act as competitors for corn and natural gas and electricity at a time when natural gas is ready to go off a cliff here in N.A. in terms of production & when there are people that are going hungry would be the height of car addicted folly. It is true I know that we have paid every other possible obeisance to our metal gods but are we now really going to feed the car and our war machines our heat and food? Really? Sigh!
By the way many an environmentalist & others got caught out by these developments thinking them great green ideas and lending them their greenwashing support. And the reason that this happened is because they did not pay attention to the energy analysis. The nub of the matter.
The other nub of the matter is that the problem of energy as it relates to the environment, transportation, sustainable systems and social justice is not really a technical problem but a social one. Which is why it can be so useful to the New Democratic Party.
Oh sure there’s an essentially infinite number of things that will need to be done from an engineering p.o.v as we make our way off the sauce that even GW jr. knows we are addicted to (addiction being something that he actually knows something about) but that’s really just a chat about job opportunities.
The real problem is not this, the real problem is the social problem we face. That problem being that too many people believe & are afraid that the real third way - sustainability & social justice – demands they lose their creature comforts.
The solution to this is very simple. All we need do is to reassure them that we love comfort just as much as they do. Which is after all nothing less than god’s honest truth. Ashes & sackcloth is not what we are practicing or preaching.
After this is done what we then need do is to utilize the minds in the fields of energy, geology, economics and environmentalism who can illuminate for the public that it is in fact their governments and their industries that are involved via a conspiracy of dunces to fail away those very comforts that we are trying to save for them.
Socialists have never in fact had a problem with comfort. Their problem, and a legitimate one it is, is that the way our systems are going about creating our comfort is ensuring that many other people end up really depressingly poor and uncomfortable. The good news today is that this is also viewed as a problem by just about everybody. And yes some do less about it than others it’s true, but this fact notwithstanding everybody but everybody today at least pays this issue lip service and that wasn’t always true.
That it is so completely true today is a political advance & a significant evolution in human thinking.
The bad news is if we do not change business as usual a whole lot more of us are going to end up in the depressingly uncomfortable category.
People very much need to understand that this is one of the very real implications of the fact that we have essentially come to the end of the growth in fossil fuel availability. People in Canada and the U.S. also need to know that this is especially true here in N.A.! The tarsands notwithstanding!
A great many of our citizens are being put in grave jeopardy of becoming part of the depressingly poor ‘others-class’ and since its true anyway we may as well sell this fact as a political and environmental & conservational tool. Sure a lot will not pay attention until they actually get whacked but we must do this work now if we expect to be listened to then.
When our middle class does finally get hit it will help a great deal with the enlistment of new supporters, but even this will not count as much comfort to most.
As for the political competition and how to manoeuvre the other parties to try and out compete us on these issues, truer words were never spoke than these: “A moral threat may serve to change your rulers rhetoric, but an economic one will change their behaviour.” Senor Juan G. Carbonel.
This economic threat will more importantly also serve to clinch the argument for conservation, relocalized economies, a reinvigoration of our appreciation for our neighbours, walkable communities and a slower pace of life, not to mention the successful selling of the virtue of a simpler lifestyle.
It will even extend to include the fact that the potential of ‘Distributed and micro generation of energy in the information age’, the age of the great neurally wired collective mind that the internet has made possible, very certainly represents the greatest opportunity for real power to the people in every sense of that phrase that the world has ever seen.
And I say again to you that what stands in our way is not primarily a technical challenge. Once we get started down the implementation road in a major way it will be readily apparent to everyone just about immediately - if not sooner - how much work/ employment opportunity is ahead of us. What stands in our way is what has always stood in our way. The problem of capital and its infinitely mutable talent for concentration and inexpert and uncreative destruction.
Before all else what lies before us is the challenge of putting into place the mechanisms that prioritize best in class data and peer reviewed information far above dollar concerns and even higher above $ interests. The fact of one dollar one vote must go the way of all slave and chattel concepts and become as odious.
To my mind events have redefined left and right.
With freedom of information as the new left and monetization as the new right.
Or as my more poetic friend senor Carbonel puts it: “Today information is the new left, money on the other hand is very much still the old right. The scientists is who they are battling over.”
And as it is very much a zero sum battle between these two combatants for diminishing resources and the world's greatest minds there is no real room for compromise. And since we are going to have to enlist all but everybody if we are truly serious about winning this fight this means that we are going to need to be far more flexible and inclusive than we have ever been before.
Now to some of you no doubt this kind of rah rah is beside the point and you’d like more steak to go with the sizzle. If that be the case then I very cordially invite you to Post Carbon Toronto’s next three events. And I sorta wonder why you weren’t at our last five. Because this spring on May 24 as part of Doors Open Toronto and the Festival of Architecture and Design we had engineer Greg Allen and climate scientist Dr. Danny Harvey detail the challenges of energy and emissions and the many solutions that are already available to architects and engineers.
This summer we had dr. Gordon laxer from the parkland institute telling us about the book he is writing about energy security, sustainability, global warming , NAFTA's energy provisions and SPP.
We then had Dr. Richard Gilbert present us with the data sets and information from his new book Transport Revolutions which you all should buy if you are genuinely serious about this subject as his book is entirely focused on post carbon transportation solutions.
We then had geoscientist David Hughes in Toronto city hall council chamber, fresh from 35 years of research for NRCAN, the Canadian Geological Survey and the Canadian Gas Potential Committee detailing for us the inconvenient truths about fossil fuels for N.A. and the globe.
For the last 150 years we in N.A. have been uniquely advantaged in terms of fundamental resources this worm has now very much turned.
We followed this presentation up the very next day with a meeting featuring once again Mr. Hughes this time along with the irrepressible Ralph Torrie from ICF International and Cherise Burda from Pembina. Each of them handing out free of charge more meaty data than most can handle in one sitting.
We then we had Dr. Gilbert again, this time reporting on the events of the global conference on energy held by the geoscientists at ASPO in Cork, Ireland. It was attended by 400 scientists, researchers, writers and interested citizens and the presentations that were seen there are available on DVD. This DVD too is very much worth buying if only because it was at this conference that the arguments for nuclear power were demolished from the technical standpoint of the paucity of uranium rich veins to bleed into our proposed reactors.
Everyone of these events was held within walking distance of the subway, most of them in fact happened inside Toronto’s city hall, and Post Carbon Toronto both invited and kept abreast of each event our Mayor and city Councillors.
Next up this month on October 24 we have Paul gypped who was one of the driving forces behind the standard offer contract that was so instrumental in moving Ontario from a few to 700 windmills over the last four years. We then in the middle of November have David Lerch the author of Post Carbon Cities and at the end of the month we finish off our year long program of monthly public lectures & outreach by showing a DVD on biofuels featuring dr. David Fridley.
A DVD that scientifically debunks corn ethanol as a sustainable biofuel and very clearly illuminates the limitations of biomass fuel en todo. Dr. Fridley by the way is employed as a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley national laboratory. Since its inception this lab has won 11 Nobel prizes.
So yes we at PCT can put some meat on the bones of this argument if and when you like. And yes I could have made this talk more data driven but I think at a forum such as this it is far more important to make the point that what is really needed is to point out to social justice advocates and environmentalists that peak energy clinches the argument for conservation of all kinds. Not just of the environment but also a very, very, deep conservation of fossil fuels as well.
The simplest solution to the problem of GHG’s and global warming is after all to keep hydrocarbons sequestered right where they currently are. Admittedly effecting such an outcome is a mite more complicated but starting by dedicating their use for the sole purpose of the building of sustainable systems is an idea whose time has come.
For once you think even a little bit about the shape and scope of the energy/emissions problem we face it is not all that difficult to come to the realization that the deep conservation of fossil fuels, and their almost complete dedication to nothing but the creation of sustainable systems, ties very neatly and directly into what we need to do to save the planet from our mismanagement. If only because conservation is from the most selfish of perspectives what is best for ourselves & the creature comforts with which we are so sensibly enamoured.
This is so because peak energy in fact totally and utterly slam dunks the argument for conservation. Again, if only because it is such a potent economic threat to the established order.
And don’t think for one second that the military industrial complex and the pentagon and the CIA and the NSA haven’t picked up on this fact and are not planning to use it to advantage their world view. Believe you me that ain’t the case. For example just this past September at the 6th ASPO conference, James R. Schlesinger said: “Conceptually the battle is over.. The Peakists have won – everyone is a Peakist now.” Schlesinger for those of you who may not know is a former U.S. Secretary of Defence, former head of the CIA, and was the very first minister for energy in the U.S.a. in other words this is one of the most connected and influential militarists in the whole damned white world.
And while its true that environmentalists & social workers can ignore fossil fuel depletion and, unlike engineers and militarists, go back to their work with a clean conscience. They cannot do so and win! And really people it is now officially past time for the forces of life to win.
Which means that it is also past time that the environmental and social movements reach out and fully embrace their natural allies in the peak energy movement.
Today all but everybody, thanks to the environmental pioneers, understands just how right these folk always were about the living systems crash we are enacting.
And “thanks” to the disastrous failure of Pax Americana as practiced by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair & Brown all but all of the techs and geeks and engineers get the peril that genuine socialists have long been detailing.
We all get the peril. It is time you all got the potential that lies begging.
Because for all the rightness of the environmental arguments and for all the virtue of the socialist positions the fact is that emissions and military spending are still rising and they are doing so at an increasing rate.
And while fossil fuels and uranium may be limited, and will fix both of these problems eventually, even if we do nothing, this will not be sufficient to the task of saving us from ourselves.
It really is time to end the car culture, Nascar and Indie car and Formula 1 and motocross and funny cars and drag racing and demolition derbies and monster trucks. It is time to end the obscenity of $1.2 trillion yearly spent on creating things that go boom. Over half of that being spent by the U.S.
Canada FYI is actually 12th in the world in military spending and 7th in the OECD in absolute terms. And that’s before our PM Harper and the bipartisan consensus among the conservatives and the liberals finishes muscularizing our military.
For Christ and our sake - if we as a people won’t abide by the moral threat implicit in renouncing our Christian and secular moral values – will we not then at least listen to the arguments of the moneylenders and the security professionals who have proved that militarism drains the treasury and not the swamp?
Dead ahead is one of the greatest revolutions human society has ever seen and by hook or by crook it will take place even if we make no choices. Geology alone makes this inevitable. If best information dominates the policy process as we move forward to meet the enormous challenges facing us then we can use this unavoidably radical transformation to gain more social justice and a higher quality of life.
If instead we fail again and let consumption manage us and not us it, I’m guaranteeing here and now that energy fascism is the jackboot that we will all be ground under.
Most of the rest of the world gets this already. They do not hate us for our freedoms they hate us for the insane recklessness and abuse of freedom that our everyday fossil fuel lifestyle screams at them.
And who can blame them?
Thank you for listening.
Jeff Berg
October, 13, 2007.
Extended version of a speech given to the Ontario Socialist Caucus Conference held at the Ontario Institute for Science and Education.
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