In order to figure out what to do you first have to figure out what is happening. I've outlined the major events that have already begun which will have the greatest impact on people's lives. How that plays out over the next decade or so will depend on a lot of factors, but some of the likely effects of oil depletion and energy constraint are somewhat predictable. Mostly, the effects will be felt economically. The kinds of employment activities many of us will be doing will probably be the kinds of things we may do now as a hobby.
Economics is really just the system used for taking stuff from the natural world and turning it into usable things for society. What we have now is a system in which the resources and finished products get moved all over the globe and is economical only because we have cheap energy. We currently pay about $2.50 for a gallon and get ten weeks of human labor for that. The lesson we can take from the price explosion of 2008 is that things can slow down quite a bit economically when gasoline reaches about $4.25 a gallon. Things that travel long distances become less competitive even with the advantage of economies of scale. What this likely means whenever that level is reached again is that economies will relocalize. Things that travel thousands of miles to reach stores probably won't make it there when gas is $5.00 a gallon opening up new manufacturing opportunities for Americans who have grown accustomed to seeing "made in wherever" tags on their consumer products.
The relocalization of the global economy is a transition that will take decades to complete. It is at the same time a difficult thing to prepare for because it is not possible to start a business, say, or create networks of people willing to say goodbye to the old way of doing things to start their own local economy. Some of this is happening now on an experimental basis but is still very limited. The fact remains that the corporate structure is difficult for any small operation to compete against. Walmart is the representative species of corporate megalithic capacity. Whenever an operation can take a loss until the competition is squashed then there is no hope. Any small business can only function in a niche and as of now, the small boutique stores with boutique items, and I don't mean luxury items, but things like a bar of soap made in your neighborhood, has to depend on those with enough money and willingness to pay more in order to stay in business. If you want locally made underwear I would say you are simply out of luck.
I suspect that, as the number of unemployed in the U.S. remains high, the relocalization effort will gain some traction. A number of other conditions would have to come into being, though, for it to represent a more or less permanent transition. For one, the price of imported goods would have to rise considerably before someone in the U.S. could earn a living making the things we use regularly. Another factor in all of this is that, once the things we pay relatively little for now become very expensive as the globalized economy convulses and dies, we will need to have the skills to make the stuff we need. Another related condition is that capital would have to be willing to move to finance local production of goods, something it hasn't been willing to do for many decades. The effect of this will be a greater portion of people's income will be used to cover the basics like food, clothing, and transportation than is the case now. Where people decide to cut their budgetary corners is what will shape the economy of the future. Much of what people buy now may not have much of a future if people decide they don't need them or can't afford them.
Some of this has already begun. What can be observed over the past couple of years as the financial meltdown stormed over the planet is that people are buying and driving less. This is primarily true in the Western countries. Places like India and China are a seperate case, but the richest nations are undergoing a process of scaling back their consumption and losing financial credibility. I expect this process to continue for the next two decades. It may be gradual, or it may be rapid. Or it will be gradual and punctuated by crises. Who knows? It's safe to say that the decline of economic, political, and military power is in the cards for the U.S. and Europe for the foreseeable future. Given this, the likelihood of another crisis in the financial markets appears great as the source of risk and instability has not been dealt with by the leaders of men. As resources become scarce, a zero sum resource game will dominate the markets functionality and wreak havoc on distribution, something the market doesn't do so much of anyway.
Making due with less is the new trend. Eventually, people will make more with their hands, grow more of their own food, and repair things rather than throw them away. These are likely to be the leading indicators of the localization transition. There is plenty more to this story. We are heading into an accelerated phase of imperial decline. All of the arrangments of daily life will change somehow. Detaching from the sinking ship called the status quo is an important first step in adapting to the new way of life.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Sunday, December 20, 2009
A Survey of Ultimates
To think in a richer and more complex way about this series of problems that ultimately defy solutions, it is useful to consider them as dimensions of an historical web of events that follows a logic that may or may not be fully discernible. Furthermore, it would be useful to think about the future as a matter of adaptation to new conditions that will overwhelm the conditions we currently experience over time and in ways that will be at once unpredictable but not unexpected. Somehow, to think of the subject of oil depletion, say, or of climate change, as problems with solutions misses something fundamental. A solution implies fixing something that allows you to continue more or less on the path you were on. What I am talking about requires the surrender of certain foundational expectations, the willingness to give up cherished identities, and to engage in the deeper task of transforming the civilization into a project that can be maintained indefinitely.
The evidence for the need to massively scale down the activities of humanity into something much less extravagant is convincing to me. I know that ultimately fossil fuel is finite and subject to depletion. I know that ultimately the industrial economy runs on fossil fuel and that there is no viable replacement fuel to run it on. Certainly there is more to it than this and objections to even these facts will ring throughout the public discourse even as it becomes obvious (which it is not as of now). The depletion of fossil fuels will have impacts throughout the world but the place that may experience the hardest fall is the Western economies, especially the United States. As the cache of past dominance gets drained, and the ability of the United States to command the world's resources, it's wealth will be drained along with it. Ultimately, the U.S. came to it's superpower status as an oil power and everything has been constructed with the use of oil in mind. It also best represents the extravagance that must be scaled down, a subject I'll return to in a little bit.
Another ultimate that fits into the panoply of ultimates is that climate change represents the greatest ultimate threat to continued civilization as an ongoing concern. The disruptions promised by climate scientists if the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere continues unabated are certain to be too much for a civilization which has developed only in the stable climate of the holocene. This does not necessarily mean the end of all human beings. Humans evolved during other climate disruptions of greater or lesser severity and lived to tell the tale. But they didn't have the large settlements that came later with the advent of agriculture. Nor were they able to increase their numbers to more than a few million worldwide for millenia. From where I'm sitting, it is fat consolation to think that humanity will continue in the event of catastrophic global climate change while my peers are looking to upscale their SUV's.
The final ultimate, and the best definition of what I mean by extravagant, is the concept of ecological overshoot. Used, of course, in ecology, this is the best way to flesh out the remaining ultimate. Ecological overshoot is pretty basic. When bunnies, for example, outstrip the food supply through population growth, then a correcting mechanism known as die off brings the population back into equilibrium with the supply of food. The overshoot analysis is trickier when applied to people because of their capacity to enhance biological productivity through the use of reason. But that very same use of reason contends that ecological overshoot still applies to the human animal due to natural limitations of the physical world. Does photosynthesis, for example, have an upper limit? Does tinkering with the upper limit have consequences for the biosphere that we hadn't considered when we began tinkering? Humans are only as good as the food supply. It makes us no different from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Food isn't the only constraint in assessing ecological overshoot. Waste, what one is often disinclined to think about, can overwhelm the population. Seems quite obviuos with bunnies given their high production rates of waste material. But it equally applies to carbon dioxide, one of the waste materials of the fossil fuel economy. It raises an important issue; natural wastes in themselves are not undesirable. It is the overabundance of waste that is the concern. Nature has measurable recycling rates of waste and if that is overwhelmed the excess is called pollution. Besides food, it is another factor to consider in the population overshoot construct. We have simply overwhelmed the natural world with our presence and our lifestyle. Our task is to find the equilibrium and stick with it.
The evidence for the need to massively scale down the activities of humanity into something much less extravagant is convincing to me. I know that ultimately fossil fuel is finite and subject to depletion. I know that ultimately the industrial economy runs on fossil fuel and that there is no viable replacement fuel to run it on. Certainly there is more to it than this and objections to even these facts will ring throughout the public discourse even as it becomes obvious (which it is not as of now). The depletion of fossil fuels will have impacts throughout the world but the place that may experience the hardest fall is the Western economies, especially the United States. As the cache of past dominance gets drained, and the ability of the United States to command the world's resources, it's wealth will be drained along with it. Ultimately, the U.S. came to it's superpower status as an oil power and everything has been constructed with the use of oil in mind. It also best represents the extravagance that must be scaled down, a subject I'll return to in a little bit.
Another ultimate that fits into the panoply of ultimates is that climate change represents the greatest ultimate threat to continued civilization as an ongoing concern. The disruptions promised by climate scientists if the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere continues unabated are certain to be too much for a civilization which has developed only in the stable climate of the holocene. This does not necessarily mean the end of all human beings. Humans evolved during other climate disruptions of greater or lesser severity and lived to tell the tale. But they didn't have the large settlements that came later with the advent of agriculture. Nor were they able to increase their numbers to more than a few million worldwide for millenia. From where I'm sitting, it is fat consolation to think that humanity will continue in the event of catastrophic global climate change while my peers are looking to upscale their SUV's.
The final ultimate, and the best definition of what I mean by extravagant, is the concept of ecological overshoot. Used, of course, in ecology, this is the best way to flesh out the remaining ultimate. Ecological overshoot is pretty basic. When bunnies, for example, outstrip the food supply through population growth, then a correcting mechanism known as die off brings the population back into equilibrium with the supply of food. The overshoot analysis is trickier when applied to people because of their capacity to enhance biological productivity through the use of reason. But that very same use of reason contends that ecological overshoot still applies to the human animal due to natural limitations of the physical world. Does photosynthesis, for example, have an upper limit? Does tinkering with the upper limit have consequences for the biosphere that we hadn't considered when we began tinkering? Humans are only as good as the food supply. It makes us no different from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Food isn't the only constraint in assessing ecological overshoot. Waste, what one is often disinclined to think about, can overwhelm the population. Seems quite obviuos with bunnies given their high production rates of waste material. But it equally applies to carbon dioxide, one of the waste materials of the fossil fuel economy. It raises an important issue; natural wastes in themselves are not undesirable. It is the overabundance of waste that is the concern. Nature has measurable recycling rates of waste and if that is overwhelmed the excess is called pollution. Besides food, it is another factor to consider in the population overshoot construct. We have simply overwhelmed the natural world with our presence and our lifestyle. Our task is to find the equilibrium and stick with it.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Climate Change: The Mother of all Mothers
Climate Change represents the greatest single adaptation humans will hopefully not have to make over the next century. What is disturbing is that ongoing observations are exceeding worst-case scenario climate model projections made not so long ago. All roads seem to be leading to the question over how long before we reach a point at which we can no longer prevent a cascading series of feedback loops that set Earth's climate at a new equilibrium. Is it 350 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere? Is it 2C (3.6F) rise in global average temperature? Something else?
Currently we are at about 390 ppm CO2. In pre-industrial times, that number was 280. So we are experimenting with what happens when we add 40% more carbon and on our way to doubling it from pre-industrial levels well before the end of the century unless something is done to stop it. A doubling is certain to cause a catastrophic climate shift upwards of 5C (9F) or more, depending on where these trigger points lie. The current thinking is that a major trigger point could well be at 2C judging from the rapidity of the ice melt in the Artic and mountain glaciers with only a .8C temperature rise so far. What is feared is that, as the Artic Ocean turns to open water during the summer months, the albedo effect will cause runaway ocean water temperature rise that will in turn melt Greenland's massive ice sheet into the North Atlantic. In addition to this, because the blue ocean water absorbs more solar radiation and therefore more heat than ice does, that additional heat will contribute to further global temperature rise generally. It goes without saying that we could not stop this source of warming.
What the trigger point(s) mean is that, upon reaching 2C above pre-industrial levels, a rise to 5C above pre-industrial levels would be more or less automatic. That is a probable equilibrium point for global climate. In the absence of additional major trigger points then that is likely where it would stay for thousands of years until the CO2 gets reabsorbed into natural carbon sinks like ocean water and plant life.
It is really beyond dispute among reasonable people that the temperature rise is caused by the burning of fossil fuels to power human economic activity. Those who say otherwise are saying so for economic or ideological reasons, and not for scientific ones. It is known well enough what impact increased CO2 has in the atmosphere. This particular property of CO2 (letting in solar radiation but absorbing heat radiation rising from the surface of the Earth) has been known since the 19th century. What is unknown are the particulars of how much carbon does what, or what other factors might exacerbate or mitigate the carbon effect. At some point I will write a post on the difference between skepticism and denial and demonstrate why the time for skepticism is over for climate change. Those who continue to question the veracity of anthropogenic global warming are denialists.
The widest scale on which to view the magnitude of our climate situation is to consider the following: the past 11,000 years, known as the holocene, have been the most stable climatic period in the history of the Earth. It just so happens to correspond to the period in which civilization has grown up. We cannot know how a climate shift northwards of 2C will have on every little piece of territory around the globe and how we could manage with the unpredictable weather that would come along with it. What we do know is that the hydrological cycles around the globe will be disrupted, with deserts expanding into places where food is now grown. We know that disappearing glaciers will have a devastating effect on agriculture in many of the most populated regions of the world. We know that increased CO2 concentrations in the air will increase it in the oceans, making the ocean water more acidic and harm and force into extinction a wide range of ocean species. Finally, we know that ocean levels are rising and will rise further as land ice from Greenland and Antarctica melt into the ocean, inundating coastal cities. All of the above is observable and measurable now. The rates are increasing.
As if this isn't enough, there is growing evidence that the amount of warming that should be happening from rising CO2 levels is being masked by the diminishment of sunlight striking the Earth due to the particulate matter and aerosols that come with the burning of fossil fuels. One study has estimated the amount of sunlight reflected back into space is reducing the amount of warming by 30-50%. Now, this is only one study but there are sure to be more. If true, and you couple this with the amount of carbon in the pipeline that has not yet caused warming, then we are already about 3/4 of the way to 2C.
It's clear that humanity needs to work quickly to get to zero carbon emissions if we want to have a climate that resembles that of the holocene period. If we fail to do this, then we will have ended the stable, nurturing holocene and entered a new and dangerously unpredictable anthropocene period. And I am only occasionally given to hyperbole. This is not one of those times.
Currently we are at about 390 ppm CO2. In pre-industrial times, that number was 280. So we are experimenting with what happens when we add 40% more carbon and on our way to doubling it from pre-industrial levels well before the end of the century unless something is done to stop it. A doubling is certain to cause a catastrophic climate shift upwards of 5C (9F) or more, depending on where these trigger points lie. The current thinking is that a major trigger point could well be at 2C judging from the rapidity of the ice melt in the Artic and mountain glaciers with only a .8C temperature rise so far. What is feared is that, as the Artic Ocean turns to open water during the summer months, the albedo effect will cause runaway ocean water temperature rise that will in turn melt Greenland's massive ice sheet into the North Atlantic. In addition to this, because the blue ocean water absorbs more solar radiation and therefore more heat than ice does, that additional heat will contribute to further global temperature rise generally. It goes without saying that we could not stop this source of warming.
What the trigger point(s) mean is that, upon reaching 2C above pre-industrial levels, a rise to 5C above pre-industrial levels would be more or less automatic. That is a probable equilibrium point for global climate. In the absence of additional major trigger points then that is likely where it would stay for thousands of years until the CO2 gets reabsorbed into natural carbon sinks like ocean water and plant life.
It is really beyond dispute among reasonable people that the temperature rise is caused by the burning of fossil fuels to power human economic activity. Those who say otherwise are saying so for economic or ideological reasons, and not for scientific ones. It is known well enough what impact increased CO2 has in the atmosphere. This particular property of CO2 (letting in solar radiation but absorbing heat radiation rising from the surface of the Earth) has been known since the 19th century. What is unknown are the particulars of how much carbon does what, or what other factors might exacerbate or mitigate the carbon effect. At some point I will write a post on the difference between skepticism and denial and demonstrate why the time for skepticism is over for climate change. Those who continue to question the veracity of anthropogenic global warming are denialists.
The widest scale on which to view the magnitude of our climate situation is to consider the following: the past 11,000 years, known as the holocene, have been the most stable climatic period in the history of the Earth. It just so happens to correspond to the period in which civilization has grown up. We cannot know how a climate shift northwards of 2C will have on every little piece of territory around the globe and how we could manage with the unpredictable weather that would come along with it. What we do know is that the hydrological cycles around the globe will be disrupted, with deserts expanding into places where food is now grown. We know that disappearing glaciers will have a devastating effect on agriculture in many of the most populated regions of the world. We know that increased CO2 concentrations in the air will increase it in the oceans, making the ocean water more acidic and harm and force into extinction a wide range of ocean species. Finally, we know that ocean levels are rising and will rise further as land ice from Greenland and Antarctica melt into the ocean, inundating coastal cities. All of the above is observable and measurable now. The rates are increasing.
As if this isn't enough, there is growing evidence that the amount of warming that should be happening from rising CO2 levels is being masked by the diminishment of sunlight striking the Earth due to the particulate matter and aerosols that come with the burning of fossil fuels. One study has estimated the amount of sunlight reflected back into space is reducing the amount of warming by 30-50%. Now, this is only one study but there are sure to be more. If true, and you couple this with the amount of carbon in the pipeline that has not yet caused warming, then we are already about 3/4 of the way to 2C.
It's clear that humanity needs to work quickly to get to zero carbon emissions if we want to have a climate that resembles that of the holocene period. If we fail to do this, then we will have ended the stable, nurturing holocene and entered a new and dangerously unpredictable anthropocene period. And I am only occasionally given to hyperbole. This is not one of those times.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
The Mother of all Technological Challenges
If it could be said that if there ever was a cultural constant in Western Civilization, it could be the idea of technological progress. Certainly, progress more generally, whether it's political or scientific, is the more fundamental mythos of the West, but technology has come to the fore in many ways as we collectively consider the replacement of energy sources by which to power the civilization in the future. The rub comes at the source of energy and it's place in the technological advances which have been made over the past several centuries. It is the first time we have ever faced the problem of replacing a concentrated source, like oil or coal, with one or several which are not concentrated and the most promising of said sources produce only electricity.
The technological challenge for scientists and engineers now in replacing oil and coal is to make up for what nature had already accomplished in concentrating the energy for us. This is fundamentally a problem of thermodynamics. The Laws of Thermodynamics are perhaps the biggest bummer physics has to offer as it constitutes nothing less than the ultimate heat death of the universe at some distant date. The problems humanity faces now, though much smaller in scale, are related. The first law states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. The second law, called entropy, states that whenever energy changes form, from say chemical to electrical, some amount of the total energy is lost in the transformation through heat. It's why you have to repair things, like cars and shoes, and to reshingle the house. The energy leaving the system (your shoe) means that it is able to do less work, and more work from without is required to put it to rights again by fixing it.
Nature, over millions of years, did that for us in the case of fossil fuels and what was left was a highly concentrated energy source. In the case of oil, the remainder of the entropic process was a liquid hydrocarbon. That it is liquid is very crucial as that enables easier transport and to have a more finely tuned applications that occur in a car's engine. So far, the only replacement fuel even to make it to market, with bad results, is ethanol. The reasons for the bad results are many, but primarily it is due to the energy needed to gather and distill the source material (corn, grass, sugar cane) is so great that it nearly exceeds that which is produced from distillation and leaves us with little to no net energy gain.
The technology fix to this problem then has to climb the wall of millions of years of distillation in the ground in a matter of years. And make it economical. And scale it up to 85 million barrels a day over the course of oils decline plus 2% per year growth, perhaps only in a matter of a few decades. All to keep cars running. If this does not work in a meaningful way, we still have other options. We can gradually move to electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids so that Americans and the world can own cars and not feel much disruption in style of life. To date, all-electric and hybrid cars are not cost competitive until the price of oil reaches the roughly 80-90 dollar range and above, at which point the economy starts to falter and makes a recession likely.
If we decide we can live without cars, then we could still go to electric rail in and between cities which has the advantage of being more fuel efficient than cars. The problem, in the U.S. especially, is that the rail system has atrophied to the point that we have virtually no passenger rail service anywhere in America with the capacity to replace even a fraction of automobile travel. So an enormous investment would need to be made into electric rail immediately to have something usable over the next two decades as our energy supply tightens.
The viable options economically for alternative sources of energy really only produce electricity and perhaps heat in the case of geothermal energy. This is very important and we should be building the infrastructure to accommodate this new means of power generation. Ultimately, the trick may be in running our economies and societies entirely on electricity. What that would look like is hard to say. The implications are tremendous but not wholly undesirable. Much can be done with electricity and it's hard to imagine life without it.
Probably, this problem of oil depletion can be dealt with in a humane way and still enable humanity a prosperous future. If it weren't for the specter of global warming and rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. If we had the freedom to burn all the fossil fuels we are able to without permanent damage to the climate and our ability to live in it, then I'd say oil depletion is surmountable. But it is not an isolated problem. It is a central factor to many other problems that have to be negotiated concurrently. The thermodynamic challenges to replacing fossil fuels will guide our decisions over the coming decades about what is possible and what should be given up as impossible or not worth the trouble. Two issues that this subject leads into is climate change and ecological overshoot, which is what makes these problems so vexing. So these will be the next features in the "Mother" series of posts. Ciao.
The technological challenge for scientists and engineers now in replacing oil and coal is to make up for what nature had already accomplished in concentrating the energy for us. This is fundamentally a problem of thermodynamics. The Laws of Thermodynamics are perhaps the biggest bummer physics has to offer as it constitutes nothing less than the ultimate heat death of the universe at some distant date. The problems humanity faces now, though much smaller in scale, are related. The first law states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. The second law, called entropy, states that whenever energy changes form, from say chemical to electrical, some amount of the total energy is lost in the transformation through heat. It's why you have to repair things, like cars and shoes, and to reshingle the house. The energy leaving the system (your shoe) means that it is able to do less work, and more work from without is required to put it to rights again by fixing it.
Nature, over millions of years, did that for us in the case of fossil fuels and what was left was a highly concentrated energy source. In the case of oil, the remainder of the entropic process was a liquid hydrocarbon. That it is liquid is very crucial as that enables easier transport and to have a more finely tuned applications that occur in a car's engine. So far, the only replacement fuel even to make it to market, with bad results, is ethanol. The reasons for the bad results are many, but primarily it is due to the energy needed to gather and distill the source material (corn, grass, sugar cane) is so great that it nearly exceeds that which is produced from distillation and leaves us with little to no net energy gain.
The technology fix to this problem then has to climb the wall of millions of years of distillation in the ground in a matter of years. And make it economical. And scale it up to 85 million barrels a day over the course of oils decline plus 2% per year growth, perhaps only in a matter of a few decades. All to keep cars running. If this does not work in a meaningful way, we still have other options. We can gradually move to electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids so that Americans and the world can own cars and not feel much disruption in style of life. To date, all-electric and hybrid cars are not cost competitive until the price of oil reaches the roughly 80-90 dollar range and above, at which point the economy starts to falter and makes a recession likely.
If we decide we can live without cars, then we could still go to electric rail in and between cities which has the advantage of being more fuel efficient than cars. The problem, in the U.S. especially, is that the rail system has atrophied to the point that we have virtually no passenger rail service anywhere in America with the capacity to replace even a fraction of automobile travel. So an enormous investment would need to be made into electric rail immediately to have something usable over the next two decades as our energy supply tightens.
The viable options economically for alternative sources of energy really only produce electricity and perhaps heat in the case of geothermal energy. This is very important and we should be building the infrastructure to accommodate this new means of power generation. Ultimately, the trick may be in running our economies and societies entirely on electricity. What that would look like is hard to say. The implications are tremendous but not wholly undesirable. Much can be done with electricity and it's hard to imagine life without it.
Probably, this problem of oil depletion can be dealt with in a humane way and still enable humanity a prosperous future. If it weren't for the specter of global warming and rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. If we had the freedom to burn all the fossil fuels we are able to without permanent damage to the climate and our ability to live in it, then I'd say oil depletion is surmountable. But it is not an isolated problem. It is a central factor to many other problems that have to be negotiated concurrently. The thermodynamic challenges to replacing fossil fuels will guide our decisions over the coming decades about what is possible and what should be given up as impossible or not worth the trouble. Two issues that this subject leads into is climate change and ecological overshoot, which is what makes these problems so vexing. So these will be the next features in the "Mother" series of posts. Ciao.
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