ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

Water, energy, and limits to growth

November 5th, 2009 by Jim Just

A post by Ugo Bardi at The Oil Drum: Europe looks at the water consumption of energy technologies.

Notice how enormously water intensive biofuels are – as Bardi says, “another drawback for a technology which has also a low EROEI, needs large areas, and competes for land with food production.”

The world’s water resources are already stretched thin – and climate change will make things worse. Rivers from China’s Yellow to America’s Colorado no longer can be relied on to even reach the sea. Glaciers are already melting, from the Himalayas to the Andes.  No glaciers, no storage, no water. Climate change threatens desertification around the globe, from the American West to Australia, northern China and Tibet, the Mediterranean basin including southern Europe. From Saudi Arabia to the American West, we’re drawing from and exhausting “fossil water” from ancient aquifers.

Bardi rightly points out that the world’s water predicament is yet another indication that we’re bumping up against ecological limits to growth:

Water is, of course, a renewable resource but a lot of the water used today is “fossil” water. It comes from deep aquifers which can be drained empty as it has happened, for instance in Saudi Arabia. In addition, climate change may further reduce the water supply in many areas of the world. How much these factors will affect energy generation worldwide in the near future is difficult to say at present, but surely the problem shouldn’t be underestimated. The EROWI problem, in the end, is just an indication that we are hitting yet another limit of our finite environment.

Our political and economic systems require that resource issues such as peak oil or water shortages be approached as problems to be solved by finding new supplies or sources – by yet more growth. But growth is itself the underlying problem. As Daniel Allen says in a post at The Energy Bulletin, limits to growth cannot be overcome by yet more growth.

Resource depletion is a predicament requiring adaptation to an entirely new low-consumption paradigm, rather than a problem to be solved with technological or social solutions.

Allen urges Americans to “start the conversation about what a lower-consumption, resource-poor society would look like, and begin the appropriate preparations.”

The world needs to begin that conversation, like right now. In ancient Greek thought, transgressions of limits inevitably in punishment by the gods. When it comes to transgressing limits, climate change would be Gaia’s ultimate penalty.

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No solution to our agricultural predicament

October 26th, 2009 by Jim Just

Compared to any other human activity, land use and agriculture are the greatest emitters of greenhouse gasses.

You heard that right. More than the emissions from all the world’s passenger cars, trucks, trains and planes, or the emissions from all electricity generation or manufacturing. Of the three most important man-made greenhouse gasses — carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation, methane emissions from animals and rice fields, and nitrous oxide emissions from heavily fertilized fields  — account for 30% of the total.

Jonathan Foley points out at Yale Environment 360 that since the last ice age, nothing has been more disruptive to the planet’s ecosystems than agriculture. Continued population growth is pushing global agricultural systems to their very limits. He asks:

Already, we have cleared or converted more than 35 percent of the earth’s ice-free land surface for agriculture, whether for croplands, pastures or rangelands. . . What will happen to our remaining ecosystems, including tropical rainforests, if we need to double or triple world agricultural production, while simultaneously coping with climate change?

We’re already exploiting Earth’s water resources in an unsustainable manner, drawing on fossil aquifers and draining rivers before they reach the sea. The use of industrial fertilizers and other chemicals has more than doubled the flows of nitrogen and phosphorus compounds in the environment and fundamentally upset the chemistry of the entire planet. How can Earth cope with future demands from increasing population and agricultural consumption?

Unfortunately, Foley’s answer is pretty feeble. First, acknowledge we have a problem. Then, “find ways to simultaneously increase production of our agricultural systems while greatly reducing their environmental impacts” – what he calls a “greener agricultural revolution.”

What Foley can’t admit is, we don’t have a “problem” that can be solved with yet another technofix. We’re in a predicament, from which there’s no solution, no easy way out. The best we can hope for is to face our predicament squarely, with as much courage and grace as we can muster.

Posted in Agriculture, Ecology, Food, Global Warming | No Comments »

The revolution starts now

September 11th, 2009 by Jim Just

An article in the UK Timesonline reports that cod are doomed to disappear from the North Sea:

Cod are doomed to disappear from the North Sea because of climate change and not just as a result of over-fishing, researchers have discovered.

In the past 40 years the average temperature of the North Sea has increased by 1C with catastrophic effects on its delicate eco-systems.

Species of plankton, on which cod larvae feed, have moved away in search of cooler waters. The decline in cod stocks has led to an explosion in the populations of crabs and jellyfish, on which the adult fish feed. The shortage of predators at the top of the food chain has had a knock-on effect on flat fish, such as plaice and sole, whose offspring are eaten by crabs.

I just finished reading Song for the Blue Ocean. Back in 1997, Carl Safina chronicled the horrifying demise of the world’s fisheries. How much worse have things gotten since then? How much worse will they get?

John Michael Greer urges us to face the truth – the future won’t be better than the present:

We are not going to have a future better than the present: not in our lifetimes, and not in those of our grandchildren’s grandchildren. We collectively closed the door on that possibility decades ago, and none of the rapidly narrowing range of choices still open to us now offers any way of changing that.

Greer advises embracing ambivalence and accepting “both the wonder and the immense tragedy of our time.” But life is yin yang, both wonder and tragedy. Always has been, always will be.  It’s not just now.

Guy McPherson takes issue with the notion that our way of life is as great as we think.  He writes at The Energy Bulletin about his trip to a family wedding. He observes that the “living arrangements” we’ve made are far from ideal:

Within the span of a couple generations, we abandoned a durable, finely textured, life-affirming set of living arrangements characterized by self-sufficient family farms intermixed with small towns that provided commerce, services, and culture. Worse yet, we traded that model for a coarse-scaled arrangement wholly dependent on ready access to cheap fossil fuels.

Yes, we’ve done that – and far worse, thoughtlessly exploiting Earth’s resources and despoiling Earth’s ecosystems to the brink of collapse and beyond.

And now we’re reaping what we have sown, in the collapse of fisheries and a looming collapse in agriculture. We eat oil – but Hubbert’s peak is now in our rear-view mirror. Shed no tears for the demise of industrial agriculture. McPherson describes what he saw throughout the Midwest:

The entire region, formerly abundant with a multitude of edible crops, currently is brimming with a single commodity: #2 corn. It’s Roundup-ready, at that, just to throw a bucket of insulting acid into the face of reason. Roundup-resistant weeds are popping up throughout the region as we bring Farmageddon to the heartland and eventually to the world. Most of the corn, which is essentially inedible until it is processed (i.e., pummeled with inordinate quantities of fossil fuels), is watered with the last remaining drops of the Ogallala aquifer, brought to the surface with the same finite fluid used to power our trucks and cars. Verdant fields of ethanol dreams are interrupted occasionally by a field of soybeans; without rotations of legumes, the soil would be so depleted of nitrogen by king corn, it wouldn’t support even the great corn desert. The corn fills our bellies with death-inducing faux sugar. But we willingly trade some of that “food” for fuel because the associated dependence on automobiles allows us to burn off the final inches of life-giving topsoil to promote our culture of death in rapid-transit, individualized death-traps. Who could pass up a deal like that?

Contra Greer, McPherson thinks better days lie ahead.

How could they not? In the near future, we’ll return to a durable set of living arrangements.

Greer points out that McPherson’s dreams of “better days” imply a human population as low as 500 million. That’s quite a crash from today’s population of almost 7 billion.  We can’t control how that crash work itself out. Suffering will not be denied. Still, life is durable.

McPherson’s “better days” are seen in some imagined “future.” Better days are here already, all around us, no matter what the political, economic, or ecological crisis of the moment. They’re here in the chipping of a squirrel, in the deep dark of a new moon, in the mist of a September morning. They’re here in a meal of local free-run turkey, fresh garden tomatoes, and copious quantities of home-grown Pinot Noir shared with dear friends. As long as there are creatures on Earth, life will be wondrous – and tragic.

Our farmer neighbors don’t seem to be interested in the debates about whether we expect the future to be better or worse, whether industrial imperialism can be saved or is worth saving. They simply get about the work of raising the best food they can while struggling to make ends meet and doing as little harm as possible. That’s true revolution.

And everybody can participate. As Wendell Berry says, eating is an agricultural act.

Agricultural acts can be revolutionary.

Posted in Climate Change, Farming, Fisheries, Food | No Comments »

Economists live in Fantasyland where exponential growth can go on forever

January 12th, 2009 by Jim Just

Want to see why economists live in Fantasyland? Take a look:

GDP and CBO’s Estimate of Potential GDP, 2000 to 2019

GDP and CBO’s Estimate of Potential GDP, 2000 to 2019

This is the latest January 8, 2009 CBO projection of output under current law – that is, without any new stimulus package. Once we get past this little rough patch, we’ll soon be back on the economic growth path within a couple of years and will have made up lost ground by 2014 or so. Business as usual, on into the future.

Obama is offering a $775 billion plan to get the economy back on the growth track sooner rather than later. Noble prize winning economist Paul Krugman argues that that’s not enough – it won’t get us back on the growth track soon enough:

The bottom line is that the Obama plan is unlikely to close more than half of the looming output gap, and could easily end up doing less than a third of the job.

In the economists’ world, there are no resource constraints such as the peaking of oil and other fossil fuels, uranium, and some metals and minerals (including copper, platinum, silver, gold, and zinc); the peaking of agricultural production due to peak phosphorus, depleting and eroding soils, desertification, and the exhaustion of aquifers; and the collapse of the world’s fisheries. There are no “sink” restraints such as the ability of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans to absorb carbon dioxide and other wastes.

Dmitry Orlov says economists are no better than astrologers:

To build support for his plans, Mr. Obama must rely on the consensus advice of mainstream American economists. These astrologers to the wealthy, with their fancy astrolabes they call “models,” may be popular during flush times, in spite of the feeble predictive abilities of their “science,” but they start to seem downright foolish and feckless once the economy starts to implode. Still, these pseudo-scientists, with their pseudo-Nobel prizes and their tenured faculty positions, are quite entrenched, and will be difficult to dismiss, because the fiction they spin is so much more cheerful than the physical reality it is designed to obscure.

Orlov is right when he points out what we call the “economy” is no longer connected to anything real; that what is needed is a concerted effort to build a new, vastly different economy, not to squander remaining resources on attempts to resuscitate the current, moribund one.  And as he says,  politicians are beholden to the system that got them into power.

Orlov’s advice seems apt: grow potatoes.

Posted in Economics, Politics | No Comments »

Relocalizing Willamette Valley agriculture

July 1st, 2008 by Jim Just

A recent post talked about how high gas prices could lead to the draining of population from small towns in rural areas as people moved closer to jobs and amenities in urban areas. But there is another possibility: the rebuilding of local, rural, agriculture-based economies that rely on human labor rather than fossil fuels.

That’s the objective of the Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project, which aims at the transformation of agriculture in Lane, Linn, Benton, and Lincoln counties at the south end of Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

This bioregion contains roughly 700,000 acres of farmland, approximately 400,000 acres of which is used for cropland. It once produced a wide array of grains, fruits, and vegetables. At times wheat represented almost a third of what was harvested. The region had the agricultural capacity and food system infrastructure to feed itself.

Now, the region is dominated by farms growing fescue and rye grass for the global grass seed market. Less than 20% of its cropland acreage is utilized for food.

The Bean and Grain Project seeks to convert grass seed acreage into plots for organic beans, grains, and edible seeds as a critical first step to reinvigorating the regional food system. Harry MacCormack, co-founder of Oregon Tilth and owner of Sunbow Farm in Corvallis, Oregon, provides the vision and inspiration.

The project aims to rebuild a complete regional food system, growing food first for local markets and then for global markets only if surpluses are available.

The project sees peak oil as a force driving the relocalization of agriculture:

“It is often overlooked, but nearly every aspect of our current food system is based on petroleum and other carbon-based inputs. Soil nitrogen levels are maintained by fertilizers made from hydrocarbon gases. Pests are fought with petroleum-based pesticides. Weeds are eliminated by petroleum-based herbicides. Fields are cultivated and harvested by machinery powered by petroleum-based fuels. Food products are transported by trucks or trains or airplanes powered by petroleum-based fuels. Foods are processed with machines run by electricity generated by fossil fuels. Foods are packages in plastics made from petrochemical products. We cook with fossil fuel derivatives. From field to distributor to store to kitchen cabinet to stove, our entire food system flows upon a stream of petroleum. This system has evolved and grown through a period when petroleum and natural gas were irrationally cheap. That era appears to be over. The cost of a barrel of petroleum has increased ten fold in the last ten years. Oil production has or will soon peak. Hydrocarbon-based agriculture and its global food system is a literal and figurative dinosaur. Freight costs alone ensure that our food systems must change.

“Add the detrimental environmental impacts of industrial farming techniques–aquifer depletion, topsoil loss, petrochemical contamination of the watershed and other biota, toxic residues on or in crops themselves, and it is becoming increasingly clear that changing the way we farm is both sensible and necessary. Creating sustainable regional food systems based as much as possible on organic inputs and as independent as possible of petroleum fuels, should be one of humanity’s highest priorities. That is the exact purpose of the Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project, rebuilding a regional food system in the Willamette Valley.

Posted in Agriculture, Peak Oil, Relocalization | No Comments »

We’re already in a “fast crash”

April 23rd, 2008 by Jim Just

Sharon Astyk at Casaubon’s Book observes that the debate about whether we are in for a “fast crash” or a “slow grind” is over – we’ve been in a “fast crash” since the beginning of 2008.

Here’s an abridged version of the evidence she compiles. Note she hardly mentions the implosion of the global financial system – only the housing collapse, which is only a symptom of the systemic crisis.

“In early 2008, the world’s food and energy train came off the rails. . .

“It started with biofuels and growing meat consumption rates. They drove the price of staple grains up at astounding rates. . .

“Haiti was an early canary in the hunger coal mine. Desperately poor, by early 2008, tens of thousands of impoverished Haitians were priced entirely out of the market for rice and other staples, and were reduced to eating “cookies” made of nutrient rich mud, vegetable shortening and salt . . .

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in History | No Comments »

House committee hears bad news from scientists about climate change

April 6th, 2008 by Jim Just

Friday April 4 the House Interim Committee on Energy and the Environment, chaired by Jackie Dingfelder, listened in Corvallis to a parade of scientists laying out the ominous consequences for Oregon of global warming.

Legislators were warned that the increases in average temperature and disruptions to our climate that are already built into our future will have profound and adverse consequences in Oregon. Changing precipitation patterns and timing could reduce water supplies in summer 30-40%. Increased temperature and drought stress threaten our rangelands and forests, leading to the increased probability of wildfires. Changed patterns of seasonal winds along our coast could further disrupt the occurrence and timing of the nutrient upwelling that is essential for the productivity of our fisheries. Higher sea levels and increased wave action will result in increased coastal erosion and flooding.

I noticed the first minor note of disconnect from reality when Stella Coakey, Associate Dean of the OSU College of Agricultural Scientists, reassured legislators that Oregon agriculture could probably adapt to the expected changes in climate – although she joked that we might be growing cabernet sauvignon rather than pinot noir. She did add a caveat – Oregon “production” agriculture could adapt, providing we have the water. Was she in the room when Anne Nolan warned legislators to expect a 30-40% decrease in the availability of surface water for summer irrigation?

I found the most troublesome testimony came not from a scientist, but from Gail Achterman, one on the state’s most experienced and respected public figures. Achterman has a sterling resume. She is Director of the Institute of Natural Resources, is chair of the Oregon Transportation Commission, and is a member of Governor Kulongoski’s Climate Change Integration Group.

Achterman talked about ODOT’s role in Oregon’s climate change mitigation plan. And this is where the hearing began to get disconnected from reality. Achterman summarized Oregon’s four-part climate change strategy for the transportation and land use sector (this strategy is laid out and discussed beginning at p. 43 of the CCIG’s Final Report to the Governor: Framework for Addressing Rapid Climate Change:

  • Use of low-carbon fuels
  • Use of cleaner and more efficient vehicles
  • Reduction in vehicle miles traveled (VMT)
  • System management and optimization

So what’s the problem? We’ll examine these “strategies” more closely, one at a time. But keep in mind that Oregon has set a goal of 10% reduction below 1990 levels by 2020, and 75% reduction by 2050. 75% by 2050 isn’t good enough to keep atmospheric CO2 below 450 ppm – to hit that target, we’ll have to achieve 80% reductions globally, which means even greater reductions in the countries most responsible for emissions (including the U.S., which is responsible for about 25% of annual global emissions and 28% of cumulative emissions since 1850 and the beginning of the industrial age.) The report concedes that the strategies don’t get us to the 2020 goal – and contains no clue of how we plan to get to 75% reductions.

And as Jack Barth said to the legislators at Friday’s hearing, James Hansen has recently said that keeping atmospheric CO2 at 450 ppm won’t be good enough to avoid melting the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps, raising sea levels 27 meters and triggering catastrophic climate change. We’ve got to lower atmospheric CO2 levels from today’s 383 ppm to 350 ppm.

So hitting a target of 75% reductions by 2050 isn’t nearly enough.

With that preface, let’s take a close look at Oregon’s “strategies” and end with some comments about our seeming willingness to write off Oregon outside of Metro. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Climate Change, Global Warming, Land Use, Peak Oil, Planning, Politics | No Comments »

We’re turning the West into a desert

February 22nd, 2008 by Jim Just

A new article in Science (subs. req.) concludes that humans are responsible for most of the drying out of the West over the last 50 years – and warns that things are going to get worse.

Here’s the abstract:

“Observations have shown that the hydrological cycle of the western United States changed significantly over the last half of the 20th century. We present a regional, multivariable climate change detection and attribution study, using a high-resolution hydrologic model forced by global climate models, focusing on the changes that have already affected this primarily arid region with a large and growing population. The results show that up to 60% of the climate-related trends of river flow, winter air temperature, and snow pack between 1950 and 1999 are human-induced. These results are robust to perturbation of study variates and methods. They portend, in conjunction with previous work, a coming crisis in water supply for the western United States.”

The ethanol boom isn’t helping. A new article in Newsweek warns that overdrawing fossil aquifers to grow corn isn’t sustainable:

“We’re going to make the area a desert. It’s going to be uninhabitable.”

Posted in Agriculture, Energy, Environment, Water | No Comments »

Saudi Arabia sees peak water, abandons agriculture

January 29th, 2008 by Jim Just

Earlier this month Reuters reported  that Saudi Arabia has decided to stop all subsidies to agriculture:

“Saudi Arabia is abandoning a 30-year program to grow wheat that achieved self-sufficiency but depleted the desert kingdom’s scarce water supplies. . . The kingdom aims to rely entirely on imports by 2016.”

The article quoted an unnamed official:

“The reason is water resources.”

Saudi farmers used 1,300-1,500 cubic meters of water for every ton of wheat produced. As Ugo Bardi puts it at The Oil Drum: Europe, “the desert is going to win back the land it had ceded to agriculture.”

Bardi puts his finger on the problem:

“Saudi Arabian food production has been based on “fossil water.” It is water from ancient aquifers that can’t be replaced by natural processes in times of interest for human beings. Fossil water is non renewable, just as oil is, and it is unavoidable that it has to run out one day or another.”

Water production in Saudi Arabia reached a peak in the early 1990s, at more than 30 billion cubic meters per year. Today it is at around 15 billion cubic meters, less than half than the peak value.  At peak, 90% of the Saudi water came from non-renewable aquifers.

Saudi Arabia is not an isolated case in Middle East and North Africa. Several countries in the region, notably Libya, depend heavily on fossil water.

Posted in Agriculture, International, Water | No Comments »

Ethanol could suck the Ogallala aquifer dry

September 24th, 2007 by Jim Just

The U.S. craze for ethanol could severely strain the already overexploited Ogallala aquifer, increasing demand for scarce water supplies by more than 2 billion gallons a year.

The Ogallala aquifer is an 800-mile-long underground pool of fossil water that stretches from Texas to South Dakota. The Ogallala feeds one-fifth of all the irrigated land in the United States, and is critical to farmers growing corn, cotton, wheat, soybeans and other crops.

Between three and six gallons of water are needed to produce one gallon of ethanol, potentially increasing demand on the already declining Ogallala by as much as 2.6 billion gallons a year just to process the corn and produce the fuel. Another 120 billion gallons a year could be needed for irrigation to grow more corn in the region.

Posted in Biofuels, Environment | No Comments »

The Green Revolution and peak oil

January 31st, 2007 by Jim Just

Most people assume that without the new hybrids and the nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides based on fossil fuels, we cannot feed the world. Read the rest of this entry »

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Huge subsidies for energy, CO2 pollution

July 23rd, 2006 by Jim Just

a typical American taxpayer is paying at least $2000 per year in perverse subsidies—subsidies which harm both the economy and the environment—and is paying almost another $2000 more for consumer goods and services with their increased prices or through environmental degradation. Read the rest of this entry »

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