240 comments on DrumBeat: September 10, 2006
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
240 comments on DrumBeat: September 10, 2006
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Beware email scams!
Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.
Search The Oil Drum with Google
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Campfire
- Passive Solar Design Overview – Part 1
- Radical Retrenchment - A Reference Model
- TOD:Campfire RSS feed
TOD:Europe
- Energy Policy: SER-2 [01] Introduction
- The Russian Bear?
- The Permanent Oil Crisis Conference in Amsterdam, January 21 & 22, 2009
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
TOD:Australia/NZ
- The Bullroarer - Friday 9th January 2009
- 2009: Predictions for Australia
- The Bullroarer - Tuesday 6th January 2009
TOD:Net Energy
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- Health After Oil
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- Calculated Risk
- The Crash Course
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
“Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning, but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat.”
—George Eliot
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Prof. Goose, Nate Hagens, Gail the Actuary, Heading Out
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Khebab, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Local: Glenn
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Emeritus: Stuart Staniford
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
Instead of building coal plants we could build nuclear reactors.
And put solar hot water on the houses.
If we use all our tillable land for ethanol crops then how can
ADM continue to be 'The supermarket to the world.'? or whatever inane slogan of theirs they once used with flying ears of corn or whatever , as a 'proud' sponsor of PBS.
If we have then cut off most grain exports to the rest of the world, causing panic, economic chaos there, rapid rises in the cost of basic foodstuffs, loss of aquifer storage levels, yada...yada,.....
...then tell me how YOU would ascertain the real cost of ethanol production? I would like to know the answer.
Right now many ethanol plants are being built as well as biodiesel , very close to my part of the country. In fact two are starting groundbreaking very soon and most if not all of our grains will be shunted to them instead of the barges and railroad cars.
What then? Peak Food I suppose.
airdale -- Note the lack of graphs. This is something that can be graphed, IMO. You just have to drive the farming countryside and look out the window. Maybe the bootheel of Missouri would give one a big wakeup call. Watch out for the irrigators.
meaning that there is an enormous number of variables IMO.
This is crops vs pumping something out of the ground.
When the soil is abused and lost? Well just look at what is happening in those 3rd world countries we don't like to think or talk about. Overgrazed,forests gone, bad weather as a result and ..well all the rest..and then comes starvation and slow death.
I have repeatedly posted studies showing that sugar cane based ethanol has energy returns of 1:8.5 or more.
While you are talking about conservation, tropical countries are doing ethanol. I am sure they will find it more usefuul that the 500 thousandth post discussing conservation without the slightest suggestion of how it might be done.
Here are just a few suggestions (keep in mind that the average German lives at least at the same standard of living as a US citizen while only consuming half the energy):
- Get rid of your too large, too strong car.
- Drive only if you really need to. Walk all distances up to 1.5 miles and bike all distances up to 10 miles, weather permitting. Use public transport as much as possible. Lobby for better public transport with your local administration. Car pool with your freinds and neighbours.
- Throw out all incandescent bulbs, put in fluorescents or LED lights. Switch off lights if you're not in a room.
- Insulate your house properly (not with fiber glass, that's a bad idea, better use styrofoam, rock wool or cellulosic insulation or something like that). A friend of mine is currently building a so-called "passive house". With 40 centimeters styrofoam insulation and very airthight triple-glazed windows and doors, it only needs a little wood oven to cover the 10 coldest days of the year. Otherwise, it has almost no external energy input except for the electricity for the (heat-retaining) ventilation and sunlight, of course. Because this house design does not need an oil or gas boiler, it is only marginally more expensive than an energy-waster.
This type of house is no rocket science, by the way. It is made with regular, common parts and engineering. Please note that here in Germany's federal country of Brandenburg, winters get as cold as 15-20 centigrades - below zero.- Encourage your power provider to invest in combined-heat-and-power plants and heat distribution networks, as they are by far the most efficient way to generate heat (as a by-product of electricity generation). Again, proven technology, see Denmark and Germany, where this is widely used.
- Turn down the thermostat to 18-20 centigrades. If you don't have thermostats on your radiators, get some, to get rid of the 'too cold' - 'too hot' - 'too cold' cycle. If you think 20 centigrades is too cold, buy a sweater or two. Running around your house in a t-shirt in the middle of winter is no necessity.
- Put solar thermal modules on your roof and a 1000 liter storage tank in your basement. Again, the technology is no rocket science, but saves a lot of energy (and money) for heating water. Larger systems can even support space heating in spring and autumn.
- Buy energy-efficient appliances. For instance, complying to the European A++ efficiency standard lets a fridge use only a tiny fraction of the electricity your curent model uses.
- Buy only devices without a stand-by mode or with one that draws less than 0.5W. Attach your old stand-by devices to a properly switchable mains connector - and use it!
- Buy food from your local farmers market - minimizing road transport.
- Stop flying around the world for minor reasons. Flying is about the most damaging human transport that exists. Use the train. (If there is no train in your area, why the f*ck did you let them dismantle it? America got big from using trains!)
My family adopted some of these measure and could easily save 30% of our electricity and gas bills without any noticeable decrease in convenience and without going to any extremes. If we can, you can, too.All this tells me that there is no excuse for complacency - you can change the world today with available, proven technology.
Cheers,
Davidyson
Stop fighting. Don't you realize we are all on the same side?
Don't tell him to get rid of his SUV. He probably doesn't even drive.
My original comment was not meant to disparage conservation or to imply that we can't get by with less. In fact I am sure that we can.
However, it is easy to just say conservation is the solution, but what does it mean? Are you just asking people to voluntarily use less? If so, I think the gains, while real, are limited. Making the changes you discuss above is good, of course. But is it a public policy?
I think that the only mechanism for creating conservation at a level that would make a difference is price. In this regard, I see call for carbon taxes, gasoline taxes and other penalties/incentives as much more meaningful. I see your changes as way that people will react to economic signals.
Trying to solve our upcoming energy/climate crisises with a hollow call for conservation is like trying to stop a crime wave by asking people to be honest.
Sorry for the sermon.
My favourite policy is a cap-and-trade system.
We estimate how much CO2 we can safely afford before ultimate climate desaster sets in or how much fossil energy we think we want to use in general, divide it by the number of people in the world and - hey presto - here we have the amount of fossil energy every citizen of the world can use. Those who use more, must pay those who use less to acquire the right to use this much fossil energy.
(Obviously, implementing this with the producers of fossil energy would make more sense - less individuals, more control.)
Taxes don't work properly, because if people shift their spending priorities from yet another box of chocolate-frosted sugar bombs to continue driving, the state will earn a lot of money, but the consumption will not go down significantly. You can't enforce a capped limit using taxes.
Cheers,
Davidyson
New-clear? Nuculur. Nuclear? Knuckler? What? Just tell me if that stuff will explode.
Of course we are accused of being just holier-than-thou and a big bother to the people who just want to go along with the usual wasteful ways. Lots of my friends zip around the world on airplanes and get angry when I hint that might not be the best thing to do- so I really am a big bother. Oh, well.
But every time I think about this problem I keep coming back to the same answer alluded to above- MAKE THE PRICE EQUAL THE FULL TRUE COST- to everything we do.
Of course I am thinking of the full cost to all of us and to the planet now and in the future. How to do that should be the challenge for these times.
If the true cost is there, then every thing you suggest will become the right thing to do automatically. The desire to do good is certainly not a sufficient motivator- who knows, maybe even a wrong one.
And of course we should never forget the problem of just too many people. How do we put the true cost of people on people?
Agreed 100%.
I applaud individual efforts at conservation, but do think it is not going to change the world without some external stimulous. I do see dwindling oil supplies as one source of price signals, but think we need more. If the price included the full cost, including externalities, conservation will, as you said, "become the right thing to do naturally".
I am well aware that there are eco-aware people in the US - after all, I invented the Prius-spotting game when I stayed in San Jose early this year... ;-)
"The true full cost" - that's a complex concept, isn't it?
I have the following thoughts on that:
- Yes, in an ideal world this should be the only and universal measure.
BUT:
- Cost from which perspective? My life has almost infinite value to me (I would only trade it for the life of my family), but someone else might be prepared killing me for a handful of dollars. (Or, less direct and more common, someone might accept people starving in, say, Bangladesh as long as he/she can continue with the "western" lifestyle.)
- There are even absolute infinite costs - like a fatal global warming or a global nuclear war.
- There are so many ways to avoid the true costs:
- Spatial shift of the cost: just ship the toxic waste to Ivory Coast, people here won't bother
- Temporal shift of the cost: We create and bury the nulear waste/the CO2 today, we don't really care if future generations will have to watch over it virtually forever. Discounting future future profits also works as discounting future losses. So this encourages short-term thinking.
- Socializing the cost: We take the profit from the deal, society as a whole can pay the price
- Funnily, the true cost is already here. We can feel it every day. It just gets so dispersed that it flies under our radar most of the time. And we get used to it. Why complain if it feels like it's been that way as long as I can remember? How fast do you have to boil the frog so it notices it's in danger?
- How do you make people care for the future if they don't even understand the value of the money in their hand - "it's just debt, I will pay it off eventually. But now, I will buy that nice new toy I have seen being advertised"
- Even finding out what the true cost is will never happen. But there is fairly sound evidence about how much CO2 we can yet pump into the athmosphere. There is a fairly good estimate of how much fossil energy is left. Everybody but a racist will admit that all people should basically have the same right to use this planet's fossil energy resources (maybe adjusted by differences in birth rates?). So I think cap-and-trade is our only hope, to at least come close to the real value of fossil energy, at least.
What do you think?Cheers
Davidyson
Not that much, frogs are smarter than humans (as far as GW is of concern).
But as they say, "if there's no way out, then the frog's fate is a foregone conclusion."
could someone pleae boil a frog with strong exponential heating water and see if it would still find a way out?
Cheers,
Davidyson
Maybe one of those prius counts was my son, who lives is San Jose.
Yes, of course the true cost is hard to get at, that's why I suggested it is a challenge for our times. But, as Amory Lovins likes to say, the external cost is hard to count, but that is no excuse to assign to it the only value we know for certain is wrong -zero.
Even an approximation is better than that one certainly wrong answer. And if we (the whole of us) admit true costing as an ideal, then we can get together and start work toward getting a better value for it.
After all, we wouldn't want all those economists to just sit around doing worse than nothing, would we?
I am thinking about cost as related to-entropy generation, as some sort of starting point, but that's because I work on heat engines.
Best regards,
Davidyson
An alternative is a full 'cap and trade' system, where we set the global carbon output to what it is now, and require permit buying on the open market. Then we ratchet the number of permits issued down (from 7 bn tpa now, to say 4 bn tpa in 20 years).
However:
- UK gas prices are twice US gas prices (97p/litre-- 97p is about USD 1.70). We still drive too much, and 1/12 cars sold is a SUV-class vehicle (1 in 8 in London: I guess the snowdrifts are pretty high here in winter ;-). Even here, petrol is only c. 20% of the lifetime ownership cost of a vehicle (in order: depreciation, insurance, maintenance, petrol, road tax). Even charging £10 per day to drive into the core of London, lots of people do it.
- our home electricity and gas prices are about twice yours, I believe. I am paying 11p per KWHR for electricity, so nearly 20 cents US.
Whatever the price of electricity, I cannot see Americans turning off their air conditioners.So I conclude taxation, in and of itself, probably isn't enough. Or else the taxes will have to be so very high, that massive evasion will be the main problem.
That's the beauty of the cap-and-trade system on producer level: you "just" manage a couple of hundred fossil energy producers and they pass on the cost to the consumers.
Very little evasion possible, no matter what the prices turn out to be. You can't hide a VLCC or build stealth pipelines or secretly run an open-pit coal mine of any serious dimensions...
So the only question is: how do we get TPTB to agree on an install and enforce such a system?
Cheers,
Davidyson
You can tax fossil fuel producing companies, I suppose, but even there, both buyer and seller have an incentive to cheat (to pay lower taxes/ buy fewer permits). Also you have given the system the incentive to be energy efficient, but not necessarily carbon efficient-- no tax incentive for sequestration or abatement, once you have paid for the carbon (either by permit or by taxation).
So collection and monitoring and corruption will be a big problem.
It's one reason why I think energy standards legislation is going to have to be a huge part of any drive to reduce CO2: you're going to have to choke off demand at the final point of sale.
- American trains aren't worth a damn. Except around a few major cities (NYC in particular) trains don't get you where you need to go
The only low energy long distance transport system in the US is Greyhound buses. And then when you get to the terminus, you are often miles from where you need to go, often in a very frightening part of town. It's little surprise Greyhound has been broke so often.
- Americans mostly cannot afford to live close to where they work. And if they did, they would regret it: ever seen downtown Detroit? Or considered the public (not private) schools in upper Manhattan?
Americans live in suburbs because it is rational to do so. Most suburbs don't have facilities for bicycling, walking to shops, etc.
- diesel cars (40% more fuel efficient) are essentially unavailable (a couple of VW models). In 2009, there should be universal low sulphur diesel fuel, and the makers should be introducing new models. But 3 years to wait.
Hybrids only generate reasonable fuel economy savings if a lot of your driving is stop-start, low speed. US hybrids do not have a 'battery only' feature.
There are things one can do. For example a European (front loader) washing machine uses 1/3rd as much water as a US machine (top loader) and less energy. New airconditioners are 40% more efficient than old ones (the SEER rating). Ground source heat pumps have a payback of less than 10 years, even with the 50' drill into the bedrock (see below re airconditioning).
It's also worth noting the extremes of the American climate. Anywhere east of the Mississippi, you are probably going to need air conditioning: not because it is hot in summer, but because it is humid. I've been in Syria and Egypt in 40 degree heat, and they are not as hot as New York or Washington on a July day.
Pretending Americans are going to quickly become virtuous Europeans is nonsensical. They won't. And we in Europe are disastersville: Germany is building new coal plants, UK pioneered low cost airlines (and no one wants a windmill built in their line of site)-- may Brits commute weekly from France or Spain by airline.
Let's also not forget Germany is the land where there was nearly a citizen's revolt at the proposal that the autobahns have speed limits. The traffic on the Ruhr has to be seen to be believed. And of course the Continental European partners in the CO2 trading scheme have been cheating (by issuing too many permits to their industrial users) causing the CO2 price to crash.
The California government may be about to take the most radical steps towards tackling global warming of any government, anywhere, (except possibly Iceland).
Let's hope they succeed.
Yes, America has a fairly disadvantageous position to start from. Of course re-forming US society in peak oil times will be very difficult - that's why many peak oilers foresee very turbulent times for the US.
And I am the last to say that Europe is the holy grail of virtue. There are a lot of things going wrong here. You give a couple of excellent examples, I could extend the list almost infinitly.
Still, there are at least some achievements and why not learn from the best practices of all the places in the world? (I just happen to live in Germany, so I know more about it than, say, about Russian or Zimbabwan eco-achievements.)
Re. California - well, their governor comes from Austria, Europe and continues down his predecessor's ecological path despite the Bushists' otherwise anti-ecology behaviour.
European legacy or just adapting to the Californian electorate's realities? ;-)
Cheers,
Davidyson
I think political expedience is a more genuine factor. A desire to differentiate himself from other Republican politicians. Also perhaps the influence of Maria Shriver, his wife and memmber of a prominent Democratic family.
Russia is doing nothing on global warming. Heck, Russia is one of the few countries that probably welcomes it (if not the droughts...).
Zimbabwe has just about the planet's worst government. I remember recently there was a charity collecting money to get female sanitary products into Zimbabwe, because distribution had collapsed in the hyperinflation. So I would say they have other fish to fry ;-).
On Europe, Matthew Simmons is arch. We have more public transport, but on the other hand there is no spare capacity for freight on the rail system-- completely dependent on long distance trucking to make the economies work.
Maybe 30 years ago one could have imagined North America making due with less liquid fuelled transport-- in those days, there were still (some) sidewalks, places to cycle to, 1 or at most 2 cars per family. There were shopping malls not 'Big Box' stores. Edge Cities was just a concept. Not now. About all that can be achieved is more telecommuting, and more efficient vehicles.
I remain a cautious sceptic on Peak Oil (there will be PO, but it might be 2025, rather than 2006)-- oil will be available at a price, even if it is $100 or $150/bl, the economy will adjust.
The problem is the leading alternative oil supplies (tar sands, shale, coal to oil, some forms of ethanol) produce even more CO2 than conventional oil production and consumption.
I am a believer that global warming is now and that something has to be done very quickly, if we are to avoid the more catastrophic consequences (the milder ones are inevitable).
I used Russia and Zimbabwe as just some (as I thought) obviously superbad examples. I should have added a smiley!
On substitutes:
Ottmar Edenhofer, chief economist of the renowned Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (www.pik-potsdam.de), says that current price levels are very bad for GW - they encourage substitution with these "easy but dirty" energy carriers that you mentioned.
He says that if peak oil actually happens, that would be a good thing for GW, as prices would go so high that the cost of renewables could be considered marginal.
But he agrees that markets probably won't anticipate the problem (and the need for transition) in time and therefore also advocates a global CO2 cap-and-trade system to place appropriate incentives.
Cheers,
Davidyson
Sorry to miss your humour ;-).
Peak Oil is not good for Global Warming. Because the first thing that will happen is economies will burn more coal.
You see it already. Canadian tar sands produces 4-5X the greenhouse gases of conventional oil production. Yet tar sands production is scheduled to rise 5-fold, with an investment of up to $200bn to achieve it over the next 15 years. That to produce an additional 4m b/d.
Even if we pay more attention to conservation and alternative energy in a Peak Oil scenario (I'll reiterate: I am a cautious sceptic on immediate PO-- 2025 is more likely than 2005-- what is true is that economic theory predicts that the price of an exhaustible resource rises over time, and this will happen, so by the time we hit Hubbert's Peak, oil is more likely to be $150/bl than $50/bl) the effect of more coal and other 'dirty' solutions, will offset the positive benefits.
Global Warming is the real crisis. PO is likely a sideshow (an important sideshow, but a sideshow).
The way I look at it, people (like us) who do those things "pilot" them for the rest of society and show what's possible. When prices get high (and it looks like natural price increase is all we are going to get, without taxes), then people will know what to do. They've heard it. That family down the street already did it.
Actually, if are happy with lower energy choices, and don't act like a bunch of hair-shirt masochists, we might gain some early influence.
It seems we're on the same ticket on this one... ;-)
Cheers,
Davidyson
This is why I am a strong advocate of Combined Heat an Power with district heating. It has a "thermodynamic" efficiency of a couple of hundred percent: you loose like 5% electricity but you can use like 20% of the original energy to heat homes. So much better than releasing the "waste" heat into the athmosphere or into rivers and the sea.
This is also why I am an advocate for "CO2 source" CO2 capping and trading. This would create the economic pressure at the root of the problem. This pressure would be passed on downstream via prices.
In any case, several people here have pointed it out, it's the wasteful "infinite growth" system that's breaking our necks energy- and climate-wise, no matter what cosmetics we apply at the surface. If we were a 1-billion-people steady state world economy, we could probably all (the ethical key question: who would be "all"?) live under pretty luxurious conditions without spoiling the planet.
Cheers,
Davidyson