ONE TOWN SQUARE: a community response to peak oil & climate change

Trek is introducing two models of chainless bicycles. No more finger-pinching, pants-munching, rust-prone sprocket and chain, which has roughly 3,000 parts including all the links and connectors. The lighter and longer-lasting carbon-fiber composite belts won’t rust, can’t be cut, won’t stretch or slip, require no lubrication or maintenance - and are “whisper quiet.”

Here’s the single-speed District model ($930):

This is the eight-speed Solo ($990)

Here’s a close-up of the Shimano internally geared rear hub:

Predecessor belt-drives include the iXi, Strida, eGo Cycle 2, Ellsworth, Jano, and Momo - and some of these are production bikes. But withTrek, belt drive goes mainstream.

From Zawya, a source for news from the Middle East:

“The global financial crisis is poised to cut a swathe through projects throughout the Gulf. Plunging costs for raw materials and the expectation of further slides are prompting Gulf project sponsors with an eye to making major savings to reschedule bidding dates on lump sum turnkey (LSTK) projects. Even state-owned Saudi Aramco, with its strong track record on delivery times, has postponed bid dates on at least two of its flagship downstream projects.

We have previously reported on the impact that the financial crisis is having on energy investment, including oil, and argued that the financial crisis will likely be found to have precipitated peak oil.

But now there’s an additional reason for postponing projects: deflation. The costs of the projects are expected to be substantially less a year from now than today, so projects are being postponed awaiting the expected fall in costs.

Of course, the “extremely bad short-to-medium term prospects for petrochemicals globally” is also a consideration. The article also cites “delays . . . aimed at giving developers more time to put together financing given the difficulties in the banking sector.” But the fall in contractor and materials prices is a new wrinkle.

An investigation by ProPublica found that the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing may be threatening  the nation’s increasingly precious drinking water supply.

Propublica studied Sublette County, Wyoming and six other contamination sites and found that water contamination in drilling areas around the country is far more prevalent than the EPA asserts. Tests on well water in Sublette County showed it contained benzene, a chemical believed to cause aplastic anemia and leukemia, in a concentration 1,500 times the level safe for people.

Hydraulic fracturing shoots vast amounts of water, sand and chemicals several miles underground to break apart rock and release natural gas. The process has been considered safe since a 2004 study (PDF) by the Environmental Protection Agency found that it posed no risk to drinking water. After that study, Congress even exempted hydraulic fracturing from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Today fracturing is used in nine out of 10 natural gas wells in the United States.

Propublica’s investigation found that the 2004 EPA study was not as conclusive as it claimed to be. Close review showed that the body of the study contains damaging information that wasn’t mentioned in the conclusion. Rather, the study foreshadowed many of the problems now being reported across the country.

The contamination in Sublette County is significant because it is the first to be documented by a federal agency, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. But more than 1,000 other cases of contamination have been documented by courts and state and local governments in Colorado, New Mexico, Alabama, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

the precise nature and concentrations of the chemicals used by industry are considered trade secrets. Not even the EPA knows exactly what’s in the drilling fluids. Of the 300-odd compounds that private researchers and the Bureau of Land Management suspect are being used, 65 are listed as hazardous by the federal government. Many of the rest are unstudied and unregulated

The Sierra Club won a stunning legal victory Thursday (November 13), blocking the Environmental Protection Agency from issuing a permit for a proposed coal-burning power plant in Utah without addressing global warming impacts. The EPA Environmental Appeals Board held that the EPA’s Denver office failed to adequately support its decision to issue a permit for the Bonanza plant without requiring controls on carbon dioxide.

The decision may well stop all new coal plant permitting while the EPA rethinks how the Clean Air Act is to be used to control carbon dioxide. That won’t happen until after the next administration takes office. In the meantime, all permits in the pipeline are stymied. The decision could affect permits for oil refinery expansion as well.

The Sierra Club argued that the EPA’s permit decision violated CAA sections 165(a)(4) and 169(3) by failing to apply “BACT,” or best available control technology, to limit carbon dioxide (“CO2”) emissions from the facility. The argument rested on the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, in which the court ruled that CO2 is an “air pollutant” under the Clean Air Act. The Board remanded the permit for the EPA to reconsider whether to impose a CO2 BACT limit and to develop an adequate record for its decision.

A copy of the decision can be found here.

The significance of the Deseret Power Electric Cooperative decision cannot be overstated. As Joseph Romm reiterates at Climate Progress, the single most important policy measure the rich nations must embrace as soon as possible is to stop building coal plants without carbon sequestration. This ruling will accomplish that in the U.S., at least for a while - and it could give the Obama administration the opportunity to get serious climate legislation passed, which is crucial to getting serious international action on climate.

We’re going to have to replace all of the world’s existing coal plants with either CCS plants or zero carbon alternatives - and sooner rather than later - if we’re to get atmospheric CO2 back down to the 350 ppm necessary to minimize the risk of runaway global warming.

The Sierra Club’s press release is below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a guest post by John Gear.

A friend recently posed this question:

So maybe using food crops to produce ethanol or biodiesel isn’t such a good idea. What about using grass clippings and other “yard debris” currently trucked to landfills? What about using “crop residue” not used for food? Doesn’t that change the equation?

There’s a seminal article by Alice Friedemann titled Peak Soil: Why cellulosic ethanol, biofuels are unsustainable and a threat to America that answers that question. It is one of the more important articles available on the internet.

Here’s the supercondensed summary:

Just like operating factories need a constant flow of raw material inputs (roughly the same as their productive output + any wastes disposed of externally), soils need constant replenishment in roughly the same mass as is being removed as a crop, plus more because of the time lag for biologic availability (the time needed for materials to break down and be consumed by the microflora and microfauna that form the base of the food web in productive, living soil).

Of course, we should never be trucking clippings and yard debris anywhere - it’s needed where it is, and we’re wasting energy twice by removing the organic matter and then bringing back replacement matter to make up for the removal.

Similarly, there are no “crop residues” that can be safely removed from land intended for steady farming.  Just by taking a crop off the land you are already putting the soil in deficit, which is why you cannot maintain soil vitality without fallow periods and some kind of fertility treatments, such as manures.  The more concentrated and fast-growing the crop, the more the crop consumes the soil, and the more replenishment is needed.

If you remove what you call “residue,” you are simply adding another crop being taken from the same soil at the same time, which means you have to add even more inputs back into it, or exhaust it that much faster.  Mining soil “residues” is simply a way to burn a candle at both ends — it burns brighter, for a much shorter time.

The issue with all agrocrops is not the nature of the feedstock, which is essentially irrelevant. The issue is land, topsoil, water, fertilizers, and energy gain.

High quality land suitable for agriculture is very limited. Agrofuel backers talk about using “marginal land” now that people realize that using cultivated land to grow fuel for cars means that fuel for people has to be grown elsewhere — in other words, you push people into using marginal land or, worse (and this is what actually happens), into converting rainforest to cropland. But you cannot make money trying to crop marginal land, that’s why it’s marginal land. The only way it works is if food and energy prices climb enough to make the expense of cropping marginal land pay off.

This is why all agrofuels end up with a negative effect on climate — the huge amount of greenhouse gases released through land use changes negates any small gains in annual greenhouse emissions (compared to petroleum) from use of agrocrops for decades. We cannot invent a way to make more land, and all techniques for getting more yield from land involve MORE energy inputs, not less. In other words, chasing our tails faster . . .

As for the climate impact, needless to say, we don’t have decades. We have months in which to respond meaningfully — maybe 100 months. Quite possibly less. Releasing massive quantities of greenhouse gases now (that remain in the atmosphere for many decades) for the possibility of a slight annual reductions later is suicide. You cannot both have an uncultivated crop and a cultivated crop.

Agrofuel boosters like to talk about using “weeds” Except that “weeds” is a non-biological label. There are no weeds. There are simply desirable plants and undesirable plants. As soon as you intend to cultivate a weed, you just turned it into a crop. Whether switchgrass or corn (for ethanol) or soy, camelina, palm, or canola (for biodiesel), agricultural use to make motor fuel means intensive cultivation, which means mining the topsoil, removing the nutrients much faster than they can be replaced and destroying the web of microorganisms that make dirt into soil.

Agrofuels are intensive water users. Fresh water is already limited, even in the rainy northwest. We cannot afford to put more fresh water into the service of autos than we already do. As our climate destabilizes further, we are going to see more and more droughts (we already are) intermingled with severe flooding bouts. We cannot afford to use our tiny reserves of fresh water as motor fuel.

Fertilizers and energy gain are really the same issue, since 99% of our fertilizers are derived from natural gas. Many have defined modern agriculture as “the use of land to turn fossil fuels into food” — but at least humans get food from it! If we start cultivating agrofuel crops, then we’ll have modified the saying into “The use of land to turn fossil fuels into fuel for cars, while pushing food crops onto marginal land and starving great numbers of the world’s poorest people through food price hikes (as food prices and energy prices are linked through the gas tanks of our cars).”

As the saying goes, let’s live on the planet as if we intend to stay.  That means taking care of our soil, first and foremost.

Scientists have discovered that the tipping point for Southern Ocean acidification caused by human-induced CO2 emissions is much closer than first thought. The results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

The “tipping point” of acidification - when the acidity of the ocean reaches a level where the shells of calcareous marine creatures start to dissolve - had been predicted to occur when atmospheric CO2 levels hit 550 parts per million, around the year 2060.

The new research shows levels of the carbonate that these creatures need to build and maintain their shells drops naturally in winter, due to natural variations in factors such as ocean temperature, currents and mixing, and pH. This means the tipping point is likely to be reached at far lower atmospheric CO2 levels - around 450 ppm - which also happens to be the current target set by the IPCC for stabilization of CO2 emissions. This concentration is forecast to be reached by around 2030.

Ocean acidification could lead to large scale ecosystem changes, affecting not just plankton at the base of the food chain but other marine life higher up the food chain including fish, whales and dolphins.

The new findings provide additional evidence that 350 ppm should be the maximum target for atmospheric CO2 levels if we are to avoid catastrophic feedback processes that would mean the end of the Holocene era.

The Holocene began around 10,000 years ago. Human civilization - including the invention of agriculture and the domestication of farm animals - dates almost entirely within the Holocene. We may have already entered what might be called the Anthropocene - the “era of man” - characterized by significant human impacts on the Earth. There’s no precedent in human existence for what we have yet to experience.

We do know Earth’s climate system has still to respond fully to the rapid increase in greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere - much more warming is already in the pipeline.  But already we’re  seeing stunning consequences, including species extinctions at a rate unseen in the last 65,000,000 years, unprecedented disappearance of sea ice, and unprecedented droughts, for example in Australia.

450 ppm isn’t a realistic target if we’re to avoid tipping points beyond which there’s no return. We have to aim to get back down to 350 ppm, and the sooner the better.

Governor Ted Kulongoski has received a final report from his Transportation Vision Committee.

The “comprehensive transportation plan” is intended as a guide for the Governor’s  2009 legislative agenda. According to the press release,  the report

“includes recommendations for reducing vehicles miles traveled in urban areas, a dedicated fund for non-highway transportation investments, a new transportation utility commission, and dollars for rural counties hit hardest by the scheduled sunset of the federal forest payments. The committee also recommends a series of funding options, including bonding, a new vehicle title fee, and a path to transition away from the gas tax as the central funding source for transportation.”

The transportation plan’s stated objective is to “strategically expand the entire transportation system to support job growth and quality of life and ensure the state’s competitive stance in the global marketplace”. So right off, it’s business as usual.

While paying lip service to alternatives, the report foresees that automobile and truck travel will continue to grow and to be the dominant mode. The big problem, as the report sees it, is how to pay for the necessary road system maintenance and expansion? The “vision” foresees huge and expensive needs for airport and especially road system growth. Public transportation and the rail system is given short shrift by comparison.

Stunning by its absence is any mention or consideration of peak oil or its impacts on our transportation systems. How can a plan that is supposed to identify transportation needs and lay out a strategy for meeting them be taken seriously if it fails to address how our transportation system is to be powered in a world where the oil fields we rely on produce 9% less oil each year?

The obeisance to “quality of life” in the statement of objectives is a fraud. The phrase “quality of life” appears five times in the report; once in the introductory letter; twice in the introduction; once in the preface;  and in the meat of the report, once in discussion of “least cost alternatives” in passing, in the same sentence as “environmental issues” and “climate change”. Nowhere in the report is any exploration of what “quality of life” is, how to measure or achieve it, or how transportation fits in.

Insofar as “quality of life” means anything at all in the report, I think the authors see it as “relieving traffic congestion”. The willful blindness of the authors is revealed by this assertion:

“[P]roperly designed capacity projects addressing system bottlenecks could have a net greenhouse gas reduction benefit by contributing to congestion reduction.”

You read that right: the way to solve global warming is by expanding the road system. Un-friggin’-believable.

What reality are the folks responsible for this report living in?

The makeup of the “vision” (or rather, “blindness”) committee is listed below the fold. In the Oregon tradition, it seems like almost every interest imaginable was represented - and again in the Oregon tradition, these are mostly the same names that show up in working group after working group.

The only “out” for members of the environmental community on this list is the disclaimer in the report that “the recommendations in this report capture the discussions of the Vision Committee, but should not be read as a blanket endorsement. Regardless, I’m glad my name isn’t on this list of infamy.

Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned in this post a new study titled “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” by James Hansen and several other leading climate scientists, now available at the free-access Open Atmospheric Sciences Journal.

The authors assert that to maintain a planet similar to that on which civilization developed, an optimum CO₂ level would be less than 350 ppm — a dramatic change from the existing consensus view that the danger level for CO₂ is 450 ppm or higher. Atmospheric CO₂ is currently 385 parts per million (ppm) and is increasing by about 2 ppm each year from the burning of fossil fuels and land use change such as the clearing of forests.

Improved data on the Earth’s climate history and ongoing observations of change, especially in the polar regions, allow scientists to compare how the Earth responded to past changes of CO₂ with more recent patterns of climate changes. The results suggest that atmospheric CO₂ has already entered a danger zone. For example, we have already reached CO₂ levels that compromise the stability of the polar ice sheets.

According to the study, coal is the largest source of atmospheric CO₂ and the one that would be most practical to eliminate. The authors argue that the only realistic way to sharply curtail CO₂₂ is captured and sequestered emissions is phase out coal use except where CO₂ is captured and sequestered.

While scientists are warning that the goal of 450 ppm is inadequate, international agencies are whining that 450 ppm is unachievable.  Next week the IEA will issue a report saying limiting global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius is not “technically achievable” and we simply have to prepare to live with the consequences. The Executive Summary of the report has been released; the discussion of the “stabilization goal” is found at pp. 47-48. (This is the same IEA report that contains the stunning finding that the “natural rate” of post-peak oil field depletion is 9%, as I discussed here.)

Why does the IEA think limiting atmospheric CO₂ to even 450 ppm is impossible? Because we would have to leave “stranded assets” - meaning we’d have to abandon coal-fired power plants “prematurely.”

“It will be necessary to face up to the reality of the cost of early capital retirement if radical measures are to be taken . . . to deliver deep cuts in emissions.”

But the IEA concludes that facing up to reality simply isn’t “technologically achievable”. Mon dieu!

Shutting down coal-fired power plants, locking the doors, and throwing away the keys doesn’t sound “technologically unachievable” to me. Of course, that means we might have to change our ways a bit . . .

Nah, never mind. As president-elect Obama says, what we really need is to “restore growth and prosperity”.

Screw Earth. We don’t need her.

At this moment, after Obama’s election and before choices or decisions are made that begin to foreclose other options, all seems possible. Letters of advice to the president elect proliferate, projecting the hopes and aspirations of the writers onto the blank slate of as yet unknown and unbounded journey.

Rather than add to a mountain of unsought advice doomed to be ignored, I think it more valuable to take stock of this moment in history and consider where we must go, whether Obama leads us in that direction or not.

Our current economic collapse is unlike any that we’ve seen before, our dream of progress (enabled by a one-time exploitation of fossil fuels) turned into a nightmare of a plundered and broken Earth. The national epiphany that peak oil will precipitate will be the beginning of the great transition that will dominate the U.S. government and the world in the years to come. The reality of peak oil will force a massive overhaul of our economy, including transportation, lifestyles, jobs, agriculture, and industrial production.

The job we have assigned economists is to maintain economic growth. But that’s a limited and twisted understanding of what an “economy” is. The word economy can be traced back to the Greek word oikonomos, “one who manages a household.” We need to establish new “rules for the house” -  a new culture - based on a sustainable economy. A sustainable economy, rather than hubristically seek unlimited growth, would recognize and respect the limits and constraints imposed by the “household” that is Earth. Rather than infinite monetary wealth, it would value community, economic justice, and sufficiency.

The overhaul is already in its incipient phase. Al Gore is calling for investment in energy efficiency, renewable power generation - including public investment in wind, solar and geothermal technology - and the creation of a unified national smart grid. Chinese and U.N. officials are calling for the U.S. and other western nations to change their profligate lifestyles and tackle climate change.

The journey before us is ours. As we have learned from hard experience, a leader may help or hinder us along the way. This time, we hope and pray we have chosen well.

Jeff Rubin, economist at CIBC World Markets, says that the current global financial crisis and recession was caused not by a collapsing real estate market, but by high oil prices.

“Four of the last five global recessions were caused by huge spikes in oil
prices. And the world economy is coming off the mother of all spikes. Over the past expansion, real oil prices rose over 500%, twice the
climb in real oil prices that produced the two biggest recessions in the post-war era: the 1974 recession and the double-dip recession in 1980 and 1982. If oil shocks half the size of the recent one caused the worst
recessions in the last fifty years, they’re a pretty obvious explanation for the recessions in oil-dependent Japan and Euroland [and the U.S.]

Gail the Actuary at The Oil Drum has posted some graphs illustrating Rubin’s point.

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This graph shows the recent price spike was far greater than any of the past price spikes.

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Of course Rubin’s analysis still is rooted in the economists’ fantasy land where prosperity has to do with esoteric phenomena such as recycled monetary flows, demand, and savings rates rather than real things such as resources and their abundance or depletion . . .

The first solar thermal plant in nearly two decades was launched last week in Bakersfield, California. The Carrizo Plains solar plant in Central California will generate enough power for 120,000 homes.

Unlike solar photovoltaic systems that convert sunlight into electricity, this plant will focus sunlight on tubes that contains water. The light heats the water, creating steam, thus turning turbines. Solar thermal plants have an advantage compared to photovoltaic technology because energy can be stored as heat without being converted to another form or relying on batteries.

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Ausra Inc., the developer of utility-scale solar thermal power technology, says the daily and seasonal variation in grid load in the United States matches solar availability and claims solar thermal power could supply over 90% of U.S. grid plus auto fleet.