Why Peak Guarantees Conservation
By Jeff Berg
17 December, 2007
Countercurrents.org
“The Peak Energy thesis clearly demonstrates that the massive energy conservation efforts that our ecology, and climate, so dearly and clearly need, are guaranteed to happen. Whether or not they will happen in time to be of any good to us is still very much up in the air.”
Senor Juan G. CarbonelI blame Einstein for many of our troubles today. In 1905, the year of his annus miraculus, he formulated a theorem that demonstrated the equivalence between energy and matter: E = MC2. Today not a thousand people on the planet truly understand what he was on about there. If instead he had used his prodigious brain and powers of persuasion to convince us that “Energy Matters”, even dullards like me would not have taken anywhere near so long to figure it out:-)
Now that I and many others have finally caught on to this over one hundred year old insight, I believe that we today can use this truth to form the basis of a Unified Field Theory for Systems and Social Change. I will be releasing a series of articles and papers, as time and work permits, exploring how these ideas can move from theory to practice.
One of the central tenets to this Unified Field Theory is that increasing specialization has trapped even the “good guys” in silos so wholly unconnected to one another as so be disconnected from much of reality. As a result “expertise” has become an almost unbreachable barrier to entry, and institutional empire building, and the resulting turf wars, have been enormous impediments to the widespread early adoption of evident solutions to equally evident problems. The first principle of this thesis will be that just as 20th Century physics was the most unifying field of human thought, so too is energy capture in the 21st Century the most unifying solution/problem to the many hydra headed monsters we have set upon the land. That the “bad guys” have over the years had very much more to do with the self-defeating nature of our policy choices is, of course, not in doubt. This should however not preclude we who understand the value and preeminence of empirically verified information from getting our act together at the very least.
The following essay takes the form of a discussion between myself and Constantine K. where I take on his dismissal of the peak energy thesis. And is just one of many very interesting and productive threads taking place on a Green Party of Canada listserv even as I write these words.
Dear Constantine,
December 16, 2007I am CC’ing Elizabeth May on this discussion because it is essential that everyone in the GPC understands how and why the peak energy thesis slam dunks the argument for massive conservation in a way that no other argument has managed in the last 150 years. So why not start at the top? :-) Adriana Mugnatto-Hamu has also been CC’d because she has long been a valuable contributor to my thinking, and to the events organized by Post Carbon Toronto. To my heart and mind she is both an important green voice as well as a dear friend. Doug Woodward is included as your post was unfairly dismissive of his analysis. I have also BCC’d a number of my contacts who may profit from this exchange.
The first thing that needs be said is that I have absolutely no worries that the peak energy thesis will prevail in the end. Reality is for everybody after all. Especially when that something in question will so materially affect the creature comforts and leisure of white people everywhere. It is a “perfect storm” that assures political rainmaking, and a concomitant very great flurry of economic, physical and mental activity. But as we all know we are in a race against time. So despite the fact that the peak in coal, oil, gas and uranium is going to go a very long way to having the problem of CO2e "solve itself", alone this will not be sufficient to staving off devastating climate change and ecological collapse.
For a very elegant proof of the assertion that the global peaks in the COG of our industrial wheel (coal, oil, gas) will take us far below almost every IPCC projection by 2050, I direct you to the following link. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2697 It is a technical analysis by Dave Rutledge, the Chair of Science and Engineering at Cal Tech. I know that many in the environmental movement will find this analysis to be a very inconvenient truth, and will be tempted to bury it as deeply as the oil majors buried Dr. Hubbert's seminal peak oil thesis in 1956. That would be a tragic mistake.
For one thing Rutledge’s analysis takes into account the recent global re-audit of coal that has been carried out in 2007 by five independent research institutes. As such it represents the best in class data on these deposits. Aka. The facts that we should be basing our analysis and policies around. For another, reality is always the friend of both the theorist and the ecologist if they can but see their way clear to understanding that when theory and reality collide it is theory that must give way. Truth moves through various stages after all. One day, a day that lasted for over two thousand years in this particular case, the truth is that the atom is the smallest indivisible unit in the universe, and the next day it is not. One day light must be either a wave or a particle, and the next day the horns of the dilemma are split when it is demonstrated that it can be both.
Truth, as Einstein said, is a function of time. Information starts in the body and mind, and then leaves by the mouth, the heart, or the hand and if it is healthy, and wise, and very, very lucky it reaches its apex as a generally recognized truth. There it rests until contradicted by observed phenomena after which it begins its move from this apex down the backside of its curve, first becoming ideology, then dogma and is finally tossed into the dustbin of history collecting dust and academics. But let us get back to our subject at hand.
There is also the not inconsiderable fact that if we use the last half (give or take) of our non-renewables to keep BAU up and running for as long as possible; then we are going to just finish of the job of collapsing all of our renewable sources of life and leisure in time for us to run out of our non-renewable sources of energy capture. That it is going to take a whole hell of a lot of fossil fuels to build our sustainable water, food, energy capture, and transportation systems, cannot be rationally doubted.
There were many fine points presented in the analysis that you recently posted under the subject line 'After Kyoto'. Unfortunately the suit jacket that you are attempting to fit on to the shoulders of the world is spun from the whole cloth of economic theories that fail to properly understand the central limit to growth. This limiting factor being energy capture.
Not that you are alone in this. A great many driven by the urgency of our ecological problems seem to have this same blind spot. I do not know if this will help in any way, but I can tell you that Dr. Suzuki both understands the reality of the peak energy thesis, and how useful it can be to our successfully arguing a better way forward. I also would like to direct you to the following work for the most lucid expositions of this fundamental truth. Crawford "Buzz" Hollings on ‘Panarchy’ and its relationship to systems theory, Joseph Tainter on the ‘Collapse of Complex Societies’, Thomas-Homer Dixon on the ‘Upside of Down’, and Richard Heinberg on ‘Powerdown’, These four men have done much of the intellectual spade work required for us to move with alacrity in a fruitful direction should we so choose.
You wrote of the peak thesis:
"This is totally wrong for the obvious reasons. Though
in the mind of the believers "the solutions
are the same", in the real world the unbelievers use
the peaker rhetoric to force different compromises,
such as opening up pristine fragile areas to drilling
and eradicating whole ecosystems such as the
Athabaska."Respectfully, you most assuredly cannot lay the waste of Athabaska at the feet of those elucidating the reality of the peak energy thesis. The Alberta tarsands were started as an oil extraction project over 30 years ago when this thesis was buried as deep and dark to the world as any oil deposit ever cooked in the underworld’s kitchen. No instead who we have to blame is those who promoted this project by government subsidy, and those who executed it for personal profit.
That the ecological arguments failed to stop this project over these last three decades should give you pause my friend. After all this was developed here in Canada. A country that in the main cannot be said to suffer from what you call the problem of distribution. And even with the very great help of the oil glut and price crash of the 1980's, the arguments that you would use today failed to stop this project. What makes you think that arguments that failed in a time of plenty are going to win in a time of constraints? Just take a look for example at how difficult it is going to be here in Ontario, Canada, to stop the nuclear fission industry build up. Not to mention our government’s recent decision to restart a reactor against the recommendation of our nuclear regulatory commission.
All this before we begin to electrify much of North America’s transportation and heating systems. Two changes by the by that are being forced to take place as a result of the peak in U.S. oil extraction (1970), the plateau in global extraction (May 2005), and the peak in North American natural gas extraction (2002). The earlier two should in and of themselves have been sufficient as shots across the bow of Business As Usual (BAU). Manifestly, they were not.
If the greens of Canada are going to have influence anywhere they are certainly going to have to start by having influence here at home. I urge you to look into and support the very real work being done on mitigating tarsands damage by the Parkland Institute. In the new year Parkland and the Council for Canadians will be launching campaigns designed to kick start a national dialogue on energy security, Canadian sovereignty, and energy independence. These campaigns will use Canada’s lack of a Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to start this dialogue. They have chosen this tack for the very sensible reason that this is a critical problem that has a short enough time window for anyone to understand no matter how long their attention span. It also has the not inconsiderable utility of pointing out to our PM, and governing party, if they think that THC is a law and order problem, try having the eastern half of the country go without oil for a week or two.
N.B. Canada is the only OECD country without an SPR. Quebec, and Atlantic Canada, import 90% of their oil requirements. Ontario 40%, however all but all of the remaining 60% is subject to American control since it leaves Alberta, travels through the States, and is reimported to Canada. If the beef and lumber industries have taught Canada anything it is that contracts are not necessarily always respected when push comes to shove. A lesson we should have learned a while ago one would have thought given that during the 1973 OPEC oil embargo the U.S. government had an oil tanker shipment contracted to Canada diverted to the U.S. That we never built a Trans-Canada pipeline will come as much as a surprise to most Canadians as it does to the rest of the world.
It is no longer a stretch for any Canadian to believe in the possibility of the Middle East imploding in such a way as to materially affect the global energy market. Further, the first order of business for any Canadian government regardless of ideology is supposed to be Peace, Order and Good Government. For our Emergency Preparedness Plan that sits at NRCan not to factor the possibility of supply disruptions is reckless to an extreme that is as difficult to countenance as it is to forgive. The SPR is but one small step in the long march towards energy security for we Canadians, true, but it is an essential one or at least it will continue to be until we see our way clear to approaching our Molecular Patrimony as sensibly as do the Norwegians.
And while we are on the subject of constraints.
You also wrote:
"Doug also fails to comprehend that nuclear fusion is
real and only delayed by final engineering problems.
Power generation is not the problem. Distribution is."
I am not sure if you wrote this simply to "pique the peakers", or merely because you found the cleverness of this formulation irresistible, something I’ve fallen prey to more than once lord knows. However, if you truly believe this, and are fixed in this belief in an ideological way, then there really is no point in my going any further at this time.Whatever your case, thirty years ago fusion was thirty years away. Twenty years ago fusion was thirty years away. Ten years ago fusion was thirty years away. And today conventional wisdom has it that fusion is, wait for it, thirty to fifty years away. Personally I like Greg Allen’s take on fusion best, "We
already have a functioning fusion plant, and it is safely located 92 million miles away. It's called the sun." And yes, if you are wondering, I have listened to Dr. Bussard’s lecture to the Google company this past year, and yes, I do think it significant that a physicist of his stature is claiming to have solved the fusion reactor’s containment problem. More significant than any of this however, and irrespective of the "nearness" of fusion, one has to at least ask the question, “What would it mean to the planet if we humans were to have access to all the energy that 6.7 billion of us could want?”
So please do let me know if you are amenable to a discussion of the facts
otherwise I will allow the reality of events to work their undeniable magic on our consciousnesses before we re-engage on this topic. "When theory and reality collide it is theory that must give way if we are not to fall into the darkest of times." Senor Juan G. Carbonel
If on the other hand you are open to a discussion of the facts, and new information is able to change your mind on something so fundamental to your world view, then I am more than willing to spend time exploring these themes, facts, and ideas with you. For my part, at the very least, I hope that I will always be in accord with what John K. Galbraith had to say on this subject. I.e. What
the negative campaigners refer to as "flip-flopping". JKG: "When presented with new information I change my mind. What do you do sir?" I will take no answer from you on this as an indication that you are fixed in your position re energy capture for now.
On the chance that you would like to have this discussion I leave you with a few points to ponder.
1) The National Energy Board of Canada’s latest report:
"For example, emerging and alternative energy, such as wind, solar, geothermal and biofuels (biomass, ethanol and biodiesel) in the "greenest" scenario account for 10 per cent of the total energy demand in Canada in 2030. Conventional energy will continue to be the number one fuel source for Canadians." http://tinyurl.com/329j57
Surely you can't believe that this generation constraint exists simply because the coal, oil, and gas companies are trying to kill the competition. Because the reality is instead that they would be just as happy buying up all the companies making windmills and solar panels if renewables were able to out compete fossil fuels in terms of energy capture per dollar spent. If the tarsands, and recent oil exploration ROI's are proof of anything it is that the oil and gas majors are willing to risk huge bucks to try and capture energy for sale.
Moreover the recent decision by the Democrats to pass a 2007 Energy Bill that kills the subsidies to renewables, and removes the $28 billion "windfall tax" from the fossil fuel majors that was to pay for them, is best explained in following way. I.e. The energy giants now know that the future of energy is renewable energy capture. But as they are late to the "party" they have let the train leave the station without them. This energy bill is their effort to cripple the competition so that they can use their enormous cash reserves to put themselves front and center as the owners and controllers of the new day’s dawn.
This is also a preemptive strike on their part designed to kill all momentum, no matter how small, towards the solutions being proposed by those like Al Gore, and Elizabeth May, and Greg Allen, and David Hughes, and Richard Heinberg, and Richard Gilbert, and Paul Gipe, and Peter Tabuns, and Colin Campbell, and Keith Stewart, and Franz Hartmann, and Cherise Burda, and Jose Etcheverry, and Derek Paul, to name but a few. I.e. Micro and Distributed generation using the power of computing to "smarten" the grid.
“Micro and Distributed Generation in the Information Age” is a solution set of such scope and power that I have in print repeatedly called it the greatest opportunity for real power to the people that our species has ever seen. What the energy majors have successfully lobbied for instead is the killing of the renewable energy provisions in the 2007 Energy Bill. This will guarantee that America’s Wind and Solar industries will slow to a crawl just when what is actually needed is a sprint. To my mind this abdication of responsibility by the American Government at the behest of their ownership class brings them as close as anyone has come to Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake” solution since she first proclaimed her cornucopian thesis.
That this is a short-sighted, massively selfish, and highly destructive decision on the part of this lobby cannot be doubted. Just as it cannot be doubted that we will need "all hands on deck" if we are to have anywhere near as comfortable a future as we would like. The reason? The daily solar allotment of energy to our planet is so diffuse it greatly limits our ability to capture it. Again, not necessarily the worst thing in the world until we become the very much better people we’ve longed known we should become but can’t seem to manage. A project that will make the 100 year one I am talking about here seem like a power breakfast by comparison I’m afraid.
2) Your take on coal is also erroneous on the facts. The U.S. has already hit peak coal as a result of a transportation bottleneck, and the fact that the easy to get stuff is gone. Neither of these facts will be changed even if Bush did just recently change the law so as to remove all the restrictions that formerly existed on mountain top removal. (Not that they were being much respected in any case.) Ergo, coal energy is now a zero sum game in the U.S. Yes it can be turned into a liquid fuel it is true, but it can only be done at the expense of the other uses to which this constrained supply is currently being put to use.
3) "Below the fold there is a roundup of the five reports published in the first half of 2007 on the global coal situation. They are all broadly in agreement saying that there is likely to be less coal available than traditionally thought." http://tinyurl.com/34nxc3
The National Academy of Sciences Report on Coal: "Present estimates of coal reserves are based upon methods that have not been reviewed or revised since their inception in 1974, and much of the input data were compiled in the early 1970s. Recent programs to assess reserves in limited areas using updated methods indicate that only a small fraction of previously estimated reserves are actually minable reserves." http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11977
4) Energy consumption per capita has been falling for decades, and local renewable energy capture is the only solution to the immense privation that so many billions suffer today. Ergo, no matter how thinly you slice it, the statement that generation, aka energy capture, has no place in the discussion is baloney.
5) "Deliverability of Canadian natural gas will decline by seven to 15 per cent during 2007-2009, says a National Energy Board (NEB) report http://tinyurl.com/2pqy8f
This last fact alone should be enough of a “generational” challenge to alert we Northerners to the extent of the peril we are courting. For as this winter is proving in no uncertain terms, climate change or no climate change, Canada in the winter is more fun when your thermal envelope keeps the cold out.
And while we are on the topic of the North and we Northerners, I leave you with the words to my new Canadian anthem. If you’d like to hear the tune you need but ask, and I will email it to you. A capability, along with memory sticks, that proves conclusively that not everything is getting worse every day :-)
CANADA
Canada is my country my heart and my home.
Canada is a northland from sea to sea.
And the Natives and the Empires and other folk too,
Have made her the land that she is today.
Canada est mon pays elle est dans mon coeur.
Canada est mon pays, Oui c’est mon affaire.
On est ici depuis Quinze Cent et Zut que je te dis,
Comment que sa pourrait que je me fuis?
Canada is my country my heart and my home.
Canada is my country, my northern affair.
We're now home to the whole world, yes every country.
And that is what Canada is to me.
Canada is my country my heart and my home.
Canada is a northland from sea to sea.
And as Northlanders differ from Southlander folk,
We have our differences from the land of the free.
Oui, oui.
French verse repeated in English
Canada is my country she is in my heart,
Canada is my country yes that’s my affair,
We’ve been here since fifteen hundred and ‘Zut’ is what I say,
How could it be that I flee?
(Not bad eh? When I do the translation it still rhymes:-)
And we want to keep her wildness, her mountains and streams,
We want to keep her wildness, her forest and seas.
But if we fail our land,
We'll melt with the world,
And that canna be!
Because Canada and Canadians,
Must always Northlanders be.
Yes Canada and Canadians,Must always Northlanders be.
Oh Canada, on dit Oui!
Composed by Jeff Berg Aka Jean-Francois Toupin:-)(2002/06/22)
Respectfully, ton confrere
Jeff Berg
www.postcarbontoronto.org
www.pledgeTOgreen.ca
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