The Oil Drum

This is a guest post by Alexis Ziegler. Alexis is a communitarian, builder, orchardist and environmental activist living in central Virginia. He is the author of a recently published book, Culture Change: Civil Liberty, Peak Oil, and the End of Empire. More information can be found at conev.org.

Abstract

The rapid expansion of biofuel production worldwide has paralleled a dramatic rise in food prices. The expansion of biofuels has been supported by a wide spectrum of people, from environmentalists looking for "sustainable" energy to conservatives wanting to reduce U.S. dependency on foreign oil. With food riots spreading, the U.S. remains committed to an expansion of biofuel.

Biofuels are part of a larger movement toward green capitalism, the idea that we can scale down our energy use through technologies that improve the efficiency of the consumer society. Biofuels are emblematic of the dark side of green capitalism, which is focused almost entirely on the well being of the global upper class. Biofuels are a form of nationalistic environmentalism that is creating a foundation on which more extreme nationalists will try to wed the racist tools of yesterday with a version of "sustainability" that will include the destruction of the global poor.

Real solutions are both impossibly difficult and simple. The cooperative societies in which most humans have always lived are capable of supporting a high standard of living with far less resources than the individualized, consumer society. Enlightened political leadership would be helpful, but we can create a sustainable society without it. Indeed, we have to.

The Oil Drum was recently ranked by Nielsen as the #4 sustainability site on the web (behind TreeHugger, WorldChanging, and Biopact). Biopact has a nice article on the report, which can be found here and from which the graphic below is duly appropriated.

The takeaway message: we have far to go with regard to making real progress on sustainability, folks. However, it is nice to see that our community is contributing in a small part. Keep it up. The more people who get the message, the more reason we have to be "sustainable," the more of a chance we have of lessening the pain. I'm not saying that I'm overly optimistic, but I'm saying that we have to continue to try to make the world a little bit better of a place. Thanks for helping us do so.

Below the fold is a link to the webinar and the report itself.

As I traveled through India on a recent business trip, the topic of energy was constantly on my mind (as it is every time I travel). I found out some interesting things about jatropha, toured a sugarcane ethanol plant, found a wind farm in the middle of nowhere, and encountered a native ethanol skeptic. Here are my impressions.

Stuart Staniford proposed a “way forward” for humanity in his article Powering Civilization to 2050. This article proposes an alternative vision: instead of trying to create continual, technological stop-gaps to the demands of growth, we must address the problem of growth head on. Infinite growth is impossible in a finite world--a great deal of economic growth may be possible without a growth in resource consumption, but eventually the notion of perpetual growth is predicated on perpetual increase in resource consumption. This growth in resource consumption causes problems: it brings civilization into direct conflict with our environmental support system. Growth is also one way of improving the standard of living for humanity by creating more economic produce, more material consumption per human. Growth, however, produces very unevenly distributed benefits, and there is little convincing evidence that the poorest, most abused 10% of humanity is actually better off today than the poorest, most abused 10% of past eras. Furthermore, if you accept my statement above that infinite growth is impossible in a finite world, then employing growth today to “solve” our immediate problems incurs the significant moral hazard of pushing the problem—perhaps the greatly exacerbated problem—of addressing growth itself on future generations.

With that in mind, my intent here is to propose one possible means for humanity to directly address the problem of growth itself. I am attempting to take what I see as an inherently pragmatic approach—one that does not rely on the universal cooperation of humanity, nor on the assumption of yet-to-be-developed technologies. My approach to the problem of growth is to stop trying to address its symptoms—overpopulation, pollution, global warming, peak oil—and attempt instead to identify and address the underlying source of the problem.

Introduction

I can be a very persistent (some might say hard-headed) person. If someone doesn't understand something that I think is important - and readily understandable - I will often continue to explain it until I am sure they either understand it and won't admit it, or they are incapable of understanding it. Because the topic of EROEI continues to be misunderstood (especially by those in the camp of "the only thing that matters is economics"), I will once again try.

Nate Hagens and I have discussed this subject at length on a number of occasions. He has written extensively on it, and I don't pretend that this essay can hold a candle to his magnum opus - and in my opinion best ever EROEI essay written at TOD - A Net Energy Parable - Why is EROI Important? (There's your dopamine fix for today, Nate.) This is just a little review of why I think EROEI matters.

Peter Newman is a hero of the sustainable transport movement in Australia. In this video he talks about the arrival of record oil prices and peak oil.

Peter Newman has spent thirty years of his career trying to prepare Australian cities for peak oil and he is one of the key people who helped push Perth towards its already very successful new rail infrastructure.

Click to watch the video

The figure above is taken from the 2004 edition of "The Limits to Growth". It shows the typical curves that the models of the study produce. These curves are similar to those of oil depletion studies based on the "Hubbert model". The similarity is not casual, the theory and the method behind the two approaches have a lot in common.

This is a guest post on energy and our agricultural system, by Jason Bradford, who has written here previously on "Relocalization: A Strategic Response to Peak Oil and Climate Change". Jason has a Phd in Biology and has written/published on the topics of relocalization and ecological economics. He is the founder of Willits Economic Localization (WELL) and runs a CSA in Willits, CA. (He also has a biweekly radio show "The Reality Report", where next Monday at noon EST he and I will be discussing evolution, addiction and economics. His show can be heard streaming online at www.kzyx.org.)

George Kenney over at Electric Politics has quite the interview with Al Bartlett. Here's a link to the .mp3 download, and here's a link to the post itself, which has an in-line player and comments. George writes:

It's an enormous conceit to think that population increases are everywhere and always a good thing. In the blessed tradition, however, of neo-classical economic theory (aka 'free markets') such is the miracle of rational choice that left to themselves people will 'optimize' the rate of population growth: no natural limit on population exists. Nevertheless, in reality the unacknowledged costs of population growth mostly shift to future generations. Call it the ultimate Ponzi scheme. And if you think about it, population growth is the main driver of all our planetary scale problems, from warming to Peak Oil to food production, right down the list. Locally as well, even to diluted democratic practices of governance. Although it makes no sense whatsoever to tackle any of these without due consideration of the population factor most of the time population doesn't get mentioned — the implications are so politically controversial. To help put population and its derivatives into perspective I turned to a man who's been sounding the alarm about sustainability for decades, Dr. Albert Allen Bartlett. It was a real privilege to talk with Al, who's as close to being a prophet as anybody can be these days. Listen, and pass the word! Total runtime an hour and sixteen minutes.

Amen, brother. (Feel free to link to other recent peak oil media in the comments as well.)

As the shortest day of the year is just ahead, and colder temperatures abound, (at least in the North), I thought I'd edit and repost an analysis on home heating I ran last summer. (That post was followed by quite a good discussion)

A short fifty years ago, people heated their homes in winter with coal. A hundred years ago and before, people living in cold climates largely stayed warm in winter with firewood. Today, in a country (and planet) with vastly more people, we heat homes in northern climates largely with high quality fossil fuels, specifically natural gas, heating oil, and propane. Trees, a less energy-dense form of stored sunlight than oil and gas, have recovered a good part of their former % of landcover in the US, despite being still used for paper, wood, furniture, pulp and some heat. Below is an analysis of how the US residential sector heats its homes, how large are our forests and how much they grow and how much wood we could use for heat, after fossil fuels decline.

US direct fossil fuel use for heating Click to enlarge.