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

Sergio Gabrielli, CEO of Petrobras (a Brazilian multinational energy company headquartered in Rio de Janeiro), says global oil production (including biofuels) will peak in 2010 due to oil capacity additions from new projects being unable to offset world oil decline rates.

Gabrielli points out in his presentation that the world will need to produce oil from new sources equivalent to one Saudi Arabia every two years to offset future world oil decline rates – which he sees at about 5% per year.

Finding and bring to production the needed magnitudes of new oil simply not going to happen. Even managing to maintain historically observes decline rates may prove to be a challenge. Take Nigeria, for example. As the world teeters at the edge of economic and political collapse,  Nigeria seems to be going over the edge. Nigeria, which in 2008 produced over two million barrels of sweet crude a day and today provides 9% of U.S. oil imports, could vanish as an oil exporter, virtually overnight. Despite its enormous reserves, Venezuela is looking none to stable as a producer and exporter, either.

Chris Nelder takes a close look at Mexico, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia and warns the oil export crisis has arrived – we just haven’t felt it yet:

[W]hen oil prices rise again, the pain will be far greater for the U.S. than it is for our top suppliers. Next time, the spear of declining oil exports will puncture a lung.

If the gap between demand and supply shown in the chart above cannot be filled with new supply, the only alternative is for prices to increase to reduce demand to equal supply: “demand destruction.”  That means economic shrinkage rather than growth, and a consequent financial crisis of epic proportions. consequence we are going to find it harder to extract other energy and mineral resources. As George Mobus points out in a post at The Oil Drum, our net energy is already in decline and that is at the root of the global economic problems we are seeing. You cannot have a growing economy when the basis of all economic wealth production is in decline.

The economic tremblings we’ve seen over the last couple of years may prove to be mere foreshocks. No matter how many trillions we throw at the problem, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men won’t be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Rather than try to save the irretrievably lost, we’ll have to accommodate ourselves to the new reality:

We can only start simplifying our societies and giving up the many discretionary expenditures of energy that we currently enjoy without much thought. We can learn to once again live on real-time solar influx via our food raising systems. And even then we are talking about an ability to support only a small fraction of the current population. Ironically the simplification of society involves the increasing complexity of individual lives. What this means in practice is that each individual must start to become more of a generalist in terms of the functions that support life. Everyone will have to become a food grower! Believe it or not that isn’t simple! Knowing how to grow your own nutrients is actually quite complicated and will demand a whole new set of cognitive skills.

For the environment, peak oil and economic collapse offers a glimmer of hope. For example, oil accounts for 43% of our CO2 emissions from energy use. Consequent economic collapse will mean that a lot of coal plants in the works will never get built, and maybe even we’ll see existing plants begin to wither away.

Architect and urban planner Andres Duany blames peak oil and global warming on the American lifestyle:

Seth Bauer at the Huffington Post quotes Duany:

It’s where we live, the size of our houses, the distances we drive for work, commerce, play–everything.

And goes on to summarize Duany’s rant:

And it’s all a vicious circle. The reason our houses are so big (and inefficient), he says, is because we have eliminated a healthy civic life. We build homes with giant foyers because we have no public squares. We need media rooms because it’s not easy or pleasant to drive to a multiplex theater, cross a parking lot through an ocean of cars, and pay a fortune for popcorn. We build bars in our basements because there are no neighborhood pubs. We have giant refrigerators and ever-growing storage needs because shopping is both far away and unpleasant (hello, Costco). The result? We heat and air-condition unused rooms in oversized unpleasant houses. And because our home bars and foyers are empty and our media experiences private, we’re lonely, to boot.

But the American lifestyle is really just a symptom of a larger disease – if not industrialization itself, certainly the ideology of growth that it has spawned.

Politicians and economists around the globe are focused on one thing: economic growth. When “the economy” falters, all efforts are towards returning the global economy to a path of growth. As Chris Martenson says in a piece titled Copenhagen & Economic Growth – You Can’t Have Both at the Energy Bulletin:

We need more jobs, we are told; we need economic growth, we need more people consuming more things.  Growth is the ever-constant word on politicians’ lips.  Official actions amounting to tens of trillions of dollars speak to the fact that this is, in fact, our number-one global priority.

Martenson is spot on in pointing out that any solution to global warming requires that carbon emissions be reduced by a vast amount over the next few decades. But economic growth and reduced emissions are mutually exclusive.  You can’t have both.

Even if we can’t muster the moral fortitude do do anything to avert catastrophic global warming, we still may fail in our desperate efforts to maintain economic growth. The primary implication of peak oil is that the era of economic growth is over. The current recession is very much energy-related. The whole concept of recession as a temporary period where growth is briefly interrupted within a long-term trend of economic growth is likely to become irrelevant in a world where oil is becoming ever more expensive to extract and oil supplies are decreasing.

We’re seeing a feedback loop develop with oil eerily similar to the feedback loops operating in the global warming context. The global financial crisis has resulted in oil investment shrinking by 20%, which in turn will result in less oil and more expensive oil in the future, causing more financial turmoil in an ever-worsening downward spiral.

We already are seeing the future beginning to emerge. As the election results in Massachusetts show, that future will hold ugly surprises.

Portland General Electric Co. is preparing plans to shut down Boardman – Oregon’s only coal-fired power plant – by 2020 – 20 years earlier than previously planned. The plant burns strip-mined coal shipped in by train from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, and accounts for about 25 percent of the power generation owned by PGE. Boardman is the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in Oregon.

Jeff Bissonnette at Blue Oregon points out this is a very big deal. Boardman may be the first baseload coal plant in the nation to be shut down.

The Boardman coal plant is located about 150 miles east of Portland and provides a baseload output of more than 500 megawatts. Under the existing plan, huge investments would be required to control pollution – which would do nothing about the plant’s carbon emissions. If global warming legislation or a carbon tax were to be enacted, the resulting high price of its electricity might force the plant to close anyway. Based on its analysis of carbon and natural gas prices, PGE believes that a 2020 shutdown would be the low-cost, least-risk plan for utility ratepayers and shareholders.

The earlier shutdown needs approval from the Oregon Environmental Quality Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

PGE is proposing to fill the gap left by Boardman’s closure with two new gas plants: a base-load unit adjacent to the existing Boardman coal plant and a smaller unit next to its existing gas plant in Clatskanie.

California’s new carbon fuel standard will shut U.S. ethanol out of the biggest U.S. market. Why? Because the regulations will count the emissions created when corn is planted, harvested and ground into fuel as part of ethanol’s carbon output. The regulation also counts indirect land-use changes – the impact on other areas of planting corn in the Midwest for ethanol.

Naturally, the two largest ethanol trade organizations have sued California over the standard.

When you count everything, “green” may not be green after all.

A prime example is the newly rolled out “Greenroads” rating system developed by University of Washington researchers and the engineering firm CH2M Hill. The system (the complete version of which is available here) outlines minimum requirements to qualify as a “green roadway”, including a noise mitigation plan, storm-water management plan and waste management plan. It also allows up to 118 points for voluntary actions such as minimizing light pollution, using recycled materials, incorporating quiet pavement and accommodating non-motorized transportation.

What the rating system leaves out is everything important:

Decisions regarding the location, type, timing, feasibility or other planning level ideas are excluded. While planning is fundamental to roadway and community
sustainability, these decisions are often too complex or political to be adequately defined by a point system.

“Greenroads” is greenwashing at its finest.

For anyone concerned about the impact of emissions from the transportation sector on global warming (or complacent about peak oil), this chart posted by Stuart Staniford at his blog Early Warning should be sobering:

Heading Out at The Oil Drum reports the Chinese purchased 13.6 million cars and light trucks last year, compared to 10.4 million sold in the USA. China is now the world’s #1 auto market. Not surprisingly, Chinese oil imports are also up. In December, Chinese imports of crude oil rose to 20 million tonnes, or the equivalent of 4.7 million barrels a day. Chinese demand is helping keep oil prices firm despite the continuing global economic disruption.

Then again, this chart from another Staniford post looking at urbanization trends shows that urbanization and vehicle use are in lockstep, growing exponentially :

Of course, correlation does not establish causation. But Staniford shows that as the percentage of the population engaged in agriculture declines and as countries “develop” and become urbanized, per capita energy use tends to increase.

The global climate and energy outlook is grim as China begins to look more and more like us. And notice India, looming there on the horizon.

Dr. Dennis Meadows, one of the authors of “Limits to Growth” and its subsequent updates, has a powerpoint presentation and podcast of a recent talk available at the Population Institute site.

Most interesting is his view that the end of growth does not come directly from depletion, but indirectly from rising capital expenditures as the costs of exploiting resource sources and dealing with saturating sinks rise exponentially. And as he points out, that’s what we’re beginning to see already:

Most people assume that the major global difficulties would occur after the end to growth.

This is not correct.

The globe’s population would experience the most stress prior to the peak, as pressures mount high enough to neutralize the enormous political, demographic, and economic forces that now sustain growth.

We are in the early phases of that period now.

Meadows’ presentation finishes up with a chart showing CO2 emissions as a function of four factors:

1. Number of people.
2. Number of units of capital per person, which is a surrogate for living standards.
3. The amount of energy required to build and operate that capital.
4. The fraction of that energy that comes from non-fossil sources.

Meadows points out the key to our climate change predicament lies in reversing population and consumption growth. If we can’t change those, technology can at best only prolong the agony.

Gail the Actuary at The Oil Drum transcribes his finishing words:

So far, our concern about climate change had manifested itself through efforts to improve efficiency and to implement alternative energy sources–the so-called technology options. I will just close by pointing out that as long as we ignore demographic and cultural issues, the growth in the first two factors will continue to offset all of the improvement we make in factors 3 and 4. And so until we can understand how to begin reducing the growth in the first two factors, climate change is a foregone conclusion.

Richard Heinberg also has his presentation posted at the same site. Heinberg focuses on how peak oil and the consequent end of growth led to the financial crisis, one that will not be resolved in the way to which we have become accustomed. The end of growth means we have entered a new era.

Postings have been slim (like totally absent) over the past week. This wasn’t planned. It’s just that everybody seems to have shut down over the holidays. There’s been nothing that seemed important enough to report on or react to.

The down time and the days absent of rain (albeit cold and mostly foggy) gave me time to finish pruning the vineyard.

I also took the opportunity to  do a little work in the cellar. A bit of hydrogen sulfide suddenly showed up in the barrels of ‘09, necessitating racking and aeration.

The hours spent pruning and winemaking offered plenty of time for reflection. Events and developments over the past year have made clear the futility of current approaches to “the economy” and to climate change.

The current great recession is the result of a crisis of the global financial system triggered by spiking oil prices, and is but a preview of the troubles ahead for an economics based on exponential growth when the underpinnings of that expansion – cheap and abundant energy – have vanished. We have seen that in our present economic system the absence of growth results in financial crisis, which in turn threatens the entire economic edifice with collapse.

Obama’s economic policy – and the ability to repay the trillions of dollars of debt taken on to bail out the financial system – is predicated on a return to robust economic growth.  How’s that likely to work out?

Global warming is similarly but a symptom of a more basic predicament: ecological overshoot of a population that has, due to its sheer numbers and to its impacts on ecological systems, overtaxed both the sources necessary to sustain itself and the environmental sinks which absorb the wastes that would otherwise kill it off. This condition of global ecological overshoot is what makes our current predicament unprecedented in human experience.

In an overshoot situation, traditional policy responses not only fail to work. They make the situation worse because they increase rather than decrease the degree of overshoot. Peak oil and global warming are predicaments that cannot be “solved” through more of the economic growth that caused them. Our situation demands not only the end of growth – it demands that the human footprint shrink, dramatically and quickly.

The approach to global warming embodied by the Kyoto accord – which finally blew up at Copenhagen – was a futile attempt to retain the objective of  industrial development of the world’s poor countries and growth in the rich countries, all the while imagining that the consequences of growth could somehow be made to disappear.  At Copenhagen, the world’s biggest polluters made it clear that they would have none of any effort which might stifle growth.

At least the nonsense that we can have growth without its consequences is no longer on the table. Forget targets, even the ambitious targets floated at Copenhagen of limiting atmospheric CO2 to 350 ppm or limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees C. The target is not important. What is important is what must be done to avoid dumping so much carbon into the atmosphere that runaway global warming becomes inevitable – and that is, leave coal (and tar sands) in the ground.  We can’t wait for consensus among governments dedicated to sustaining economic growth at any cost. We is needed is direct action by people, everywhere and around the globe. No more coal-fired power plants. Phase out existing plants, the sooner the better. No more coal mining. No more coal trains. No more tar sands or other unconventional oil. No more pipelines stretching from Athabasca to fill gas tanks in Canada, the U.S., or anywhere else.

Peak oil and global warming demand that we craft a new economics, one that is capable of recognizing and valuing ecological reality. Every species has its economics, a way of living within its environment. Humans are no different. It should be obvious that an economics that destroys its environment and the ability to continue to exist is not one that produces prosperity. Prosperity, not growth, must be the goal and measure of a new economics: enough to eat, enough to drink, adequate shelter, loving and enriching community, within a stable and beautiful ecosystem, all imbued with a sense of the sacred.

All species survive by tapping energy available in the environment. Again, humans are no different. Over the last two centuries, tapping millions of years of ancient sunlight has fueled an explosion in both human numbers and human impacts. As the days of ancient sunlight draw to a close, even the best of us dream of new stores of unlimited power, waiting to be tapped.   We’re willing to trade our souls for nuclear, bequething upon the grandchildren of our grandchildren the burden of dealing with deadly waste and with dangerous facilities that will need tending for tens of millennia. This would require that a stable, complex, wealthy, and energy-intensive society also endure for tens of millennia – a feat never before accomplished, in all of human history. What hubris.

What’s needed is a rediscovery of humility. If we begin the work now, we may be able to put in place the infrastructure to enable the future to maintain some of the comforts of the present, as the foresighted leadership of Aruba has done in building a windfarm that will provide a very substantial portion of the island’s electricity. Solar thermal offers promise in sunny locations – Europe is betting its future on it.  Solar photovoltaic keeps looking more and more promising.

We can’t have it all, not without destroying ourselves and the Earth itself (at least the Earth as we know it). If we lower our sights, get to work, and do our best, we may be able to have enough.

Now that the dust from the collapse of the Copenhagen talks has settled, we can begin to see what actually happened:  the old world ended at Copenhagen.

Paul Gilding at Business Spectator observes that while Copenhagen failed to deliver action on reducing emissions, it delivered a very clear outcome. It shattered assumptions that had previously framed the debate and so provided an historic shift in the approach to the issue. The world stopped debating the rules of physics and chemistry. As a result, old assumptions about the pace of change and the process by which it would be delivered were finished.

After Copenhagen, it is clear that when the change does come, the pace will be rapid, the process chaotic and the transformation radical. The attempt at consensus is over. Power has shifted to a new club whose membership is dominated by the world’s biggest emitter – the U.S.; China, the world’s second biggest; and India, biggest newcomer in emitter circles.

After Copenhagen, we know that either coal is finished, or Earth’s climate as we know it is finished. The world’s approach to climate change before Copenhagen – embodied in the Kyoto protocol – is too complex and misses the key objective, which is to keep coal (and unconventional sources of oil such as tar sands) in the ground. Coal is the target: every coal mine, every coal company, every coal train and ship.

When governments begin prohibiting new coal plants and demanding that existing plants be phased out, we’ll know they’ve become serious about global warming.

Fat chance, given the implications for the global economy.

Some, like James Hansen, believe it’s both necessary and possible to maintain our high-energy economy. He puts his faith in a techno-miracle: 4th generation nuclear, relying on conventional nuclear to carry us through to the bright day when unlimited, safe power becomes a reality.

Others, such as Jan Lundberg, think we’ll have to give our fantasies of dominating nature and of endless economic growth, reject an unworkable system and culture, and look to the only sustainable model humanity has known: indigenous, traditional society based on tribes.

Then others, such as John Michael Greer, think it’s foolish to imagine that our political leaders could do anything other than what they are doing: try at all costs to keep the present system running as best they can all the while knowing that the fossil fuels necessary to sustain it are being exhausted, putting off the inevitable explosion as long as possible. What will be, will be; and we’re not likely to end up with anything like the complex, centralized nation-states we know today.

I suspect they’re all on to something. While pulling a nuclear rabbit out of the hat seems unlikely, maybe solar thermal  could keep the lights on, however dim. Here, we’re growing food, getting to know others around us who do the same or contribute in other ways, doing our best to he;p and support each other. Disillusion has set in – we may at last be getting over the illusion that the world will change with the outcome of the next election.

The old world ended at Copenhagen. The new world is beginning to be born, right here and before our eyes.

Even as the climate change talks begin today in Copenhagen and as EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announces the U.S. will begin regulating greenhouses gases regardless of what the House and Senate do, some are warning: what we are considering doing, won’t be enough.

Consider that economic infrastructure now being installed around the globe is locking in future increases in fossil fuel consumption. Take China, for example.

In 2008, less than nine million cars were sold in China. In 2009, car sales will rise to between 12 and 13 million. By 2015, car sales are expected to reach 16 million – an increase of 44% over 2008 levels. The cumulative increase in cars on the road in China cannot do other than increase future demand for oil, as gasoline and diesel.

At the beginning of 2006, China had an estimated 350 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity in operation. An additional 600 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity (net of retirements) is projected to be brought on line in China by 2030 – an increase of 42% over 2006 levels.

Not to pick on China. The U.S. is responsible for 29% of carbon dioxide emissions over past 150 years, triple China’s share. But assigning blame for greenhouse gas emissions is irrelevant to crafting a solution to the climate change crisis.

Even while a new study published in Nature Geoscience (abstract here) reports that over the long term Earth’s temperature may be 30-50% more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide than has previously been estimated, the decade of the 2000s will go down as the warmest on record – and climatologists warn warmer weather is on the way.

In a speech to delegates at Copenhagen, IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri went down the list of impacts from global warming, some of which we are already beginning to see:

• More heat waves and heavy rainfall events
• Increase in tropical cyclone intensity
• Disappearance of Arctic sea ice
• Decrease in water resources in semi-arid areas, such as the Mediterranean Basin, western United States, southern Africa and north-eastern Brazil
• Elimination of the Greenland ice sheet and a resulting contribution to sea level rise of about 7 meters
• Species threatened with extinction
• Greater stress on water resources from population growth and economic and land use change, including urbanization
• Significant future increase in heavy rainfall in many regions, with greater flood risk, while other regions dry up
• More than two billion people will live in areas threatened by flood
• Increasing threat to low-lying island nations and coastal cities and deltas from rising seas Seas are already rising because of melting glaciers and icesheets as well as expansion of the oceans as they warm

The good news may be that the scenarios spun out by the IPCC are fantasies when it comes to potential future fossil fuel consumption. The fossil fuels – oil, gas, and coal – simply will not be physically available to generate the greenhouse gas emissions projected in the several IPCC scenarios. Even the IEA, in its recently released World Energy Outlook 2009, is admitting its projections of future energy availability are nothing more than “faith based”, conceding the majority of oil production in 2030 will be coming from “fields yet to be developed or found” and that “output at existing fields . . . will drop by almost two-thirds by 2030.”

The bad news is, the science keeps getting increasingly gloomy. Every new study seems to report that Earth’s climate is more sensitive than previously believed and that “tipping points” are fast approaching, if not already exceeded.

And the good news is pretty dismal, for business-as-usual. If peak production of fossil fuels is near enough to ensure that climate catastrophe will not occur no matter what emissions policies we adopt, that in turn means that our energy policies are hopeless when it comes to transitioning to a social and economic system based on renewable energy resources that in any way resembles the industrial society we have come to think of as normal and desirable.

We cannot avoid the reality that any possible solution to our energy and climate predicament requires that we invent an entirely new economic model, one that doesn’t strive for or depend on economic growth but instead is based on the ecological principle that we must learn to find happiness within limits imposed by the natural systems within which we all live.

Unfortunately, economic growth remains the official ideology at Copenhagen. How to continue on that path is the agenda.

Stuart Staniford at Early Warning has posted this chart showing that new vehicle fuel economy wasn’t very responsive to the oil price spike of 2005-2008.

Unlike the oil crisis of the late ’70s, people just didn’t run out and trade in their gas guzzlers for new fuel-efficient cars. And “cash for clunkers” did very little to offset the impacts of lower gas prices.

With gas prices down from the spike in 2008, vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is once again on a growth path after falling in 2008. The Federal Highway Administration reports travel on all roads and streets was up 2.5% (5.8 billion vehicle miles) for September 2009 as compared with September 2008. Cumulative Travel for 2009 through September was up 0.3% (6.7 billion vehicle miles) over 2008.

U.S. Vehicle Miles through January 2009

The decline in VMT totaled 122 billion for the period December 2007 to January 2009, compared to the same 14-month period a year earlier. If VMT keeps increasing by almost 6 billion miles a month, it won’t be long before VMT is back to where it was before the oil price spike hit. If oil prices spike again . . . ?

The Energy Information Administration reports petroleum used for transportation in 2009 remains significantly less than in 2007 and 2008 (8.0% and 4.2%, respectively).

The urban structure of our cities, towns and suburbs is one of the largest drivers of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Cities that are compact, walkable, and transit-served, with a good distribution of daily services, use a fraction of the energy and generate a fraction of the greenhouse gases as U.S. cities.

There is an enormous difference in energy use between compact cities and sprawling cities, as American ones tend to be – with no corresponding difference in quality of life. This chart shows gasoline use.

Vehicle Miles Traveled (VTM) is just part of the story. Other sources of emissions from urban form in the five key categories of infrastructure, and its embodied and operating energy; other advantages of “location efficiency,” including additional benefits of walking; optimized size, orientation and urban shaping of buildings; lost ecosystem services; and behavioral factors and “induced demand” may add up to twice as much as emissions from personal transportation and VMTs alone.

Michael Mehaffy explores each of these factors in depth in an article at Planetizen. Bottom line: increasing urban energy efficiency and cutting urban emissions is about a lot more than increasing density, reducing VMT, and improving fuel mileage. The way we design the places we live can make it improbable or even impossible to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. But if done right, the places we live can make it possible an elegant, satisfying, low-carbon way of life.

Jeff Vail at The Oil Drum has a blog post pointing out two things that must be kept in mind as we think about transitioning away from fossil fuels.

1. Net energy declines faster than gross energy. As the easiest and best resources were exploited first, the remaining fossil fuel resources are increasingly expensive in terms of both money and energy to exploit. It’s taking more and more in both energy and money to get each unit of energy out.

2. Even as net energy is declining more rapidly than gross energy, more of that shrinking supply of energy will have to be diverted to building alternative energy infrastructure. The energy investments needed to put in place the generating and distribution networks for renewable energy sources such as wind and solar have to be up-front. This means there will be even less energy left over for all other uses.

The longer we wait to begin building that replacement infrastructure – and the less the life-cycle EROEIs of renewable sources prove to be – the bigger the pickle we’ll be in.

This isn’t exactly news. The Hirsch Report reached the same conclusion back in 2005, warning that beginning a crash mitigation program 20 years before peaking would be necessary to make a more-or-less seamless transition. But it helps to be reminded.

The bad news is, we’ve now probably seen the peak in global oil production and the beginnings of any mitigation program, crash or otherwise, is still nowhere in sight.

A new study concludes that wind, solar photovoltaic, concentrating solar thermal, geothermal, wave and tidal have the best net-energy performance and offer the best prospects for supplying society’s energy needs – but cautions all of these have challenges, including intermittency, remoteness of good resources, materials needed for large-scale deployment, and scale potential. The bottom line is this:

Contrary to the hopes of many, there is no clear practical scenario by which we can replace the energy from today’s conventional sources with sufficient energy from alternative sources to sustain industrial society at its present scale of operations.

The study warns that conventional energy sources such as oil, gas, coal and nuclear, “are either at or nearing the limits of their ability to grow in annual supply, and will dwindle as the decades proceed but, in any case, they are unacceptably hazardous to the environment.”

The report, Searching for a Miracle: Net Energy Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society, was published by the International Forum on Globalization with content provided by the Post Carbon Institute. The report is said to be “the first major analysis to use the new research tools of full lifecycle assessment and net energy ratios to compare future scenarios for how industrial society can face its long term future.”

The report asked the basic question: Can any combination of known energy sources successfully supply society’s energy needs at least up to the year 2100?

And the answer:

It is reasonable to conclude . . . that a full replacement of energy currently derived from fossil fuels with energy from alternative sources is probably impossible over the short term; it may be unrealistic to expect it even over longer time frames.

The easiest way to replace our current energy sources – while at the same time reducing greenhouse gas emissions – is to use less energy. Maxine Savitz, a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, says the energy efficiency gained through new technologies in buildings, cars, and industry could reduce energy use as much as 30% by 2030.

That wouldn’t get us very far. A 30% gain in energy efficiency would only be enough to offset projected growth in energy consumption through 2030.

Political leaders have yet to come to grips with the question, what will follow “industrial society at its present scale of operations”?

Forget “green growth”. Judging by the hard numbers, only two economic factors produce reliably good environmental outcomes: high energy prices and recession.

That’s what Mark Lynas writes at the New Statesman. We need to go cold turkey to kick our addiction to oil:

Unfortunately, these two drivers of emissions reductions are also the two things that everyone seems desperate to avoid.

The good news is, as fossil fuels begin to price themselves out of the market, they could make up for the failure of politicians to do anything to slash emissions.

But remember, the biggest historical contributor to carbon dioxide emissions, and the biggest ongoing threat to climate stability, is coal. Production of this dirtiest of all fuels has been rising for most of the past decade, led by the surging use of coal for industrial uses and to generate electricity in China.

The U.S. Energy Information Agency is projecting an almost 50% increase in coal consumption from 2006 to 2030. That’s the same thing as projecting climate catastrophe.