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TechnoratiOil-dependent countries are focused on growth at all costs, and the pale green political consensus looks unlikely to hold
Almost everyone seems to agree: governments now face a choice between saving the planet and saving the economy. As recession looms, the political pressure to abandon green policies intensifies. A report published yesterday by Ernst & Young suggests that the EU's puny carbon target will raise energy bills by 20% over the next 12 years. Last week the prime minister's advisers admitted to the Guardian that his renewable energy plans were "on the margins" of what people will tolerate.
But these fears are based on a false assumption: that there is a cheap alternative to a green economy. Last week New Scientist reported a survey of oil industry experts, which found that most of them believe global oil supplies will peak by 2010. If they are right, the game is up. A report published by the US department of energy in 2005 argued that unless the world begins a crash programme of replacements 10 or 20 years before oil peaks, a crisis "unlike any yet faced by modern industrial society" is unavoidable.
If the world is sliding into recession, it's partly because governments believed that they could choose between economy and ecology. The price of oil is so high and it hurts so much because there has been no serious effort to reduce our dependency. Yesterday in the Guardian, Rajendra Pachauri suggested that an impending recession could force us to confront the flaws in the global economy. Sadly it seems so far to have had the opposite effect: a recent Ipsos Mori poll suggests that people are losing interest in climate change. Opportunities for energy populism abound: it cannot be long before one of the major parties abandons the pale green consensus and starts invoking an oil cornucopia it cannot possibly deliver.
The British government maintains both positions at once. In his speech last week, Gordon Brown said he wanted "to facilitate a reduction in short-term global oil prices" while seeking "to reduce progressively our dependence on oil". He knows that the first objective makes the second one harder to achieve. The government's policy is to build more of everything -- more coal plants, more nuclear power, more oil rigs, more renewables, more roads, more airports -- and hope no one spots the contradictions.
Is there a way out? Could we abandon the fossil fuel economy without provoking a blistering backlash? Two things are obvious. We need a global system, and the current one, the Kyoto protocol, is bust. It sets no cap on global carbon pollution, its targets bear no relation to current science and are unenforceable anyway, it contains loopholes and get-out clauses wide enough to sail an oil tanker through.
Until recently I supported an alternative system called contraction and convergence. Every country, this system proposes, should end up with the same quota of carbon dioxide per person. The richest countries must produce much less than they do today; the poorest ones could pollute more. Another proposal flows logically from this one: carbon rationing. Having been assigned its carbon quota, each nation would divide up part of it equally among its citizens, who could use it to buy energy or trade it among themselves. These proposals have the merit of capping global pollution, of being fair, progressive and easy to understand and of encouraging us to think about our use of energy.
But, after reading the proofs of a book by the independent thinker Oliver Tickell, to be published next month, I have changed my view. In Kyoto2: How to Manage the Global Greenhouse, Tickell slaughters my favourite ideas. He shows that there is no logical basis for dividing up the right to pollute among nation states. It gives them too much power over this commodity, and there is no guarantee that they would pass the pollution rights on to their citizens, or use the money they raised to green the economy. Carbon rationing, he argues, requires a level of economic literacy that's far from universal in the most advanced economies, let alone in countries where most people don't have bank accounts.
Instead Tickell proposes setting a global limit for carbon pollution then selling permits to pollute to companies extracting or refining fossil fuels. This has the advantage of regulating a few thousand corporations -- running oil refineries, coal washeries, gas pipelines and cement and fertiliser works for example -- rather than a few billion citizens. These firms would buy their permits in a global auction, run by a coalition of the world's central banks. There's a reserve price, to ensure that the cost of carbon doesn't fall too low, and a ceiling price, at which the banks promise to sell permits, to ensure that the cost doesn't cripple the global economy. In this case companies would be borrowing permits from the future. But because the money raised would be invested in renewables, the demand for fossil fuels would fall, so fewer permits would need to be issued in later years.
Tickell calculates that if the cap were set low enough to ensure that the world became carbon neutral by 2050, the total cost of permits would be about $1 trillion a year, or roughly 1.5% of the global economy. The money would be spent on helping the poor to adapt to climate change, paying countries to protect forests and other ecosystems, developing low-carbon farming, promoting energy efficiency and building renewable power plants.
But his figure seems too low. Like many of the world's climate scientists, Oliver Tickell proposes that the concentration of greenhouse gases should eventually be stabilised at 350 parts per million (carbon dioxide equivalent) in the atmosphere, and his calculations are based on this target. Last week Lord Stern suggested that meeting a less stringent target (500 parts per million) would cost 2% of world gross domestic product. If the price of the carbon permits sold at auction were much higher than Tickell suggests, the extra money could be used for massive tax rebates and social spending, aimed especially at the poor. But could the world afford it?
This money doesn't disappear, it gets spent. Tickell's proposal could represent a classic Keynesian solution to economic crisis. The $1, $2 or even $5 trillion the system would cost is used to kick-start a green industrial revolution, a new New Deal not that different from the original one (whose most successful component was Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps, which protected forests and farmland). This would not be the first time that business was rescued by the measures it most stoutly resists: there's a long history of corporate lobbying against the kind of government spending that eventually saves the corporate economy.
Do we want to save it, even if we can? It is hard to see how the current global growth rate of 3.7% a year (which means the global economy doubles every 19 years) could be sustained, even if the whole thing were powered by the wind and the sun. But that is a question for another column and perhaps another time, when the current economic panic has abated. For now we have to find a means of saving us from ourselves.
monbiot.com
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
34 Comments so far
Show AllThe only reason there's a perception that "governments now face a choice between saving the planet and saving the economy," is that "governments" everywhere have imposed monetary systems upon their people which can only multiply debt into collapse. The only reason there seems to be no choice is those governments have been usurped by usurers who plunder us *via* the very vehicle of the imposed monetary systems.
Nonetheless, there *is* one and one only way to solve all the monetary issues imposed by these unassented systems; and thereby, to save the planet *and* the economy. That one solution for all is mathematically perfected economy:
http://www.perfecteconomy.com/
FVHorn: hear, hear!
Panic is good. If you are not panicking, then you are obviously in government or business. A massive depression and economic contraction is required to slow down emissions, since the rate of adoption of renewable energy resources or zero emission technology of any form is insufficient to save us. The question is what parts of the economy can be contracted with lesser harm to the environment and people. There is in fact so much overproduction used fir luxury and military excess, that perhaps the world emissions economy could be cut in half in a very short time. Only the western lifestyle would suffer. Cut the number of working days of every worker in half. Only produce necessities for a reasonable supply of nutrition. All other activities that are carbon neutral or negative are allowed. Remember that we are rationing for the survival of our future with Gaia. Rather than central planning, mandate real holidays where most things get turned off, and only enough power for essential services, fridges and cooking, by raising the price of electricity very high. Reduce private vehicle speeds, number of journeys allowed.
Well the price of oil rising is starting to do this already! Soon the luxuries will be too expensive, and employment layoffs are going to occur in related industries. Food prices will mean that nutritional value for money will be a matter of survival. There is not much need to model this, as real life will take over all too soon. The repercussions will take time to spread through the economic gears. Only then inexhaustible supplies of renewable energy look like gold mines.
How is the developed world going to manage?. Probably with full political denial of responsibility. One day carbon emissions will have a personal lifestyle cost. By the time governments swing into action with their carbon trading rackets, the cost of developed world living will be far ahead.
Let's quit dancing around the truth, we are on our own! Governments and industry are not structured for the Green Economy and therefore continue to operate on economic self interest. Most of us have not faced up to the level of change required to reduce our carbon footprint sufficiently and sustainably. If we, the more enlightened, have not done so what possibly could force the unenlightened to do so other than high prices, shortages, and suffering.
I believe it is too late to avoid serious long term consequences. It's time to think of your own survival and that of your neighbors. We cannot carry the burdens of the ignorant and careless until they begin pulling with us.
Mother Earth can and will care for herself, even it it means eliminating man from the mix of life on Earth. One would have to be blind not to see her wrath. It only takes one super volcano or methane burp to eliminate us. It may not even be about us, it may be about the rocks.
Right on Vera! The entrepreneurial opportunities could have saved our economy and helped people and the planet at the same time. I think that India and perhaps China are going to come to the forefront on this. Let us hope that it won't be too little, to late.
By choosing the economy we delay the obvious...the loss. Europe is already creating hundreds of new jobs in the 'green' business. "Green" industries are coming up all over.
Hey, endcapitalism, why are you so disgustingly offensive when faced with a person(boy howdy)who is genuinely and intelligently concerned about population pressures on the biosphere of Earth? Do you think the human population can expand indefinitely? Especially in the face of the end of oil, which humans are burning right now with the current population mix at a rate of four million barrels an hour? And with global warming desertifying the globe?
We are reaching the end of a viable planet because there are now billions of users - most of whom apparently believe as you apparently do, that overpopulating the Earth is OK. Multiply every single thing you do every day by seven billion and understand how much more difficult it will continue to get for the planetary biosphere to sustain such a human population... even if we all eat mud cookies, and I guarantee there will be massive genocidal war before that state is reached. That, too, is human nature.
So today's cute kids will be tomorrow's machete killers (see Rwanda and Darfur), if the population explosion is not brought under control. And maybe you, endcapitalism, will wind up one of the victims. So are YOU castrated? You should be. Because people who breed without regard to the future of the planet are the ones who are wrecking the future for everyone, even their own offspring, and even those that abstain from breeding in consideration of life on Earth and the impact humans have on its sustainability.
Really, see the Youtube video "Are humans smarter than yeast?" to understand the explosive exponential nature of population. If you judge by people like endcapitalism, the answer to the question posed seems to be No, humans are Not smarter than yeast.
As most lower, irrational life forms (see bacteria, or the NeoCon Club for Growth) tend to do, the available environment is completely used up by growth, if unmitigated, until there is nothing more to use or eat, then the population crashes dramatically, sometimes to utter extinction. This is where we are now as a species.
Will we be wise, and have family planning and a good and, yes, hopefully a more equitable and saner life provided for All? Or will we just continue to expand population, and have to kill others, one way or another, to gain resources for our own families in a dog-eat-dog world? Otherwise known as Planet Bush.
Believe me, the families of the developed world will not tolerate a decline into third-world living standards for their children without massive war. Where do you think we are now? Read the Kunstler book THE LONG EMERGENCY and the Lovelock book THE REVENGE OF GAIA, to understand the critical situation we are in. It would, of course, be far better to bring the third-world up to developed world living standards instead, but that becomes increasingly impossible with an ongoing wild expansion of population.
We have alleviated the old curses of humanity with modern science, medicine and technology. And since we have positively and happily interfered with the natural and brutal old processes of population control- wherein the average age of humans until the nineteenth century was around thirty-five, war and famine were tribal norms, a third of children did not see their fifth birthday, and many women died in childbirth- then we must interfere with the quantity of pregnancies as well, with good family planning for everyone. And this will be necessary in order to facilitate the improvement of life for all the people of this planet. Or soon nobody will have a life worth living.
George, here is a solution. Free public transit.
http://freepublictransit.org
boy howdy, when was it that YOU were castrated? You are doing your part for population control I have to assume.
The market has spoken - to deaf ears. 
By Dobereiner, David
Due to the rise in oil prices, which are permanent and will continue to rise because we have reached Peak Oil, a momentous change has occurred. Solar Thermal power generation is now competitive with oil fired stations. So is wind. Why are they not being built in large numbers to replace coal fired then? Because of the power of the fossil fuel industries. The next President should not only cease all subsidies to Coal, Oil, Ethanol, Nuclear but should turn all those existing subsidies into community owned solar and wind research. And yes, John McCain has one good idea for offering a prize to improved battery technology. Electricity storage is the missing link in the whole alternative energy system. Relying on natural cycles means intermittent generation which needs to be reconciled with round the clock use - but no encouragement of solar and wind makes any sense without an equal and opposite discouragement of the powers that be. Moreover, the President should regulate the new solar panel arrays so that they are legally required to be mounted on raised structures - high enough for a truck to pass underneath if on the ground and high enough for gardeners and residents to walk underneath if on an urban roof. The solutions are here now to the problems James Hansen has so vividly described. We must quickly generate the political will to set up the infrastructure that can serve humanity for the next thousands of years - or see all lost.
The last energy crisis caused much more efficient processes to be put in play in industry. Automobiles were made bigger, heavier and with much more powerful engines that destroyed most of the gains from the better technology.
This is why technology solves nothing. People just consume bigger, better, faster, more unless the social and legal changes are ahead of the curve. We need to install a conservation approach then substitute new energy technologies that are better than the ones we use now.
If we develop new energy sources, only, we will use old and new energy systems to the limit and press for more.
We could easily have 3.7% growth forever if we measured the right things. How about a reduction in unwanted unloved children, raped women, medical mistakes, premature death, unemployed people, uneducated people, pollution? How about an increase in healthy wild ecosystems, healthy food? How about fewer, smaller, shorter, wars?
Real growth is not 3.7% more Walmarts and freeways.
When you get a bunch of apes running a planet, you get a bunch of apes ruining a planet. At what point does the little light bulb go off and the, "oh shit!" happen?
chessgames56 - excellent observation. yeah.
frank1569 - s'right. And maybe, we never even learn how to handle a crisis once it happens. Other, generally unrelated activity around the crisis occurs until it is receded by some of those events. The Great Depression wasn't cured by Hoover Dam. Poverty bounced on until WWII. Japan never recovered after WWII, the Korean War and it's US munitions orders boot-started the economy. What new engine technology came out of the last oil crisis? What single innovation is there for the 50+-year-old issue of unemployment for people who have no alternative to urban life unlike, say, a 100 years ago when you could just go rural/alternative? We are not really a society. It's an ego-label like a dictator calling himself "General". We all play along hoping its true.
right... and slumping is bad for your autonomic nerve action, I heard. Like lying on the couch while watching TV trains you to stay awake in a sleeping pose mixing up your "awake/sleep" body-system switching. (lifts fingers from keyboard but continues to ramble..)
Over the years, I've been converted to the give-up/give-in school, which is based on a solid premise: humans only react AFTER a catastrophe - rarely, if ever, before one strikes. For example, my hood was rocked by the '94 Northridge quake in LA, and, out of about 100 units in the apt. complex, I was the only one with an "earthquake kit." By the end of the week, however, nearly everyone and their mother had water and flashlights and batteries and food stored, both in a closet and their car. But by 2000, most stopped worrying and the kits were gone.
The drunk driver stops - for a while, at least - not when they get "caught," but only after the car is totaled or someone is killed. And it's not like anyone can claim they didn't know drunk driving was a bad (and illegal) idea...
On ExxonMobil's website, you can read all about how peak oil is a hoax, how there's enough "in the ground" to keep the world running for 60 years+ at full capacity, blah blah blah. I have friends who will argue that global warming is a total hoax (though they can never seem to know who is perpetrating said hoax and what the unknown hoaxers end game is,) and just today it was reported that there are waiting lists for high-end SUVs that average 14mpg.
The only real solution is to use it all up as fast as possible. Expecting the entire world to band together and work toward a common cause as fast as possible is about as ridiculous as expecting some God to stop by and save us in the nick of time...
hidflect, no need to slump. I try to keep my assumptions about most things in a flexible state and I appreciate when someone can challenge them. When I get to a computer that allows me to download your links (later this evening), I will check them out. Thanks.
rebelnow - Aargh - no fair. It's tricky to say 99.99% without implying your in the other camp... so OK - I was in the 99.99%. Everyone starts there. Basically I copped out of lengthy explanations... Tired, lazy. I have family in oil biz (good luck to them - doesn't correlate to my income) and my work has given me a "fly-on-the-wall peek sometimes.. not snooping - just talking face to face with "know-ees" Maybe watch these videos (maybe already seen it?)...
Informative - Funny - bit too green
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5267640865741878159&q=oil&ei=KZ...
This guy is a bit alarmist but what he says is true. (e's a baptist minister if that helps cred...!)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3340274697167011147
(resumes slump...)
Is it just me or is trying to rig a market to stop greenhouse emissions a little like a rectal tonsillectomy. Far too hard and frought with danger. The patient might die as a result of attempting to implement a convoluted solution.
Isn't it time to put the brakes on and tell those "few thousand corporations" to gradually reduce and eventually stop emitting greenhouse gases (and for that matter all pollution). The markets will then do what they are good at, responding to a need (environmentally benign power), and begin to develop alternatives. Government can then focus its efforts on something it is supposed to be good at, dealing with the inevitable dislocation.
Dislocation seems like a bad word, but there is no solution to a problem of this magnitude without it. The sooner we recognize and begin dealing with this the better.
And here's another solution for Monbiot to CHOKE on !
http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/05/making-renewabl.html
Making Renewable, Carbon-Neutral Oil — From Algae
By Chuck Squatriglia EmailMay 29, 2008 | 5:45:25 PMCategories: Biofuel
Hirescrude_2
A San Diego start-up says it is using algae to make oil that can be refined into gasoline and other fuels that are both renewable and carbon-neutral, and it plans to produce 10,000 barrels a day within five years.
That's a fraction of the 20 million or so barrels of petroleum the United States consumes each day, but Sapphire Energy says "green crude" production could ramp up to a level sufficient to ease our dependence on foreign oil, if not end it altogether.
Company CEO Jason Pyle says the algal oil is chemically identical to light sweet crude and compatible with America's $1.5 trillion petroleum infrastructure, making it a direct replacement for oil. Although the algal fuels refined from it emit as much carbon dioxide as conventional fuels, the company says the emissions are offset by the photosynthetic process that uses sunlight, water and C02 to create algal crude.
"At the very worst, it's carbon neutral," Pyle says, calling the fuels a "benchmark for an entire new industry" and "a paradigm change."
Energy experts and air quality regulators say they'll withhold judgment on those claims until they've seen a production-to-combustion analysis of the fuel's emissions. But they say Sapphire could be on to something.
Making fuel from algae is nothing new, and a lot of organizations, from the smallest start-up to the biggest oil companies, are trying to find the best way to do it. But most of the effort has been on replacing diesel fuel or kerosene. Sapphire wants to replace petroleum.
"We designed it to be a completely fungible product with crude oil," Pyle says. He says the company has refined its algal crude into 91-octane gasoline, diesel fuel and kerosene chemically identical to conventional fuels. He wouldn't disclose how the process works or what it costs but said it is competitive with deep-water oil drilling and extracting petroleum from tar sands.
Sapphire also avoids the food-for-fuel debate that has plagued crop-based biofuels because it uses algae and works on non-arable land with non-potable water. Pyle wouldn't say where Sapphire plans to build the demonstration plant it will have running later this year, but it's reportedly working in Oklahoma and may locate its facilities in the South and Southwest. It hopes to have a full-scale plant up and running within five years, producing 10,000 barrels of green crude a day. The company has lined up more than $50 million in funding from investors like ARCH Venture Partners.
Ramping up to that level of production without killing the algae can be tricky, one expert said, and the environmental impact of green crude remain to be seen. Even if it is carbon neutral, the algal fuels will emit pollutants that contribute to smog and ozone, says Don Anair of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
"You're still going to get combustion emissions. You aren't eliminating those with algal fuels," he says, echoing a point the California Air Resources Board made. Still, Anair is cautiously optimistic.
"The fact that there is a lot of interest in finding a better way to fuel our transportation system is encouraging," he says. "This is one avenue to pursue that has very good potential."
Photo by Sapphire Energy.
Ah, poor Mr George FUCKING Monbiot ! He cries "WAH ! WAH ! The oil is running out ! WAH ! WAH !" but calls all real solutions "scams". Well, here's an article the dumbfuck can learn from !!
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4133668.ece
June 14, 2008
Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol
Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide 'renewable petroleum'
Chris Ayres
"Ten years ago I could never have imagined I'd be doing this," says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. "I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into."
He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.
Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls "renewable petroleum". After that, he grins, "it's a brave new world".
Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities such as software and networking and embarked instead on an extraordinary race to make $140-a-barrel oil (£70) from Saudi Arabia obsolete. "All of us here – everyone in this company and in this industry, are aware of the urgency," Mr Pal says.
Related Links
* Biofuel: a tankful of weed juice
* The arithmetic of crude oil
What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to reengineer the global economy – as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this "Oil 2.0" will not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.
LS9 has already convinced one oil industry veteran of its plan: Bob Walsh, 50, who now serves as the firm's president after a 26-year career at Shell, most recently running European supply operations in London. "How many times in your life do you get the opportunity to grow a multi-billion-dollar company?" he asks. It is a bold statement from a man who works in a glorified cubicle in a San Francisco industrial estate for a company that describes itself as being "prerevenue".
Inside LS9's cluttered laboratory – funded by $20 million of start-up capital from investors including Vinod Khosla, the Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Micro-systems – Mr Pal explains that LS9's bugs are single-cell organisms, each a fraction of a billionth the size of an ant. They start out as industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by custom-de-signing their DNA. "Five to seven years ago, that process would have taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars," he says. "Now it can take weeks and cost maybe $20,000."
Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.
For fermentation to take place you need raw material, or feedstock, as it is known in the biofuels industry. Anything will do as long as it can be broken down into sugars, with the byproduct ideally burnt to produce electricity to run the plant.
The company is not interested in using corn as feedstock, given the much-publicised problems created by using food crops for fuel, such as the tortilla inflation that recently caused food riots in Mexico City. Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw in California, for example, or woodchips in the South.
Using genetically modified bugs for fermentation is essentially the same as using natural bacteria to produce ethanol, although the energy-intensive final process of distillation is virtually eliminated because the bugs excrete a substance that is almost pump-ready.
The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes. It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.
However, to substitute America's weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.
That is the main problem: although LS9 can produce its bug fuel in laboratory beakers, it has no idea whether it will be able produce the same results on a nationwide or even global scale.
"Our plan is to have a demonstration-scale plant operational by 2010 and, in parallel, we'll be working on the design and construction of a commercial-scale facility to open in 2011," says Mr Pal, adding that if LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably cost about $50 a barrel.
Are Americans ready to be putting genetically modified bug excretion in their cars? "It's not the same as with food," Mr Pal says. "We're putting these bacteria in a very isolated container: their entire universe is in that tank. When we're done with them, they're destroyed."
Besides, he says, there is greater good being served. "I have two children, and climate change is something that they are going to face. The energy crisis is something that they are going to face. We have a collective responsibility to do this."
Power points
— Google has set up an initiative to develop electricity from cheap renewable energy sources
— Craig Venter, who mapped the human genome, has created a company to create hydrogen and ethanol from genetically engineered bugs
— The US Energy and Agriculture Departments said in 2005 that there was land available to produce enough biomass (nonedible plant parts) to replace 30 per cent of current liquid transport fuels
interesting comment hidflect. I consider myself one of the 99.99% clueless about the realities of oil. You seem to imply that you are of the .01% who is not clueless but also imply that any "geologist worth a damn is snatched up by the oil and gas Ind. and 'bought' into the system...other geologists simply never get access."
So how is it that you seem to have confidence in a seeming unlimited supply of oil? by hanging out at Schipol airport? How is it that you are 10 steps ahead of most?
Regardless of the "hidden" reserves, be they reality or fantasy, the immediate problem is not the availability but the irresponsible use of those "fossil fuels", namely pollution and toxicity.
hemp and switchgrass for biofuel. nuclear's a dead end---literally.
americans are still very ignorant about nuclear power, knowing very little for example about breeder reactors. do your research!
Oil is the most important "thing" in our lives. From medicine, crops, toothbrushes, transport, etc. But 99.99% do not even know 1 fact about it. People think its a fossil fuel. It's not. That's originally a mistaken myth based on the inference of coal. It's subsequently been taken up and championed by oil producers and industries to legitimize the territorial possession of oil fields. Oil is all over the inside of the planet like the colouring inside a child's marble. Some places much more than others, true, but there is more oil than we could burn in 200 years of expansion. But oil is the money of the planet. Paper and electronic cash is nonsense. Energy is everything. So we have peak oil now. Someone owns a lake but he's keeping it hidden from view. All we can see is a single 2 litre bottle of water that is sold by the cup at a very high price. Magically that bottle will never empty out. THanks to the lake, of course... No? Not convinced? Methane Giants. Bloody big planets about 95% methane gas. Cows? Sheep? Methane hydrate at the bottom of the ocean. Reckoned to equal the "officially known" oil reserves in energy value. Same stuff found on comets. OK - so it's not made from little bugs... but how to know there's so much left? Hang out at Schipol airport and ask any oil worker coming back from XYZ-stan. " 4x more oil than UAE" is an oft quote. Or just examine the geographical results from oil sites.. WHat's that? Can't? Closely held secret you say? If it's safely in the ground, not padlocked or anything true but ah.. no-one's gonna pinch it, why the secrecy? On and on the lies go. Any geologist worth a damn is snatched up by the oil and gas Ind. and "bought" into the system to keep stum. Other geologists simply never get access. Peak oil is a brilliant and stunning victory of the very people who mimic being it's greatest sceptic. Oil and Gas. Bill Gates (not now) richest man in the world? Joke? Must be... Some families have been being pumped gigantic, incessant oil stake dividends for over a century, but it's the guy selling floppies and CD's who's the richest? Wake up. Your 10 steps behind.
"Spiral Dynamics" a la Ken Wilber and others, says there's never been more than ten percent of the population at one time who knows what's truly going on and is self-actualized enough to act purposively and effectively to stabilize events for the positive. I have to agree with James Lovelock (Gaia Hyphothesis, late 70s)- about 500 million will live to see the 22nd century - they will be in upper latitudes - Canada, Scandanavia - they will have captured some expertise in the art of living within ecological limits -- Post-oil -- and most of the population, 7-8 billion, will have either starved to death, since you can only grow enough food for maybe 2 billion without oil, or they will be gobbled up in the resource wars that are sure to come in greater numbers (longest running act in human history).
Does anyone else experience examples of sheer cluelessness about ecology and energy efficiency out in the daily American world? It's 100 degrees in San Fernando Valley in June, air conditioners are all on full blast, and half the doors and windows on the built structures are hooked wide-open. Why is that? For customers?
If we want to live like they do in LA, we're doomed. If we solve the energy/transportation/food/education/housing/healthcare/debt/warondrugs/crisis, then we should be fine.
This is the thing: those who are in a personal economic crises will not care about global warming, or other enviornmental issues. Set up a society where everyone's basic needs are met, then people will begin to care about the state of the planet. Those being starved out will only care about getting what they need--or feel they need--to survive. Desperation has no conscience. Thus, the consequences of greed are far more reaching than we might presently imagine.
qbaldsmoove,
Gosh, somebody responded! No, not the rapture. That's a lot of flapdoodle. And certainly, as voxclamantis points out, time will bring unforeseen developments. But my hobby-horse has continued to be human population increase and the way it has of swallowing efforts at progress, peace, harmony, stabilization. And how population decline would begin healing us. But pay no attention -- it's just me ranting my own brand of flapdoodle.
So boy howdy,
does that mean we should just give up / give in? Sounds like the rapture is your exit strategy.
Should we not be skeptical about efforts to impose today's paradigms on people 40 or 50 years into the future? How obligated do you think we would be today to some utopian mandate authored by, say, the Kennedy administration way back in 1960? There is a new world every morning for our ADD afflicted race, and current needs will always trump the admonitions of past sages. So we are confident that people in 2050 will still retain the phrase "carbon neutrality" in its lexicon, and that 1.5% of the global economy will flow predictably to the poor in developing nations, as Tickell's prescription is dutifully followed down through the generations? I have my doubts.
Any viable solution to the upcoming energy crunch is worth a try, but it is also silly to depend on our mindset and our agendas not to change like bubbles on a river over time. The only constant during the time of increasingly scarce oil will be the increasing scarcity of oil. The 50 year plan should have been started 50 years ago. Rather than composing happy and unenforceable agreements for our children to renegotiate, we'd better focus on the present where things are less abstract and speculative. The sooner we realize alternative energy infrastructures and lifestyle changes, the better our odds are going to be of surviving the wrapup of the oil based industrial age. That mega-event, I'm afraid, will be huge and complex and turbulent and will have a mind of its own.
It is mildly amusing to speculate on what measures could save civilization from disaster, if they were effectively implemented. But what would be necessary -- a ten-year moratorium on the propagation of the species -- ain't going to happen. We're going down. So be kind to each other and enjoy, as much as possible, each remaining moment.
Some good points there by Mr. Monbiot. It's about time we buried the idea (all too often promulgated by mainstream environmental groups) that we can 'transition' to a green economy whilst creating new jobs in a win-win scenario for the bottom line and nature. We can't have our cake and eat it too.
Until we ask ourselves why we have become trapped on this path that demands exponential growth and expansion, and more importantly how we can get off it, any environmental progress in the form of lighter carbon footprints, lower resource consumption etc is pretty pointless - the gains simply get eaten up by the growth machine a few months later.
"It is hard to see how the current global growth rate of 3.7% a year (which means the global economy doubles every 19 years) could be sustained, even if the whole thing were powered by the wind and the sun." Excellent observation!
The means to savings ourselves, which should not be postponed, is to question the emphasis and sanctity of 'growth'; the mantra of the modern economies. Money issued in the form of debt is nothing more than a pyramid/ponzi scheme. The quantification of debt applies the algebraic concept of exponential growth - compounding interest - upon money. The distinction between usury and interest is an arbitrary legal determination with no basis in mathematics. Nothing can grow forever at an ever-increasing rate. As time moves on, the emphasis of ever-increasing growth becomes omnipresent, is quantified and institutionalized in the societal structure, encouraging over consumption, over development, and excessive expectations, pushing economic stress to its upper limit of expansion, eventually inciting conflict and spawning War to insure growth. Sound familiar?
http://theformofmoney.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2005/9/18/1236759.ht...
from the article:
"there's a long history of corporate lobbying against the kind of government spending that eventually saves the corporate economy."
this illustrates perfectly lee's law of economics, which states that "short-term smart = long-term stupid."
corporate capitalism (which, since it socializes risks while privatizing only rewards, is an oxymoron) stands at lest an even chance of ending all life on this planet in pursuit of the last nickel of profit.