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

A new report from Metro titled Regional greenhouse gas inventory concludes it’s our consumerism – our making or importing, buying, using, and throwing away of stuff – that’s most responsible for Portland’s greenhouse gas emissions and contributions to global warming (here’s the press release). The report finds 48% of emissions come from consumption, 27% from energy, 25% from transportation.

The graph above is from an article in The Oregonian. The Portland Tribune also has a story about the report.

“Transportation” includes vehicle miles traveled by passenger vehicles and light trucks and operation of public transportation system (TriMet). “Energy” includes natural gas consumption from residents and businesses and fossil fuel consumption from utilities’ imported electricity. “Materials” includes manufacture of products and food (from inside and outside the region) consumed by metro residents and businesses; freight movement of materials, goods and food (heavy truck, rail, air); and waste management and recycling system (collection, landfills).

Excluding the movement of goods and waste from “transportation” and including it instead in “materials” is an interesting Gedankenexperiment that could be extended even further. How much of the “transportation” we engage in is related to buying stuff, either working to make the money to do so or shopping? How much of the stuff we use is related to filling up and maintaining the oversized houses we live in? How many fewer business-related structures could we avoid having to power if we didn’t consume so much stuff?

All that aside, shifting the movement of goods and waste from one category to another doesn’t reduce our reliance on oil as a transportation fuel.

Let’s continue along this line of thought.

According to the EIA, oil is the biggest source of energy consumed in the U.S.

The U.S. Department of Defense, in a new report titled “The JOE 2010” (JOE = Joint Operating Environment) sees an oil shortage of ~10 million barrels a day developing by 2015. This excerpt is from p. 29 (highlighting added):

Energy Summary

To generate the energy required worldwide by the 2030s would require us to find an additional 1.4 MBD every year until then. During the next twenty-five years, coal, oil, and natural gas will remain indispensable to meet energy requirements. The discovery rate for new petroleum and gas fields over the past two decades (with the possible exception of Brazil) provides little reason for optimism that future efforts will find major new fields.

At present, investment in oil production is only beginning to pick up, with the result that production could reach a prolonged plateau. By 2030, the world will require production of 118 MBD, but energy producers may only be producing 100 MBD unless there are major changes in current investment and drilling capacity.

By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 MBD.

Energy production and distribution infrastructure must see significant new investment if energy demand is to be satisfied at a cost compatible with economic growth and prosperity. Efficient hybrid, electric, and flex-fuel vehicles will likely dominate light-duty vehicle sales by 2035 and much of the growth in gasoline demand may be met through increases in biofuels production. Renewed interest in nuclear power and green energy sources such as solar power, wind, or geothermal may blunt rising prices for fossil fuels should business interest become actual investment. However, capital costs in some power-generation and distribution sectors are also rising, reflecting global demand for alternative energy sources and hindering their ability to compete effectively with relatively cheap fossil fuels. Fossil fuels will very likely remain the predominant energy source going forward.

An identical prediction of a gap of 10 MBD between supply and demand in 2015 appeared on page 8 in the Department of Energy (DoE) document that Matthieu Auzanneau blogged about recently at Le Monde. And of course the Pentagon is being incredibly optimistic in projecting production levels at 100 million bpd in 2030.

The Pentagon is blunt: cheap fossil fuels are key to “economic growth and prosperity”.

Jeff Rubin is less than sanguine about the odds of maintaining access to cheap oil.

There are no Spindletops waiting to be found anymore, neither in the mid-Atlantic nor in the Gulf of Mexico. There aren’t even Prudhoe Bays or North Seas—just ridiculously expensive stuff found miles below the ocean’s floor, like the recently discovered Tiber field. By the time any oil flows from these newly opened offshore areas, the American economy will have abandoned oil as a transport fuel—a change that will be dictated by a series of oil-induced recessions like the one we’ve just exited.

* * *

So baby, you can drill all you want, but what you’ll find won’t keep you on the road.

In Metro’s formulation, less oil means less “materials”, not just less transportation. What we call “economic growth and prosperity” is precisely the “consumption” that Metro has identified as the major cause of global warming.Then there’s the other big and nasty fossil fuel: coal. Coal is the biggest source of energy produced in the U.S.

And of course, as shown in the chart below, coal is the world’s biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, 2008 (Million Metric Tons)

¹Includes combustion and flaring of natural gas.

As James Hansen points out, only a rapid phasing out of coal can avert the risk of passing “tipping points”, beyond which catastrophic climate change cannot be avoided.

There are no substitutes for fossil fuels. The EROI of alternatives simply isn’t adequate to maintain our industrial life style. Dave Murphy at The Oil Drum: Net Energy runs a rough calculation and concludes civilization, at a bare minimum, requires a 3:1 “extended EROI” – which includes not just the energy of getting the fuel, but also of transporting and using it – to allow only for energy to run transportation or related systems. This would leave little discretionary surplus for all the things we value about civilization: art, medicine, education and so on – things that use energy but do not contribute directly to getting more energy or other resources. This ratio would increase substantially if the energy cost of supporting labor (generally considered a consumption by economists although definitely part of production here) or compensating for environmental destruction were included. Any fuel with an EROI less than about 10:1 may in fact be subsidized by the general petroleum economy.

So here’s where this thought experiment leaves us. Petroleum, our biggest energy source, will soon be in short supply. That development in itself threatens to derail “economic growth and prosperity” – the whole project of consumerism. Coal is our second biggest source of energy. Averting climate catastrophe requires that we stop burning coal, and soon – yet another blow to “economic growth and prosperity”.

We’re between a rock and a hard place.

It’s past time to begin imagining a different kind of future, a different kind of prosperity, based on something other than “stuff”. We have no other choice.