John Darnell, Bartlett's energy advisor
Posted by Yankee on October 7, 2005 - 4:05pm
Over at PO-NYC, peakguy (along with commenter apsmith) has posted about John Darnell's speech from the Petrocollapse conference.
I'm going to hold off on David Pimentel for now, since my notes turned out to be more incomprehensible than I'd thought. In the meantime, this Cornell publication is a decent summary of some of the points he made in this talk about the (non-)practicality of ethanol.
“To be thrown upon one's own resources, is to be cast into the very lap of fortune; for our faculties then undergo a development and display an energy of which they were previously unsusceptible.”
—Benjamin Franklin
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If the United States does not commit itself to the transition from fossil to renewable energy during the next decade or two, the economy and national security will be adversely affected. Starting immediately, it is paramount that US residents must work together to conserve energy, land, water, and biological resources. To ensure a reasonable standard of living in the future, there must be a fair balance between human population density and energy, land, water, and biological resources.
Pimentel is a big supporter of solar energy, hydro and biomass for electricity. He is very pessimistic about liquid fuels from any bio-source.
- there are many govt agencies looking into this - the problem is that most are unavailable to public scrutiny - only in Congress and a few other venues can CSPAN televise proceedings, which is one reason Congressman Bartlett continually made those presentations the way he did I presume.
- The IEA, of which US is a member, has rationing policies in place should supply drop below certain thresholds - there are numerous speeches/presentations/policy discussions available from their last plenary:
http://www.iea.org/textbase/work/2005/oil_demand/FinalAgenPresentations.htm3) Count yourself lucky - from an evolutionary sense, I would PREFER that my state senator and governor were female- womens responses to stress are more cooperative (oxytocin) than competitive (dopamine, testosterone) on average, than men. In my opinion, we need many many more female leaders if the Sustainability Revolution is to be successful (note: I am not female, but do like them quite a bit)
from aljazeera
http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/news_service/middle_east_full_story.asp?service_id=9677
"Bush said God told him to invade Iraq, Afghanistan"
10/7/2005 9:00:00 PM GMT
Bush told two senior Palestinian officials that God told him to invade Iraq and Afghanistan
The U.S. President George W. Bush told two senior Palestinian officials that God gave him a personal message to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a new BBC documentary.
Bush made the comments when he met Palestinian leader- then Foreign Minister - Mahmood Abbas and Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath at a summit in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm al-Sheikh in June 2003, the ministers told a BBC documentary series to be broadcast in Britain next week.
Bush also told the ministers that God ordered him to establish a Palestinian state.
Shaath, now the Palestinian Information Minister, said: "President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God.
"God would tell me, 'George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan'.
"And I did, and then God would tell me, 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq...' And I did.
"'And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, 'Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.' And by God I'm gonna do it'," said Shaath.
Abbas, who attended the meeting too, also appears in the documentary series to recall how Bush told him: "I have a moral and religious obligation. So I will get you a Palestinian state."
White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said Bush never made the claims, which he described as absurd.
The three-part TV series, "Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs", charts recent attempts to bring peace to the Middle East, from former U.S. President Bill Clinton's peace talks in 1999-2000 to Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza strip this year.
The program interviews presidents and prime ministers, their generals and ministers, to reveal what happened behind closed doors as the peace talks collapsed and the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, grew.
The series is expected to be screened in Britain on October 10, 17 and 24
Thanks,
Rick
There are two things that are important here - if "God" is telling Bush what to do in the middle east, where it just so happens the majority of accessible oil reserves are, then "Houston, we have a problem".
Further, while not well known in the mainstream, a key component of the Israili/Palestinian conflict is control over water resources which is a scarce and strategic resource in the region. This gives us a glimpse of what can happen in the fight to control scarce resources: in PO scenarios, oil becomes increasingly scarce.
This idea seems to come out time and time again, some sort of "they wouldn't allow it", or "they will sort it out" a sense of some higher group sorting or creating the problems.
so the bush article is/was a warning to all those who follow a hierarchially structured society..
we cant wait for leaders to sort it out, they wont, it is up to us to sort it
No just kidding. Many women are limbically cultivated, meaning they spend more of their brain power worrying about family needs rather than their own self-centerd needs. By contrast, men are focused on power, control and self centered needs, although they do stand guard over the herd much like a stag would stand guard over his herd of does and fawns.
The Peak Oil alert message sent to women has to be different than the one sent to men.
For women: your children, your family are at risk if we do not have enough energy resources to grow food, make clothing, to feed and nurture our families. Your children will never forgive you, and you will never forgive yourself if you do not take steps to assure that your family's needs are met. Oprah will curse you for not having read the right books and felt the right, nurturing feelings. You will be ostracized from the upper groups.
For men: our command and control systems are at risk if we do not have enough energy resources to power our armies and our factories. You will be looked at as having failed to "provide for and protect" your family if you do not become alert to this problem (to the terror that can terrorize) and if you do not rally the herd to safer grounds. Dr. Phil will disrespect you for not having stood up to be a man, to fight and flight, when the challenge was so obvious. Be proud, be powerful, be among the extraordianry few.
Evidence that, duh, the sexes are different and respond to different messaging (this does not account for different religious biases as to what the proper roles of men and women are):
http://www.princeton.edu/~anscombe/articles/rhoads.html
http://207.122.589.com/imprintPM/issues/spring-2004/features3.htm
http://www.iouedu.com/press/09puri/09_01.html
http://www.humiliationstudies.org/documents/evelin/GlobalisationTransformsGenderRelations.pdf
Seriously, trying to craft messages for hoary and polarized cartoons of appropriate sex roles seems unwise. People respond to price signals as well as credible arguments that their kids and their kids' kids are threatened by contemporary irresponsibility.
The actual point is that different people respond, or not, to different messages. There is no ONE grand unifying message that will motivate all to act on the Peak Oil Problem.
Despite the fact that I am a reptile brain, I do care for my children (and yours) and pray they all will thrive in the challenging world of the future.
Peace.
http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2005/10/123-more-racist-connections.html
Pimentel was part of a group trying to take over the board of the Sierra Club, running on a nativist, anti-immigrant platform. His candidacy attracted the support of a number of racist and white supremacist groups, who made an attempt to flood the Sierra Club voting rolls.
Unfortunately Peak Oil, like other fringe beliefs, has a tendency to attract a variety of extremist groups. Anti immigrant and racist beliefs are likely to filter in if people are not vigilant.
In any case, he has been out there researching problems and giving speeches and training ecologists for 50years -I assure you that there is not one Peak Oil spokesperson who EVERYONE agrees with all of his/her points - we kind of peel the layers of the Peak Oil onion and pick and choose what components make sense to us.
JD, on Peakoildebunked.com is smart and a good writer - but is he giving speeches where people can publicly criticize him on his views? Has he published hundreds of peer reviewed scientific articles? My point is that its tough for someone who doesnt risk to criticize someone who does.
RE: immigration - I have no solid opinion, but oil per capita use on the planet peaked in 1978. When resource quality has peaked in prior societies and organisms, there were eventual population declines - maybe his 84 year old viewpoint is one of experience and scholarship, rather than racism.
For example, she is on the editorial advisory board of the newspaper for this site:
http://www.cofcc.org/
Pimental works with this woman. As does Marcia Pimental, Albert Bartlett, William Catton, Herman Daly, and L. Hunter Lovins:
http://www.carryingcapacity.org/
Heinberg's book (The Party is Over) has a promotional blurb from Abernethy, and Heinberg mentions Abernethy as a person with political ideas relevant to peak oil:
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/transcripts/220
This is all very unsavory, and, at the very least, constitutes collusion with racists.
In each movement, organisations or whatever there are people having different interests or trying to use the idea behind that organisations to persue their own goals. Even the army is not monolythic. Basicly I find arguments like this quite impotent - if you can not rule out the argument, rule out the person. Quite distasteful JD.
It's very unlikely that the EROEI of Brazilian ethanol is 1.6 or less, because it sells for $25/barrel = $7.81/MMbtu, versus about $10/MMbtu for crude oil. It's cheaper than oil.
http://lieberman.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=247140
maybe there is hope after all
but it is the most professional news from the USA (on par with BBC) the reporters make the least jokes and they interview smart people.
Does he think that electricity is a "commodity" that is magically manufactured by "the markets"? Does he not know that 50% of our electricity is produced by burning coal? How about that roughly 67% of the energy generated from burning coal goes up in smoke as air-polluting, waste heat? How about that superconducting transmission lines have not yet been invented and roughly another 10% of electrical energy is wasted as transmission line heat?
Plug and play hybrid is not an answer.
I was very impressed with Pimentel's talk. Yeah, he's old and a bit cranky, but he and Darnell were the only ones who really talked about the numbers. In reality the numbers are not good at all for liquid fuels: we really need to get off them. Kunstler's suggestion of greatly upgrading US passenger rail systems is a good one.
Here's what I have from my notes on Pimentel's talk:
First he talked about malnutrition. He's an ag. professor, and the fact that much of the world is hungry bothers him. Out of 6.5 billion people, he claimed 3.7 billion are malnourished from a WHO report. Of course, US people are over-nourished, which is another problem.
He talked about about efficiency of capture of solar energy. Plants capture about 0.1% on average, corn about 0.2%. Photovoltaics, in contrast, can capture 20% or more, 100 times as much energy from the same area covered.
In 1850 our energy source was primarily biomass - wood provided 91% of US energy needs. Now, fossil fuels provide 97%. Current US energy use is about 100 quads; that's TWICE as much as the total solar energy captured in a year by ALL PLANT LIFE in the country.
But biomass (mostly wood) still provides quite a bit of our energy - about 3% of the total in thermal form (burning), similar to hydroelectric's 3% (by the way, these numbers don't seem to reconcile with his 97% claim for fossil dependence - maybe it was 87%?)
Then Pimentel got into ethanol - in the US made from corn, in Brazil from sugar cane. They considered 14 different inputs into the corn growing process: machinery, diesel, fertilizers, lime, electricity, etc. Their analysis totaled 810 liters of oil per hectare of corn, just to grow it.
Ethanol production (fermenting) and distillation (to 99.5% purity needed to mix with gasoline - only 95% is needed for "pure ethanol" vehicles); for each liter of ethanol produced, they found 6600 kcal required, but the energy content of the liter of ethanol is only 5130 kcal. So net energy is negative.
"I wish it were positive", he said. He is an ag. professor after all.
He talked about discrepancies with a USDA (and DOE?) analysis - they left out a number of the inputs he considered, and they also took credits for byproducts he believes are unwarranted. At the very large scale that would be needed, there's no market for those byproducts.
Other aspects neither side really considered are soil erosion and fertilizer runoff (creating the Gulf of Mexico "dead zone"), higher beef prices (ethanol subsidies already cost Americans $1 billion/yr in higher beef prices, in addition to the $3 billion in direct subsidies which mostly go to the big manufacturers (ADM, Cargill).
He also covered some of the same issues for soybeans and sunflower oil, and switchgrass or wood. In some cases, if you can take appropriate credits, the net energy is positive, but even so the land area requirements are enormous. For soybeans under some conditions they had a net output of 664 liters/hectare; just fueling US trucking would require planting the ENTIRE land area of the US in soybeans (not just arable land, but every square inch).
He also raised the issue, again, of world malnourishment. If we grow corn as a fuel, we lose that much of it as a food, isn't this an ethical issue we would face, burning food instead of feeding it to people?
He talked a bit about coal - conversion to liquid fuel loses energy (as we've heard in the discusison of Schweitzer's arguments) and adds to pollution; he doesn't think it's a good solution.
He summarized energy payback and land area requirements for hydro, burned biomass, wind, and solar:
Hydroelectric - 24:1 payback, 75,000 ha for 100,000 people
Wood-burning electric - 6:1 payback, 200,000 ha for 100k
wind - 5:1 payback, 13,000 ha
solar - ??? , 3,000 ha for 100,000 people
His conclusion here was that we can indeed provide US energy needs (if reduced somewhat by conservation) through purely renewable sources using only 1/6 of US land area.