Four Billion Cars in 2050?
Posted by Stuart Staniford on February 18, 2008 - 10:00am
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: 2050, automobile, civilization, hybrids, peak oil, phev [list all tags]
The Tata Nano will sell for about $2500 (US) in the base model, and get about 51 mpg (US). Source: Wikipedia.
This post is the start of an attempt to sketch out what an integrated solution to the world's food, energy, land, climate, and economy problems might look like. My basic goal is to get to a somewhat defensible story of how civilization could get to 2050 in reasonable shape, despite the problems of climate change, peak oil, global population growth, etc.and some of the requirements I saw as necessary in order to consider a solution viable:Since it's not possible for me to entirely solve this problem in a week of part-time work, I put this out as a hasty straw-man. Feel free to point out the parts of this that don't work, or where my ignorance of some of the relevant issues shows particularly badly. Of course, I don't make the claim that I can predict what will happen forty years ahead. Nor do I expect the global population to pay much attention to what I think they should do. Instead, the value of a scenario is to try to think through the general issues that society faces, and the value of an integrated scenario is that we can think about how all the parts fit together holistically, whereas usually they get projected separately by specialists, and even the obvious interconnections get missed by decision-makers (if we try to solve our fuel problems by converting food to fuel, perhaps the price of food might go up).
With that said, for the remainder of the piece I'm arrogating to myself sole authorship of all relevant international treaties and implementing legislation at the national level. Here's how I'd go about it. In this first piece, I've analyzed the overall requirements for the problem, but only fleshed out any detail on the population, economy, and energy sectors; I did not have time to write up my analysis of transportation and agriculture/land issues. I will do so in a future piece.
Then I looked at the energy sector and we saw that there are several potentially feasible ways to power civilization. They aren't cheap or easy, but solar, wind, and nuclear all have good to excellent EROEI and a fairly large resource that could be exploited. Solar in particular has the best learning curve historically (the rate at which price falls for each doubling of the installed base of the technology) and the highest growth curve and fewest barriers to early adoption (except cost). However, the renewable options are growing from a tiny base, and nuclear faces ongoing political resistance, so in the short term conservation and efficiency are critical requirements if we are to make it to the long term.
- Population: The global population is able to grow and go through its demographic transition with death rates continuing to go down. No die-offs.
- Economy: The world economy is able to grow on average over the period - modestly in developed countries, faster in developing countries.
- Carbon emissions: The global energy infrastructure will be mainly replaced with non-carbon-emitting energy sources by the end of the period, and residual emissions will be rapidly diminishing.
- Fossil fuels: I assume that peak oil is here about now but that declines will be governed by the Hubbert model (and thus will be gradual). I assume natural gas and coal are globally plentiful enough that climate policy is required to prevent their full use.
- Technology: I do not assume any massive breakthroughs - no technological miracles that solve problems in ways completely unknown or untested today. However, where technological sectors have long established rates of progress in key metrics, I extrapolate the metric to continue improving at the historic rate (eg the economics of solar power, or the yields/acre of agriculture are assumed to keep improving on the historical trajectory).
Still, if as a society we were serious and determined about solving our energy/climate problems, and we made the right investments, there seems to me little doubt that there are a number of feasible technical paths to a non-fossil-fuel energy infrastructure for civilization. Indeed, I argued that energy would likely become cheap again after a couple of decades of being expensive, once a renewable civilization was over the hump (the hump having been caused in part by failing to make more progress in the 1980s and 1990s).
However, there are many other resource constraints that we might hit along the way. So I want to continue surveying the terrain at a very high level and look at the automobile sector under the rough assumptions I outlined in Powering Civilization to 2050. In particular, how many cars might we expect by 2050, and how can we possibly power them, given that there will be less oil, not more, by that time. I think most readers would intuit that if society was wealthier in 2050, as I postulated, then if they possibly could, the planet's citizens would tend to drive more, not less.
But how much more? In my earlier scenario, I postulated a world GDP of about $350 trillion in 2006 dollars by 2050 (on a purchasing power parity - PPP - basis) which arose by assuming reduced economic growth in the near term due to problems of recession and energy constraints, but then renewed growth as those ultimately lift. Given the UN's medium population projection of 9 billion people, that gives a world GDP/capita in 2050 of about $28,000 (versus about $11,000 recently).
Now, global figures on auto ownership have proven hard to find. The best I've been able to get is some data from the EIA for a small selection of countries, and the world as a whole, for 1990 and 1999. However, it's probably enough. I combined that data with GDP data from the IMF, and UN population data to come up with the following graph:
Cars per thousand population versus GDP/capita for selected countries in 1999 (using 1999 PPP dollars). Bubble area is proportional to population. Sources: Auto ownership from the EIA, GDP data from the IMF, and population data from the UN.
Both travel budgets are of very rough nature only. However, since they apply to virtually all people, independent of income, space, and time, strong regularities in aggregate travel patterns are observed when we compare cross-sectional and longitudinal data of all travel surveys, including those from the developing world. The travel money budget along with country-specific characteristics of the transportation system (land-use, prices, etc.) translates disposable income into daily distance traveled. All other patterns can be largely explained by the travel time budget. Using this approach, travel patterns of countries with very different characteristics at first glance evolve on nearly uniform trajectories. Thus, despite their only rough stability, the travel budgets offer a simple, elegant framework on the basis of which average travel behavior characteristics can be approximated on aggregate levels.While there isn't enough data above to prove this statistically, it rather looks like the major secondary variable controlling car ownership would be population density. The country with the lowest car ownership for their income level is the Netherlands, which is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, and the region with highest car ownership for income level is Australia/New Zealand, which is one of the most sparsely populated parts of the world. This matches the intuition one would get from US data, where public transportation ride share is highly correlated with population density, and auto usage inversely so:
There's a similar pattern in vehicle ownership - households in areas with the highest population density (over 10,000 persons/mile) are much more likely to have no car, and much less likely to have lots of cars:
This is somewhat encouraging for keeping the car count down, since the average world citizen in 2050 is likely to live in a very dense city in what we today call the developing countries (a lot of them will be pretty developed by 2050 under my assumptions). However, the discouraging thing is that those countries are growing the fastest economically, and that means rapid growth in car ownership also:
Annual growth rate in cars per thousand population versus annual growth rate in GDP/capita between 1990 and 1999 (using current PPP dollars). Bubble area is proportional to population. Sources: Auto ownership from the EIA, GDP data from the IMF, and population data from the UN.
So let's try to roughly guesstimate the number of cars people might buy if they weren't resource constrained under this scenario, and then look at the resource constraints that might prevent them from having that many cars. I'll do the guesstimation three different ways which should give us a rough sense of the ballpark.
The first method is to note that the $28k/person/yr GDP in 2050 (expressed in 2006 dollars) would be about $23k in 1999 dollars. On the straight line in the ownership versus GDP graph above, that would place us at around the 500 cars/person mark. However, if we figure the average citizen is at Netherlands densities, we might knock 200 cars/person off that total to come out around 300 (give or take). With 9 billion people, that's about 3 billion cars in round numbers.
Another way to get to it is to notice that in the growth rate comparison, the average elasticity is a little more than 1 (ie 1% growth in income/capita leads to 1% growth in car ownership/capita). The EIA says that global car ownership in 1999 was 122 per 1000 people, which was 730 million cars. This source says there were a little less than 1 billion cars in 2006, so let's figure 1 billion in 2007. So car ownership grew 4%/year, and the global economy averaged 4.3% growth over the same period. Close enough to an elasticity of 1. So if we extrapolate that out to 2050, we go from 150 cars/person and $75 trillion today to $350 trillion and thus about 700 cars/person in 2050. If we again knock a couple of hundred off for high density city effects, we would get down to around 500 cars/1000 people, or about 4.5 billion cars. This is effectively to say that another 40 years of economic growth at something like current rates would place the world average roughly at current European levels of car ownership, which sounds reasonable if only we can find some way to power that many cars.
The third method is to use some data from here which show production of autos (rather than ownership). Production from 1997 to 2005 grew at an average rate of 2.43%. If we apply that growth rate to ownership and extrapolate to 2050, we get 2.8 billion vehicles on the road at that time.
So all three methods come out somewhere in the range of a few billion vehicles on the road in 2050. Whether it's 3, 4, or 5 we can't know, but clearly it would take something on the order of a major economic collapse somewhere along the way for there to still only be 1 billion cars on the road then. (For example, Soviet car ownership declined from 357 per thousand people in 1990 to 134 per thousand people in 1999, so that's what a major economic collapse can do). Let's take 4 billion as a reasonable working number, with the understanding that this is ± 25% (at least). Is there any way that many cars could be built and powered? Let's first look at powering them, and then building them.
Running Four Billion Cars
The Tata Nano will sell for about $2500 (US) in the base model, and get about 51 mpg (US). Source: Wikipedia.
US annual vehicle mileage for vehicles of varying age grades. Source: 2001 NHTS Summary of Travel Trends .
I don't really see doing too much supplementation of this with biofuels. Even the 1mbd of biofuels the world is already producing is causing a lot of problems, and it has the potential to get much worse quickly. Although cellulosic ethanol in theory could help, in reality most of the good agricultural land on the planet is already in use, and expansions onto the remaining land will tend to create far more carbon emissions than they save. (See two recent Science papers by Fargione et al, and Searchinger et al which are pretty convincing on this point).
So to run 4 billion cars, we should be looking at more like an average fleet economy of 200mpg to 250mpg, to keep the fuel bill down around 10mbd. That makes it likely that most of the energy would have to be coming from something other than liquid fuel.
There are two basic possibilities. The first is the hydrogen economy, in which renewable/nuclear power is used to produce hydrogen via electrolysis. The hydrogen is then used to power vehicles (and other things). I'm deeply sceptical about this whole idea. My objections are not primarily technical (though there are technical concerns) but rather based on the market diffusion problems.
Generally, diffusion of a new technology requires that there be early adopters who see value in it, then a larger group of less early adopters who are willing to do it once the worst bugs have been worked out, then the bulk of customers who only convert once the technology is really well established and their friends are starting to do it, and then finally the holdouts who cling to the old way of doing things until it becomes really not viable. This is the mult-stage diffusion process that has to occur.
Hydrogen has the huge problem of requiring a new infrastructure. So there need to be both early adopters on the infrastructure side (investors willing to fund hydrogen pipelines, gas stations owners willing to put in a hydrogen pump, etc), and early adopters on the consumer side (people willing to buy hydrogen cars). And in the early stages, both of these kinds of early adopters are going to have a miserable time because there won't be enough of the other kind close by. (I buy a hydrogen car, but have to drive 100 miles to buy hydrogen, or I open a hydrogen station and I lose my shirt because there are only three hydrogen car owners in my city).
Now, if hydrogen cars were the only way to get around at a decent speed, people would find a way to get over these hurdles (after all, cars succeeded in displacing horses). But hydrogen cars will have the problem that there are already lots of gasoline cars on the road. Gasoline of course is expensive and likely to get more so over time. But hydrogen is even more expensive and, even in my scenario, is not likely to get cheap for decades. In the meantime, a hydrogen car is at a serious disadvantage to a gasoline car. Therefore, they won't get adopted any time soon.
The other story, which I think is a lot more appealing, is that the present trend to hybrid gasoline/electric cars moves onto a plugin-hybrid stage in which the car has a larger battery and motor and gets plugged in to the electric grid at night or during the day at work. This has a far less serious adoption barrier. We already have distribution infrastructures for electricity and liquid fuel, so the only early adopter needed is the buyer of the plug-in hybrid. To the extent the grid needs to get expanded over time due to increased electricity usage by plug-ins, this will be done on the basis of clearly proven demand trends and can be a relatively low-risk decision. The speed of adoption of plugins will essentially be controlled by the relative prices of electricity and liquid fuels (including any carbon emission surcharges and governmental incentives).
In this scenario, power for cars will be predominantly coming from electricity by 2050, which I have already argued could be plentiful if we make the necessary infrastructure investments. So then the issues become whether it might be feasible to build that many plug-in hybrids.
Building Four Billion Plugin Hybrids
I stress of course that I'm not proposing that we make any crash program to build plugins. I'm simply proposing that as the economy grows and people, particularly in developing countries, get wealthier and want more cars, we create incentives to shift the car population gradually to hybrids and then plugin hybrids. Such incentives are already in place in a number of countries (eg the hybrid tax credit in the US). If this is done sufficiently, we would end up with a few billion plugin-ins by 2050. Market forces will do a lot of the work, since electricity is already cheaper per unit energy than liquid fuel, and the gap is likely to widen over time.So then the question is what other resource constraints might we run into along the way, given that energy is not one in my scenario (at least not in the long term). Some things are fairly clearly not problems. The bulk of the car is made from steel, perhaps aluminum in future (lighter), and plastics. Iron and aluminum are the two most common metals in the earth's crust and are unlikely to be serious resource constraints this century. Plastics will be available from oil as long as we can mostly stop burning the oil in automobiles. The necessary roads can be made from concrete, and we are very unlikely to run out of limestone to make the cement, or sand and gravel.
Two issues seem to me to be potentially pressing - lithium for batteries and copper for motor wiring. I will examine lithium in detail now, but defer copper, which is a more general concern, to a future piece. (Roughly speaking, those familiar with the copper issue can imagine that it comes down to an argument about how much copper usage can be substituted by much more plentiful aluminum).
Lithium
The best battery chemistries known for future automobiles all appear to involve lithium. Lithium-based rechargeable batteries have more energy density per unit weight, as well as carrying more energy per unit volume:
Energy density (weight and volume) for various battery technologies. Source: Wikipedia.
The concerns raised in Trouble With Lithium are two-fold. One is that the best and cheapest sources of lithium are limited to a few geographic regions (principally certain high desert regions of South America and Tibet) and that therefore the world would be as vulnerable to political problems with these regions as it is now with oil and the Middle East. The second is that the expansion of lithium mining required to support a plug-in hybrid world would be enormous relative to present day production. There is some validity to both these concerns, but let's first look at the total amount of lithium available, see if that's enough, and then come back to the potential bumps along the way.
The best estimates available are these (expressed as thousands of tonnes of elemental lithium).
| Variable | Quantity (KT Li) |
|---|---|
| Reserves | 6,200 |
| Reserve Base | 13,400 |
| 2005 Production | 21.4 |
| 2006 Production | 23.5 |
| 2007 Production | 25 |
As you can see, there is not an urgent lithium problem - reserves/production is currently about 250. (As far as I know, no-one has raised a serious question about the validity of lithium reserve numbers). However, this is with hardly any cars containing lithium batteries. How does four billion of them change the picture?
Let's take a moment to look at the definition of reserves and reserve base:
Schematic of various categories of reserves and resources. Source: Resource Limitations on Earth.
Thinking about 2050, it seems to me that the reserve-base is the best guesstimate of how much lithium might be available if really needed (ie if we haven't figured out a better idea in the meantime). This allows for improvements in extraction technology and/or higher prices (manageable by a wealthier society), but we aren't getting out into "lithium from seawater" territory - the "reserve base" is lithium in known deposits.
Furthermore, since cars are 95% recycled even now, it seem reasonable to assume that long before 2050 we can pretty much be recycling all or nearly all of the lithium. So the calculation I'm going to assume (and I freely admit this is just a rough back-of-the-envelope sort of exercise) is to just divide the 13.4 MT of lithium reserve base by the 4 billion cars, which gets us an average of 3.3kg of lithium per car. Now, currently, it takes 0.3kg of lithium to get 1 kWhr of battery capacity, so that 3.3kg of lithium represents about 11 KWhr of electricity storage.
A reasonable assumption is that a plugin would require about 0.2 kWhr/mile. Thus the 11 KwHr average battery is 55 miles of all-electric range, or about 90 km. Now if we assume that they all get charged at night (figuring that the extra charging during the day for some cars is cancelled by others that can't or don't charge at night) then we can basically treat this as the maximum amount of daily mileage that can be covered by electricity, rather than liquid fuel.
Which allows us to make use of this data on the cumulative distribution of daily miles:
Cumulative distribution of personal daily travel distance in the US, UK, and an estimate for developing countries. Source: The Geography of Transport Systems, summarizing data from Regularities in Travel Demand: An International Perspective.
(Obviously, powering even more cars after 2050 would require at some point that we find more lithium, figure out how to extract it from seawater profitably, discover some better battery technology, or somehow otherwise work around the problem. I'm willing to live with this - who knows what 40 years of innovation will come up with. We wouldn't be worried about peak oil if it was 40 years off, and so I'm not going to worry about running out of lithium then -- we have to leave our children something to do...).
Now, let me go back to the other concerns raised in Trouble with Lithium. The author, William Tahil, spends a lot of time concerned about the disconnect between the current production of lithium and the amount required to turn out all of today's car production with lithium batteries, or convert all of today's cars on the road to lithium. But these are not reasonable models for the time path of lithium/plugin adoption occurring. Instead, the right way to frame the question is to assume that the market for lithium-ion batteries in plugins grows gradually over time, and then look at the required growth rate in lithium production and see if it looks outrageous. In my case, for a first quick calculation, I'm just going to look at what constant growth rate is required to produce a cumulative 13.4MT of lithium by 2050, and then compare that to recent history. Here is the recent history:
Recent history of global lithium production (exclusive of the US). Source: USGS. Note that the USGS doesn't publish US production because there is only a single US producer. The US will not be a major factor in lithium production going forward.
The second major objection Tahil raises is the geographic concentration of lithium that will thus give some countries a lot of leverage over global supplies. He is undoubtedly right, but this will be only one of many such world problems, and far from the most serious. The world is going to be ever more dependent on the Middle East for oil in coming decades. The world will be critically dependent on Asia for a lot of manufactured goods. Asia and the Middle East will be critically dependent on big food exporters like the US and Brazll to eat. If we don't trade, we are all going to be in a world of hurt. In this context, concentration of lithium exports doesn't seem like the worst problem (at least if lithium exports stop, it only hurts the ability to build new cars, not run the existing ones).
In conclusion, these stylized facts seem to be roughly true:
- With the existing known reserve base of 13.4 million tonnes of lithium and less than 10 mbd of oil, we could run 4 billion cars in 2050.
- If we assume most residents of the planet are living in dense cities in the third world with degrees of public transportation comparable to dense western cities today, then 3-5 billion cars should be enough to satisfy people's aspiration for automobile transport by that time.
In the next 5 years we'll face a completely different problem: how to mass produce 4 billion components for renewable energy systems. This is because in that time the Arctic summer sea ice will disappear, with incalculable consequences for the weather and climate of the Northern hemisphere, including the destiny of the Greenland ice sheet to which Stuart has alerted us 2-3 years ago.
Causes of Changes in Arctic Sea Ice; by Wieslaw Maslowski (Naval Postgraduate School)
http://www.ametsoc.org/atmospolicy/documents/May032006_Dr.WieslawMaslows...
In the meantime, NASA climatologist James Hansen is moving the goal posts from 450 ppm CO2 to 350 ppm as the threshold for dangerous climate change.
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/RoyalCollPhyscns_Jan08.pdf
So what should be discussed here is how we can re-tool all those car plants which will inevitably close down as a result of peak oil, into manufacturing plants of wind generators, solar panels, solar water heaters etc.
We should also discuss what needs to be done to get all that CO2 out of the atmosphere again because we are now already above 383 ppm. Time is now critical. For 50 years planet Earth is out of energy balance with space. We see now increased heat exchange between the equator and the poles.
4 bn cars is the last thing we need. A planning horizon up to 2050 is completely academic. We can consider ourselves lucky if we have good plans for the next 10 years. For the Australian context I have calculated that - if we want all essential transports sustaining our present life (food, basic consumer products etc.) and all traffic in rural areas to continue at present levels capital city motorists will have only 1/5th of current fuel supplies by 2020 (assume 30% reduction of oil supplies according to the EWG report). By that time, therefore, long distance commuting in urban areas by private car will be history. Mandatory car pooling will help while we build up electric urban rail on all freeways as has been done in Perth.
http://www.sustainability.dpc.wa.gov.au/CaseStudies/trains/trains.htm
I am sorry to say this very clearly: our unrealistic car dreams will kill this planet.
matt, i agree with you. the next 5-10 years will be critical. but i believe it's wrong to assume that we will convert the factories by assuming the current economic situation. most likely, they will postpone the investments, and only in the final hour will we rush to a green frenzy. but by that time, most of the money that could be used to get a head start will be used for building smaller (petrol) cars, hybrids, biofuels, and so on. When the governments will realize that they need rail, there will be little money to do the task in a big way, because much of the income will be lost due to the citizen's eroded buying power and increased government costs.
long story short, i believe we'll just keep digging deeper hoping for some miracle, and one day we'll realize it takes a tremendous effort to climb back up. we're not "hoping for the best, preparing for the worst". we're just hoping for the best and expecting for it to happen.
All this effort to move around when we could be building places that have almost everything we needed within walking distance.
I call it the transportation illusion: the illusion that solving the problem of how you get to the people and things you need is more important than solving the problem of how to ensure that the people and things that you need are already living and existing where you are.
Matt,
Chris Vernon circulated this latest offering from Hansen a couple of weeks ago - its the same you have but with the voice over. I gotta say I thought this was off the bad end of the scale and not worth the time of day.
https://admin.emea.acrobat.com/_a45839050/p89418435/
You make an astute observation:
So would you care to say which of the laws of physics have changed to cause such a dramatic revision of this theory. Or is that Hansen and colleagues have just been plain wrong in their understanding of the natural world? So if they were wrong then why should anyone believe them to be right now?
The latest temperature anomaly map from GISS is indeed worrying:
All that anomalous warm in the arctic region. And all that anomalous cold in central Asia, Africa, Greenland, The Pacific and Antarctica. We need to remember that these maps compare today with the mean datum period of 1951 to 1980. There is absolutely no reason to believe that this datum period is normal.
If Hansen is right you may as well kiss your ass goodbye - cos we're already passed 350 ppm and heading north at break neck speed. There is nothing on this earth going to stop China, India, the ME and others having a C based binge - that is until FF run out - the peak year is 2020.
I share your concern about the loss of Arctic sea ice and I also share your concern about the additional forcing caused by CO2 and other GHGs. The main worry here is that no one seems to understand the consequences of these phenomena on Earth's climate. The sighting of a blue parrot in a Norwegian Fjord I dare say will send panic through the international GW community.
4 Billion electric cars are of course part of the remedy - of reducing uncertainty about what we are doing.
"If Hansen is right you may as well kiss your ass goodbye"
Been there, done that.
I think concerning ourselves with how to build so many cars is a total distraction.
Please don't be so dismissive with comments like "which of the laws of physics has changed." It helps to understand the social context in which climate change science occurs (much like the denial around peak oil), and to understand how the the dynamics of ice sheet collapse have been misrepresented by models.
Please read:
www.climatecodered.net
I basically concur with Climate Code Red: In a few years we either go into an "emergency mode" and dispel with "normalcy" to deal with the problem or we let that window slip away and be faced with the existential crisis of being alive for a short while as it all goes to hell.
Jason, it wasn't like this in Nansen's day - too much f*ing ice back then:
The first voyage of Fram proved that the Arctic Ice pack rolls on a conveyor belt of ocean currents and is renewed every 3 to 4 years? So when I hear folks talking about irreversible loss of Arctic Sea ice I really gotta laugh out loud. Do you think the IPCC are aware of this?
Climatecodered does reference the fact that ocean currents have warmed the water the Arctic ice pack sits on. So this comes back to the critical question:
Is our climate controlled to a large extent by ocean currents or is it vice versa? Off course there is a bit of both - but I always learned the former to be dominant.
Any physical scientist who has been out in Alpine snow conditions in Spring is aware of the power of albedo in melting snow - as a patch of soil expands exponentially in spring sunshine - at the expense of snow pack. If the IPCC and Hansen et al have failed to model this correctly it leaves me with a feeling of dismay.
So what exactly is the evidence that anrthopogenic climate forcing is the cause of the current decline in Arctic Sea Ice summer minima?
http://www.fram.museum.no/en/
Trends in perennial sea ice extent:
Source: Nghiem et al., Rapid reduction of Arctic perennial sea ice
And the pattern of arctic ice circulation:
Note gyre in center. Source: NSIDC.
Yes, NSIDC shows it best.
http://www.nsidc.org/news/press/2007_seaiceminimum/20070810_index.html
Animated table 4 on the above link is showing constantly moving, thickening and thinning sea ice. It was once in color, now in less informative B/W. Can someone follow up on this to change it back to what it was?
Just now it displayed in color for me. It did seem like a slow server but worth the wait. Thanks.
Thanks for the charts Stuart - I learn something every day. The general idea of water flowing in through the Bering straights and out through Baffin straights and E Greenland holds though. And the water coming in the top is warm.
The main point I wanted to make here is that the Arctic Sea Ice is on average very young - a handful of years old - and is renewed on an "annual" basis. Its not like the Greenland and E Antarctic ice sheets which have taken hundreds of thousands of years to millions of years to form. If we lose these then I'm prepared to accept that they are lost "forever" to all intents and purposes for Homo Sapiens. All we need is one (or a series of 2 or 3) really cold Arctic winter to restore the Arctic Sea Ice to its former glory in terms of volume. Whether or not that happens soon is another issue.
Your first chart showing perennial sea ice extent is extremely interesting. Would you agree that the 1957 to 1971 we have some form plateau and that the current trend of accelerating loss began in 1972? 1972 looks like a really dramatic year in the Arctic. What happened?
To my eye what we are experiencing now, started then. So is this anthropogenic GW or is it something else? My chart up the thread has 126,053 million tonnes oil equivalent (mmtoe) burned 1900 to 1972 and 251,166 mmtoe burned 1973 to 2007. So we have burned more than twice as much in the last 34 years than in the preceding 72 years.
If the onset of Arctic Sea ice loss in 1972 was due to human activity then we are well and truly screwed. The thermal and kinetic inertia of the ocean atmosphere system will ensure on-going highly unpredictable climate change for decades - and there is absolutely nothing man kind will be able to do to prevent this. At best we can mitigate effects by building coastal defenses and prepare to cultivate Greenland - like the Vikings did 1000 years ago!!
If on the other hand the onset of sea ice loss in 1972 is due to a natural cycle then is it not the case that what we are experiencing now is a continuation of that same cycle that has presumably happened many times before? And Planet Earth and all its species survived.
Where my position differs I believe from your own and certainly from the GW advocates is that I am uncertain which of these options is true. I actually lean quite strongly towards the latter - that is perhaps down to denial - but also down to the fact that we know The Vikings cultivated Greenland as I already mentioned. I would see some danger that anthropogenic GW may amplify the natural cycle - unquantifiable and unstopable.
If it is the case that we have jumped off a GW cliff then we had best prepare our parachute. Flapping around hysterically trying to regain the cliff edge just ain't going to get us anywhere. If we have jumped we can't go back.
Euan,
it's all a matter of rate of change (as is so often the case!).
If warming comes too quickly, we are toast.
If it comes slowly, we can adapt. We human beings could possibly adapt even to quicker climate change, but nature can't. In former times, when there was climate change, it usually took hundreds to thousands of years to manifest itself.
This time, the exploding CO2 emissions could do it really fast - too fast for slugs, bugs and cheetas.
Cheers,
Davidyson
Davidyson - I should know more about past mass extinctions, but don't, other than they probably were not instantaneous.
Are there any examples to date of species lost to global warming? This is a straight question - I don't know the answer.
I am aware that we are losing vast numbers of species from rain forests and other habitats - and this is a true and avoidable tragedy. It brings us back to what I believe we need to focus on which is population reduction some how - and that of course will ultimately lead to lower CO2 emissions.
I'm also aware that fish stocks are moving around as are birds and insects in response to the rapid warming we have experienced this past 20 years or so. The structure of food webs and ecosystems are changing - as they always have done so. But are species getting wiped out?
Indonesia provides a very interesting case history where vast tracts of rain forest have been burned to grow bio fuels - and this has been in response to declining oil production in Indonesia.
Euan
The American Pika is thought to be headed for extinction. They live at altitude and can die if the temperature goes over 23o C for an hour. The species extinction rate is about 50,000/yr. Presumably some of these lost their last members as a result of climate change but many other human activities, particularly related to land use and fishing lead to this high rate. The normal rate is about 50 to 500/yr. http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2005/01/31_olsond_biodive...
Other species considered affected by climate change are the Polar Bear, Moose, Florida Panther, Canada Lynx, Brook Trout, Salmon, Mallard Duck, American Gold Finch, Sage Grouse and Coral.
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/2006-05-30-critters-warming_x.htm
Chris
"The main point I wanted to make here is that the Arctic Sea Ice is on average very young - a handful of years old - and is renewed on an "annual" basis. Its not like the Greenland and E Antarctic ice sheets which have taken hundreds of thousands of years to millions of years to form".
Oh, certainly. But still, there is a distinction between the stuff that's five or ten years old, and thinner ice. Once the perrenial ice is gone, it's harder to recreate it because the thin stuff melts faster every summer and lets more heat into the ocean.
The reason why it's probably irreversible are heat stored in the ocean, and basic physics suggesting that global temperature can only go up from here (bumpily but basically up). The reason people think this is almost certainly due to anthropogenic GW is because climate models pretty much all predict a much warmer Arctic, and lo and behold we have a much warmer Arctic (albeit that the sea ice melt is going much faster than they predicted). The climate models are fairly well able to explain the 20th century temperature history by now, and able to distinguish natural variability from forcing in general. However, it's certainly possible that some kind of natural fluctuation is accelerating the anthropogenic trend here. I suggest reading something like this GISS E paper (PDF) on the model data fit. Incidentally, I think you'll regret criticizing Hansen in public like this - he really is first rate, and I don't think you've done the spadework yet to understand the issues, let alone be criticizing leading thinkers on it.
Here's a speculation: it almost appears that climatologists are much better at modeling the atmosphere than they are at modeling the ocean, and better at the ocean than the cryosphere. Would that seem accurate to others?
Stuart said:
Which seems a shame considering the oceans are so important, and is one of the reasons why it seems to me to be premature to be too certain of the future course of events, although the probabilities are clear.
The Navy has been running subs under the Arctic for decades. Turns out Arctic sea ice loss is about 80% so far when thickness and not just extent is calculated.
Hansen has also proposed was to geoengineer a refreezing of the Arctic using injected atmospheric sulfates. The ice cover can be rebuilt quickly, which is important because if the Arctic opens up then Greenland could go quickly, which would then mean the loss of W. Antarctica and a runaway greenhouse effect from permafrost melt, etc. This could quickly lead to Lovelock's nightmare scenario, which I dismissed when it initially came out but the more I learn the more I am afraid he looks right.
While the Arctic is being artificially kept cold to buy us time the global economy needs to decarbonize over a 10-20 year period and carbon needs to be sequestered in soils and vegetation regrowth to bring us down to 300-320 ppm.
Forget about 450 ppm and peak fossil fuels saving us. I was giving talks while at UC Davis about peak fossil fuels making the SRES reports grossly wrong about emissions potentials, but at the same time the slow feedbacks of the climate system could take a 1-2 C initial warming into a positive feedback loop that gets out of hand. I never imagined it would happen so soon.
Jason - I gotta say I can at least respect your position on this. It is unequivocal. 300 - 320 ppm takes us almost back to pre-industrial concentrations and this tallies with my observation that the current cycle of sea ice loss (area) appears to have begun in 1970 when concentrations were about 325 ppm. I dare say volume losses will have started many decades before
And so what your saying is the time for 1/10th measures let alone half measures is over and we need to try and refreeze the Arctic, virtually shut down combustion of FF and take drastic measures to reduce atmospheric CO2 form its current levels.
And so if your are right in your analysis of our situation I can respect this point of view. I must add that I sincerely hope that you are very wrong because you are aware that none of this is going to happen and proposing it will be seen as bat shit crazy by 90% of people on Earth - until they are gasping their last gasp in a parched (or drowned) land scape.
What I cannot respect then are those who hope half or 1/10th measures might work. If you lack total commitment then you are as well doing nothing at all.
So I conclude by repeating I hope you are wrong and I hope Hansen is wrong. I certainly lack the commitment to do what you would ask - if for no other reason that I find it very difficult to believe that 30 to 40 ppm above the historic baseline will be lethal for our climate - and the target for reductions seems to be shifting on a daily basis. And there seems to be so much of the climate - ocean - ice system that is still very poorly understood.
Euan,
Where I grew up, the only war memorial was a civil war memorial. Names from other wars have been added to it but a single statue of a soldier surrounded by four green cannons is the marker.
In 1783, a petition was brought to parlimement to abolish slavery in England. Quakers were also organizing in Philadelphia in 1775. Between 1861 and 1865 12% of the US population was freed from slavery and much of its real and paper wealth evaporated. That is about 90 years between conception that there was a problem and putting an end to the problem.
In 1903, Teddy Roosevelt established the first National Bird Preserve and in 1970 we had the first Earth Day. Slavery was abolished in England 50 years after the first petition. Environmentalism is a little slower. In 2006, the USGP called for an 80% cut in CO2 emissions within a decade (your bat shit crazy kind of thing). The GOP was established in 1854, seven years before the start of the Civil War. What is a little different is that no one running for president now thinks global warming is not a problem.
The US seems to go through spasms of about four years durations from time to time to fulfill a commitment to freedom that has built up over a period of 90 or so years. The transformation of industry in the 1940's, the emancipation of the slaves in the 1860's, Civil Rights in the 1960's, the Great Awakening of the 1730's or the Revolutionary War of the 1770's were all culminations of themes of freedom that had been brewing for generations. I think that global warming, or giving due consideration to the ecosystem, can be seen as a freedom issue. In deep ecology, it is a matter of respect for all life while in human terms it can be seen as securing the blessings of liberty to our posterity. This was one of four reasons given for establishing the Constitution so you could kind of say that it is part of our mission statement.
I would thus not be too surprised to see about four years of enourmous activity starting within a decade that leaves the US and the world quite transformed with global warming looking like it is well on the way to solution. That the challenge appears to be growing greater as we learn more about the situation is probably not something to worry about. It will only spur us to greater effort I think. Interesting times....
Chris
Chris - thanks for all your input here. But I remain skeptical. I accept that GHGs will lead to warming and climate change superimposed upon the natural cycle of the Earth. Warming superimposed a cooling phase may lead to stability and warming superimposed upon a warming phase may lead us into new and worrying territory.
I just read the link on Arctic Ocean currents posted by Matt:
http://www.ametsoc.org/atmospolicy/documents/May032006_Dr.WieslawMaslows...
It basically shows what I was trying to say - that warm water flowing in through the Bearing straights may account for 50+% of the recent sea ice loss. Now it is predictable that the GW crowd will jump up and down claiming this is further evidence of GW. I'd tend to want to know more about longer term ocean circulation cycles. You just need to look at a map of ice loss - and you see it is concentrated around the Bearing entry point.
Incidentally, the Maslowski presentation has charts of ice area, thickness and volume that present a totally different picture to that presented by Stuart with a sudden onset of change in 1997.
Looking at the moving target for CO2:
Kyoto about 350 ppm
Hansen initial target 350 ppm - but aiming at 300 to 350 ppm
Jason Bradford - 300 to 320 ppm
I'm afraid i just don't think there is a chance of meeting any of those. In fact I think the most likely out come is that CO2 marches up towards 450 ppm and will only start to decline when FF peaks - around 2020.
The difficulty in turning around the atmosphere is best illustrated by looking at the CFCs - hailed as a great success. Much easier to tackle - and yet stabalisation / small reduction is all that has been achieved to date. A major triumph yes. The methane chart here is interesting - not much sign of runaway melting of clathrates here. I wonder if this is pipeline repairs in Russia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Major_greenhouse_gas_trends.png
I remain concerned that a significant portion of what we see in the Arctic today has nothing to do with Man. We can sit back and hope that there is a corrective mechanism that is currently unknown - one of very many unknowns. If there is not, and Greenland begins to melt in earnest then we may well see a panic set in among global leaders - but then it will likely be too late.
You mentioned investment and IPCC scenarios down the thread. The big stumbling block here is the need to spend a fortune now to maybe prevent a catastrophe that might happen, as opposed to waiting to see if the catastrophe happens and then spending the money to mitigate the consequences when you know for sure what and where the problem lies.
Euan
Maybe relevant research paper linked at climate ark on historical flows of water into Arctic (15 million years):
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/186402,german-scientists-warn-of...
Galactic - curiously i spent the greater part of my professional career analysing sediments for Nd isotopes (oil reservoir rocks). We also just had a long email exchange about looking at Arctic ocean floor sediments - I'b be particularly interested in paleo ecology indicators that might indicate the presence or absence of sea ice for the last 10,000 to 1,000,000 years. This I believe will become one of the biggest questions this decade.
The paper you reference i fear may have the cart before the horse - concluding that the disappearance of sea ice has caused ocean currents to change and not vice versa!
Euan,
I think you need to separate the emissions reductions from the response of the atmosphere which takes longer. The CFC emissions have been cut dramatically and the effect is now showing in the atmospheric abundance in your chart. The residence time of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is longer than for CFCs so emission cuts lead to stabilization rather than the reduction you see in the chart. In order to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide, we need to remove it from the atmosphere. It turns out that this is fairly easy to do in the sense that removing carbon dioxide can multiply loaves and, possibly, fishes. Cutting emissions also looks as though it can be done in a way that makes energy less expensive.
In each of the American upheavals over freedom, prosperity has increased as a result. This was not the intention of those movements. My working hypothesis is that moves to increase freedom tend to broaden the pool of creative inputs. Buckminster Fuller points out that when the war to end fascism came to a close, automation had grown so much in four years that there wasn't any work for the demobilized soldiers. So, everyone when to college and this resulted in a huge rise in prosperity. Perhaps doing the right thing puts people in the mood to do more of it.
It is worth remembering that in the lead up to that war there were leading Americans like Senator Bush who greatly admired Germany and sought to assist its efforts. There are many now who feel that fossil fuels are worth fighting over. Perhaps oil depletion helps get past this kind of thinking since it is becoming clearer that we are going to have to make do without fossil fuels sometime while global warming sends us in a particularly productive direction. Regardless, it does feel as though things are coming to a head.
So, seeing the result of cuts in CFC emissions in the atmosphere is encouraging. It shows that we know what we are talking about. But, we also know that to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will require efforts to remove it. This is an enormous challenge in scale and perhaps just the thing to cure the ennui that leads to such products of idleness as mortgage backed securities.
Chris
I agree completely about the urgency of the climate issue.
Your chance of selling the planet's population on a no-car, no-plane future are zero. Nada. Not going to happen. If that's the alternative, people will decide it's hopeless and take their chances on adapting to climate change. This kind of proposal is irrelevant at best and actively counterproductive at worst, in my opinion - allowing the perfect to be enemy of the good enough.
We need to propose something that can meet (most of) people's aspirations.
We need to propose something that has a prayer of working. The fact that a global supergrid and stock market growth until the end of the century can be 'sold' to gullible people does not mean that they sensible proposals. If physical reality and peoples aspirations are in conflict, guess who is going to win.
"People's aspirations"?
Really. A century ago who "aspired" to own a car? Car ownership is human nature? Because advertising con men have sold us a load of BS we are now all doomed?
You are right RK physical reality always wins.
And while the gang here at TOD spins pipe dreams some of them should figure out that social reality is constructed by us and could be rearranged by us.
Not that I expect that to happen
I think one could argue that there is a strong aspiration towards personal transportation, whatever is available at the time. Once individual wealth reaches the necessary level, a sizable fraction of people look to become independent of public transportation, with its schedules and/or sometimes limited availability. Technology and cheap fossil fuels have (temporarily, at least) greatly lowered the threshold for the amount of wealth needed to reach that point.
Whatever is, is the only way things can be. And we will create the tech and make the investments to make sure it stays that way.
Devise circular arguments and submit to Fate.
I'm not worried about 4,000,000,000 cars ever happening, I'm worried about the utter death of imagination.
Dunno bout dat, when I lived in the Big Apple I didn't own a car, got to work on time almost every day and I wasn't even poor. I personally knew well to do people who took the subway just like I did. Some of them were in advertising creating ads to sell cars, they laughed all the way to the bank.
I aspire to anti-gravity flying vehicles and space-timewarp travel to other planets and suspended animation and eventually uploding myself to the galactic wide web and living forever! Please can't I have my fantasy for just a little while longer? None of these things are dependent on fossil fuel - I promise. Not in my fantasy anyway.
So you need to identify which parts of what I'm proposing, specifically, are physically impossible (with numbers).
Yes, the supergrid is far fetched but we do have plenty of fission fuel. And it is pretty clear that we could build a primarily nuclear based grid fast enough to satisfy Stuart's model. It just might not happen the way he hopes.
You don't need a supergrid for nuclear, as you can put them where they are needed.
You don't really need one for renewables either, as long as you use them where they are most appropriate, fro instance solar in the South of the US, but not trying to power the North by that means- all you need then is overnight storage.
Limited extensions of the grid for wind would help to reduce variability.
It was clear from Stuart's earlier article on energy that costs are greatly reduced if you allow some nuclear energy in the mix, and alternatives would be very expensive, if indeed they can be done, as they relied on continued massive improvements in the costs of solar energy at the same rate as has happened in recent years - personally I feel that this rate of increase will level off to some degree before long, as maintenance and installation becomes a larger part of total cost, but solar should be good to provide at minimum peak load capacity and probably almost all capacity in sunny areas.
I prefer however to base proposals on what we can be sure we can do - we know that we can power society with nuclear energy,and only modest engineering development is required to get better burn of fuel and so on - we have thousands of operating years of experience, and one whole society, France already gets most of it's electricity from nuclear power.
If solar turns out to be economical I would be all over it though! - that is not going to happen without major breakthroughs for the cold and wintry north though.
I'm all for going in stages. The important thing now is to provide subsidies/mandates to ramp up solar/wind as fast as possible purely on a fuel displacement basis, while permitting nuclear plants wherever they can overcome local political opposition, and fighting coal plants tooth and nail. Fund R&D into anything and everything that even vaguely makes sense. Actual development of a super-grid can happen in stages - more continent grid structure to begin with, and then as the solar and wind costs continue to fall and we want to drive the penetration higher than intermittency will allow without wider averaging, more grid elements can be added.
I think care needs to be taken in providing subsidies for renewables.Feed-in tariffs and mandates can grossly distort the market and lead to missalocation of resources.
In my view the correct and most neutral way of doing things is by a carbon tax
Here in the UK conservation efforts have been pathetic or non-existent.
By putting money into that we get a lot more 'bang for the buck' in terms of carbon reduction than by building power sources.
Things are different in America, but here in Europe mandates and huge feed-in tariffs have lead to a lot of capacity and vast expense on wind power where the wind don't blow and solar power where the sun don't shine.
According to Deutsche Welle 30c/kwh and high taxes are leading a lot of the public to loose interest in efforts to mitigate carbon emissions.
They are leaders in conservation, but their efforts to generate power from wind where it isn't windy and solar at their latitude bemuse me.
Recent Government plans in the UK to develop 33GW nameplate of off-shore wind, actual hourly output of around 10-11GW from Government figures would cost around £40bn.
For the same money you could buy around 14 of the 1.6GW, some 1.44GW actual hourly output of Areva like that being built in Finland, allowing an additional $2bn on top of the present $4bn , total $6bn, £3bn pounds per reactor.
That is about 20GW of power to the grid, all of UK baseload. fuel costs in nuclear power are a minor part of the cost, and life expectancy of the plants is around 60 years, as opposed to 25 years for wind.
It should be noted though that in the UK wind power has excellent load-following characteristics.
Just the same it is clear that a conservation program in the interim before a nuclear build program would lead to much greater overall reductions in CO2 emissions, and more value per pound spent.
Current EU regulations though mean that the wind resource counts towards renewable targets, whilst a nuclear build or conservation don't.
This wouldn't matter if resources were infinite, but they are far from that- personally my guess as to what will actually happen is that some wind power will be built, but nothing like target as it just gets too pricey, and money which could have been used much more effectively will have been wasted.
None of this should be taken as a knock on wind in general, and it is clear that in the US, for instance, there is a lot of potential for on-shore wind power, and China with it's low costs has even better prospects.
As for opposition to nuclear power, a lot of moderate people are coming, however reluctantly, to support nuclear power in order to reduce CO2, whilst a lot more are still bamboozled by false claims of how much we can do with renewables at the moment.
In an engineering sense at any reasonable cost what we can now is conserve, and use our thousands of operating years in nuclear to build that up, with modest engineering advances in fuel burn and so on.
Wind also has a big part to play in many areas, and hopefully solar in suitable regions, and this is the realistic perspective.
The 'no nuclear whatever the cost' brigade - in economic terms or to the environment in CO2 emissions - will doubtless plan to stamp their feet, and scream and scream and scream until they're sick but my guess is that as a political force in the UK at least they will be finished as soon as the first power cut hits, which is probably not long given the dire state of power planning here.
Here is a costed perspective on conservation:
http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/Investing_Energy_Productivity/i...
Global warming aside, a lot of folk such as the Chinese are likely to take a close look at this as difficulties and the expense of supplies bite - for that country it would make an immense difference in purely economic terms.
I would put a lot of emphasis on conservation - expenditure there can build in cost savings.
With minor refurbishment and rebuilds, wind turbines should easily be kept operational for a hundred years.
And then with major rebuilds, should be as good as new.
Steel does not fatigue that fast, and there is no radioactive waste.
I hope that is so, but do you have data on that?
Certainly the wind companies only specify around 20-25 years, and due to sudden changes in wind speeds stresses are high. I believe in some instances they have even affected the foundations.
The sea is also a very challenging environment, and salt water does not much agree with much engineering.
I would have thought that experience in the North sea on oil rigs would have lead to relatively close estimates of life expectancy from the companies concerned, although I accept that rebuild would cost a lot less than the first build.
Maintenance costs on the nuclear alternative would not be cheap either, so I am not attempting special pleading.
And, in the USA, spend $135 billion to $175 billion on "on-the-shelf" Urban Rail projects that can start physical construction in 12 to 36 months
http://www.lightrailnow.org/features/f_lrt_2007-04a.htm
And start electrifying our freight railroads.
Best Hopes,
Alan
France already gets most of it's electricity from nuclear power.
Yes and no.
There is an irreducible 10% FF in French power generation (even with 10% hydro, which also helps meet peak demand).
All night long, France sells power to it's neighbors at very low prices, to displace their hydro (Swiss), FF (most of them) or fill their pumped storage (Luxembourg) and often buys back peak power at premium prices.
In isolation, modern nuke cannot supply much more than 50% to 60% of the power (without pumped storage).
Nuclear would also benefit from a super-grid. Texas nukes could sell power to Florida at dawn there and to Phoenix & So. CA after 10 PM CST, and pumped storage in the Rockies, Ozarks or Smokies late at night.
Best Hopes for HV DC transmission,
Alan
I can't really understand where you get the idea that there is an irreducible minimum of 10% of FF needed for nuclear, Alan.
At the moment it is not worth doing away with it financially, and energy storage is an issue, but if we do indeed turn to plug-in hybrids you have a built in energy store so you could run the nuclear plants all the time.
So prospectively at least it does not seem that it is irreducible.
And your idea of pumped storage would also reduce the irreducible! :-)
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/France/Electricity.html
After the last four N4 nukes were built in France, the nuke building industry in France (large & influential) wanted to build more, but France had "too many nukes", despite the continued FF use.
The lack of expansion created a disruptive dead time between 1999 & 2003 (the last two French nukes completed) and 2007 (start) and 2012 when the first EPR is scheduled to be finished. Construction personnel were idled and found other employment during this idleness.
If a 5th and 6th N4 reactor could have displaced the carbon emissions (and imported fuel costs), they would surely (IMHO) have been built.
I also found out that
Alan
It seems it all depends on what is meant by 'irreducible' - I would go for impractical in this case, and at this time.
When someone asks 'why' the answer is usually 'money' and that seems to be the case here.
They are part of a wider grid and can easily get power form fossil fuel as needed, and pumped storage would presumably have been more expensive.
Overall though, if they had really wanted to they would have been able to do so at a relatively minor cost, as they have around 50 reactors do building another 2 would at most cost 1/25th more.
The impact on the bottom line would be much greater though, and it is not surprising that they chose not to.
A large fleet of electric cars would surely alter the equation though as they would mostly be charged overnight off-peak, as would rising fossil fuel prices or insecurity of supply.
Not sure I agree with that. An article on TOD some months back about new battery technology suggested that the ones in question (LiFe) could be charged in 5-10 minute with really high amperage. I think this would lead to a whole network of immediate charging stations just like today's gas stations. This has significant consequences for the architecture of the grid.
Nobody has cheap gasoline in their garage.
OTOH, most people could charge their car at home much more cheaply and quickly than at a "gas" station.
You are really killing me. I might as well weep, accept the loss of the whole planet then. Cause what you are saying is we should just give in to our perceived need/greed and not ask for anything other than the destruction of most life forms, Gods creation in some belief systems, instead of telling people the truth and asking for some self sacrifice for long-term survival.
If you want a 4 billion car future, run the numbers on how that gets us down to 320 ppm.
If you can't show that it can be done, than your proposal is most counter-productive and irrelevant because there won't be many people around by 2050. Your proposal seems to guarantee die-off, which is what you claim to want to avoid!
Everyone wants to be rich. That's not possible. So everyone is disappointed. Nothing about your plan is going to change that, so why even bother? I don't believe in "evil" in the spiritual sense, but a continuation of business as usual "lite" is about as close as it gets.
And I never said anything about a "no car future" or "perfection." I am much more nuanced and complex than that and so is Climate Code Red.
No way. We are so close to peak fossil fuels that there is really not anything we can do to avoid going to about 450 ppm but there is also not enough fossil fuel to go beyond that.
Stuart's scenario does not have a net carbon impact. It does not increase the amount of fossil fuel that will be consumed over the best case scenario. Other than possibly leaving perhaps 20% of the coal in the ground, consumption of all fossil fuels will peak in 10-15 year and then follow the same trend down no matter what we do.
The fact is that there are plentiful supplies of nuclear, wind and solar and none of these has to have serious negative environmental effects on the world. Once people realize this, life will go on. We will build a new energy infrastructure, a new fleet of vehicles. The world will grow and people on average will grow richer, as they have for the last hundreds of years. This is not evil.
People are inventive and ambitious. We find ways to make our lives better. Fossil fuels have been a blessing and a curse. They have cause tremendous growth of cities and population and are causing a climate crisis. I hope they will run out in time to prevent a major climate disaster. The climate crisis is largely out of our hands. But the end of fossil fuels does not have to mean the end of development and the reversion of society to some more primitive state. There would be no moral good in that.
I don't see that morality has anything to do with it. A supply crunch possibly coming in 2012:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/09/AR200707...
Is likely to reverse economic growth. Mr. Staniford appears to be leaving any cost analysis for a future article, but as he himself states a lot of the scenarios he is suggesting will depend on economic growth:
Is this likely ? The same thing worries me for Nuclear power. The cost is so prohibitive the British government wants to leave it all to private investors. How much of that nuclear infrastructure is likely to be in place before we start to see an "oil supply crunch" ? Relocalizing food distribution chains would appear to be a far more realistic solution in the short term.
I am not sure where you got the idea that the cost of nuclear power is prohibitive. The British government is doing it privately because that is the way the energy market works over here.
The only reason nuclear looked more expensive than fossil fuels was because it has internalised a lot of the costs which are born by the rest of society for coal and gas.
Any sort of emissions tax or carbon tax puts nuclear well ahead, and supply constraints are likely to mean that gas at least will rise a lot in the future.
As against renewables, the only one apart from hydro to give nuclear a run for it's money is wind, which on land in the US with their great wind resource may compete.
In the UK unfortunately most new turbines would have to go off-shore, that is the Goverment's plan, and the costs for that according to Government figures are around twice that from nuclear.
Nuclear plants also have a 60 year life expectancy, so after the first 20-25 years of a nuclear build you start to get power from the old plants at maintenance and fuel costs.
You will probably have to pay more for power than you do at the moment for power from gas and coal plants in the US, but not prohibitively so.
The only thing which looks likely to come in cheaper than nuclear is conservation!
You forgot to mention the VERY long time it takes to get enough nuclear power on-line in Britain to make up the retiring nukes, aand displace natural gas, not to mention coal.
By the time that 7.5 GW of new UK nukes are on-line (a minimal figure BTW, much more are needed even in a Rush to Wind scenario), the UK will be pawning the crown jewels for LNG. Coal appears to becoming scarce on the world markets ATM.
Wind can be built in some quantity quite quickly, more so if built on-shore.
Alan
Perhaps a compromise ? Say a British "Rush to Wind" until 7.5 GW of new UK nukes are on-line and another 6 GW under construction and at least 33% complete ? Then scale back subsidies if the market situation seems to warrant it and cut wind subsidies out all together when the UK has 25 GW of new nukes on-line (and 1 GW of old nuke).
As you know Alan, when I came across the excellent load following characteristics it altered my thoughts on wind power here.
However, if the Government is right on cost it still sounds darn expensive.
My preferred option is expenditure on conservation to reduce the gap, but the government policy has indeed dug a darn big hole and I am not sure if that alone will fill it.
So I would tend to agree that some build on off-shore turbines will be needed, but £40bn is a fair old chunk of change to fund after you have thrown away £100bn on Northern Rock, so perhaps a smaller build would be possible.
Perhaps costs might be held down by building rather more turbines on-shore - the good load following characteristics might make that a more worthwhile sacrifice, as my prime objection to land-based turbines was that if you were just generating a lot of power when it was least needed then it would not be worth it.
The objections of the Scots, Welsh and Irish to building more turbines, as they would see it to benefit the English, though are real and won't go away, and many of the best land sites in England are taken.
Your suggestion on getting the French to build a couple of reactors near the channel and buying all the output might be a good one too.
One way and another it is a real mess in England.
As you know EdF is building one 1.6 GW EPR on the French side of the approaches to the English Channel. A short underseas transmission line to England.
Building two more at the same site (I think that there is room) with the same work crew etc. is the best stop-gap on the supply side. They might be finished 12 to 18 months apart. Get a 35 year contract for all 3.
HV DC to Iceland and Norway also should be looked at.
On conservation, just translating the rules & regs & incentives for new and old buildings from German would be an excellent start. Your climates are not that dissimilar.
As for funds, yes that is a problem !!
Higher rates incentivize conservation at considerable pain. Higher taxes (perhaps on petrol ?) would be a good place to start there.
Best Hopes for the Brits,
Alan
You won't overcome the temptation of the British Government to fiddle with regulations rather than adopt them straight from another country, and in building regs they actually have a point.
The problem is that the British building industry has always been very cyclical, used by successive governments to regulate demand.
In contrast the German industry has been much more stable, and their workforce is very highly skilled.
So for instance British architects have proposed a different way of meeting Passivhaus insulation standards, as they did not think that the very tight standards for air-tightness and the use of mechanical ventilation was possible in Britain.
Instead they have proposed passive ventilation and large porches front and back, which unfortunately would eat into the already limited floor area of British homes.
You might have similar obstacles to just importing standards in America.
In other areas their insistence on British certification is just silly.
The Areva nuclear design has already been passed by the Fins and the French, and other potential designs have been certified in other countries which have very capable regulators.
What do they think they are going to add but more delay?
OTOH they probably feel they have to do this for political reasons.
Actually Alan, thinking about it further a shortfall of 7.5GW should be quite possible to cover with conservation, given the truly awful efficiencies at the moment.
This is about 10% of peak generating capacity. I have no access to information to estimate potential savings in the industrial and commercial sector, but given that they often leave their lights on all night for a start it is presumably of the same order as in the residential sector which comprises 40% of the market.
With 3 million houses out of a total stock of 24million in the lowest insulation band and a further 9 million in the band just above it is clear that massive savings are possible before you even consider other measures like air-heat pumps for the 5 million homes off the natural gas grid or upgrading the power standby specifications of electrical equipment.
Not that I think there is a cat's chance in hell of the Government actually putting a proper co-ordinated program together, but they could surely cover most of the gap if they did.
Jason:
Emotions can run high here. We both know that so much is at stake, we are both taking big personal risks, in different ways, because so much is at stake and we care deeply about the world. Let us honor that in each other. If I have misunderstood your position or ClimateCodeRed's, I apologize. Perhaps you could explain how many cars you do think would be appropriate and why. We have much to learn from one another, let us continue to dialogue and constructively criticize the various options put forward.
An analogy I often think of is that, as a civilization, we are lost in the mountains, and it has started to snow. Visibility is dropping fast. There are cliffs all around, and we are starting to feel a little cold. Things look pretty scary. We are starting to realize that we have made some big mistakes coming up this particular path on this particular day. We were warned, but we ignored the warnings - it looked pretty sunny up here to most of us when we were lower down on the mountain earlier in the day. Now that the blizzard is closing in, some of us are denying that there's any problem, shouting "Follow me, this is easy", and heading straight for one of the cliffs. Others of us are panicking, running about and shouting, "Oh my God, we're all going to die".
In a situation like that, what is needed is to get out the map and compass, huddle round, and with a nice balance of briskness and calm rationality figure out where on the map we are, what the various cliffs around us are, and what way offers the best chance to get the party down off the mountain to somewhere that is tolerably warm and safe. It will be best if we can build a clear enough understanding that the party can agree - it's a bad idea to split up when lost in the mountains.
We know that impulsive decisionmaking can get us in a lot of trouble. Many people thought biofuels a good direction, but instead we find a cliff yawning at our feet as we start to go down that direction. It is important when we look at a particular direction on the map that we ask "how steep is the slope that way?" "If we keep going in that direction, does the terrain get rougher or smoother?"
It is in that spirit that I offer my ideas, and also critique yours. I accept that our society is going to have to make changes, big changes. I accept that we are going to have to make sacrifices. At a minimum, we are going to have to build an awful lot of new infrastructure, which is going to be very expensive. So when you say "instead of telling people the truth and asking for some self sacrifice for long-term survival." I agree with you on the need for that.
But where I have a hard time is that I have found it very difficult to get you to tell me to tell me "the truth" of just how much "self sacrifice" you want us to make along your path. I'm not convinced you know. You won't answer questions about how much of a paycut you want people to take in a relocalized future. You won't present calculations of how many people the world can feed if we stop trading food globally. You want us to take a particular path down off the mountain, but I don't see that you've done the work of figuring out how steep that path is, or whether it comes down to a safe place. I think you need to do that.
It's true of course that climate change is an enormous danger. But it's hardly the only danger here. If we take actions that cause the world to get much less wealthy in a hurry, as I believe the kinds of proposals that you favor are likely to do, then those consequences will not be spread evenly. There will be people who will starve and there will be people who will revolt. Perhaps a lot of people. Social stability is a major concern here. I think you need to think that path through a lot more carefully than you have, and be in a position to convince other people of goodwill that you really have the best path to propose.
And you challenge me in the same way, and rightly so. I presented a scenario for energy use last time that should give you a general idea of the path of future carbon emissions I'm imagining. I believe I've argued pretty defensibly here that the 4 billion cars can be run on less than 10mbd of oil. In general, I propose to move to use renewable energy as the basis of civilization as fast as we can manage without wrecking our society. I will adjust the scenario as I go, and I will continue to try to flesh out more sectors - time limits me - I have a full time job, with mouths to feed and rent to pay. I do my utmost.
In my mind, my scenario is the about the best I can imagine being able to sell the world to do, and probably somewhat better than that really (the world is showing a huge propensity to stay in denial). Obviously, so far, the schemes that environmentalists have been proposing over the last couple of decades have not attracted enough support to have any discernible impact on the growth in global carbon emissions, so I suggest that thinking a lot harder about this question of public acceptability is very important. Splitting off and heading down the mountain alone is unlikely to help either you or the rest of us.
You seem to feel that moving to mostly but not entirely eliminate carbon emissions by 2050 is not nearly fast enough, would cause a die-off, and that going much faster is both a) possible, and b) would make a major difference in the outcome. I don't follow your logic here - perhaps you could lay out the steps for me.
For some people, it seems to me that peak oil, climate change, etc are almost a game, something divorced from reality. It's like a scary adventure movie that is exciting to watch, but somehow doesn't quite touch them as something that is going to be a reality in their lives. They are disappointed if the clouds appear to lift for a minute and the scary show isn't as vivid. And it becomes a way for people to advocate for whatever they wanted to do anyway, regardless of whether it really meets the need of the hour or not, which to me is a kind of frivolity.
I don't see it that way at all. This is no movie - I believe that we are really up on the mountain together in the snow. The stakes are high. People really are going to die if we make bad decisions - a few people already are dying from high food prices. Doing nothing is not an option either. I have my children with me on this journey and I am absolutely damned determined to have done everything within my talents and energies to help the party make a good decision, so that my kids have a future. Of course, I am only one of the 6.5 billion people up here on the mountain. So I have no real control over what we all decide to do. All I can do is put my best thinking out there, and hope that somebody somewhere reads it and it ends up making a difference. For all its many faults, which frustrate me at times, TOD still seems to be the place were the best all round conversation on the global predicament is happening.
Stuart, I like The Poseidon Adventure movie analogy.
They see the wave coming try evasive action but the wave hits and the ship capsizes. (The world around them is turned upside down, nothing is quite the same).
Some are killed immediately.
The survivors gather and most decide to wait for rescue. (Trusting in the great power of human technology to save them) They are ultimately engulfed as rescue never comes.
Some decide to try and find a way out.
Along the way there are right and wrong turns to make, there are obstacles to overcome and people die along the way. All the way, time is running out, the ship is sinking (the climate they could rely on is changing).
Eventually a small percentage of the original ships passengers and crew survive.
The end
But right now, it's impossible to tell just how bad the situation is. It's far from clear that the situation is hopeless. And until it is hopeless we have a duty to do whatever we can to bring the ship through intact.
Stuart - a great speech and a great analogy - though I missed your reference to Posiedon.
If you are on the mountain in bad weather the last thing you want are members of your party in panic and worse than that, others breaking down in tears saying they never wanted to to climb the mountain in the first place.
You have no control over the storm and don't know whether it is going to blow over or get worse. All you can do is dig a hole, put on a hat gloves and fleece, take stock of your provisions, break out the whisky and start telling cannibal jokes.
It would also be cool if some members of your party were watching what was going on before the storm blew up - those cornices on the cliff above looked mighty dangerous. Have you dug your hole in a safe place? Or is it in line with the energy decline avalanche that will most surely wipe you out if it hits you.
Personally I don't think there is anything we can do to prevent anthropogenic GW if it is indeed an issue. But we can take many precautionary measures to avoid the avalanche and I'm with you 100% of the way in building a bridge to that future.
I agree with Euan here in this subthread. That was extremely well written.
To use your analogy, we have a difference of opinion on the route to take. You think that your route is passable, I do not, and all we have for definitive data is a topographical map with inadequate data#. Your path is the path of least resistance to change in our current culture.
In either case (passable or not) your path has a tight margin for error and can easily lead to catastrophic failure.
What I advocate has a wide margin for error, and a series of soft failure modes.
I want to rely on existing technology, with adjustments made as improved technology arrives, instead of planning on continued advances arriving at specified times.
To briefly outline an overview, I want the thrust of government policy to promote a massive build-out of a Non-Oil Transportation system (EVs not heavily promoted but mainly left to market forces) and a massive build-out of renewable energy with associated HV DC transmission and pumped storage in the near future. Those two thrusts will take all the effort we will likely be able to muster.
Non-Oil Transportation includes:
Electrified intercity railroads (hopefully with some semi-high speed express tracks that can handle passengers and low & medium density freight at 100 to 125 mph. See CSX proposal for DC to Miami).
Urban Rail is all flavors (Rapid Rail (subway), Light Rail, Streetcars, Commuter/Regional Rail) and associated TOD (The low hanging fruit is that about a third of Americans want to live in TOD, and less than 2% do. Meeting this unmeet existing demand for low energy living should be a top priority).
Some Electric Trolley Buses where streetcars will not work well.
Bicycles for Transportation
Walking
I would be willing to include Seqways as a adjunct.
All of these (except Segways) have significant elasticity of supply. In a crisis, they can surge their supply on short notice and even more supply over longer periods of time, with marginal new supply of transportation often costing less than the average, but certainly no more.
And all supply enormous gains in energy efficiency (on the order of end use 20 joules of gasoline or oil for 1 joule of electricity, even better for bicycling). These efficiency gains have enormous implications for GHG and GW.
And all are long lived. Things built today, with cheap energy, will not need replacement in a period of prolonged crisis.
As the existing Oil Based Transportation System is stressed##, transportation can shift quickly and easily over to the Non-Oil Transportation System (remember elasticity of supply) IF THE NON-OIL TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM EXISTS !
## I do NOT expect a smooth decline on oil availability, but a disjointed series of crisis. These repeated shocks to our Oil Based Transportation System (if there is no alternative) will tear at our social and economic fabric and reduce our ability to adapt (see our doomer friends).
I also support a plan to convert the North American electrical grid to 90% non-GHG. The last 10% will have to wait on new technology and events as they develop. My guess is 30 years best case, even with strong gov't incentives. A future TOD article.
The problem with EVs and why I do not support a strong push for them is that
1) They have little or no elasticity of supply
2) we are several decades away from the marginal source of electricity being non-GHG and
2b) they are not as energy efficient as Urban Rail (see #4)
3) They do not promote TOD, with it's inherent energy efficiency
4) They are not on the market today (except for GEM) and this creates a wide range of unknowns.
I would have no problem with $400 tax credits for Segways and $1000 tax credits for EVs *IF* this does not detract from higher priorities. The market, given our culture, will give adequate support for a rapid conversion to EVs and there is little that the Gov't can do.
Returning to your analogy, I see one member of the party (France) clearly heading down this path for the last 35 years. They seem to like the feedback and are increasing the pace as the storm clouds gather.
BEST HOPES !
Alan
# A couple of decades ago I had an "interesting life experience" in the Rocky Mountains due to going down a stream that could not be scaled back up and running into a shear 12' cliff with a steep scree at the foot. It did not show on our topographical map.
Alan,
I was going to post something similar, but you beat me to it.
I think the key here is what is considered a realistic aspiration. One small example: China is already choking in smog (even affecting Japan: http://mdn.mainichi.jp/national/news/20080212p2a00m0na019000c.html) and facing enormous problems with gridlock (e.g. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_ar...).
And this is with only a fraction of the population owning cars.
Why do they aspire to this? Maybe because they aspire to being like the US and Europe, where cars are seen as signs of wealth.
What this doesn't consider is that maybe people on a large scale will finally get fed up with all the problems caused by cars, and they will no longer be seen as anything more than what they are: a useful tool in certain circumstances.
Actually, there's already a movement in Europe and even parts of the USA to take back the streets from the negative effects of cars: e.g. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_ar....
Ok, one other point. Stuart completely neglected the electric grid effects of his plan. I calculate that to power our current fleet of passenger cars would require a constant 65GW in the USA alone, totaling over 1.5 TWH per day. While this may not sound like a lot of additional capacity, from a DOE/PNL document on the subject:
While not insurmountable, in a situation of economic disaster brought on by peak oil, it will certainly present major challenges. Add that to the need to heat more and more people's homes with electricity (due to shortage of fuel oils), the question will become: cars or heat?
I think Alan's proposals are much more realistic. We will redefine expectations, using electric cars only where really necessary, and using other modes in most other circumstances. This will save money, and address many other problems related with automobiles. Why use a car for short trips when a bike or walking is so much more efficient and cost effective (and healthy)?
Morgan
So you don't think that over the next twenty years or so the US can manage to build 65GW of extra capacity?
That's just a pinch over 3GW a year, or just over 1% of present US capacity.
What is going to cause this decrease in US build?
Wind alone can do that comfortably, and the use of electric batteries in cars would smooth any intermittency issues.
The US challenge is going to be to replace much of the Natural Gas generation and some of the coal as well.
As with the British "Rush to Gas", the USA built very little but NG plants for about a dozen years.
Alan
The problem is threefold:
1. Our aging and over-capacity electric grid infrastructure, which is already strained in summer months (e.g. http://www.cfr.org/publication/13153/americas_vulnerable_energy_grid.html)
2. The need to replace a large amount of current natural gas and some coal fired electric generation capacity with other alternatives, as those commodities reach peak. Hence, it will be a substantial effort to just maintain the status quo
3. That cars won't be the only additional load on the grid. Think heating, lots and lots of heating. As heating oil supplies dwindle and/or get very expensive, the only available alternative for many will be electricity. I haven't calculated it, but I strongly suspect this would be a very large load on the system.
Given the combination of the above factors, yes I do think that this build out will be very challenging. Not impossible, but it would certainly require a major investment in things like nuclear, starting now, not in 10-20 years from now.
Morgan
Stuart:
My frustration is that you are asking me to do the impossible: give you specifics about "self-sacrifice" and "income loss" in a situation that I consider to be paradigm shifting and too complex. Does a general going to war tell the soldiers--we expect these many losses of limbs, this many losses of eyes, this many losses of lives, this many losses of future mental stability? Can that even be done? It is too messy. In an emergency you lay out the problem, people agree it is an emergency, they have the attitude of "whatever it takes" and we go from there. Actuaries, accountants, engineers can all give ball park estimates of the scale and rate of change but this level of detail can wait. What is first needed is agreement of what needs to be done and how fast, something like: 300-320 ppm, fossil-fuel free economic transition within 20 years, possible geoengineering for ice caps, carbon sequestration projects.
You are not even going to get the rational climate scientists to agree to that goal.
"My frustration is that you are asking me to do the impossible: give you specifics about "self-sacrifice" and "income loss" in a situation that I consider to be paradigm shifting and too complex. "
I agree it's complex. But without making some effort in that direction, you're another guy shouting "this way" without having taken the time to figure out whether or not you're advocating going over a cliff.
When you sharply reduce people's wealth, or equivalently, sharply increase prices for essentials, they get mad. They protest, riot, or revolt. They fight wars. That is a danger that needs to be seriously considered. Eg fuel protests in Europe, the French Revolution, this paper on the correlation between conflict and climate/food supply in historical China.
The level of wealth that the global economy produces is heavily dependent on global trade. If we were to follow a strategy that sharply reduced trade, we would produce far less wealth. All hell would break loose.
And then we would have the big die-off, resource wars and environmental devastation.
The breakthrough with the Millennium Institute T21-USA model (funded by ASPO-USA)is the strategy with the highest GDP in 30 years, also had the lowest GHG and lowest oil consumption. Specifically
GDP 1.50 (2006 =1)
GHG 0.50
Oil consumption 0.38
The best strategy for all 3 metrics (and best national defense policy), a combined maximum push for renewable, reasonable nuke power growth and a maximum push for electrified rail.
Alan
Stuart, the mountain analogy is great, but there's two problems with it:
1. More a boat than a mountain
On the mountain, if somebody panics and runs off, it's mainly their problem, and they will be the ones to pay the price. But with GW, and to some extent Peak Oil, we are all in the same boat. Even if you manage to get a group behind you, your efforts will be meaningless unless most people agree to follow your plan. You showed it very well with your biofuel-food articles.
2. Who has the magaphone?
We didn't just end up on a mountain. We went on an organised trip. The tour-leaders assured us it was safe and good for us, actually they're still saying so. But we paid them good money; they are making a profit from this adventure. Their words and actions are motivated by profit.
Unfortunately, the tour-leaders still have the megaphone. And they're shouting out loud that it's all fine. You, on the other hand, are standing in the corner, with a compass and a map, quietly and calmly explaining to the small group around you that it's not at all fine, it's really very dangerous, but you have a way out. Some look at you with amazement. Then they lose interest. The group leaders said there's free videos starting now.
I'm with you on this one. Sadly, it's not Hansen I'm losing faith in. I'm losing faith in TOD contributers, especially Mearns and Staniford. For all their bluster, they don't have a clue about how modeling of complex systems happens. Which makes me wonder...maybe peak oil is a hoax? Oh right, that's an ad hominem attack. Just because they tout peak oil doesn't make the theory wrong... But I'm certainly not paying attention to them anymore.
Sadly too, Mearns is possibly partly right. I don't think there is any way we are going to stop the effect of anthropogenically driven global climate change now. We can struggle and fight for change, but I think our human nature is such that we don't want to really look (or are not able to look) at the long term consequences of our actions.
Geez, Stuart, probably 90% of the world's population is no-car no-plane now. When the U.S. car culture fails miserably, I'm guessing fewer people outside the U.S. will aspire to it.
Stuart, your post talks about reaching a sustainable society in 2050 but you seem to think that any solution that doesn't include economic growth is dead in the water. I must assume that you think that economic growth is sustainable. Could you explain why you think this is true and, if not, when do you think people will have to accept a solution that boesn't include economic growth (regardless of whether it meets their aspirations)?
There is no economic law that says economic growth is incompatible with sustainability. For example, economic growth includes growth in intellectual capital (art, entertainment, software, etc.) and there is no a priori reason that kind of growth cannot be sustained. There are clearly some types of growth that cannot be sustained indefinately but that is not true of all types. And transition growth is not necessarily incompatible with sustainability. Sustainability itself is not an overriding good, although it is probably a good idea over the long term. In the long run, we are all dead and the world will be consumed by the sun.
The more pressing need is to stabilize and, hopefully reduce world population. The only way to do that that has shown consistent results is through development, which will require growth.
Correct, there is no economic law that states that economic growth is unsustainable. However, natural limits will always trump economics. Even if intellectual capital can grow, it is not the economy and will require resources to exploit. An increase in economic activity ultimately requires more stuff to be produced, more stuff to be used, more services to be provided. Whilst efficiencies can help alleviate natural limits, they will never be able to make them irrelevant.
I agree that development can reduce population growth, but if it requires more economic growth, you had better keep your fingers crossed that natural limits are not hit before population stabilises. However, if it does stabilise, do you think people, especially those who have benefited most from the economic growth, to happily give up future growth, in order to maintain their current standards of living? If they won't do it now, they won't do it then and that is also a pressing problem.
True, but, as mentioned, that "stuff" can be produced substantially more efficiently.
Germany is arguably a good example of this; despite still having a large manufacturing sector and despite its GDP growing by ~25% since the mid-90s, its energy consumption has been flat that whole time (per EIA figures). In general, there's a great deal of scope for doing things more efficiently than we do now. There are, for example, 50% efficient coal plant designs, even though the average installed plant is under 40% efficient in Europe, under 35% in the US (IIRC), and lower yet in places like China.
It's not clear that exploiting efficiency gains like those (or qualitative changes like renewables) will be sufficient to allow growth to continue, but it's not clear that it won't be sufficient, either, so "growth must stop this century" is not something that can be assumed.
I don't agree that if people won't do it now they won't ever do it. In particular, in a Star Trek-like utopian future of ease and comfort, I would expect there to be a great deal less pressure for economic growth than there is today in China. Economic growth is making a huge difference to the everyday lives of millions upon millions of Chinese, but the effect of continued growth has been much less stark for people in the West (based on my experience, at least); the difference between an oxcart and a car dwarfs the difference between a car and two cars.
Part of economic growth is increased efficiency, so effectively the only way growth can go to zero is if the level of resources being consumed is declining as fast as the efficiency of using them is increasing, which seems an unlikely balance to strike. Since the total supply of perhaps the most important resource - energy - is effectively unlimited due to the massive solar influx, it's not clear that there are looming physical limits that cannot be sidestepped by substitution, just as people propose sidestepping the physical limits on oil availability by moving to renewable energy.
It's possible such limits exist and are imminent, of course, but people have been suggesting it to be the case for decades, meaning the claim really needs evidence to back it up.
Germany, along with the world, as a whole, has reduced the energy intensity of its economy. I don't know if the absorbtion of East Germany gave them an opportunity to do better, or if they are exporting some of their energy use overseas. Efficiencies can never go beyond the (highly improbable) limit of 100%, so economic growth ultimately needs more resources (energy included).
I don't know how the "since" phrase leads to your conclusion. Solar influx appears to be unlimited but it requires resources to harness and I still wonder if drawing increasing amounts for our own use (ultimately converted to heat) will ever start to have undesireable side-effects (apart from the land and resources needed to harness it). So I don't think it follows that, just because there is a lot of solar energy, we can substitute something else for any depleted resource.
Like topsoil erosion, scarcer fresh water, soaring commodity costs, plateaued oil production, human impact on the environment? The comment is often a way of saying that no action is needed until obvious shortages are seen in some critical resource. I think the finite nature of our planet, including its ability to absorb our pollution, is evidence enough. Limits to Growth, and other books have argued the point quite well.
That may be true but do you have any evidence for that? This would be a good time to move to sustainability in developed nations, since we, possibly, have the energy to make the changes. Do you think it is remotely likely that the people of developed nations will willingly forego economic growth as their part in a sustainable future? If you don't, why do you think the developing world would do so, once they reach the standard of living currently "enjoyed" by developed nations (which will have gone further by then)?
At a guess, both were factors. I know that there was a lot of highly inefficient industry in East Germany that, while expensive to replace, offered substantial scope for modernization.
More recently, though, the trend has continued, which I'd guess is more due to conservation zeitgeist and laws - minimum insulation requirements on buildings, and the like.
Depends on the rate. If efficiency improves so 2% fewer resources are needed per unit of production per year, using the same quantity of resources per year will allow production to grow at 2% per year. Alternatively, production could grow at 1% per year, meaning less resources are needed each year, meaning 1% growth could continue indefinitely using a finite amount of resources - 100x the consumption in the first year would be enough resources for all time.
Exponential functions can be just as powerful for conservation as for growth.
I didn't say we could; I said it wasn't clear the we couldn't. The difference is that I'm not saying "I know the answer", I'm saying "you don't know the answer, so we need to look more carefully".
In particular, there's a lot of things that can be done with (effectively) unlimited energy to compensate for shortages in other resources. Synthesizing hydrocarbons from atmospheric CO2 and water is one example; it's too inefficient to be interesting now, but if energy is no problem, there's much less of a barrier. Similarly with mining lower grades of ore, or extracting minerals from seawater, or mining garbage dumps, or...
Maybe those things won't be effective or won't be sufficient, but given loads of cheap energy there's a lot that can be done to compensate for shortages in other resources, so it's something that needs to be taken into account when analyzing the situation.
All of those have been true for a long time, save for plateaued oil production, which isn't true (by the latest IEA figures, at least). People thought these were at their limits 30 years ago, and were wrong; based on what do we believe they're at their limits now?
I'm not saying they're not; I'm just saying that it's a claim that needs evidence to back it up.
Moreover, a simple list like that doesn't answer the question. The question is whether there are physical limits are looming that cannot be overcome by substitution, mitigation, or other reasonable measures.
Perhaps, but it's not what the comment actually says, so it's a mistake to assume that's what everyone means by it.
If I ask for evidence, it's because I think you've made a questionable claim, not because I want to make a claim of my own.
That's not at all evidence that a problem is imminent, though.
People have made the "it's clear we're at the limit now" claim for decades, and no brick walls have been encountered, meaning "it's clear" and "it's true" don't appear to be strongly related.
Maybe there are imminent problems, but that's a claim that requires evidence to back up.
Again, there's a difference between me not believing your claim and me making a claim of my own.
However, I gave you an example of why current behaviour might not accurately predict future behaviour. Another example is the strength of various Green Parties, especially in Germany; people in some areas are taking ecological considerations increasingly seriously. Witness the strong buildouts of solar and wind in Germany, despite the country not being well-suited to either.
Like I said, though, asking what happens "without growth" is making a very strong assumption about the world being in a particular special case. Fundamentally, "zero growth" is largely a straw man, and it's likely much more useful to talk about resource availability and figure out from there what its effects on growth would be.
The production of intellectual capital is just as much part of the economy as the production of phyical stuff. Its share of over all production continues to rise.
There may be physical limits to most resouces but they may not be reached before the Earth is consumed by the Sun. Most resource are not destroyed when they are consumed. They are just transformed.
If we stop and reverse population growth, that will go a long way to slow the destruction of wild lands. We will not need to continually build new housing sub divisions. All kinds of output will not need to grow. More and more of their desire for stuff will be supplied by low impact intellectual property.
I didn't say it wasn't part of the economy, only that it wasn't the whole economy. Do you expect the whole economy to be composed of intellectual capital that never actually gets used or even created? In order to do either, it takes resources. But I wouldn't expect intellectual capital to ever become even the main part of the economy, would you?
To hope that no essential physical limits are reached before the sun consumes the earth is, well, wishful thinking and I hope social or economic policy doesn't rely on that.
I agree that most resources are transformed, rather than destroyed, but the only way that will become an important fact is if, eventually, all resources are simply recycled, though even that would consume resources in the process. However, I don't see that happening without a wholesale change in the way society is organised and certainly not with economic growth happening.
I agree that a stable population (and possibly reduced from today) is important but it is also important to recognize that economic growth is unsustainable. It seems that many hope that it can continue long enough to somehow correct the population problem. That is, it is hoped that using one unsustainable aspect of human behaviour can correct another unsustainable aspect. Wishful thinking.
Sorry. Not buying it. It might be true that some types of economic growth, like building coal power plants, become unsustainable. But it is hard to imagine many types for which that it true in a time frame that is relevant for us to consider. It is certainly not true for unspecified growth, because you can always come up with types that do not have immediate limits, like arts, software, entertainment, financial services, etc. Our economy is increasingly dominated by these types.
What relevance does it have for us that some types of growth might become unsustainable 100 or 1,000 years from now? It would be the height of presumption for us today to try to determine for the future how those people should run their lives and conduct their affairs. Just because it looks to us today that some kinds of growth cannot go on forever, how do we know that people in the future will not figure out how to overcome obstacles we see today?
And what is magical about a growing amount of an economic activity vs. a constant amount of it? Or transitions from one energy base to the next? Let’s say we burn up all the oil in the next hundred years. Before that we move to a nuclear/renewable base. 200 year for now we move to a fusion base. What is the problem with that?
There is nothing inherently wrong with economic growth and no reason that it has to stop any time soon.
How is it possible to disentangle certain "types" of growth from others, and of what use would that be? If economic activity increases beyond the inflation rate, then that will require more stuff to be made, more stuff to be used, more services to be provided and consumed. Arts require materials, tools and energy to provide, and resources to present and view. Entertainment the same. Software takes resources to develop, distribute and use. Financial services also use resources. Some of the resource use may be trivial but still real and these things don't amount to the economy. Why do you say that these non-productive parts of the economy are increasingly dominating the economy? I think it unlikely that they dominate the economy but, even if true, they will certainly not be the majority of the economy long term, nor will their increase use less resources.
There is nothing "magical" about a growing economy or stable economy. However, only a stable economy has a chance of being sustainable. It's simple natural limits.
It's inherently wrong because it is unsustainable. Nothing you've written shows that to be a false premise. Whilst it can be sustained for some period of time, natural limits will get in the way eventually. You talk about limits kicking in only centuries away. However, you don't know that. There are many who can see the limits getting near in all sorts of resources, and in the environmental effects. It is complacent to believe the limits are so far away that it will be some future generation's problem. Maybe you believe that future generations will somehow find a way to usurp natural limits (which would, indeed, be magical) but that is not good reason to ignore the problem now. It is more likely (i.e. certain) that natural limits will impose themselves eventually and there is no reason to assume that "eventually" will not be within our lifetimes (heck, isn't that what CERA and big oil have been trying to tell us for years?).
Unfortunately, we seem destined to always assume that there is a solution that allows us to be complacent and not act until it is too late to avoid unmanaged collapse.
" I wouldn't expect intellectual capital to ever become even the main part of the economy, would you?"
It already is. That point was passed in the 1950's, when the US was still a net exporter in manufacturing. Manufacturing is now only 17% of the US economy (and that includes a lot of knowledge workers in manufacturing companies). If all outsourcing were to end, manufacturing would still be substantially less than 50% of work, and services would still be more than 50%.
What has changed is our ability to understand climate better. The research is advancing rapidly. We can hardly keep up with the new data published now on a monthly basis.
In my opinion (I am not a climatologist), we are doing a live experiment with the world's climate. Or should it be called an experiment with the life of our civilization?
All of civilization has been an experiment anyway. Religion and spirituality are the quests to find out what the experiment is trying to prove.
The answer that comes from a lot of religions is a kind of apocalyptic end to it all once we have proved oursleves to be a species of incredible greed and stupidity. Not surprising really just animal instinct.
Most species will breed and multiply up to the environmental constraints that surround them and we kid ourselves if we think that we are any different. We just happen to have been very, very adaptable and very cunning in our use of energy which gives us a hugely expanded environment with us at the top of the food chain.
We have no predators that can limit our population growth so we will keep growing until we reach equilibrium with the energy and other non-bio life support systems. The Earth itself will reject our civilization and there is not much we can do ultimately do about it. We can tinker or sacrifice a few of our number but eventually the destiny of planet Earth will be a humanless one.
No other species however has had the ability to kill off all life on Earth so that there is no hope for life itself to continue in the only place in the universe that we know it exists.
Euan,
Hansen published a really nice piece of work in Philosophical Transactions this Summer. The albedo flip mechanism seems to explain the response of the climate to orbital forcing very nicely. This is quite masterful work. As a part of that paper there was some investigation of climate sensitivity in paleoclimate data. The sensitivity, albeit based on a scaling from regional Antarctic data, looks to be closer to 6o C per doubling of CO2 rather than 3o C. The explanation for this would seem to be that slow feedbacks have about the same final effect as fast feedbacks. A higher sensitivity means a lower amount of CO2 puts us into a situation where certain climate consequences become inevitable. So, the laws of physics are the same, but the understanding of their application is becoming more astute. This is what one hopes for in science.
Chris
Chris,
Maybe I'm being a bit harsh on climate science - and of course we are permitted to learn and revise our ideas as we go along.
Three or four things have got under my skin about the way the GW debate is heading:
1. There is massive uncertainty in the climate models - but nevertheless climate science is calling for the Global Economy as we know it to be shut down - with little regard to consequences this might have for the destiny of Man. I think this is one issue that Stuart has taken issue with.
2. Climate science is being driven by events that are not understood. The current panic presumes that loss of Arctic Sea ice is caused by Man. No quarter seems to be given to the possibility that natural cycles contribute or may even be the main cause.
3. If we are experiencing extreme anthropogenic GW now then there is absolutely nothing we can do to prevent this running its course. It is pure vanity to think otherwise. Capital spent in futile attempts to reverse this would IMO be better spent in preparing for the consequences.
4. In the real world this means not wasting billions on carbon sequestration - but instead building new (C free) sustainable energy infrastructure and sea walls
5. Many of those engaged in the GW debate, some of whom have joined the energy decline debate, seem to want to return to the past and are using these issues to advance their relocalisation agendas.
My vision of the future would be 1 to 3 billion souls living in an ultra high tech and prosperous world that is very different to the one we live in today. Offer mankind that vision (without a dieoff) and we may achieve it.
Euan
Doesn't all science disagree with Republican religious fundalmentalism? Isn't that where you are coming from? Let's be honest with ourselves.
Euan said:
Precisely my feeling. Although I agree that man-made global warming is the the likely explanation of what is happening, some of the degrees of certitude expressed stagger me when talking about complex poorly understood phenomena.
That is without going into the quasi-religions ramblings of those who want to use wholly inappropriate terms like 'GW denier'.
In practical terms a lot of the measures we would take would be the same with or without GW, conservation, moving from Fossil fuels and so on, and it is unclear to me that sequestration is even possible on any scale, except possibly through agrichar, which is a good idea in any case, and so actual policy differences are limited.
Complex? Complex is understanding that time is another dimension! What is the fabric of our universe -- that is a difficult question. If a certain group of politicians find the theory of relativity inconvenient, I am sure you will be there denying that time slows as velocity increases (even though you probably are not a physicist).
The theory that adding compounds to a closed system and those compounds increase warmth is pretty darn simple idea to understand.
Yup, if it was one-for-one, but it is not.
The proposal is instead that through a whole bunch of feedback mechanisms the purely mechanical effects of that increase get magnified, whilst negative feedbacks are relatively unimportant.
To support this model have been made, which claim to match climate history better than alternatives.
I emphasise that I agree that this sounds the likeliest outcome, but the IPCC themselves are not sure of the result, that is one reason why they give us a bunch of different scenarios and not a forecast.
It is not so simple as you imply.
Euan,
I think if you read the IPCC report, you'll see that economists have been consulted. It is not the case that climate science is calling for the the global economy to shut down. There is some indication though that mitigation costs less than adaptation. So, a transformation of the global economy away from fossil fuel use would seem to make sense. If you read the report, concern for the destiny of Man is at its base. In my opinion, the economists have missed a crucial distinction in kinds of mitigation efforts: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/11/reprise.html but that likely only makes mitigation that much less expensive compared to adaptation.
The loss of the Arctic sea ice is not really presumed to be caused by Man. Rather, it is a prediction of climate models. This tends to boost confidence that the models are including relevant physics. The loss appears to be happening faster than expected based on present models so there is an opportunity to improve the models by including more physics I think, but this does not disprove the physics that is already included.
I think that reversing global warming is possible and desirable. There are a number of natural carbon sinks which are not operating at historic levels and profitable changes in land use can restore these. There also appears to be the potential for scale in sequestering carbon in a profitable way in cropland and marginal land soil as well an inkling that new sustainable fisheries might play a large-scale role in sequestering carbon. Your objection may be based on the idea that carbon must be sequestered as carbon dioxide. This is not the case. Sequestering carbon in elemental form can boost agricultural production and sequestering it in mineral form is exothermic and thus might be made to pay. Consideration of the possibilities for sequestration is only beginning but there are some very encouraging leads.
I think that relocalization is more of a way forward than a way back. Your low population vision surely is relocalization taken to an extreme. My picture tends more towards a greater harmonisation with bioregions where people live. Learning the ins and outs of the local ecosystem allows better cooperation with it. Ensuring food security bioregion-by-bioregion leads to very robust global food security. Perhaps this is not what you think of as relocalization but it does seem to me to be a way to accomodate a larger population in a sustainable manner. It may well be that population will reduce at some point, but that needs to be a choice for that generation rather than forced by our unwillingness to build a world that can make choice possible.
Chris
Without a massive dieoff or a drastic reduction of birthrates which would lead extreme age imbalance in society, a population below six billion people does not seem to be in the cards for many decades into the future. The question is how do we transition from where we are now to a sustainable future without social chaos. I think that the answer is that we don’t, not because it is physically impossible to do so, but because it is politically and psychologically impossible to do so. The most sensible strategy from a physical viewpoint is to voluntarily limit consumption and to share resources fairly. To me this strategy does not imply ‘radical localization’. It implies developing an economic system whose goal is to produce a decent quality of life with a minimum consumption of resources. In many cases centralized manufacturing of long lived products will be substantially more efficient. If we can figure out a way to manufacture less computers and make them last longer we should do so even if it puts computer engineers out of work (That’s where the ‘fair sharing’ comes in. People who work themselves out of a job for the benefit of society should continue to be supported by that society). Many luxury items (jet skis, 300 hp sports cars, 60’’ plasma screen televisions, etc. can be discontinued. I personally do not give a damn about the “highness” of the tech which supports me with the possible exception of health care, and even there I do not want to be kept alive for another decade and a half after the quality of my life starts to degrade. The OECD nations should reduce their resource consumption and allow the less developed parts of the world rise to meet us on some reasonable middle ground. At that point we can assess the ecological sustainability of our economic system and opt for more material wealth if and when it makes sense to so.
I realize, of course, that these ideas are just a socialist wet dream of a touchy-feely, environmentalist, tree-hugger moron, and so have no chance of being acted upon. Only someone like me with a PhD in physics and 22 years of engineering experience in Silicon Valley could possible think that they make sense. Since they do not make sense we will naturally have to grow until we collapse. This is the essence of a strategy of supporting the economic status quo. Private finance capitalism by its very nature produces huge inequalities in wealth, and as Stuart so well illustrates, those people who have got hold of the long end of the stick will give it up only when it is pried out their cold dead hands. The idea that five decades in the future we will suddenly decide that we are 'wealthy enough' to abandon competitive accumulation as our modus operandi is nonsense.
The breakup of our current social structures and a period of chaos and suffering seem inevitable. I spend my time thinking about what kinds of social and economic structures will work in a sustainable manner in the long term, because the breakup of the old norms in no way implies the development anything more intelligent. The breakup of the Soviet Union was followed by the development of gangster capitalism and rampant alcoholism and greatly decreased life spans. They are now achieving some degree of ‘success’ from a macro economic point of view, but when their supplies of oil and gas start to decline the shit will hit the fan. Stuart’s suggestion that in a world of cutthroat economic competition they should plan on the sunny south sending them loads of electricity on global super grid does not strike me a great strategy for the future.
Proposing that constant growth should not be the goal in all societies at all times is not a proposal to shut down economic activity. Please do not talk nonsense.
Euan,
Please consider two things.
1. Hansen has been consistently wrong by being too conservative.
2. Hansen's trend lines have all been in the right general direction but ended up falling below the reality.
The same can be said about the IPCC. This is not a case where they have random noise errors above and below. They have consistently predicted the right direction of climate movement and they have consistently been too conservative on where it actually went.
To me this says that (a) the observation of the direction of the trend is correct and (b) the severity of the situation is far worse than even the worst case models given by climate scientists thus far. As for stopping climate change, we won't. We're far too greedy, short sighted, and self-indulgent of a species to act in any rational, cooperative manner. Want proof? Look at the global credit crunch around you. There go the "best and brightest" of the world out to rip each other off down to the last possible second in a massive Ponzi scheme. To expect better behavior than that on climate change seems to me to be wishing for a human being that does not exist.
I think that this is where human-induced climate change deniers do the world a disservice. They usually inflate the uncertainties ("massive uncertainty," says Euan) and imply (if not state explicitly) that because there are uncertainties, no huge effort to slow or adapt to climate change should be undertaken. The same people also assume that economic growth is sustainable and so hope to continue reaping the benefits of it, hoping governments everywhere will ignore the consequences of it.
Euan is not denying human-induced climate change. He and I are saying that we are so near peak fossil fuels that nothing we could possibly do would slow emissions faster than declining resources will force on us. If you have not done so, check out Dave Rutledge's analysis (professor at CalTech). The bottom line is about slide 50. His point is that there is only 1.3 tboe of coal left (compared to the widely used 1.2 tboe for oil).
Once peak fossil fuels hits (Euan thinks by 2020), people will be so traumatized by having to do with so much less, that there is no way that they will agree to do without even more. Even if we slow it down and burn it later, this will have very little impact over the long term.
The bad news is that there is little we can do. The good news is that the IPCC have used 12-18 tboe for coal when Hubbert Linearization says there is only 1.3 left so the worst case is only 450 ppm, even if we do nothing.
I agree. Oil and gas are going to peak and head down sooner and faster than we could ever muster the political will to hold them down. There is just no way that we will leave any of them in the ground, except the low grade stuff. With coal peaking by 2025, we have some chance to leave some of it in the ground. But Rutledge estimates there is only 1.3 Tboe of recoverable coal left, much less than the 12-18 Tboe that the IPCC uses in their models. The short to mid term prospects for climate change are discouraging but there is almost nothing we can do about that. FF peaking will do much more than we could ever hope to just to mitigate climate change. And Rutledge says the worst that can happen is 450 ppm, assuming we burn up all that is left.
Two points:
1) What about Ultra capacitors (EEStor, etc.)? The promises made would negate the Lithium issue.
2) Much of the transport currently employed is unnecessary. Commuting to work being prime amongst them for most people. If cities reduce car ownership significantly, since people don't need them for their everyday lives, what might telecommuting and more enlightened planning achieve?
I believe that EEstor is not going to work. I saw a blog posting by a physicist who had previously deep experience with barium titanate capacitors.
The essential problem is that it appears they made a giant, simple mistake at the outset.
The error is that they apparently took E=1/2 C*V^2 from freshman electromagnetics, plugged in some numbers and came up with a rocking energy density, and then got the VC funding.
VC funders all have some decent engineering background so it looked reasonable: "ultracapacitors are a materials engineering problem, and we're going to solve it with hard core chemistry and nanoparticle processing". Which they might do.
The problem is that 1/2 C*V^2 is wrong. In the high voltage region there is very strong dielectric saturation due to the underlying physics: you have to integrate instead (0..V_max) and the effective dielectric K is a *decreasing* function of voltage.
Sure, the zero-volts K is going to be huge. But energy density is going to be orders of magnitude less than the dream, which means, unsuitable for transportation.
Notice how all PR releases from them have never once given the actual figure that matters: experimentally *measured* energy density, not implied.
It seemed like a great dream, but like many other things, you can't wish around the laws of physics.
PS: This is why I think we need strong fission build-up now. Because we can't wish around the laws of physics, either in climate or energy, and hope that undefined things with enormous thermodynamic barriers are going to help, versus something with clear large scale capability and mature engineering. Once we've retired every single coal plant on the planet and made coal mining a Crime Against Humanity punishable by international prosecution and life imprisonment, then we can seriously consider retiring the annoyingly tricky and complex fission plants with more pleasant technologies.
DALLAS, TX, January 9th, 2008 -- Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] has signed an exclusive international rights agreement to integrate and market Electrical Energy Storage Units (EESU) from EEStor, Inc., for military and homeland security applications. Specific terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/news/press_releases/2008/010908_LockheedMa...
Well, I think EEstor could make some pretty good ultracapacitors.
But they'll be in the same range as other ultracapacitors.
I don't think they are going to be able to do what people really wanted: better energy density than Lithium-ion batteries with far greater current capacity and longevity.
Also from the physics text: 50% of the energy in the charged capacitor is in E field in the dielectric, the other 50% is mechanical energy due to the compression of dielectric by the field - like winding up a spring. This piezoelectric effect has been the main application of barium titanate up to now, and the limits are well known. If you overdrive the transducer it shatters. Stress is greatest at the edges, so transducers are built as cylinders or spheres to avoid this, then sometimes wrapped in pre-stressed carbon fiber to contain the force. It will be interesting to see how Eestor solves the problem.
Hi mbkennel,
I'm trying to do energy storage research at the University of Oklahoma along the lines of silicon or carbon nanotube/nanowire based capacitors and I was interested if you could send me the blog and e-mail of that physicist. Perhaps he be interested in working with me? Thanks
my email is A.Crews888@ou.edu
I'm sorry, it was an anonymous blog posting on somebody else's blog about EEstor.
So the name of the person is still unknown.
read the comment by Emosson
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/18330/
http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2007/09/eestor-update.html
"dielectric saturation" "barium titanate" EEstor might start for a google search.
I think the main problem is that, even at theoretical limits, a capacitor does not store more than a smallish fraction of the energy of a battery. I realize that ultracapacitors blur the lines somewhat, but in a battery you are completely removing electrons from one side of the reaction and storing them on the other. Lots of electrons are involved -- like Avogadro's number of them. Though the potential is only a few volts, the battery can keep pushing electrons through the circuit for quite a while.
In a capacitor, OTOH, the electrons are not moved about in bulk quantities, but remain attached to their parent atoms. The capacitor's potential drops off quite rapidly as it discharges.
It's like the difference between pumped storage and a wind-up spring. The spring can release its energy very quickly but doesn't really store much when fully wound-up.
As for the "lithium issue", there are lots of other choices in battery chemistry. It's just that lithium (being right next to helium) gives the very highest energy-to-weight ratio. Sodium has a somewhat similar chemistry, and is quite common. And not all that heavy, really, unless you're trying to launch it into space.
Thank you once again for another very stimulating and thought provoking article - this kind of approach makes us examine our ideas for feasibility, and certainly helped clarify issues in the first article in this series on energy in 2050.
A couple of comments on your thesis here:
I also was a bit concerned about lithium availability, although over a shorter time horizon as I felt that adequate alternatives were available anyway over the longer term , but that the present emphasis by car manufacturers on lithium was perhaps ill-advised and that in the even of a oil shortage in the next few years it would not be feasible to switch a substantial proportion of the developed world's car fleet to plug-ins in short order due to lithium's price and availability - early days for lithium from the sea.
IOW I was concerned with a short-term shortage.
Discussion set my mind at rest, as it appears that the main reason why no more resources have been found is that no-one was looking very hard, and supplies should be fine for several years production at 30million vehicles a year or so.
In the longer term the source you quote for 'Trouble with Lithium' further sets our minds at rest, as as he indicates supplies of nickel for NiMiH batteries or Sodium Nickel Chloride batteries are of another order of magnitude to Lithium.
Sodium iron chloride or zinc would move us to a resource base which is for these purposes essentially unlimited.
It is possible with zinc to use a solar tower or a nuclear power station to turn zinc oxide into zinc, which could then be fed as slurry to cars, which would oxidise it and the slurry would be pumped out on refill and sent around again to be re-formed.
This would mean we could use something very similar to present filling stations.
In short there is no way we should be unable to run the 4 billion cars you hypothesise by 2050.
4 Billion in 2050? If we make it over the hump in good order. I'm more interested in the next decade. How many new car owners will be created in the 1 billion strong India due to the Nano just as we're going into the global oil crunch? It can't be a good thing for the near term to suddenly make a car affordable to hundreds of millions for the first time.
Surely the answer to that one is simple: if oil availability declines as forecast, then its price will rise sharply. India's emergent middle class will then decide to spend their rupees on cable-TV rather than the Nano.
Trust me: if oil prices continue to rise, then there will not be a billion Nanos sold.
That car looks like a real P.O.S.. I know, that's not the point, just sayin'...
I don't worry about that many EVs on the road, the status quo is going to fight them every step of the way.
'Four billion cars'
I'm sorry, but it would surprise me if the world currently has four billion bicycles.
And yes, there are a number of reasons why the number of bicycles would be less - whether it be geography (Winnipeg is not a real bicycle friendly city in January, and anywhere with enough hilly terrain will be a challenge) or practicality (a motorized vehicle can travel farther, and carry more, in a wider range of conditions).
But consider that in a city with one million bicycles, for example in China, how much physical space will be required for the vehicle alone. Assuming 5 m2 (roughly the size of the Nano), and 100,000 bicycles being exchanged for 100,000 cars, the city will need to find 500,000 m2 within its boundaries to merely park the cars when not being driven. Yes, parking garages can help, but generally, an auto needs more than one parking space - but realistically, this means that said city needs to find 1 free square km of space, which no one is currently using, merely if 10% of the population no longer rides a bicycle. Your case suggests that easily 30%-50% of this city will be driving in 2050 - however, where that city is supposed to find several unused square kilometers is left unanswered.
After all, there is a reason why such reasonably prosperous areas as Singapore, Hong Kong, or New York do not have higher car ownership rates, and it has nothing to do with the cost of energy or automotive technology.
I don't honestly think that if 300,000,000 million Chinese can afford to own an auto, that the Chinese will be able so easily find 3000 square kilometers of currently unused land in their urban areas.
Well, China has 137 people per sq. km, which is half the level of the UK, a third of the level of South Korea, and a fifth of the level of Taiwan. Space is not the problem.
Lack of oil, on the other hand, might well be.
China's figures are misleading, it does have a population density of 137 per sq. km. However, 2/3 of the land mass in the country is some of the most inhospitable places on the planet, either the Gobi Desert, or the 17,000 ft Plateau in the west of the country.
In usuable terms, its more like 500 people per sq. km. That makes it among the highest in the world.
people can't live on 17,000 ft. mountains, or in 3 inch/year rainfall zones. Its just not happening. 4 billion cars is a pipe dream, we'll be lucky to have 4 billion people to drive 400 million vehicles (cars+ships+planes+trains). World's changing mighty fast, lets not forget the brutal reality of nature.
You illustrate the fundamental problem of automobile transportation:
The MORE people you have, the WORSE it gets!
This is the opposite of trains:
The MORE people you have, the BETTER it gets!
When there are more train passengers, then you can run more trains per hour. This makes the train more and more convenient. Most train systems in Asia run 20+ trains per hour per track (one direction) for the busiest hours. Also, the major cost of a train is capex for the track and stations, plus station employees. This is spread over more people, so the per-passenger costs get cheaper and cheaper. Then, as more and more people use the train, it becomes economical to include more and more stations/areas within the train network. As it gets bigger, the train network becomes more and more useful, because it can be ridden to more and more destinations.
Which is better for China? China has lots of people. Therefore the system that gets WORSE AND WORSE when there are MORE AND MORE people using it is better, right? I don't think so.
This also helps describe why Amtrak can't quite get off the ground. It lacks critical mass.
You make a good point about space. How much space is taken by a train system? The track itself is about the width of a two-lane road. The station takes almost no space, and can even be put underground. When a city no longer has gigantic roadways and parking lot deserts to accommodate cars, not to mention the useless greenery that architects then add to make the roadways/parking lots a little more tolerable, it becomes very walkable.
You illustrate the fundamental problem of automobile transportation:
The MORE people you have, the WORSE it gets!
This is the opposite of trains:
The MORE people you have, the BETTER it gets!
Much better said than I managed to do !
Alan
PS: We have a real time experiment in France. Last fall, they announced the goal of building 1,500 km of new tram lines in a decade. My reading of French (English language press never picked up on the story per Google) was that 1,500 km of trams would be started 2008 to 2017 and all finished by 2020. Cost 17 billion euros from the national gov't and 4 billion euros from local sources.
An excellent set of points. And don't forget that trains can be electrified without the need for mining vast amount of lithium.
And you miss the fundamental problem with trains - given enough income, people will choose to drive instead (note car ownership level in every European country, which all began the 20th century with excellent train networks). I am completely in favor of public transport wherever there is enough population density to make it viable. However, the only way everyone is going to choose to take the train/bus is if they are too poor to afford a car.
However, the only way everyone is going to choose to take the train/bus is if they are too poor to afford a car.
A fundamental and profound error.
I was just looking up the latest commuting statistics for Washington DC.
The number of those commuting via public transit in 2006 was 10% more than those driving single occupancy cars.
http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ADPTable?_bm=y&-qr_name=ACS_2006_ES...
The reason that I track DC is that is was a typical American non-Urban Rail city in 1970. Per memory, only a few % took the bus, and that % was dropping (4% in Metro area). It was completely transformed by building a good (it could be better, see extension to Tysons Corner & Dulles and 14 other worthwhile Urban Rail projects Ed Tennyson & I have identified#).
Note also the increasing % walking to work and other (mainly bicycling I assume).
Washington DC could not support the existing job density (with the advantages that come with that) without DC Metro.
# The first year (no TOD effects) ridership of the two new subway lines plus light rail, streetcars & commuter rail would be, per Ed, 80% of current public transit ridership, with much of it being outside DC proper. With expanded TOD, even more.
Alan
"The number of those commuting via public transit in 2006 was 10% more than those driving single occupancy cars."
So what proportion of the population of DC don't own a car?
I have been DC modal share for several years. Single occupancy car is down % wise, and public transit, walking and other have been increasing with carpooling increasing slightly.
I do not think that auto ownership has been decreasing due to increasing poverty in DC. If anything, gentrification is going hand in hand with increased transit ridership.
I will have to look up data.
I own a car (my infamous white 1982 M-B 240D). I have driven it twice in the last 3 weeks, about 9 VMT. My goal for 2008 is <60 gallons of diesel (barring evacuation).
Alan
To answer my own question, the Wiki entry for DC says the population density for DC would be 9000 persons/square mile. The NHTS data I showed above:
suggests such a city would have about 28% of households with no car. Ie 72% of households with a car. I think this is a fine example which supports my point - given enough wealth, car ownership amongst the population will be quite high even if they have access to a good mass transit system. Do you have an example, or different data, that supports your point?
The actual data is 36% of households w/o a car.
90,287 out of 250,456 households in 2006.
http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ADPTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=31200US47900...
More later (You tend to post on the WORST possible days ! :-(
Alan
PS: I would not characterize the DC public transit as "good" (except on the very poor scale of the USA), but as "adequate". Build 15 more Urban Rail projects that were justified at low oil prices and I would them call it "good".
Thanks for the data. So I contend this supports my point - give reasonably well-off people a mass transit system, and a lot of them will still own a car if they can. (This should be a no-brainer - we ran the experiment in every western European country, and they all ended up with a bunch of cars).
The utility of a car declines as transit quality improves. So does VMT.
A separate gov't incentive (higher annual tag prices, parking fees, etc.) can increase the cost to exceed the utility, with significant social benefits.
I see some significance in the 8% delta between predicted and actual.
It is not as if DC has more than an adequate, i.e. not a good, transit system.
Off for sure now !
Alan
The DC metro isn't that convenient. It's expensive and has so few stops spread over such a vast area that it's next to impossible to get to one's destination without a car at one end or the other. Also, it's a star topology with no outer ring, so a trip to the next town over might involve an hour's travel downtown and then back out again. Unless it's rush hour we go downtown by car -- it takes ten minutes as opposed to forty-five.
Contrast that to Paris, where you can get to within three blocks of anywhere on the metro.
Stuart;
Did this experiment recognize the inherent condition that these well-off people were making this choice to own cars during oil's upslope?
Would you really contend that people will continue to insist on car ownership if it becomes generally known that Liquid Transp Fuels are 'permanently flat or sagging', and all-too likely to continue that way? That is, of course, putting the Cart before the ICE, as it were, and considering the behavior of an oil-thinned economy once it is finally known.. but for this subject today, isn't it sensible to anticipate that situation and the likely changes in priorities that might be right around the corner?
As with the premise of the main post, predicated on a continual population rise.. it pretty much makes the argument implausible to me right out of the gate. I have to expect population to start tracking our energy curve, and similarly, I can't prove that people's preferences for car ownership WANTS TO change, but I can't see how the auto-industry, road infrastructure and gas and service station availability, to name a few Canaries.. won't be getting the rugs pulled out from under them in the years following the peak, so that the decision will be supply-driven easily as much as from demand. A sinking tide, if you will.
I think car ownership will increasingly become an unsupportable luxury, as much as that is not something people would dream of 'voting for' today. I'm not getting rid of my car.. not til I simply have to.. but then, of course.. I will. (As it is, I use it very little, and look for ways to eliminate more trips by walking and biking.. but it's a great device)
Bob
But ownership and usage are two very different things.
An example which runs contrary to your theory is my brother.
After working for several years close to the financial heart of London, and after making some lucky 'bets' on the stock market, he and his wife live virtually mortgage free in a top-floor apartment, not 2 blocks from Tower Bridge in London (North bank). Their combined wages are in the top 5% in the UK, so they are what you would call 'wealthy'.
Indeed, they do own a car - a 1996 Ford Fiesta.
This poor vehicle has spent the vast majority of it's life locked up in the ground-floor garage of his apartment block. It very rarely sees the light of day, as my brother and his wife travel virtually everywhere by public transport. He has told me that on several occasions he has had to recharge the battery after long periods of inactivity.
Just because people are wealthy, does not mean that they shun the public transport system.
Indeed, in large cities like London and Edinburgh (where I spent 6 years living car-free), traveling by car can be a slow, frustrating and expensive (parking fees and tickets) venture.
I believe that if you provide a good public transport system (as Melbourne has done over the past few years), then people from all walks of life will patronise it, regardless of how many cars they own.
Actually, I would say another metric is more important (and more indicative);
DC % of non-car commuters = 47.95%
Carfree database at BikesAtWork.Com
2006 data was even better.
If one subtracts the work-at-homes, the non-car commuters in 2006 were even better, 56.5% (Note other includes taxis as well as bikes, scooters, motorcycles, roller blades, ferry, ... so 56/5% is a SLIGHT overstatement).
If work-at-homes are called non-car commuters, then the 2006 data is 58.3% non-car in DC.
Alan
'However, the only way everyone is going to choose to take the train/bus is if they are too poor to afford a car.'
Interestingly, I know several people who take the train to their workplace because it they find it both cheaper and faster - that is, as a rational decision. Admittedly, these are people only earning something like 70,000-100,000 euros a year as computer programmers or otherwise involved in the insurance, banking, or telecommunications industry.
Which makes them too poor to afford to drive an hour each way to work, I guess.
I find the switch between VMT and car ownership to be interesting - I know couples that own a car, but who never drive it to work, as both use the train. The train being faster and cheaper, which seems to be a concept that people who feel the automobile is paramount have a hard time understanding. Or as a certain hippie pointed out, we construct our social reality - at least in Germany, no one considers using public transportation to be somehow inferior, used only by those who can't own a car. Maybe that is because it is common to hear on the traffic reports something along the lines of 'all parking spaces are filled at event X (concerts, fairs, soccer games, etc.)- please use public transport.'
In the Karlsruhe region, the number of passengers has been steadily rising over more than a decade as more people choose an alternative to the automobile. An alternative which in part is encouraged by both regional governments and employers - after all, ever larger parking lots are a cost for an employer. And many citizens hate the noice and smell of the current volume of traffic, which they are trying to beat back - with fair success. However, I'm equally certain that car ownership has not declined.
But even a Porsche owner is likely to bicycle more than occasionally, and would be just as inclined to sit in the ICE to travel for business as drive for hours - after all, a Porsche is no faster in a traffic jam than a truck. And being late is considered poor form, Porsche or no Porsche. Not that the Bahn is perfect - it is merely beyond your control, and thus understandable.
"This also helps describe why Amtrak can't quite get off the ground. It lacks critical mass."
amtrak ridership is up for the past 5 or so years.
You keep saying that but its just not true
http://www.bts.gov/publications/white_house_economic_statistics_briefing...
There was a small increase in 2000 when the high speed line was opened on the NE Coridor. Since then, for the past 8 years ridership has not increased at all.
Amtrak ridership increases
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2006-11-28-amtrak-ridership_x.htm
From your article
A 1% rise over 1 year. Looks to me like that falls into the statisitcal noise catagory. As you can clearly see from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics ridership has been more or less flat for the past 8 years.
Let me say it again, stop repeating that Amtrak ridership has risen over the past five years. Its just not true.
http://blogs.thenewstribune.com/business/2007/10/30/amtrak_ridership_up_...
I can't even begin to respond to that. Its an unsourced number from a blog.
Let me again quote you the numbers from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics
http://www.bts.gov/publications/white_house_economic_statistics_briefing...
2006 24,392,017
2005 25,374,503
2004 24,972,470
2003 24,028,045
So please explain to me, where are these increases?!? Do you have any actual statistics?
Ah, this would explain why Europeans don't own cars, since they were unable to fit them into their pre-existing cities.
If you can get by without a car on a daily basis and only need one occasionally to get to someplace not well served by transit (or maybe need to haul something), then rental cars are the way to go. Most European cities have rental car agencies conveniently located downtown.
Having car rentals be widespead and conveniently available is going to be at least as important as mass transit in getting people out of their cars.
People are not going to get out of the cars unless you pry their cold dead fingers from the wheel. That's the point here. You aren't going to change that. If you give them really great mass transit and pack them in tight enough, you might get them down somewhere around 400/1000. Anything much less than that is complete speculation with no worked examples.
"People are not going to get out of the cars unless you pry their cold dead fingers from the wheel."
amtrak rider ship is up and people are getting their cars repoed like crazy. same for their homes. so?
I corrected you above. Please stop repeating this.
From Foreclosure Signs to Auto Repo Lots
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/17/AR200802...
Are you an idiot? I corrected your Amtrak ridership claim, not foreclosures.
You did not correct anything and I was responding to someone's car comment.
Annual Amtrak Ridership Sets All-Time Record; Fifth Straight Year of Increases
From the article
FY 2005 24,306,965
FY 2004 25,030,000
So 2004 was greater than 2005. How in the world is this 5 straight years of growth?
Do you know what I think is going on here? Amtrak is playing loose with the statistics, and representing statitical noise as actuall "growth".
The reality is Amtrak ridership has been flat for the last 8 years (minus some noise in the numbers).
you didn't put that last part in. I won't judge. I don't know what kind of statistical noise you're talking about.
isn't the common doomer view that people won't get out of their cars? well rider ship is increasing in the last 5 years there is no doubt about that. why 8 years ago doesn't matter is because that was before gas prices started their long climb.
"I don't know what kind of statistical noise you're talking about."
You don't understand a 1% rise in ridership is just statistical noise?
Is it possible that such a move may yet occur? Sure. The 06-07 ridership numbers showed a small increase. Only time will tell if this is the start of a larger trend.
Not that you have any credibility, but you only do yourself a disservice by continuing to claim that there has been any sort of meaninful move to rail over the last 5 years when the statistics from the US DOT show otherwise.
US population is increasing at close to 1% annually. Any change in absolute numnbers of Amtrak ridership less than or equal to the population growth rate means that the overall percentage of people taking Amtrak has not changed or even declined. i.e if in a body of 400 people you have 100 taking Amtrak and 300 taking cars, then increase the body to 404 (1% increase in population) then the next period of measurement you see 101 taking Amtrak and 303 taking cars, you have exactly the same situation as you have always had, at least on a percentage basis.
Amtrak ridership must rise faster than the rate of population growth to be meaningful as an indicator of willingness to change transportation habits. John15 has not demonstrated that such a rise is occurring.
You obviously don't understand what statistical noise is.
You are conflating two scenarios:
1. The null hypothesis, i.e. that the change was due to random fluctuation
2. The increase ridership hypothesis, that due to various factors, ridership increased
You are assuming that because the change was small, 1%, that "obviously" the change was due to the null hypothesis. You have absolutely no way of proving that, just as much as I have no way of proving that it is due to the competing hypothesis (though I could possibly gain evidence if so inclined by doing various statistical tests to assess the probability of the null hypothesis).
The least you could do, if you insist on repeating this, is to provide some evidence, such as a rudimentary t-test, to show that the null hypothesis can't be ruled out.
Until then, your posting resembles statistical noise.
The thing is, though, the cost and hassle DOES get to be too much for some people, and they DO elect to not own a car. For people living in dense cities, owning a car is quite a pain. Parking is at a premium and quite expensive. Insurance and taxes are expensive. Fuel and service are often not very conveniently located. Everything is all very expensive, and often more trouble than it is worth. Especially if your life situation makes it quite feasible to get by without a car on a daily basis, and if rental cars are available for those few times when you do need a car, then it is quite reasonable to question: why bother with the things? One can save a lot of money and a lot of bother by just not having them. There ARE people that arrive at just such a conclusion; as the costs of owning and driving a car increase, one might expect that their numbers increase.
As I have emphasized in other posts here, there is a difference between doing without OWNING a car and doing without ever DRIVING one. For the person that only needs to drive a car a few times a year, rentals offer a very reasonable and economical alternative to all the expense and bother of owning one year around. I would also venture to guess that the calculus might change for quite a few people were car rentals to be more convenient for them.
Look. I don't give a crap about what activists think people should do if only they were better people. I care about what statistics show that generally imperfect people actually do under various circumstances. So I pick the best case known to me (Holland) and basically extrapolate that, which is how I come out somewhere in the 4b range. If the developing countries proves to do a poorer job at promoting alternatives to the car than Holland, then car ownership would tend to go higher if resource constraints didn't intervene.
Stuart, I understand your frustration with activist perspectives.
Before assuming cars are the answer, however, I would want to explore this first:
Do you think car desires are inevitable because they tap into something basic about humans?
Or are cars so desirable because a huge industry and marketing system exists to build and promote them?
If we understand what basic needs are met by cars and could assess if there are alternative ways to meet those needs that are less resource intensive, would that be interesting to explore?
Or, is it too late to change the built environment and we are locked into cars because of the previous investment in infrastructure in many places (but does that imply it must be so elsewhere)?
IMO, the basic human desires at issue are desire for mobility, and desire to prominently display social status.
It's true that there's a huge amount of marketing effort that goes into trying to channel this, but marketing really doesn't work unless it taps into some desire people already have (I've worked for a number of product companies and we always spend a sizeable fraction of time messing around trying to figure out what customers want - most new consumer products fail because people don't want whatever it is and no amount of advertising is going to tell them different.
"Desire for mobility." That's it right there. Convenvience of knowing it's handy when one needs it to go whenever one wants to break free from the confines of the home base. The part I can't stand about public transit is 1. Waiting 2. Super-bright lighting 3. Obnoxious riders 4. Lack of flexibility to come and go as I please.
I worry about Peak Oil from the standpoint of wondering if the day will come when I have to give up my wheels.
Try a bike.
Great freedom.
Great mobility.
People travel across the globe with them.
Minimal expense.
No supporting oil oligarchs, oil executives, etc.
I've driven a lot in my time, and still do when necessary, but biking is way more fun and freedom-giving.
Stuart:
You are a fine man and are making great contributions to this website. But with all due respect, you and I just have some basic differences in assumptions & worldviews.
I started my working life in the late 1970s, and saw with my own eyes people who used to drive to work taking mass transit (buses, there was no light rail there) and carpooling. Yes, they still HAD cars, but they were not USING their cars (for their commutes, at least) - they were left parked at home. This was all driven by the fact that their wages were stagnant while double-digit inflation was driving up the cost of everything, motor fuel most of all. They might not have liked it, but they did what they had to do. People DO respond to changing circumstances, and they DO adjust their behavior when they have good reason to do so. This is part of the reason why I have a little more scepticism about some aspects of modeling than you apparently do. I apparently have a greater appreciation for the ability and propensity of people to change instead of to just continue to operate as they have in the past, as if they were on "automatic pilot".
Secondly, I am more inclined to view peak oil (really peak non-renewable resources, more or less) and the awareness that we are reaching irreversible (within a scale of centuries) tipping points in GCC as driving a fundamental and far reaching paradigm shift in how we view the world, how our economy works, and how our society operates. I'm sure you are familiar with Kuhn and know that paradigm shifts do happen; surely we have good reason to believe that we are very likely seeing one happen before our eyes. Given the likelihood of a paradigm shift, I tend to be especially skeptical about extrapolations of the past into the future. I think it more reasonable to think that people are going to be doing some things differently in the future because they are going to HAVE to be doing things differently. I have no doubt that there is going to be a lot of denial and resistance along the way. Sooner or later, however, people are going to have to start adjusting to new realities, whether they want to or not.
Thirdly, I tend to have a personal philosophical bias toward multiple choice and diversity rather than centralization and "one size fits all". I appreciate that human societies, true free market (not corporatist) economies, and natural ecologies are all naturally and remarkably diverse, and that the greater the extent of the diversity, the more healthy the system generally tends to be. Thus, when considering our energy future I tend to think that developing a wide mix of alternatives will serve us better than will putting all of our eggs in a single basket. I also suspect that the mix will differ in each locality, depending upon local circumstances. Similarly, as I have stated elsewhere on this thread, I think that a mix of transport options will serve societies better than an exclusive reliance on one single transport option; this holds true whether that single option is the motor car or anything else. I also think that the mix will vary depending upon circumstances. I have no doubt that there may well be four billion households that would like to have at least the level of personal mobility that a small NEV offers. That is not the same thing as saying that they would want motor cars to be the only transport option available to them, or that they would necessarilly elect to use their motor cars exclusively under all circumstances, regardless of the other options available or their relative costs. Different modes of transport occupy different "niches" because they are adapted to those specific niches better than other modes. This is an ecological approach toward looking at transport, and I think it has a lot to say for itself.
Finally, while I am not a "dieoff doomer", I hold a considerably more pessimistic view of the future than you apparently do. I operate under the assumption that the peaking and depletion of FF and all non-renewable resources inevitably means that humankind MUST eventually transform itself into a sustainable economy based entirely upon the carrying capacity of the earth's available renewable resources. This is the end to which the aforementioned paradigm shift is taking us. It might take us a century or more to get to that state, and I have no doubt that many are going to be swimming against the tide, being carried kicking and screaming into the future. It will be a powerful, irresistable force, however, and cannot be stopped or changed. Better to make our peace with the inevitable and adjust ourselves to it sooner rather than later.
What this means is that I suspect that the average per capita GDP that can be sustainably supported globally in the long term will have to be considerably lower than the $28,000 figure that you are working with in your article. No one knows for certain what the number must be, and we could debate it a length. However, given that the world economy is presently consuming resources at an unsustainable rate, this would suggest that we will need to be ending up by the start of the 22nd century at something considerably less than the present ~$11,000; by mid-century, we will already need to be well on the way toward that lower figure. There will be room for some variation around that average, of course. However, I see little reason to think that countries at the top of the heap, like the USA, can possibly hope to end up any better than with a soft landing to something like 1/4 of our present per capita GDP (i.e., to around something like maybe $10,000 or so). We could, of course, end up a lot worse, as many other countries that are less well endowed with natural and human resources undoubtedly will. In my own thinking I am assuming a global average of $5,000, with that $10,000 being the upper bound, but those are only working assumptions. (Some might suggest that a massive die off (which neither of us wants) might make it possible to leave each person with a bigger slice of the pie, there being fewer left to divide it. However, I doubt that things will work out that way. If we can't avoid a massive, catastrophic dieoff, then the inevitable damage to the infrastructure and the environment will be so great that the carrying capacity will be permanently reduced as well; fewer people, but also a smaller pie.)
Thus, well before 2050 -- and probably within the next decade or two -- human society is going to be forced to come to grips with the reality that we are going to have to operate within a permanently limited resource base, and to get serious about adjusting ourselves to it. As I have argued above, if we are smart and lucky, we just might be able to have societies where there are still some NEVs available to take some people on some short trips, and there may be a mix of other transport options to provide some mobility to most people. Because mobility inherently requires the expenditure of energy, however, and because the supply of energy is going to be at a premium, the whole notion of human mobility is going to have to be re-examined and re-prioritized. In an energy-scarce society, people will only be moving about to the extent that they truly need to do so; wasteful movements will be prohibitively expensive, and thus unaffordable, and thus won't happen, and thus will not need to be accomodated by transport systems. People may not like it, but they will do what they need to do. This paradigm and set of assumptions thus leads me to radically different conclusions than yours, and leads me to very much doubt that there will exist anything close to a 4 billion car (of any size or type) future.
I agree with most of your viewpoint, in contrast to Stuart's world view.
However, I don't think that mobility will have to be as constrained as you think.
Just two examples, electric rail gets the equivalent of hundreds of MPG per passenger (if not more).
My electric bicycle (which is set up to carry up to 200 lbs of groceries, kids, etc http://alifelikewater.org/Bikes/bikes.html) gets between 500 and 1000 mpg equivalent, depending on the assumptions made about equivalency/conversion of gasoline to electricity. That is between 20 and 50 times more efficient that the current US fleet average, and can easily be run by a minimal solar source (I have enough solar panels to charge the bike, it requires only 250 watt hours per day, or 1/4 of my 1,000 watt solar system for 1 hour of sunlight).
So there are already other options. It is just a matter of people deciding to use them.
Have you ever lived in a city with a great mass transit system Stuart?
Reasonable ones - grew up near Liverpool, worked in London for a while. Both of those are cities were it's quite feasible to do everything by public transit. Now live in SF, which is not as good, though better than most US cities.
I do. Can I answer for him?
I live in Tokyo, a fantastic rail system. I can also see that just about every household has at least one car. And while most daily commutes are done by rail, those cars still get driven a heck of a lot.
I can't imagine a better scenario for low car ownership than Tokyo. Dense, large population, extensive rail/bus system, expensive gas, sky high insurance and parking costs etc etc.
Yet its very much a car culture here. If you can't convince the Japanese to give up their cars then perhaps you'll never be able to convince anyone anywhere.
Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mazda, Suzuki, Isuzu, Mitsubishi - I think I am starting to recognize a pattern why even in Tokyo, many Japanese feel having a car is necessary.
BMW, Porsche, Volkswagon, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Daimler - Yeah, I'm starting to see a pattern here.
Absolutely - which is why Karlsruhe is so interesting. Stuttgart and Mannheim, the other two major cities in Baden-Württemberg (along with other cities near Karlsruhe, such as Gaggenau, Wörth, and Rastatt), are either thoroughly or heavily dependent on automobile (Stuttgart region/Rastatt), truck (Wörth/Gaggenau), or bus (Mannheim) production.
And yet, surprisingly, the city with by far the most innovative and effective transit system in this Bundesland has no serious connection to the automobile industry. A Bundesland that is heavily dependent on automobile production for much of its economy, a fact patently obvious to everyone here. A Bundesland where the interests of the automobile industry remain consistently well represented at all levels of government - except in Karlsruhe, a city which has never had any real connection to that industry. (And for those who believe that the Greens are responsible for any and all anti-auto policies - Karlsruhe's city politics are dominated by the same CDU that runs most of this Bundesland.)
The fact that Germany continues to actually have a functioning transit system is not because of the auto industry, it is spite of it. And provides a bit of insight into the idea of a socially constructed reality.
One of the most absurd things I saw in my first year living in Germany was the construction of a 'demonstration' project in Mannheim showing how a bus could flexibly replace a street car. The street car stop in the middle of a street was reworked so that a bus could pull into it, and pick-up/discharge passengers. Of course, the bus sat in slow moving traffic before and after using the stop, but it was a 300,000 DM project, paid for with taxpayer money, which Mercedes just coincidentally happened to be involved in, having a bus factory in the same city.
But as Germans tend to be obstinately pragmatic, the results were so idiotic that even Mercedes couldn't use such a demonstration to grow support for the idea that a bus sitting in traffic is an improvement over a train running on the same open track that had been in place for decades, which delivered its passengers more quickly than a bus possibly could, especially when taking into account the fact that the train carries 2 to 3 times the number of passengers. Which just might lead one to the conclusion that increasing bus sales wasn't really the point, if just 10 out of 100 hundred former street car users decided to buy a car, since it would be an improvement over a miserably slow and crowded bus trip.
Not that Mercedes & Co. have given up trying to convince everyone that cars are the best way to travel, it is just even the most status conscious manager can see the advantages of sitting 1st class in an ICE without wasting hours driving. As a matter of fact, it is the status conscious managers that one tends to see doing just that - otherwise, they would be in 2nd class.
Japanese logged 850B passenger-kilometres in 2005. On a population of 127M, that's 4,200 passenger miles per person per year. At an occupancy rate of 1.6 passengers per vehicle (which is the rate for the US and UK), that's 2,600 vehicle miles per person per year.
By contrast, the UK logs 500B vehicle-kilometres per year. On a population of 60M, that's 5,200 vehicle miles per person per year, or almost exactly twice as many as Japan.
There's likely to be a number of factors creating that difference, of course, but it seems likely that Japan's fantastic rail system plays a very substantial role.
People are not going to get out of the cars unless you pry their cold dead fingers from the wheel.
That is the bitter truth. Personally, I hate cars, and I much prefer life without one. But most people don't feel that way, and it's better to be realistic and face up to that.
I live in Osaka, which has a superb mass transit system. Most people I know don't have a car, and here you really don't need one. Nevertheless, the roads are absolutely clogged with cars at all hours of the day.
Most people I know don't have a car, and here you really don't need one. Nevertheless, the roads are absolutely clogged with cars at all hours of the day.
This implies that they built just barely enough roads for those people that did have cars. If they built more, more cars would be bought.
Severely limit car infrastructure and provide excellent public transportation is the best strategy.
Alan
What if the public transportation system is seriously over capacity?
BTW, they are building more roads. Lots of big expensive highways all over Japan. They aren't building any more rail.
Don't get me wrong, Alan. Regarding cars, I agree 100% with you, and even Jim Kunstler. I love the car-free life in the dense urban environment. But that's just my personal preference.
The raw fact is that people love cars. And it's not just about transportation. Cars are status objects, and part of human mating rituals.
Yes that is true. But cars are starting to lose their appeal......especially young people (according to newspaper polls) (here) say they won't buy them (and sales of cars are dropping every year here (in Japan) since 1992. Toyota and Honda et al say they are VERY CONCERNED. (Good--I personally detest the things). By the way, noticed a few local huge used car dealerships out of business recently as gasoline hit 150 yen/liter. acres of abandoned cement doesn't look as nice as a meadow!!!
"Severely limit car infrastructure ". Exactly. If you (de-jure or de-facto) outlaw the cars, people won't use them. Otherwise, they will. And guess how popular you'll be for proposing to outlaw them.
Then outlaw trucks and semis.
Long haul freight goes back to rail and everybody's happy.
The guy that does that has my vote.
It is far easier never to build more streets. highways and parking spaces than it is to take them away. Even within the USA, a halt to further road building and investing those funds in Urban Rail is a preferred option. And one can slowly take away existing auto infrastructure by reducing maintenance.
From a holistic perspective, developing nations would be very well advised to NOT invest limited infrastructure funds in distorting the urban form for the automobile. Large up front costs and large continuing costs, many paid for by society at large. And a large oil import bill !
Anyway, out the door to catch George French and his band :-)
Alan
Also the French commonly take lane km from streets and give them to new trams (often times growing grass between the rails).
Just back from some excellent jazz :-)
Alan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_per_capita
You must live in an expat bubble. Japan ranks 11th in world wide car ownership per capita at 543. The UK is 20th at 426.
But I agree with the second half of your comment. Yes the roads are clogged and no, they don't need the cars for the most part. Like Stuart said, if people can afford a car, they inevitably have one.
Actually, you should look at 'Stadtmobil' in Germany - an interesting business model, where many people 'split' car ownership, in a way. That is, 'Stadtmobil' owns a number of vehicles, from Smarts to Mercedes vans, and you reserve your time to use the vehicle, which can then be left at one of their designated parking areas.
Stadtmobil actively works to reduce car ownership by increasing the use of individual vehicles. Obviously, the system is not perfect, but an increasing number of people are using it - why pay 100% of the costs for a car to sit around 95% of the time?
And Stadtmobil is a business - for example, though a normal car owner realizes no tax benefits from vehicle depreciation, Stadtmobil as a business most certainly does. Stadtmobil provides a trade-off - the lack of perfect 'convenience' in owning a vehicle compared to paying perhaps 5%-10% of the cost of owning a vehicle. With Stadtmobil, you can choose between any number of vehicles depending on your actual needs, a luxury not available to a typical car owner.
That such a system could make a few billion autos redundant is part of the constructed 'social reality' a certain hippie was referring to. We don't do things one way because that is the only way - we do them because decisions and choices were made.
This is an example of exactly the sort of multi-modality that we need. The paradox is that placing Stadtmobil stations at each mass transit node doesn't take away from mass transit ridership -- it increases it substantially. Making more cars of the Stadtmobil type available to people can actually reduce the number of people who feel they need to own a car and drive it all the time.
It would be instructive to compare downtown Amsterdam or Prague (in the case of Prague, without any gas stations at all) with a city like Berlin or Frankfurt - after all, urban 'renewal' does not always happen with a bulldozer blade. I don't think the number of cars owned in the first two cities is going to double, ever, unless something along the lines of Germany's urban renewal opportunity comes along in the future.
But you are absolutely correct that even in Western Europe, car ownership has been increasing - in part, because in Western Europe, the automotive industry remains a major part of the 'capitalist' economic system (rich/well-off people drive cars, correct?), while public transit/trains are part of the 'socialist' economy (even the poor and not well-off can travel), and in part, because not owning a car now seems so radical.
However, it is interesting to see how owning a car is not the same as using it, especially as the price of fuel keeps climbing. I find the trains to be more full now than a few years ago, especially of a certain demographic - people wearing suits.
Let's put some numbers to this.
Consider Changsha, the capital of Hunan, picked simply because I know someone from there. With a population of 6 million people, a vehicle ownership rate equivalent to the UK would result in 3.3M cars. Let's assume they currently have zero cars, so we know we're way overestimating.
It would take 16.5km^2 to park those cars. Again, let's over-estimate, and let's multiply that by 20 to take into account expanded roads and such. That would give us a requirement for 330km^2 in the city.
The city covers 12,000km^2. 330km^2 is 2.8% of that.
So, even wildly inflating the numbers, we're still at a tiny percentage of the city's area. I think perhaps you're overstating the space requirements of a car compared to the size of a city.
I think my size estimate is very, very conservative - I simply take the physical size of a Nano (4.5 m2), round it to 5 m2, and then say each vehicle requires 10 m2 of physical space. Notice I have not included the normal distance between autos in my estimate (though arguably, it is covered in the .5 m2 rounding), any extra infrastructure (gas stations, auto dealerships, the equipment yards of the machinery used to maintain the roads, etc), and any expansion of the existing street network.
As a realistic question - do you honestly think any Chinese city has ca. 3% unused land just hanging around, waiting for development? I find it hard to imagine.
No, but neither did Manhattan or Boston, and they managed.
So did London, Paris, Dublin, Berlin, Rome, ... Most of Western Europe had 80-90% fewer cars in 1960, and yet seems to have managed. To assume that China won't be able to do something similar is to assume that they have constraints nobody else had, which really needs evidence.
Leaving aside prestige projects and distortions caused by extreme disparities in wealth, I don't think the Chinese can afford to be building parking garages on the scale that the well-off Western Europe of the 1960s did - in part, because the average income in China would have to be 10-20 times more than it is today.
China is a remarkably poor country, with a huge population and several intensely industrialized regions. Most of China remains incredibly poor and undeveloped, and any government that attempts to provide suitable facilities for large numbers of automobiles will be unable to contain the social unrest from tens to hundreds of millions of people who want somewhere to live with clean water and without a dirt floor. Even now, the Chinese government has a very hard time containing social unrest based on human misery - it is a major reason for China's extreme efforts in censoring things like the Internet or cell phone text systems.
Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words:
China has built the second largest freeway system in the world:
Looks like they can still fit quite a few cars on it. The total length is as great as the freeway systems in Germany, France, and Canada together. All of it has been built in the last 20 years.
Shanghai subway lines #4, #6, #8 and #9 opened up between Dec. 29th, 2007 and Jan. 2, 2008.
Last time I looked (one must make this caveat with Chinese subway plans), Shanghai planned to build 17 subway lines (4 of the 17 are not yet under construction apparently, #1 opened about a decade ago).
By every metric (length of track, passengers, passenger-km, stations, rolling stock), Shanghai should operate the largest subway system in the world when completed.
Comparable plans for other large Chinese cities.
It is NOT all just about cars. I suspect that there will be a change in emphasis as oil (and later lithium) supplies tighten.
I noted about two years the response of local authorities (with central approval no doubt) to higher oil prices was to add km to several planned subway lines and add two new lines to the plan (15 to 17). "Reduced oil use" along with reduced pollution and increased mobility were the reasons given at the time.
More new subways and railroads and fewer (or no) new highways may well be the Chinese response to post-Peak Oil. It is, in fact, the only logical response.
Best Hopes for Chinese Urban Rail,
Alan
China had about the same per capita GDP (PPP, inflation-adjusted) and car ownership rate in 2002 that Spain had in 1960.
China's a poor country, but poor countries have become rich countries in 42 years before - in 2002, Spain had more cars per capita than Britain.
It may boggle the mind, but minds get boggled sometimes, and every major analysis I've seen suggests that China will become a rich nation over the next 40 years, roughly on par with where the West is now.
let's multiply that by 20
I think that is likely too low. My gut says x50. Multiple parking spots, access to the parking spots (graph a typical parking lot, perhaps a third to a fourth is covered by cars. Space to open doors on either side, space in front of the car, turning radius into the spot, entrance and exits.
Each car requires more than two parking spaces, say 2.5 (USA cities often have 8 to 10 parking spaces/vehicle (from memory). So 2.5 x 4 = 10 times the area of the car just for parking.
Then roads and the support facilities.
Alan
This strikes me as being off in fantasy land. I wonder how many dozens of times we will run into Liebig's Law of the Minimum before we produce four billion cars. How much oil and other products will be needed to actually produce the cars themselves? What will be the pollution impacts? How will we do this, along with all of the other things that need to be done, like maintaining/upgrading the grid, building new electricity supplies, and paving the roads?
If a person looks at one little piece of the problem, it looks solvable. It is when you look at the broader picture that the solution falls apart.
Stuart - "I postulated a world GDP of about $350 billion in 2006 dollars by 2050"
Change to Trillion
Thanks - fixed.
Given his assumptions, he's right. He's assuming energy is cheap by the time his four billion cars are sold. He's assuming world GDP has kept right on going up, and it's not all BS GDP like the U.S. (it's actual productive capacity).
Take it for what it's worth. It's a superficial cut at a BAU economy to see if it's at all feasible.
"This strikes me as being off in fantasy land. I wonder how many dozens of times we will run into Liebig's Law of the Minimum before we produce four billion cars."
That's exactly what I'm attempting to analyze. However, I can't do it all in one week :-)
I agree with Gail, this was also my reaction to this piece. We will never get close to four billion cars because we'll hit so many other limits first.
Focusing on too small a part of the problem was the major weakness with Stuart's last piece about industrial agriculture as well IMO...
I agree with gail 100%. I guess Staniford is one of the ones I ignore because I think alot of the stuff he writes is fairy tale B.S.
There seem to be two types of people on this site..., those who know the world is a ball and that peak is a symptom of growth..., and those who still jsut don't get it.
...those who know they don't know everything, and those who don't know they know nothing?
That you believe something doesn't mean it's true. If you don't realize that, you also don't realize you belong to the second group.
Thanks for your support:
http://reddit.com/info/694v9/comments/ (business)
http://reddit.com/info/694vj/comments/ (environment)
http://reddit.com/info/694vo/comments/ (science)
http://digg.com/business_finance/Four_Billion_Cars_in_2050
Those little wheels are going to depend on well maintained road surfaces. They wouldn't even reach the bottom of some potholes around here. Is there anyone can comment on whether something like this would work with narrower and larger diameter wheels? It seems to me that would have consequences up and down the drive train. Or is it just a matter of changing gearing?
cfm in Gray, ME
Stuart,
two small points:
1. Current technology says 50mpg can be done easily. But there are currently also 80 mpg cars available (the VW Lupo 3L). So maybe 50 mpg is a bit conservative. I would expect at least 100 mpg by 2050, based on the ordinary ICE, together with a cubic foot of electronics / sw
2. Assuming 10.000 miles/car/year may be a bit pessimistic. Anything below ca 8 miles can be done on bicycle and a lot of people will do so (maybe not all ofcoarse) Above 40 miles, public transport becomes competitive, so I would expect some more impact there. Especially when oil becomes more scarce out there, people would easily switch.
3. Getting people to drive small cars is really a marketing thing. Look at this car. Does that look like a dull geek car to you?
Thanks.
That's looks pretty cool! My only fear is that tiny vehicle vs. an SUV, truck, 18-wheeler, etc. If nearly all cars on the road were this size then it would be safer driving this. But imagine getting T-boned by a raised 4x4 or an SUV or being caught in the wind off an 18-wheeler.
The circumstances you'd be using that electric car (commuting) the traffic wouldn't be going much more than 25 mph anyway. I personally would have no fear driving it since I already drive a GEM.
To be sure both looks and size matter. The Mercedes SMART looks pretty much like this - a great wee car for getting to work or to Tesco. My main worry with these wee cars is safety. For so long as our roads are populated with trucks and SUVS and Range Rovers all driving like they are driving an impregnable tank at great speed (which they are) - you just can't feel safe sharing the road with them in a Dinkey car.
The solution then is to have speed limits that are inversely proportional to the mass and power of what you are driving. Trucks get to go at 10 mph, SUVs at 20 and so on. The VW Lupo would be permitted to go at 60?
The trouble is the idea of one size fits all. Driving around town or city streets should be perfectly safe for an NEV. They have no business being on a highway, though, and don't have the range for it anyway. If you are just going to have an NEV, though, you need to have an alternative mode of transport that will take you where the NEV can't. If you can only afford one car (or one car per working adult) and no good alternatives are available, then you end up driving the same vehicle everywhere as your ONLY mode of transport. It is very inefficient and uneconomical, but it is exactly the situation that we have created for ourselves here in the US.
Weird that PedalPusher made the exact same comment 2 hours earlier - which wasn't there when I wrote mine. My wife says I live in a parallel universe - I'm beginning to believe her.
Driving round town in Aberdeen, we have to share the road with trucks, Porches and bicycles. I agree entirely that we need to classify roads for different use. We have a huge problem with bicycles right now that have to share the road with everyone else. If there were roads for NEV's and bikes and others for the heavy duty ICE vehicles that would be an enormous leap forward. In the the UK I suspect that our politicians are about 3 years and 9 months away from grasping the inevitability of this.
Euan,
When oil becomes more scarce, then also the big SUV's become more scarce. Remember that the assumption was that by 2050 cars get an average of 50 mpg? So I'm not so worried about that, because it has happened already in continental europe after the oil crisis. Driving an SUV in the Netherlands is really very-very-very expensive. No Joe Sixpack can afford that.
About the different type of vehicles on the road:
- All over Europe already separate biking lanes are set up. Here in the Netherlands this is massive. You can go anywhere on a bike without having to share the road with a car. And the rest of the world will follow once oil prices go up a bit more.
- When in 20xx oil production has halved, that means that there will be 30% less vehicles and they will be 30% more efficient (0.7*0.7 = 0.5) 30% less vehicles will immediately solve all traffic problems. Especially when people will drive max 75 km/h.
Interestingly, in the USA, approximately 1/3 of households have only 1 vehicle; 1/3 have 2 and 1/3 have more than 2. It gives then that most people have driving options available. I personally own a GEM and a Toyota PU. The GEM gets by far the most miles because my situation allows it. The longest trip in the GEM is 15 miles on arrival back home. Fortunately, I live in Washington state which allows MSV's with a top speed of 35 mph.
Indeed, I argued that energy would likely become cheap again after a couple of decades of being expensive, once a renewable civilization was over the hump (the hump having been caused in part by failing to make more progress in the 1980s and 1990s).
A concept of mine is Maximum Commercial Effort the maximum effort possible with purely commercial incentives. Less than war time efforts for critical projects (as assumed in the Hirsch Report). An example would be current efforts to develop Canadian tar sands.
Maximum Commercial Effort does not come cheap ! Best case for a 90% non-GHG North American electrical grid with maximum commercial effort is 30 years, not 20, with 40 years entirely possible as the quickest realistic time frame.
IMO, one cannot get cheap non-GHG electrical power in massive quantities by 2050. The marginal costs may have dropped by 2050 but all the embedded capital costs of earlier decades will still be with us.
So your assumption of cheap non-GHG electricity by 2050 is unrealistic. You underestimate the costs and time required for conversion.
Alan
I like the "Maximum Commercial Effort" concept and I agree with you that maximum commercial effort would be unlikely to be sufficient. It will take significant government incentives for quite some time. I will come back to the energy infrastructure at some point and build a more detailed model, but propose to keep circling around the various sectors at a high level first to make sure I've identified all the key issues.
Stuart - thanks for the interesting thought piece. Being a long time scenario builder myself, I'll avoid the temptation to question your assumptions. Most of the comments before me have done just that, and that's fine, but it is, after all, your scenario.
Rather, I'd like to give you a couple of things to chew on within the context of your scenario.
1) Your attempts to estimate the total number of autos is largely based on an income to ownership relationship. Consider that the use of average incomes may distort your final number by not reflecting possible changes in income distribution. By using current ownership to income ratios, you are essentially hypothesizing that income distribution at the current time is representative of income distribution in 2050. We all know that income distribution has been changing toward a more bipolar model, will that trend continue and impact the ownership possibilities?
2)You support the plug-in hybrid solution, in part, with the observation that "we already have distribution infrastructures for electricity and liquid fuel...." Consider that you may have succumbed to a bit of developed world blindness. One would assume that the vast majority of the new autos will not be in the already developed world, but in the developing world where that infrastructure is not as ubiquitous as you may have assumed. Consider also that over the next 40+ years you are assuming a 50% growth in population. Where will these people be living? If there is a simple one to one relation between population an the need for new infrastructure (and this is doubtful when one also considers you posit increasing incomes) then the infrastructure will also need to expand by at least 50%. In short, you may be overly optimistic when you suggest that this infrastructure already exists.
Hope these help in your continued efforts to build your scenario. Thanks for the good work!
"We all know that income distribution has been changing toward a more bipolar model, will that trend continue and impact the ownership possibilities?"
I think this is mainly a function of policy. FWIW, I'm personally of the view that income inequality has gone a bit far, and we could do with making the tax structure somewhat more progressive (though certainly not back to the levels of the 60s/70s) and focus somewhat more on poverty reduction. I think the rightwing backlash was a necessary correction to the oversocialization in mid century, but has now gone too far.
Stuart - it sounds like you are answering a question about income distribution in the United States. Remember, you aren't building a scenario about a single nation. There is no policy institution that can impact income distribution on the world scale. And until the process of globalization is addressed, along with its momentum toward unfettered, unregulated "free" markets, I think we can expect continued concentration of wealth. You accept most other current day trends as continuing on into the future, I think you need to address why this one won't.