Archive for October, 2006

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Facing Climate Change: Dithering, Denial & Delay

Monday, October 30th, 2006

By David L. Brown

A new report commissioned by the British government, the Stern Report, has added to the growing mountain of evidence that not only have humans created a looming threat of climate change, but that the costs will likely be immense. The report also points out that it is almost certainly too late to avoid at least some effects.

The report’s author, Sir Nicholas Stern, claims that “our actions over the coming few decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th Century”.

Sir Nicholas is a distinguished development economist and former chief economist at the World Bank. Although his report gives prescriptions for how to minimise this economic and social disruption, he warns that we are too late to prevent any deleterious consequences from climate change.

According to an analysis on the BBC.com website (here), his central argument “is that spending large sums of money now on measures to reduce carbon emissions will bring dividends on a colossal scale. It would be wholly irrational, therefore, not to spend this money.”

The BBC analysis by Robert Peston, BBC News business editor, continues:

The prospects are worst for Africa and developing countries, so the richer nations must provide them with financial and technological help to prepare and adapt.

[Sir Nicholas] believes it is practical to aim for a stabilisation of greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere of 500 to 550 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2050 – which is double pre-industrial levels and compares with 430ppm today. But even stabilising at that level will probably mean significant climate change.

As well as decarbonising the power sector by 60%-70%, there will also have to be an end to deforestation – emissions from deforestation are estimated at more than 18% of global emissions, more than transport. And there will have to be deep cuts in emissions from transport.

The costs of these changes should be around 1% of global GDP by 2050 – in other words the world would be 1% poorer than we would otherwise have been, which would be significant but far from prohibitive.

To be clear, this does not mean we would be 1% poorer than we are today, but that global growth will be slower.

The way to look at this 1% is as an investment. Because the costs of not taking this action are mind-bogglingly large.

Responding to the report, which was commissioned by Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, the likely next prime minister, Brown has announced that Al Gore has been named as an advisor to the British government on matters relating to climate change. Long an advocate for the environment, former vice president and presidential candidate Gore is known for his role in the recent motion picture “An Inconvenient Truth” (read my review of the movie, “Al Gore Film on Global Warming Is a Must-See,” posted June 23, 2006.)

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Posted in Climate Change, Politics, Pollution | Comments Off

Malthus’s Classic “Essay on Population” Revisited

Sunday, October 29th, 2006

A RETRO REVIEW

“An Essay on the Principle of Population,” by T. R. Malthus; originally published in 1798; Oxford World Classics edition, © 1993, revised edition 2004; 172 pgs., $9.95
By David L. Brown

Anyone who is the least bit clued in about population and environmental issues has heard of Thomas Malthus, the English cleric who published his “Essay on the Principle of Population” in 1798. We all know — or at least we think we know — that Malthus was a doomsayer who predicted that the human race would continue to multiply until the Earth was overwhelmed and destroyed by the press of human numbers. For generations Malthus has been ridiculed for his (supposed) ideas.

Until recently, it had not occurred to me that I didn’t know anyone who had actually read Malthus, nor had I seen any in-depth discussion of his work. I recently saw a book passage describing Malthus as “an English monk,” which I knew was wrong and which seemed to reflect a great deal of ignorance on the part of the writer. My curiosity aroused, I determined to find out what this supposed doomsday character actually said. Going to my nearest bookstore (Amazon.com, located about two keystrokes from my desk), I ordered a copy of Malthus’s book. (Yes, book, for we have been misled by the word “essay” in the title and in fact this is actually a small volume of more than 150 pages.) Reading it and the biographical information it contained was a revelation in more ways than one.

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Editor’s Note: The date of birth on this artwork is incorrect; Malthus was born in Surrey, England, on February 13, 1766.

First, I learned that Malthus was more than just an ordinary country parson (much less a monk). He was a scholar of some note, having graduated with honors in mathematics from Cambridge University in 1788 and completing an MA degree in 1791. He was elected a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1793. He was indeed an Anglican parson in his early years and at the time he wrote his famous essay. However, he went on to become one of the most influential economists of his era. In 1805 he was appointed Professor of History and Political Economy at East India College, a position he held until his death in 1834.

Malthus was well traveled, including an extended trip to Scandinavia and Russia in 1799 and visits to Switzerland and France in 1802. He was a founding member of the Political Economy Club (London, 1821) and was elected a member of the Royal Society. He published many books and articles on economics and was recognized as one of the leading thinkers of his generation.

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Posted in Book Reviews, Population Issues, Retro Reviews | Comments Off

Are Investors Mixing Oil and Water?

Saturday, October 28th, 2006

By David L. Brown

There has been a paradigm floating around for a long time that goes something like this: “Water will be the oil of the 21st century.” I don’t necessarily agree entirely with that; my bet is on food to be the new supreme commodity. But water and food are inextricably connected to the extent that it has been observed that countries that import foreign grain are essentially importing water (see my article “Water Shortages Threaten World with Famine,” posted here on October 3, 2006).

Nonetheless, there is something going on with water that is exemplified by this brief news item from a recent issue of The Economist (October 21, page 9):

The management of RWE, a German utility group, agreed to sell Thames Water, Britain’s biggest water company which it boughtin 2000, to a consortium led by Macquarie Bank for £8 billion ($15 billion) including debt. It is the third announced takeover of a British water company this month. The investment group trying to buy Anglian Water’s parent company raised its stake in the company to fend off potential counterbids.

Fifteen billion dollars is not a sack of chicken feed, and with three deals on water companies in a single month and another acting to fend off buyers in Britain alone, there are apparently some investors who know something about the future value of water. There appears to be a boom in the once little-noted and, yes, boring business of providing ordinary H2O to consumers. Macquarie Bank is an Australian investment bank.

According to Bloomberg.com, water is a hot investment topic. Writing about the RWE sale of Thames Water, that web site noted today (read it here):

The Bloomberg World Water Index of 12 utilities has gained 39 percent in the past year, outpacing a 19 percent gain for the Morgan Stanley Capital International World Index and a 6.2 percent decline in oil futures in New York. European utility takeovers this year have jumped 22 percent in value to about $185 billion.

In other words, water is doing better than oil in the financial markets, at least. The Bloomberg article included this observation:

“Water is clearly becoming a more obviously crucial area,” said Neil Berlant, managing director of the water group at Los Angeles-based investment-banking firm Seidler Cos., which doesn’t own shares of RWE or Macquarie. “The perceived value is climbing and that offers the prospects for these buyers to have substantial growth in profit.”

We will not even attempt to analyze the thinking behind these investment trends, other than to note that the world’s water resources are rapidly being depleted by the demands of irrigated agriculture, industrial uses, and consumer needs. Perhaps water will indeed play a role in this century similar to that of oil in the last.

Posted in Economics, Resource Depletion | Comments Off

The Financial Times and the Oily Straw Man

Wednesday, October 25th, 2006

by Val Germann

In a recent Star Phoenix Base article this writer commented on the phony argument used by an academic to discredit those of us concerned about world oil production.   The method in that case involved setting up a false premise (“the world is running out of oil”) and assigning that view to ”peak oilers” and certain fellow travelers.  Never mind that this is NOT the actual position of the target group, it’s an easy premise to attack, and therefore makes the casting of aspersions very easy work indeed.  This tactic is a fairly obvious dodge, once you have been sensitized to it, and it shows up quite often.  For instance, the FINANCIAL TIMES of London used it just the other day, and in a lead paragraph, to boot:

As major oil discoveries become rarer and as motorists face the highest petrol bills in a generation, the debate over whether the world is running out of oil is again rearing its head. 

Yes, I suppose it is, but just where are the headwaters of the ”running out of oil” part of the thing?  The “peak oilers” are not saying that.  No, they are talking about the end of any increases in petroleum production, not that oil is suddenly going to disappear.   Note that the TIMES in the very next paragraph sort of states that, but in a vague way that includes another error:

In books, speeches and articles, and particularly on the internet, the doomsayers – known as “peak oil” theorists – are warning that the world’s oilfields are on the decline and will soon be unable to match mankind’s insatiable appetite for energy.

The implication that all of the world’s oil fields are in decline is not a part of the peak oil argument.  Rather, it is the fact that most of the big fields are faltering, just as mankind’s ever-increasing demand for energy has taken a step up.  That is the big problem now, as the TIMES also alludes to, down the page: 

The IEA estimates that, by 2030, the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, owners of most of the world’s remaining oil supplies, will need to almost double their production and pump 57m barrels per day. Of this, Saudi Arabia is expected to provide about one third, and already it is taking steps to try to deliver this amount.

Never mind that the Saudis, despite all their rhetoric about increasing production, are not able to pump now even the 10-million barrels-per-day they were getting just a few years ago.  And this is in spite of more new wells and the increasing use of “enhanced recovery techniques” on the older ones.  The world gets 5 percent of its petroleum from one giant Saudi field, a field that is undergoing massive water injection and may have reached its own “peak” at this time. 

If this is true then there is no way the Saudis can ever double their current production.  They don’t have enough potential elsewhere to make up for the peaking of that one super-giant field, should it actually occur.   That this peaking may in fact be happening is strongly implied by this paragraph in the TIMES piece:

This year, Saudi Arabia, which says it holds 260bn barrels of oil and the potential of another 200bn, will have 90 operating drilling rigs. That is twice as many as in 2004 and three times as many as in the previous decade.

Do you think that the light went on for most TIMES readers as they read that paragraph?   No, it likely did not  because the TIMES did not include the production information above, the fact that the Saudis aren’t pumping as much now as they were 20 years ago, or even ten years ago, in spite of massive investments in wells and technology.  (more…)

Posted in Age of Oil, Economics, Politics | 1 Comment »

Could Third World Be Winner in Biofuels Bubble?

Tuesday, October 24th, 2006

By David L. Brown

We have written much on Star Phoenix Base about the rapidly growing phenomenon of biofuels production, in which a growing proportion of agricultural crops are being turned into ethanol or biodiesel as alternatives to petroleum.

The race to produce biofuels is taking off in America like a Saturn V rocket, with several dozen ethanol plants now under construction and many more on the drawing boards. In just a couple of years it is estimated that 30 percent or more of the American corn crop will go to alcohol production, just as a growing percentage of the soybean crop will be going to biodiesel plants instead of world food markets. This has all the earmarks of a classic economic “bubble,” as I described here on Star Phoenix Base in my article “Madness of Crowds Surrounds Ethanol Bubble,” June 5, 2006.

We have taken a negative tone toward these biofuel efforts, and for a number of sound reasons. Among them are the fact that farm production itself is energy-intensive, with petroleum and natural gas providing the fuel to drive farm equipment and transport crops, and as the feedstock for fertilizer and farm chemicals needed to maintain high yields.

Another reason is that the biofuels craze is certain to cause farmers to put marginal lands under the plow, resulting in increased erosion from wind and water. Even higher quality soils will be degraded by the process of “mining” their nutrients to produce ever-growing quantities of grain to feed the rapidly expanding biofuels industry.

Another factor we have mentioned is that the diversion of crops to biofuels is taking place just as many less fortunate regions of the world are verging on significant food shortages. As we have pointed out, it will not sit well with starving third world populations to see the U.S. and other advanced nations selfishly using precious food to continue to maintain energy-hogging lifestyles.

But everything deserves to be viewed from all sides, and after some thought I have realized that this scenario deserves another look. During recent decades, and particularly since World War II, the world’s major food producers have used the third world as a dumping ground for excess farm production. Of course, this has been largely characterized as charity — food aid for the poor and hungry — giving we smug Westeners a warm and fuzzy feeling while keeping our farmers fat and happy through generous subsidies.

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Posted in Age of Oil, Economics, Energy Technology, Essays and Opinion | 2 Comments »

Humanity’s Heavy Footprint on Mother Earth

Monday, October 23rd, 2006

By David L. Brown

Using United Nations statistics available back to 1961, a U.S. think tank called the Global Footprint Network (GFN) has calculated the impact of humanity on the resources of the Earth. Now each year the organization calculates the Ecological Footprint of the human race — its demand on cropland, pasture, forests and fisheries — and compares that to global biocapacity, or the ability of these vital ecosystems to generate resources and absorb wastes. The estimate for that first year 45 years ago for which figures were available, the “footprint” amounted to about 40 percent of the Earth’s ability to sustain humanity.

But that comfortable situation has changed dramatically in just a few decades, and continues to look more ominous with each passing year. Nineteen years ago GFN tells us that we reached the first “World Overshoot Day,” determined by the calculation that as of December 19 of that year we had used up all of the Earth’s resources necessary to support humanity for 1987. The remaining 12 days were indicative of “overshoot,” a term used by ecologists to describe the situation when a population of living creatures has grown to a level beyond which it can no longer be sustained by its environment (for example, a population of deer on an isolated island). In this case, the term overshoot is being used to describe the position of humanity relative to the entire planet. (For more on this, see my article “Overshoot-and-Collapse: A Model for Our Future?” posted here on August 6, 2006).

Since then things have just gotten worse, and the organization recently announced that by their calculations October 9, 2006 was the date by which we had used up all the available resources of the Earth for this year. That leaves us with almost three months to live on our environmental “credit card,” an account that is becoming stretched quite thin and may be in danger of being cancelled.

Just to drive home the point, here is a graph that shows the ‘Footprint” calculated by GFN since 1961 and the extent to which we are now overshooting the sustainable environment:

overshootgraph06.jpg
In the year 1961 I graduated from college, and in my brief adult lifetime (not that much unlike that of a mayfly if compared to the long and relatively stable two billion year history of life on Earth) it is difficult to conceive that humanity has gone from dominating about 40 percent of the vast resources of our planet, to using nearly a third more than the Earth is capable of yielding. To put it a different way, it now takes the Earth more than 15 months to replace what we use each year. A sad situation indeed.

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Posted in Population Issues, Resource Depletion | 1 Comment »

A Coyote’s Lesson in What We Don’t Know

Sunday, October 22nd, 2006

By David L. Brown

We all know the story: A certain desert-dwelling canine has its eye on an indigenous bird and goes to all kinds of extremes in an attempt to catch the avian speedster. This is, of course, the imaginary world of Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner.

Now a recurring episode in the on-going tale of the coyote and the bird is being used as a metaphor for the situation the human race may face if suspicions prove correct that the Earth is passing tipping points of warming and climate change that cannot be reversed. In the 13 October 2006 issue of SCIENCE magazine, (“Trying to Lasso Climate Uncertainty,” pgs. 243-244) environmental scientist Brian O’Neill, a staffer at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis ( IIASA) uses a metaphor from the cartoon series to make his point about all the factors we do not yet understand about the environment.

The classic scene to which he refers takes place when Wile E. Coyote, in hot pursuit of the Roadrunner, runs off the edge of a cliff. In violation of the laws of physics, the coyote stops in mid-air, not realizing that he is about to fall. Then, when he looks down he suddenly plummets toward the canyon floor, fading into the far distance. After a brief pause we see a little “puff” of dust to signal the end of his fall. Here is an illustration that reflects the lesson that Wile E. repeatedly fails to learn:

coyote-06.jpg

O’Neill fears that humanity may already be in a situation analogeous to that in which Wile E. Coyote finds himself after running off the cliff, but still unaware of his coming fall. According to the SCIENCE interview with O’Neill, an American climate scientist who works in the IIASA’s headquarters near Vienna, Austria:

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Posted in Climate Change, Satire, Irony, and Humor | 1 Comment »

World Oil Patch Problems Solved — Again

Sunday, October 22nd, 2006

by Val Germann

One of the chief tools of the propagandist is the “straw man” argument, one that sets up a false premise and then knocks it down, supposedly defeating the enemies of the propagandist, who are associated with the false premise.  A recent article on the TERRADAILY website reports on just such an incident: the use by an academic of the classical straw man.  The lead paragraph sets the tone:

If you think the world is on the verge of running out of oil or other mineral resources, you’ve been taken in by the foremost of seven myths about resource geology, according to a University of Washington economic geologist. “The most common question I get is, ‘When are we going to run out of oil.’ The correct response is, ‘Never,’” said Eric Cheney. 

This writer could only sigh with relief, intoning, “Whew, I’m so glad THAT problem is solved!”  Of course, hardly anyone is saying that the world is “running out of oil” but rather that the growth in oil production is about to end and a decline begin.  That’s what Hubbert was wrting about in the 1950s and that’s what the “Peak Oilers” are writing about now, causing one to wonder just how ”peak oil”  became ”running out of oil.”  In  the end though the question is moot because it seems there is a slight catch to Cheney’s argument, viz: 

“It might be a heck of a lot more expensive than it is now, but there will always be some oil available at a price, perhaps $10 to $100 a gallon.” 

Anyone can see the ”myth” here, can’t they, that there might be a problem with $100 per gallon gasoline?  Why it’s obvious that there would be no problem at all because, let me see, I could fill up my Buick for a mere $2,400!  Yes, indeed, that would be a world wide breeze even though something like 99.9% of the human race would be “out of oil” — priced out — which amounts to the same thing. 

That is, what do you think the world volume of petroleum sales would be if gasoline were going for $100 a gallon in today’s money, making a barrel of oil worth about $3,000? 

Ain’t academia great?

Read the entire TERRADAILY article here. 

Posted in Age of Oil, Economics | 1 Comment »

Making that pesky Ozone Hole go away

Sunday, October 22nd, 2006

by Val Germann

As many Star Phoenix Base readers know, the famous Ozone Hole has been on a back burner for some time now, the problem supposedly fixed by the Montreal protocol forbidding those bad “old” CFCs like Freon.  Not so long ago we were reading in some establishment journals that the “hole” would “close” as early as 2020.  However, that judgment has fallen to “further review,” as they say in NFL football. 

The problems are those pesky ozone depletion zones over the poles, particularly the South Pole.  It seems that the southern ozone hole has reached record extent, both in geographical size and intensity, as a recent TERRADAILY article reported:

NASA and National Oceanicand Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists report this year’s ozone hole in the polar region of the Southern Hemisphere has broken records for area and depth.

Not only that, the timeframe for the “healing” of the hole has been put back just a smidge, to 2065! 

The recently completed 2006 World Meteorological Organization/United Nations Environment Programme Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion concluded the ozone hole recovery would be masked by annual variability for the near future and the ozone hole would fully recover in approximately 2065.

This writer had to chuckle a bit at this news in spite of its dire import.  Close reading of the TERRADAILY article, based on a combined NOAA and NASA press release, reveals that what has been done is to simply declare a good result and then place any possible confirmation of that result far into the future.  Voila!  The “ozone hole” has in effect been made to go away while it’s still here, and bigger and meaner than ever!  There’s a word for this kind of thing: propaganda. 

Read the entire article here.

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Posted in Pollution | Comments Off

Turning CO2 into Alternative Fuel?

Friday, October 20th, 2006

By David L. Brown

A company in Massachusetts, GreenFuel Technologies Corp., is developing a process through which CO2 generated in power plants can be captured and used to grow algae, which in turn can be processed into various forms of fuels including biodiesel and ethanol. The system is designed to be retrofitted to existing power plants, thus helping both to mitigate future emissions of greenhouse gas and to provide an alternative source of energy.

An article in New Scientist magazine (6 October, 2006) describes the process:

Two of the world’s greatest energy users are electricity generation and transport. Both are responsible for huge quantities of greenhouse gas emissions, as most power plants and vehicles still rely on fossil fuels. Now GreenFuel and others are hoping to marry the two together with an emerging technology that uses a by-product of one to supply fuel to the other. Doing so could dramatically reduce their overall carbon dioxide emissions.

At the heart of the technology is a plastic cylinder full of algae, which literally sucks the CO2 out of a power plant’s exhaust. The algae can in turn be converted into biofuel, creating a cycle that takes the carbon from the smokestack to the gas tank before it enters the atmosphere.

If successful, the technology could capture all of a power plant’s CO2 emissions. “Right now, when you say CO2, people want to hide under the table. Carbon dioxide is not something you want to pump underground, it’s something you want to reuse,” says [Isaac] Berzin [the company's founder and chief technical officer].

According to the company’s website, its patented Emissions-to-Biofuels™ (E2B™) process “harnesses photosynthesis to grow algae, capture CO2 and produce high-energy biomass. Using commercially available technology, the algae can be economically converted to solid fuel, methane, or liquid transportation fuels such as biodiesel and ethanol.” The entry continues:

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Posted in Energy Technology, Pollution | 1 Comment »

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