The Good, the Bad and the Really Ugly

John Rawlins has a B.S. in physics and a Ph.D. in nuclear physics. He retired in 1995 from the Westinghouse Hanford Co. at the Hanford site in Eastern Washington. Currently, he teaches physics and astronomy at Whatcom Community College.

I’ll be writing a monthly column for Whatcom Watch with recent news in the energy and climate change fields for the foreseeable future. The title (above) is tentative, and we invite reader comments and ideas for a permanent title. Please e-mail me or Sally Hewitt, Whatcom Watch editor, with your ideas. (See e-mail addresses at the end of this article.) Maybe the winner will actually win something!

In this tentative title, the Good represents the fact that fossil fuel emissions (carbon dioxide) will be declining no matter what we do as a result of the facts that fossil fuels are finite, and that they are all near world peak production. The Bad represents the fact that fossil fuel decline will mean energy decline, which implies a general worldwide collapse in the human-endeavor-as-we-know-it over the remainder of this century.

The Really Ugly refers to the increasingly disturbing news coming from various climate scientists that we may already have passed dangerous tipping points in worldwide climate, far ahead of schedule — and greenhouse gases continue to pile up in our atmosphere at an accelerating pace during our great global climate experiment. So please, send us alternative ideas for a monthly column title or you’ll be stuck with this really ugly one.

In his speech to the London Soil Association, Richard Heinberg asks “What Will We Eat as the Oil Runs Out?” Richard has estimated that the U.S. will need 50–100 million farmers three decades from now — a­­ truly stunning number when you realize we now have more like three million. We need to replace fossil fuel farm inputs with animal (including human) labor and sustainable practices (like composting), and that means we need to replace large mega-farms with many small sustainable farms.

This will be a wrenching, difficult transition — if we make it. His conclusion: “A hundred years from now, everyone will be eating what we today would define as organic food, whether or not we act. But what we do now will determine how many will be eating, what state of health will be enjoyed by those future generations, and whether they will live in a ruined cinder of a world, or one that is in the process of being renewed and replenished.”

One additional note — he refers to a new realization that phosphate supply will be peaking in a few years — another quite inconvenient truth because phosphorus is of course one of the three main ingredients plants need to grow. (http://www.energybulletin.net/38091.html)

Sharon Astyk, whom I read regularly because of her focus on sustainable food production, has the following to say about Heinberg’s article: “From my own reading, and from what I’ve learned from Pat Murphy and Faith Morgan who were in Cuba for the filming of ‘The Power of Community,’ there’s a step missing here. Before the agronomists were given carte blanche (or perhaps before their influence was felt — I honestly don’t know), before the government broke up large farms, people started growing gardens.

“That is, the government’s intervention may have enabled more people to grow urban gardens and put rabbits on their roofs, but the idea and the need to eat came from ordinary Cubans. That is, this was not a top- down national strategy at first, but one enabled by government, rather than conceived by it. I think this bears some emphasis.

“Top-down strategies must be concurrent with and redundant to bottom-up strategies. What does this mean? Well, I don’t happen to trust my government to act in my interests. So while I support top-down strategies, I believe that the top-down strategies we advocate should be built upon bottom-up strategies, created by the people.”

Amen — why would anyone trust a federal or state government system that has ignored this problem for three decades? (http://www.energybulletin.net/38234.html)

Here’s a report from Global Public Media (GPM) about a regional food security conference held in Nelson, British Columbia, with about 250 in attendance. The title of the conference was “The Future of Food in the Kootenays Conference.” The following GPM link gives access to the various presentations. This would be a great idea for Whatcom County. (http://globalpublicmedia.com/deconstructing_dinner_fof)

Tom Whipple, former CIA analyst and now an analyst for ASPO-USA (Associate for the Study of Peak Oil), has an interesting article on some lame reporting by the New York Times and the Washington Street Journal about oil prices and production levels. Both continue to miss the main points and risks associated with peak oil. A skeptic might think they run ads for companies who don’t want anyone to know about what are becoming very obvious energy problems. (http://www.energybulletin.net/38385.html)

Dave Cohen, another writer for ASPO-USA notes that the 2008 presidential candidates in the U.S. are not addressing peak oil, and energy plans from candidates focus on “solutions” to future oil problems (never mentioning energy decline) — none appear aware (or willing to say) that no combination of substitutions will come anywhere close to replacing present fossil fuel energy. (http://www.energybulletin.net/38319.html)

The following link takes you to a Bellingham Herald story about a Washington state report which claims our freeway exits will be overwhelmed by traffic congestion by 2035, and that we need some combination of more lanes and better exits through town.

Considering the likelihood that oil use by then will be a small fraction of what it now is, the best use of this report would be as a fossil fuel substitute. Viewed through the lens of peak oil, most future major roadway projects seem destined to produce very expensive stranded assets. (http://www.bellinghamherald.com/102/story/260476.html)

Here’s a story to make all you beer-sippers weep. With the federal and state incentives to grow more corn for ethanol production (a non-sustainable gasoline substitute), some farmers are shifting from growing hops to producing corn. In effect, the price of conventional oil will set the price of beer! Better learn to make your own. (http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10337782)

Dr. Dan Bednarz argues that organized (centralized) medicine is not ready for peak oil/energy descent: “The implications of these intertwined socioeconomic and geopolitical perils are stupefying, with global warming calling for radical reductions in the use of fossil fuels to reduce carbon emissions — most estimates calculate 80 percent or more by 2050.”

Dan has been writing articles on the vulnerability of medicine to future oil supply/price problems for a couple of years, and he clearly understands the overall energy situation. He foresees a shift in emphasis to preventive medicine and a much less energy-intensive hospital system. (http://www.energybulletin.net/38642.html#sdendnote3sym)

The story in the link that follows describes a Pacific Gas & Electric (PGE) commitment to purchase electricity produced by a demonstration wave power plant off the California coast. The idea of that commitment is to enable the vendor, a Canadian company (!?), to qualify for a loan to build the facility, which could grow much bigger if the initial phase is successful.

Sketches at the Web site show how this simple system can produce electricity from the up and down motion of an ocean buoy. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/12/18/MNEKU05V9.DTL)

Here’s a huge surprise about coal reserves — world coal production (best case) will peak around 2025 at about 30 percent above today’s level. In the U.S., we have already experienced peak energy from coal about five years ago as we’re now burning lower quality coal (meaning less energy per ton), and it is unclear whether we can increase production.

In the U.S. today coal accounts for nearly 60 percent of electrical capacity. This is the same time as we expect peaking of world natural gas (nearly 20 percent of U.S. electrical capacity). On the North American continent, natural gas is already in the slow decline phase. (http://www.energybulletin.net/28287.html)

Nate Hagens reminds us that what we buy for the December holiday season correlates well with the oil we import, and reminds us that world exports (hence all imports) face the prospect of rapid decline to near zero by 2035. This would translate to about an 80 percent decline in oil availability in the U.S. — because the U.S. will be producing less than 20 percent of what we use today, and we may be unable to import oil from anywhere by then. (http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3425)

Ross Gelbspan joins several climate scientists in arguing that it is now too late to avoid dangerous anthropogenic global warming (AGW, known as human-caused climate change). He goes on to advocate for worldwide measures to prepare for a changing climate, as well as to do some mitigation.

While he clearly gets the point that such measures will completely change all societies, his arguments ignore the rather important complication of fossil fuel peaking, especially peak oil, which will be a very near-term forcing function. Observations of ice loss in the northern Arctic during the summer of 2007 has obviously frightened many climate specialists. (http://www.energybulletin.net/38315.html)

The following link is for a city of Bellingham report on mitigation plans for climate change. It includes a lot of material that would be helpful in writing an energy descent plan. Eventually, the best plan would combine the climate report with an energy descent plan, as well as plans for adapting to climate change — i.e., a combined mitigation/adaptation plan for both these elephants in our living rooms. (http://www.cob.org/documents/pw/environment/2007-04-12-Greenhouse-gas-inv-rpt-and-action-plan.pdf)

Are we seeing an increase in heavy rainfall events in the Pacific Northwest? Yes, says this article; such events are about 30 percent more frequent than 60 years ago. We also may be seeing more rainfall over the past 15 years, but it’s too early to be sure it’s a trend. (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/342268_stormwater05.html?source=rss)

A tropical virus found its way to a small Italian village, Ravenna, around 45 N latitude. The tiger mosquito now breeds there and is the carrier for chikungunya, a nasty disease brought there by someone who had traveled in India. “This is the first case of an epidemic of a tropical disease in a developed, European country,” according to the World Health Organization director. This is one expected result of global warming. (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/world/europe/23virus.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin)

Following the summer of 2007, several technical papers appeared describing accelerated rates of ice loss in the northern Arctic. The post by Rob Hopkins summarizes the findings of a small group called “CarbonEquity” that clearly states the lessons from last summer. The conclusion is that the planet has probably already crossed at least one tipping point in climate, perhaps as long as two decades ago, when the northern ocean icecap began to thin.

The latest projection is that the northern ocean will be ice-free around 2013 during northern summer — 100 years ahead of the schedule predicted by climate scientists just two years ago. Rob’s postings are generally forward looking and relatively upbeat — but not this one.

The gazillion dollar question now is how long it will take for Greenland’s ice cap to melt — it contains five to seven meters worth of sea level rise, and the rate of ice loss may have begun to accelerate there as well, based on 2007 observations. (http://transitionculture.org/2007/10/17/the-single-most-depressing-thing-i-have-ever-read)

The report by CarbonEquity is well worth the (long) read for anyone planning for adaptation to climate surprises: http://www.carbonequity.info/PDFs/Arctic.pdf.

Debt of gratitude: many effusive thanks to Bart Anderson and crew at The Energy Bulletin (http://www.energybulletin.net) for their work in collecting and reporting worldwide energy and climate news so thoroughly. Without their effort, writing this column would be practically impossible.

E-mail column name suggestions (with “column name suggestions” as the subject line) to john235mary@earthlink.net and/or editor@whatcomwatch.org. §