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

There’s a terrific interview of Robert L. Hirsch by ASOP-USA’s Steve Andrews published at The Energy Bulletin. Hirsch was the lead author of the seminal 2005 report Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation & Risk Management. He says although the report was written for the US Dept. of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (DOE, NETL), says the report was suppressed.

When the report was done, management at NETL really didn’t know what to do with it because it was so shocking and the implications were so significant. Finally, the director decided that she would sign off on it because she was retiring and couldn’t be hurt, or so I was told. The report didn’t get widely publicized. It somehow was picked up by a high school someplace in California; eventually NETL put it on their website. The problem for people at NETL-and these are really good people-was that they were under a good deal of pressure to not be the bearers of bad news.

Question: Under pressure from whom?

Hirsch: From people in the hierarchy of the DOE. This was true in both Republican and Democrat administrations. There is, I think, ample evidence, and some people in DOE have gone so far as to say it specifically, that people in the hierarchy of DOE, under both administrations, understood that there was a problem and suppressed work in the area. Under President Bush, we were not only able to do the first study but also a follow-on study that looked at mitigation economics. After that, visibility apparently got so high that NETL was told to stop any further work on peak oil.

Yes, that was terrible. And it was strictly politics and political appointees-I have no idea how far up in either administration (the current one and previous one) these issues went or now go.

Hirsch explains the tragic consequences of hushing up any talk of peak oil:

Basically, the best we found was that starting a worldwide crash program 20 years before the problem hits avoid serious problems. If you started 10 years before-hand, you are in a lot of trouble; and if you wait to the last minute until the problem is obvious, then you’re in deep trouble for much longer than a decade. As it turns out, we no longer have the 10 or 20 years that were two of our scenarios.

Nothing like the ostrich approach to governing.

At “work group” meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, land use advocates and developers reached accord on proposed changes to Lane Code chapters 13 and 14.

Adoption of the Chapter 13 amendments would mean that Lane County would at last review and approve property line adjustments. The absence of a county review process has led to numerous illegal property line adjustments over past years, creating a legal limbo for property owners; and has allowed developers to reconfigure rural properties into what are in effect rural subdivisions without public notice, public scrutiny, or opportunity for public participation.

The Chapter 14 amendments would streamline Lane County’s land use decision-making process and would provide a means to bypass the exorbitantly expensive process for appealing a hearings official decision to the Board of Commissioners. The expense of the process has effectively insulated hearings official decisions from review.

The historic agreement was prompted by the new lineup on the Board of Commissioners. LandWatch Lane County and Goal One Coalition have for several years been pushing for Lane County to regulate property line adjustments and to lower appeal fees so that people are not priced out of the process. Those efforts have included litigation. Also, LandWatch and Goal One drafted code amendments to implement new state law while fixing both the property line adjustments and decision-making process problems.

The development community, together with Lane County’s Land Management Division, stonewalled the proposed reforms for years. But the election of Rob Handy last November resulted in a shakeup in the makeup of the Board of Commissioners, changing the political dynamics. The new progressive majority chose Pete Sorenson to chair the Board. The agenda committee, which has the power to set the county’s priorities, consists of Sorenson and Bill Fleenor. Sorenson and Fleenor, now with the unanimous assent of the rest of the Board, bypassed Land Management and scheduled a joint meeting of the Lane County Planning Commission and the Board of Commissioners to consider the LandWatch/Goal One proposals.

The joint hearing made it clear to everyone that the Board of Commissioners was now determined to adopt the LandWatch/Goal One proposals. In an act of remarkable generosity and accommodation, the Board directed all interested parties to meet to see if a consensus proposal could be crafted. The Board also set dates certain for the Planning Commission to consider the resulting proposal and for the Board to adopt final code amendments.

It was now obvious to the development community that they could obstruct no longer – the Board was determined to act. The developer “group,” under the leadership of ex-commissioner Steve Cornacchia, came to the table with slightly modified proposals that would achieve all of the ends sought by LandWatch and Goal One: property line adjustments would be reviewed by the county for compliance with applicable law in a process open to public participation, and Lane County’s land use decision-making process would be simplified and would allow for appeal to LUBA of a hearings official decision without the necessity of paying over $3,700 to first appeal to the Board of Commissioners.

Written drafts of revisions embodying the agreements in principle are now being prepared. The revised Chapter 13 and Chapter 14 amendments will be posted on the Goal One Institute website as soon as they become available.

Dave Cohen at the Energy Bulletin observes that the 21st century will surely usher in a peak and decline in both expansion and growth for human population and economies. He then takes on what he calls “friedmanism” – a syndrome certainly not particular to Thomas Friedman, but he serves as exemplar: the “Awful Truth” is too much for him to handle.

Cohen observes Friedman has to be a cheerleading, “blue skies” kind of guy if he wants to be a mover and shaker, and a fixture at the New York Times. That’s true, not only at the New York Times. Joseph Romm, for all his invaluable work is another example. As Cohen says, realism will get you fired in a heart beat. Why do you think we have a cheerleader as President (now that’s two in a row!). Realism won’t get you elected.

We’re in the middle of Earth’s sixth great extinction event – this one caused by human activities. This loss of species will pose a major threat to human existence in the next century. Yet we press on as usual, mining fossil fuels and burning oil, gas, and coal as if nothing’s wrong. It’s keep the economy growing at all costs – even at the cost of the collapse of Earth’s ecological systems that sustain us.

Pundits like Roger Pielke Jr. warns that we can’t aspire to the impossible – that is, to actually doing something to mitigate global warming before it’s too late. That would be “magical thinking.” Pielke says setting unattainable emissions targets such  is not a policy – it’s an act of wishful thinking. Nature doesn’t give a damn about what’s politically possible or not. Believing that reality can be placated by half-measures is magical thinking, in my book.

Question: why is a supposedly reputable journal like Yale Environment 360 publishing bilge by Roger Pielke Jr.?

Realistic thinking would be to admit that the days of economic growth are over and to begin planning for a measured descent; to admit that global warming is a crisis and to take whatever steps necessary to avert catastrophe; to admit that the end of the fossil fuel age is upon us and to begin to transition to living well on far less. To optimistically believe that these problems will solve themselves without effort and without drastically changing our ways is magical thinking.

Realistic thinking would recognize that the American Empire is unsustainable and needs to be dismantled. We spend hundreds of billions each year on so-called  “defense” to sustain a network of 865 military facilities stretched around the world. As Chalmers Johnson writes at TomDispatch:

However ambitious President Barack Obama’s domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.

But I suppose it is magical thinking, to think that anything will be done to avert disaster, either here in the U.S. or globally. Humans are what they are. Things will unfold as they will unfold.

Cohen ends his piece by citing David Quammen:

I can’t top David Quammen. As he says, in some millions of years the planet will fill up with life again-that’s the good news.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich issued a statement explaining he opposed Waxman Markey because the bill creates only the “illusion of addressing the problem” while instead virtually guaranteeing catastrophic levels of warming.

James Lovelock in the U.K. Guardian warns of the desperateness of our situation, comparing today’s environmentalist movements to the peace lobbies of the 1930s and calling for a “new Churchill” to stir us from our lethargy and lead us from the “clinging, flabby, consensual thinking of the late twentieth century”:

Gaia, the Earth system, is no cozy mother that nurtures humans and can be propitiated by gestures such as carbon trading or sustainable development. . .

The climate war could kill nearly all of us and leave the few survivors living a Stone Age existence.

A “senior Chinese climate change official” berated the U.S. for setting the bar too low and offering the world a poor example. Li Gao, a division director with the Climate Change Department of the National Development and Reform Commission, said the U.S. climate change bill did not live up to international expectations and warned the bill’s woefully inadequate mid-term carbon emission target would probably be seized upon as the new standard by developed countries in the battle against global warming.Here’s Kucinich’s full statement:

“I oppose H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.  The reason is simple.  It won’t address the problem.  In fact, it might make the problem worse.

“It sets targets that are too weak, especially in the short term, and sets about meeting those targets through Enron-style accounting methods.  It gives new life to one of the primary sources of the problem that should be on its way out– coal – by giving it record subsidies.  And it is rounded out with massive corporate giveaways at taxpayer expense.  There is $60 billion for a single technology which may or may not work, but which enables coal power plants to keep warming the planet at least another 20 years.

“Worse, the bill locks us into a framework that will fail.  Science tells us that immediately is not soon enough to begin repairing the planet.  Waiting another decade or more will virtually guarantee catastrophic levels of warming.  But the bill does not require any greenhouse gas reductions beyond current levels until 2030.

“Today’s bill is a fragile compromise, which leads some to claim that we cannot do better.  I respectfully submit that not only can we do better; we have no choice but to do better.  Indeed, if we pass a bill that only creates the illusion of addressing the problem, we walk away with only an illusion.  The price for that illusion is the opportunity to take substantive action.

“There are several aspects of the bill that are problematic.

1.      Overall targets are too weak. The bill is predicated on a target atmospheric concentration of 450 parts per million, a target that is arguably justified in the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but which is already out of date. Recent science suggests 350 parts per million is necessary to help us avoid the worst effects of global warming.2.      The offsets undercut the emission reductions. Offsets allow polluters to keep polluting; they are rife with fraudulent claims of emissions reduction; they create environmental, social, and economic unintended adverse consequences; and they codify and endorse the idea that polluters do not have to make sacrifices to solve the problem.

3.      It kicks the can down the road. By requiring the bulk of the emissions to be carried out in the long term and requiring few reductions in the short term, we are not only failing to take the action when it is needed to address rapid global warming, but we are assuming the long term targets will remain intact.

4.      EPA’s authority to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the short- to medium-term is rescinded. It is our best defense against a new generation of coal power plants.  There is no room for coal as a major energy source in a future with a stable climate.

5.      Nuclear power is given a lifeline instead of phasing it out.  Nuclear power is far more expensive, has major safety issues including a near release in my own home state in 2002, and there is still no resolution to the waste problem.  A recent study by Dr. Mark Cooper showed that it would cost $1.9 trillion to $4.1 trillion more over the life of 100 new nuclear reactors than to generate the same amount of electricity from energy efficiency and renewables.

6.      Dirty Coal is given a lifeline instead of phasing it out.  Coal-based energy destroys entire mountains, kills and injures workers at higher rates than most other occupations, decimates ecologically sensitive wetlands and streams, creates ponds of ash that are so toxic the Department of Homeland Security will not disclose their locations for fear of their potential to become a terrorist weapon, and fouls the air and water with sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, particulates, mercury, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and thousands of other toxic compounds that cause asthma, birth defects, learning disabilities, and pulmonary and cardiac problems for starters.  In contrast, several times more jobs are yielded by renewable energy investments than comparable coal investments.

7.      The $60 billion allocated for Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) is triple the amount of money for basic research and development in the bill. We should be pressuring China, India and Russia to slow and stop their power plants now instead of enabling their perpetuation. We cannot create that pressure while spending unprecedented amounts on a single technology that may or may not work. If it does not work on the necessary scale, we have then spent 10-20 years emitting more CO2, which we cannot afford to do. In addition, those who will profit from the technology will not be viable or able to stem any leaks from CCS facilities that may occur 50, 100, or 1000 years from now.

8.      Carbon markets can and will be manipulated using the same Wall Street sleights of hand that brought us the financial crisis.

9.      It is regressive.  Free allocations doled out with the intent of blunting the effects on those of modest means will pale in comparison to the allocations that go to polluters and special interests.  The financial benefits of offsets and unlimited banking also tend to accrue to large corporations.  And of course, the trillion dollar carbon derivatives market will help Wall Street investors.  Much of the benefits designed to assist consumers are passed through coal companies and other large corporations, on whom we will rely to pass on the savings.

10.  The Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) is not an improvement. The 15% RES standard would be achieved even if we failed to act.

11.  Dirty energy options qualify as “renewable”: The bill allows polluting industries to qualify as “renewable energy.”  Trash incinerators not only emit greenhouse gases, but also emit highly toxic substances.  These plants disproportionately expose communities of color and low-income to the toxics.  Biomass burners that allow the use of trees as a fuel source are also defined as “renewable.” Under the bill, neither source of greenhouse gas emissions is counted as contributing to global warming.

12.  It undermines our bargaining position in international negotiations in Copenhagen and beyond. As the biggest per capita polluter, we have a responsibility to take action that is disproportionately stronger than the actions of other countries. It is, in fact, the best way to preserve credibility in the international context.

13.  International assistance is much less than demanded by developing countries. Given the level of climate change that is already in the pipeline, we are going to need to devote major resources toward adaptation.  Developing countries will need it the most, which is why they are calling for much more resources for adaptation and technology transfer than is allocated in this bill.  This will also undercut our position in Copenhagen.

“I offered eight amendments and cosponsored two more that collectively would have turned the bill into an acceptable starting point.  All amendments were not allowed to be offered to the full House.  Three amendments endeavored to minimize the damage that will be done by offsets, a method of achieving greenhouse gas reductions that has already racked up a history of failure to reduce emissions – increasing emissions in some cases – while displacing people in developing countries who rely on the land for their well being.

“Three other amendments would have made the federal government a force for change by requiring all federal energy to eventually come from renewable resources, by requiring the federal government to transition to electric and plug-in hybrid cars, and by requiring the installation of solar panels on government rooftops and parking lots.  These provisions would accelerate the transition to a green economy.

“Another amendment would have moved up the year by which reductions of greenhouse gas emissions were required from 2030 to 2025.  It would have encouraged the efficient use of allowances and would have reduced opportunities for speculation by reducing the emission value of an allowance by a third each year.

“The last amendment would have removed trash incineration from the definition of renewable energy.  Trash incineration is one of the primary sources of environmental injustice in the country.  It a primary source of compounds in the air known to cause cancer, asthma, and other chronic diseases.  These facilities are disproportionately sited in communities of color and communities of low income.  Furthermore, incinerators emit more carbon dioxide per unit of electricity produced than coal-fired power plants.

“Passing a weak bill today gives us weak environmental policy tomorrow.”

Dmitry Orlov at Club Orlov writes that the depletion curves touted by the Peak Oil community are ‘way too optimistic. Oil production will likely not drift down gently over the coming decades. Rather, it will collapse as the economic and social systems that support it collapse. Orlov points to the ex-Soviet Union as the cautionary example.

If the future unfolds as Orlov foresees, the climate change psychodramas we are witnessing (such as the kerfuffle over the shameful Waxman-Markey bill) will prove to be nothing more than a distracting sideshow. Emissions will collapse of themselves as the industrial economies collapse.

For example, Russia is proposing a target level of 10-15% below 1990 levels by 2020. That’s far more than Waxman-Markey,  – but would actually allow Russian emissions to grow by 30% from 2.2 billion tons in 2007 to 3 billion tons in 2020. From a climate perspective, economic collapse has proven to be the most powerful measure imaginable – far more powerful than the policies proposed by the world’s politicians, which are limited by the proviso that they be politically “realistic.”

Orlov describes how events unfolded in the Soviet Union:

Firstly, the crash in oil production preceded collapse in USSR’s Gross Domestic Product. The lag time between the two, and the severity of the collapse are clear enough to ascribe causality: to say that the oil crash caused the economic collapse. On the other hand, coal and natural gas production, which also crashed, did so after the GDP collapsed, again, with a significant enough lag time to say with confidence that it was economic collapse that caused coal and gas production to crash.

What actually happens to an economy and a society under such circumstances? With oil in short supply, industrial production plummets, the economy stalls, there is a financial crisis because of debts going bad, followed by a commercial crisis because of falling demand and lack of credit, followed by political collapse caused by dwindling government revenues, followed by social collapse as unemployment rises and crime becomes rampant. After a while of this, the idea of you and your friends going out to the oil field and pumping some more oil starts to seem rather odd, and so oil production heads to zero.

We will soon see how prescient Orlov’s vision proves to be.

But don’t forget the bright side – averting climate catastrophe may not prove impossible after all!

The best analysis of Waxman-Markey I’ve seen is by a Brit – George Monbiot, writing in the U.K. Guardian:

The cuts it proposes are much lower than those being pursued in the UK or in most other developed nations. Like the UK’s climate change act, the US bill calls for an 80% cut by 2050, but in this case the baseline is 2005, not 1990. Between 1990 and 2005, US carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels rose from 5.8 to 7bn tonnes.

The cut proposed by 2020 is just 17%, which means that most of the reduction will take place towards the end of the period. What this means is much greater cumulative emissions, which is the only measure that counts. Worse still, it is riddled with so many loopholes and concessions that the bill’s measures might not offset the emissions from the paper it’s printed on. You can judge the effectiveness of a US bill by its length: the shorter it is, the more potent it will be. This one is some 1,200 pages long, which is what happens when lobbyists have been at work.

There are mind-boggling concessions to the biofuels industry, including a promise not to investigate its wider environmental impacts. There’s a provision to allow industry to use 2bn tonnes of carbon offsets a year, which include highly unstable carbon sinks like crop residues left in the soil (another concession won by the powerful farm lobby). These offsets are so generous that if all of them are used, US industry will have to make no carbon cuts at all until 2026.

Like the EU emissions trading scheme (ETS), Waxman-Markey would oblige companies to buy only a small proportion (15%) of their carbon permits. The rest will be given away. This means that a resource belonging to everyone (the right to pollute) is captured by industrial interests without public compensation. The more pollution companies have produced, the greater their free allocation will be – the polluter gets paid. It also means, if the ETS is anything to go by, that the big polluters will be able to make windfall profits by passing on the price of the permits they haven’t bought to their consumers.

In one respect the bill actually waters down current legislation, by preventing the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating coal-burning power stations. If the new coal plants planned in the US are built, it’s hard to see how even the feeble targets in this bill can be met, let alone any targets proposed by the science.

Monbiot compares the U.S. to a failed state:

Why do we treat the world’s most powerful and innovative nation as if it were a failed state, rejoicing at even the faintest suggestion of common sense?

The U.S. may soon prove to be a failed state in fact, if California is a harbinger of things to come.

Monbiot blames a combination of corporate money and an unregulated corporate media for America’s inability to seriously address any one of the big issues we face, be it climate change, health care, or the class warfare the rich have been waging against everyone else.

Would that Obama had the courage to throw the moneychangers out of the temple. It was naïve to ever believe he would.

Charles Eisenstein writes at Reality Sandwich that the corruption permeates every institution of our society, even to our language. Our personal and political lives are immersed within an “ubiquitous matrix of lies.” The challenge is to stay honest by grounding ourselves again and again in the “reality outside representation”:

When environmentalists focus on cost-benefit analyses and study data rather than real, physical places, trees, ponds, and animals, they end up making all the sickening compromises of the Beltway. Liberal economists with the best of intentions cheer when a poor country raises its GDP; invisible to their statistics is the unraveling of culture and community that fuels the money economy. Visit a real “mountaintop removal” operation and you know that there is no compromise that is not betrayal. Visit a real third-world community and the vacuity of free-trade logic is obvious. See the devastation of a bullet wound or a bomb strike, lives strewn across the street, and the logic of national interest seems monstrous.

Eisenstein warns we can not for much longer hide the gathering collapse of environment and polity, economy and ecology – eventually, reality will break through. When stories fall apart, the world falls apart. As we rebuild from the wreckage that follows, the stories we tell with words unite masses of people toward a common goal, and assign the meanings and roles necessary to attain it.

And words will once again matter, and truth will mean the difference between life and death.

Michael Moore has written a fitting obituary for GM. But what to make out of the corpse – especially now that we own it?

Moore has some really good suggestions, around the idea of retooling it to build the things we will soon be needing: mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices.

Based on what’s happening nationally with the transportation element in Obama’s “stimulus” package and here in Oregon with Kulongoski’s transportation package, we’ll simply continue to pour additional billions into the black hole of an auto-centric transportation system.

Bob Stacey, Executive Director of 1000 Friends of Oregon, bemoans what happened to the transportation package:

“What started as a balanced transportation package has become an $840 million highway funding bill that takes the state backward.

Stacey was being overly generous in conceding that the transportation package started out as “balanced.” It always proposed directing by far the greater bulk of funding to roads.