Oil Threatens Marine Life – ABC News
I’ve just met Dr. Guggenheim on Twitter. As we suspected the amount of Methane in the spill was being underestimated. Thank you Matt Simmons for being right on the ball. This is not going to go away.
If you’re interested in a great source for Ocean information go to 1-Planet 1-Ocean.
Oil Threatens Marine Life – ABC News, posted with vodpod
BP and the Storm of Idiots
Is this possible? The Communications people at probably the most beleaguered large corporation on earth thought it would be okay to (badly) Photoshop an image of the control room. Make the boys at the screens look busier while they’re stopping the oil spill. And then say that it was just some kid showing off. Yeah, that’s reassuring. We are handling the greatest environmental disaster in America’s history, but we thought it would be okay to let someone play with Photoshop. Not really. First you will look like (even worse) idiots, and second, there’s a tropical storm developing in the Gulf.
But when you look at this Jon Stewart video it all becomes clear, in a terrifying sort of way…
BP and the Syncrude Tailings Dam – an apology
In my post “Nature is not a Machine”, since I was essentially writing humour I didn’t think to include references. I apologize unreservedly. I got a comment from a person who disagreed with me that it was a large area and an ecological blight on the landscape. This is a picture of the Syncrude Tailings Dam. You are free to make up your own minds if this a) attractive, or b) an easily fixed piece of geo-engineering. You are looking at 540,000,000 cubic meters of toxic sludge. My original point was a comparison with the “catastrophe” in the Gulf, while this is business as usual in Alberta. Of course I realize that it’s the absolute right of the good people of Alberta to do this to their landscape if they wish. 
2010: The Next Leg Down
Before I go off on my transatlantic sailing trip next week I thought I’d make some forecasts for 2010: The next leg down.
Oil and Globalization: First thing is our reaction to the arrival of triple digit oil prices. Right now oil is at $80. I’m not expecting a miraculous recovery in demand, but a political crisis could easily drive prices into triple digits. If so, whether or not you actually believed the news tripe about recovery, oil over $100/barrel will begin the next leg of the post peak oil crisis. Right on schedule. The same process will be broadly applicable to most of Western Europe, the US and the rest of the developed world, but my immediate concern is Britain. This is the year when transport begins to trump labour arbitrage and the global part of globalization starts to look shaky.
On the face of it, this is disastrous. The OECD industries have come to rely on almost completely on foreign manufacturing sources, obviously for the most part China. But in fact it’s a tremendous opportunity, because except for bankers and entertainers, globalization has been a disaster for wage earners. The myth of the service economy has run its course. It was largely an artefact of cheap oil. It brought cheap goods, but the side effects have been an ecological horror. According to a recent report in the Guardian, major companies caused $2 trillion worth of environmental damage just in 2008.
Sir Richard, my new best friend: Probably the most important signal for Britain is Sir Richard Branson’s discovery of peak oil. Dollar short and a day late, but he may be the person to make it mainstream in Britain. He’ll be our Al Gore. It’s a pity that Matt Simmons, Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrere, and all the rest of the ASPO folk couldn’t get any traction for the last decade. Never mind, now that Sir Richard has noticed and the Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security has been formed at the Royal Society finally we’ll see some righteous panic.
Re-Industrialization: I’m expecting to see talk of the rapid re-industrialization of Britain. The flag wavers for the service economy will be ushered off the stage. Despite being the economic darlings of the last decade or two, suddenly they’ll be seen as hopelessly out of touch. Start watching for some new clever marketing speak. Right now in glass walled offices with aluminium furniture, there are eager young marketing drones with perfect complexions, dreaming up the sound bites for the new new clean energy renaissance: Social enterprise resourcing , Clean Tech revolution, Cloudsourced inventory control, AgroUrbanOrganic complex …it’ll be some such jabber. Especially watch for UrbanFoodCommunities.com and “Liveability.” And yes, I have trademarked all these buzzwords, so don’t even think about it, nasty little marketing children.
What it means is that if the bloody Chinese are too far away to make all our stuff we’ll have to remember how to do it ourselves.
Does that mean I’ll have to get mud on my Vivien Westwood?
Yes darling, I’m afraid it does.
Nukes: I’m expecting some real surprises around nuclear energy. I remember talking to Kjell Aleklett in 2003 about the nuclear renaissance. This is one of those issues that gets normally polite ecology people at each other’s throats. Whether or not nuclear energy has an EROEI to make it worth building is one thing, but the politics will be interesting. The current British Government is talking about going from 19% to 40% electricity from nukes in 20 years. I stand in awe of the nuclear energy PR machine that has completely turned the government’s opinion round from 2003 to 2006. Now watch for the demonstrations.
Immigration is going to hit the big time: 2010 will be a tipping point in the collapse of Africa and the mass migration into Europe. For the last 4 decades, more or less since the independence of the last colonies, there’s been a tragic failure of Africa to adapt. As William Easterly puts it, “Spending $2.3 trillion (measured in today’s dollars) in aid over the past five decades has left the most aid-intensive regions, like Africa, wallowing in continued stagnation; it’s fair to say this approach has not been a great success.” A mixture of tribal identity, corruption, over population, infrastructure and ecological collapse combined with increasingly severe climate effects have initiated the collapse of sub Saharan Africa. The collapse seems to be propagating rapidly out of the Horn, and accelerating. The Africans are doing what populations always do in the face of collapse. They die or leave. In this case the death toll will make the term “Biblical” obsolete, by an order of magnitude.
It’s the leaving that’s the problem for Europe. The population of sub Saharan Africa and Europe are roughly the same; something over 800 million. Europe is already far past carrying capacity, probably by a factor of two, like Britain. The transport and agricultural infrastructure, health systems, education systems and societies of Europe cannot successfully cope with such an influx and remain viable.
I’m not suggesting for a moment that Africa is the sole source of illegal migration into Europe. If only. But Africa seems to me to be in the worst shape. Add in the populations of failing countries in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and the Indian subcontinent from which migrants will flood into Europe and the total is well over a 1.5 billion.
The cracks are beginning to show. In Italy last month there was a riot in Rosarno in which illegal immigrants from set fire to cars and shops. Italy’s demographic is changing very rapidly. At least 7% of the population, not counting illegal immigrants is now non-Italian. 1 in 6 babies is born to a non-Italian. Italians are about to wake up to the permanent changes in their country. I expect some desperate headlines as we head into summer. Naturally the cry of ‘racism’ will be the sure sign of backlash.
In 1997, the number of foreigners living in Spain was 500,000. In 2008 it was 5.3 million. That is an order of magnitude difference. In Catalonia 15% of the population is foreign born. The Spanish are now beginning to realize the full effects of such high levels of immigration on its school system.
In Greece, which is already close to financial meltdown, has a non-Greek population of 10%. Until recently most of that influx came from Balkan states, but as Africa’s situation deteriorates more of the illegal immigrants will come from Africa. Aside from street riots in Greece over the economy, expect a backlash over immigration.
The cultural, religious and ethnic divides in the new Europe have been ignored by a generation of politicians. There is even a rumour in Britain that the Labour party secretly decided to allow unlimited immigration to Britain during its tenure since they thought immigrants would be more likely to vote Labour in future. For the past decade it’s been almost impossible to talk about immigration without being silenced by cries of racism. I’d expect this debate to get a lot more difficult in 2010. For better or worse, Europe is now a fundamentally different place demographically than it was 10 years ago. How it fares in the 21st century with this starting population is anyone’s guess, but if history is any guide balkanization is a lot more likely than peaceful integration. I wish there was something vaguely humorous about this whole thing, but I can’t see it.
Fighting in the street: Whole areas of Britain, Europe and the US have fallen into decay. Along with it communities have been destroyed, and we are left with a vast underclass living on benefits. Add to that the tensions in the middle classes as the last of the savings dribble away. People can generally last about 3 years if they’ve got some savings, but now it’s down to the dregs. Living on the kid’s education money and worrying about losing the house. The last shops in the high street boarded up. No room at university for the kids anyway – and nowhere for them to go. 50% unemployment in the under 25s. The austerity measures announced from the balcony of some grand old palace by some unelected Brussels apparatchik with a bad comb over. The human mind can only stand so much. It’s impossible to predict the spark, but if it’s an el Nino hot summer, look for trouble in the streets.
Weather: I know that economists are the only profession with a worse record than weather forecasters, nonetheless I’m going to chance my arm. The la Nina conditions of the last couple of years have given way to a new el Nino. If it persists into summer 2010, as looks likely, we may be getting some exciting weather. As I said above, if it results in a very hot summer look out. Angry unemployed people and 40°c are a bad combination.
War: Rule number 1. Do not under any circumstances allow yourself to be drawn into an endless campaign in Asia. You are not that rich. No empire ever was, nor ever will be. You are thinking in years. They are thinking in centuries. From Babylon, with love, Alex@Macedon.
Anyone got a film crew they’re not using, I’ve got the oil film script re-done. Now I’m going to cross an ocean under sail for the first time. Wish me luck.
Requiem for a Dream
It was a very peculiar experience these last few days to live without a computer. The old mac’s transformer popped and she died, sudden as a heart attack. None of the gradual dementia of malware decaying OS, just goodnight. Naturally there followed the reincarnation ritual of data transfer to the gleaming new imac. And the new printer because the perfectly serviceable HP isn’t supported by OSX 10.6. When is the computer industry going to get off its disposable styrofoam cup version of tech? But it doesn’t matter really. Because by the time I got it all sorted Europe was having a nervous breakdown.
Old Europa is crumbling. That EU lobbyist, self-congratulatory ‘end of history’ marketing speak never could quite paper over the cracks of language and ancient wars. They wanted it to be a rerun of American history, but the history of Europe is a different beast. Free trade? Sure, I like olive oil and German cars as much as anyone. But a puzzle palace in Brussels making laws for all, accountable to none? Not really.
There is something splendid about the fact that it’s Greece where the end began. Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to the laws of finance we lie. That’s what we need: 300 sweaty men in leather jock straps to hold the bond market at bay. Will the Germans really be willing, or able, to support 11 million Greeks? So who will take care of the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Italians, the Irish…the British? Because that’s a lot of people and a lot of money. How the euro zone survives this without default is anyone’s guess, but I’d expect people in the streets before too long.
What no one seems willing to bring up is the possibility that growth may not be possible while oil is near $80/barrel. According to the Independent on the 11th of February, soon we’ll be looking back at $80 with nostalgia. All that’s left to do is watch as the people who’ve grown used to cheap money and oil learn to live with expensive money and oil.
Suppose it’s not about the bankers wondering how to get out before the roof caves in. Suppose it’s about the fact that the EU happened to be one of those ideas that came to be popular during the era of cheap oil, and now it’s obsolete because it belongs to a resource environment that no longer exists. I’m sure that some sort of smoke and mirrors deal will be figured out to keep it going for a while. But in the event of a major oil spike it will simply be impossible to find all the money needed to bail out 5, 6 countries. Who will be buying all this new sovereign debt: China? And this is just at the moment when all the headlines were trying to buck everyone up on the idea we were headed out of recovery because all the subprime mortgage lending in the US had been handled. Do you believe that the problems in Greece and Portugal were the direct result of mortgage dealers misbehaving in Cleveland?
Meanwhile I’ve been wondering about the numbers on the “recovery.” It seems as if more than half of the supposed growth over the last quarter is inventory rebuilding, which is normal, but the next part that has to happen is that the new inventory has to be bought. But consumer spending isn’t improving, it’s declining. So the businesses that are buying inventory will adjust to new lower levels of consumption. People are busy paying down debt and looking for work. If people in Europe and the US aren’t buying then China isn’t selling. China’s manufacturing miracle was based on transport being cheap. Now it isn’t, and it’s unlikely that it will ever be again. It looks as if the price of fuel will reverse 3 decades of trade liberalization. In the absence of a new technology boom, and with unemployment staying high and growing, and governments still trying to borrow their way out of a debt crisis it looks like a fake recovery to me.
What’s happening is that the service economy which has been the central mythology of the cheap oil era in Europe and the US is done. But like all our favorite myths, it takes a while to wake up to the truth. There is simply not enough productive capacity left in Europe to support the population at current standards without cheap oil and gas. The income from Tourism and coffee bars just isn’t going to crack it.
In the new local world Europe has to figure out how to get its hands on energy. Because the good folk of Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Russia are using their own oil and gas at unprecedented rates. At a time when the bank vaults of Europe are full of bad paper we need a massive and immediate wartime level energy infrastructure mobilization. An intelligent HVDC Europe wide grid for a start, with inputs from all over, including French nukes. It’s the only way that the Europeans are going to keep things running.
It’s an unfortunate fact of human history that this kind of paradigmatic change seldom, if ever, comes without blood in the streets.
There is a chance we can make a break with history here. We’re at a critical juncture. We cannot afford to allow ourselves the luxury of civil war and social breakdown because our model of global capitalism is obsolete. One of the things we’ve done in our race to build this Utopia is use up or waste a good portion of the world’s rare resources. Sir David King, who knows a thing or two about this business, is trying to get people to understand that we are going to be running short of Helium, Platinum, Copper, Tin, Neodymium, and a host of rare earth metals, before mid century. Contrary to the economist’s idea of substitution, there are some things that we can’t substitute for. It reminds me of that Fred Hoyle quote from 1964:
“It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology.
This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only.”
What a shame it would be if it turned out we had blown our one chance at developing intelligence for this entire solar system because we were too busy swanning around in luxury cars right before the lights went out.
Obsolete Paradigms
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Buckminster Fuller
A couple of friends have kindly pointed out that it might be possible to interpret my last post – Ghost Acreage and British Immigration – as suggesting that stopping immigration would effectively solve the population problem in Britain. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s like that old adage; if you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. The real task will be to get population down this century to manageable levels without chaos. Chaos is the real enemy. The point I was making is that when politicians talk about ecology in a country at twice carrying capacity, without mentioning immigration, it’s inherently hypocritical.
There is another version of ghost acreage that is actually much scarier. It’s sometimes called phantom acreage and means the extra energy provided by fossil fuels and its effect on population. We have relied on fossil fuels to change our environment so that it will support many times the historical world population. But now we are bumping up against hard limits in food supply, water, a host of critical metals and gases, fish stocks, and of course fossil fuels. So we’ve set ourselves up for overshoot. The issue in Britain, and for the rest of Europe, is how to manage population so that overshoot doesn’t cause a chaotic crash. To my knowledge no civilization, in the 69 odd empires so far, has managed it. They just collapsed. I have started to see some alarmed commentary on the ominous figure of 70 million UK population, so perhaps there’s hope that finally it’s sinking in.
Which brings me to my subject: Obsolete Paradigms.
I know that numbers of ecologically minded folk have started to run for the hills, or its equivalent, the transition movement. They argue that it’s already too late to avoid a crash for many parts of the world and it’s wisest to adapt our small towns, like Totnes, to a post fossil fuel community. Well…yes and no. There are two problems with this approach. One is that if things do really collapse, then Totnes isn’t going to be some safe haven. That is unless the good folk of Totnes are considerably better armed than I thought. Two is that it assumes that we are at the end of innovation, and I disagree completely. We are on the cusp of an era of innovation unique in our history. What’s hanging us up is not so much carbon fuels and climate chaos as it is an obsolete paradigm.
The usage of the word Paradigm has changed significantly over the last century, but here I mean it as the axiomatic epistemological framework of a culture. I’m taking it from Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shift in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but not just applied to science. I mean the entire paradigm of the way we operate on earth.
The one we have right now is cobbled together from bits of desert religions and some economic ideologies based on an early and tragically misinformed interpretation of Darwinian evolution. Its main weakness is that it requires infinite resources and space. On the one hand you’ve got ‘go forth and multiply’ and on the other you’ve got ‘don’t worry when it (whatever it is) runs out or gets too expensive we’ll substitute something else for it.’ Both ideas are idiotic in a closed environment. So we need to get rid of it, as Bucky says, not by fighting it, but by making it obsolete.
We need a new framework. Let’s see if we can hack one out on the fly. We’ll need some basic rules. To make it more interesting we can make it a test. We’ll call it the intelligent species test. If you’re too dumb to manage your environment and population you go extinct.
Axioms of a New World Order:
1. All species that reproduce without limit in a closed environment die in their own poisons. I like this one because of its elegant simplicity. Take your pick, either you set a limit on your reproduction or you make earth an open system, which means you’re going to have to figure out space colonization. Or a bit of both?
2. The laws of thermodynamics are true. There’s no work around. That’s called magic, including those desert religions, and much as I love Harry Potter movies, it’s made up. Have you ever noticed that’s what all magic is about? Some sort of exception to the laws of thermodynamics. Only we’re making up rules for a real planet here, so no cheating.
3. Pollution is not intelligent design, it’s a complete failure of design – a failure of the imagination. Pollution is not waste. It is useful chemicals in the wrong place in the wrong concentrations. It’s our job to manage our chemical and metallurgical environment. Disposable? You live in a closed system dope. (Talking of closed systems did you see the news about the urine clogging up the water recycling on the space station?)
4. Adapt or die. Adaptation is time dependent. Whether we’re talking about a species or infrastructure, it all takes time. We can probably adjust to global average temperatures on a century timescale. On a decade timescale we won’t.
5. Complexity theory is true. Complex systems tend toward the fragile, and once their equilibrium is nudged by some enthusiast with a hammer they can get very unpredictable. Respect recursive environments, especially if you live in one.
That’ll do for a start.
I don’t think there’s much to do about the religions, unless there’s some mass spontaneous waking up experience round the corner. I’m stumped. About capitalism I’m more hopeful. Suppose it’s not the be all and end all of human economic organization? Why are we all so attached to it? I understand if you’re one of the 1% of the population that’s really profited from it, but I don’t understand all the enthusiasm from the 99% who didn’t. The Gini Coefficient numbers on most of the developed world outside Scandinavia are hilarious. It’s virtually feudal.
We can start by including Gini Coefficient in all national economic calculations, in the same way we include inflation etc. Scandinavia looks like it does okay with .25! And we go to full cost accounting, no artificial externalities. No, Virginia, carbon isn’t free. None of this cap and trade malarkey. You smoke it, you pay for it. Why are we subsidizing the use of fossil fuels? How is it that international aviation fuel isn’t taxed, but ground transportation fuel is? Let’s tax aviation fuel and subsidize solar and wind power. Subsidize disaster preparedness – think Haiti.
None of this is particularly threatening as far as I can see.
Intelligent Design
Intelligent Design, as a phrase, has had a bad time recently since being hijacked by Creationists as a way to describe their er…“scientific theories.” Well, with apologies to the Lord, we need it back. For despite the glossy advertising and general glitziness of so much that passes for modern technology, most of it is pretty primitive. We’ve wasted the vast majority of the first trillion barrels of oil because of the way we operate. We spend vast quantities of oil and gas heating houses and businesses that are hilariously thermodynamically inefficient. It’s so bad that the new paper “Home Truths” from Oxford University suggests it’s possible to increase efficiency by 80%! If all those ideas were implemented it would very nearly halve Britain’s domestic energy consumption. The same is true, and probably more so, for the States.
What I mean by Intelligent Design is really two ideas. The first is to embed intelligence in most of the infrastructure that’s pretty primitive right now. We heat inefficient homes. We use a road and rail system that is unable to let us know how traffic conditions will affect our journey. We have designed a throwaway culture based on cheap plastics. Those plastics aren’t cheap, they only appear cheap if you allow the companies producing them to keep the waste products out of sight.
So suppose we begin to design everything with an understanding of the interdependence of everything and the massive advantages that can be made by including artificial intelligence in products – specifically to minimize energy and resource waste, both during manufacture and use. Obsolescence is obsolete. Designers need to take all aspects of the product cycle into account from an ecological perspective, that includes initial design, production, use, maintenance and eventual disposal. From this point of view the designer and architect have a fundamental responsibility to provide a sustainable infrastructure, a built environment, and the products that we use everyday.
Currently design is a function of least possible cost, rather than long life and environmental effectiveness. Perhaps what we’re looking for here is a general application of Bionics, not simply in the medical sense of implants and prosthetics, but in the more general sense of using natural systems as the basis for engineering and design. The work of Julian Vincent at the University of Bath is an example of the kind of thinking I mean: “Animals tend to do things using as little energy as possible but to maximum effect. That’s not always the way humans think, so it’s a great way to achieve a novel design.” It’s a pity that more ideas like this aren’t commonplace in the design world. But then maybe necessity will be the mother of all inventors once again.
Despite the bust in Bali and the ongoing avalanche of data that lets us know all our models have woefully underestimated the speed of climate change, we may have time to get this kind of new intelligence into the built environment. But to be realistic, we don’t have 3 decades either
Time Crunch 1
When industrialization really got underway around 1850 the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere was 280 ppm, as it had been for most of human history. Today it stands at 380 ppm. It’s simple arithmetic to see that by burning, at $100 or whatever price, another trillion barrels of oil – roughly what we’ve burnt so far – plus the rest of the recoverable gas and coal we will add at least another 100ppm to the atmosphere. Given that these gasses tend to stay in the atmosphere for as long as 200 years, we should expect to see 480ppm GHG concentration at least, and perhaps far earlier than imagined . At these levels the evidence is strong that the climate will radically destabilize, possibly outside the range of temperatures at which civilization, or humans, can exist. However, despite the obvious danger and 30 years of action by ecologists and climate scientists there has been no reduction in the increase of fossil fuel use, so it seems probable that a good quantity of the remaining oil, gas and coal will be extracted and burned. We are then faced with trying to adapt to a rapidly changing environment with increasingly expensive fuels and other resources. Can we at least get a good idea of the trajectory of these changes?
Aye, there’s the rub. The climate of earth is inarguably a Complex System. Complexity as a new branch of mathematics developed in the last 25 years gives us some interesting ways of looking at natural phenomenon like forest growth, cloud shapes, epidemiology, the branched shape of river systems or the coast of Brittany: – stuff with fuzzy edges. But one of the problems is that Complex Systems are inherently non deterministic, which means that making precise predictions about climate is virtually impossible[1]. So there is a fundamental problem in trying to get a grasp of where CO2 concentrations are likely to take us in temperature terms. So while the IPCC report[2]gives us a general view of the range of temperature increase, we have no way of knowing what real outcomes will be.
However, while the actual temperature rise may be impossible to predict, the probable effects of each degree of increase has been researched by Mark Lynas [3]in “Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet” – which makes for devastating reading. What comes out of it is that at temperatures within the IPCC predicted ranges, not to mention above them, we will be faced with the greatest adaptational challenge our species has faced. What makes this more difficult is that fossil fuels and the technologies they make possible are vital to our adaptational ability in the short term: building windfarms, solar panels, CO2 scrubbers or for that matter, fusion reactors all require sophisticated tooling and materials. This is what makes it imperative that we begin to adapt infrastructure, transport, and agriculture immediately. We are in a time crunch, with maybe 20 years at most (being wildly optimistic for once), before we begin to lose the ability to adapt our technology. As unfortunate civilizations before us have discovered, once a critical technology or resource is lost it may be irrecoverable.
That’s the proposition for climate, so now we need to look at how accurate estimates are for the extraction of the remaining fossil fuels….
[1]For a technical discussion of this topic see the new Roe & Baker paper in Science.
[2]Available here: http://www.ipcc.ch/
[3]Available here: http://www.marklynas.org/
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