We are talking about mankind being forced to deal with a massive change. The current economic system will not be able to continue, and this requires a change in the way of thinking.
-Noam Segal, School of Environmental Studies, Tel Aviv University 43
Of course, I'm not suggesting that no technology can work. In fact, there's so much tech research and development taking place on any given day now that no one can possibly keep up with it all. Fake trees and giant vacuum cleaners are probably not good stock bets; neither are "geoengineering" schemes like enormous solar screens in space, injections of sulfur particles into the atmosphere to block sunlight, or dumping iron into the oceans to make them absorb more carbon dioxide. 44 But battery design is changing almost by the hour, house-sized wind turbines are ready for suburban roofs,45 solar panel production uses steadily fewer amounts of toxic materials (and the panels reduce CO2 output by 90%, even with manufacturing processes accounted for), and methods for storing excess solar power are being tested in dozens of R&D labs.46 Direct wind-to-hydrogen plants have gone up in North Dakota, 47 and three fishermen in Wales have developed a "Greenbox"—an updated catalytic converter that can convert car exhaust into an algae-based biofuel with a clean byproduct: water.48 Electronic reusable "paper" will eliminate newsprint, green roofs can restore photosynthetic processes to urban canyons, and inventor Dean Kamen has followed up on the Segway scooter with a water filtration unit powered by any organic material (cow dung in the product's first field tests) to generate clean electricity along with purified water.49
The most exciting of times is born from the most terrifying of times. All of a sudden the "quaint" customs of the plains Indians, especially that one about using every last scrap of the buffalo to make something, are no longer by definition quaint - i.e. obsolete, strange, odd, old-fashioned. Instead, they're fantastic. Poultry processors save random bird scraps to make biofuel. Paper and lumber companies look anew at mountains of wood chips left over from processing—more fuel there, too. Cattle and pig farmers look at their gigantic lagoons of manure and see methane conversion. And the amount of ideological shifting that's had to take place, to get these industries thinking of refuse as resources, is significant and remarkable. They're no different from us; they would prefer the convenience of throwing trash into the trash and staying focused on their main jobs, their main products. But they know that the days when both garbage and a single purpose were possible are gone. Everything counts.
I have two friends who work in a city that has no curbside recycling program—there's a recycling facility near downtown, but you have to drive your own stuff over. They share an office. One keeps a huge box under her desk and recycles everything (Right Thought, Right Action), then takes the box home when it's full, because she lives in another city that has an excellent recycling program in place. The other, who lives in the city without a program, recycles nothing, and when I asked him why, he just laughed and said, "It isn't part of the culture around here."
Without realizing it, he identified the core issue behind the massive ideological shifting that six (soon to be seven) billion people need to make at once. Like my son who trusts that "they" will come up with "some technology," and the huddled and terrified masses at the end of Latham's story, we're all secretly or overtly "waiting hopefully for the light that has always returned"—even as the existing lights go out one after another. The current culture for developed countries consists of unlimited electricity, so when each exciting announcement about new forms of wind, wave, or solar power also mentions that the breakthrough technology will power "only" 900, 1,500, or 6,000 homes, we don't realize that this is at current rates of consumption. If we reduced, then those numbers would double or triple, and power for a neighborhood could become power for a community.
But reduction "isn't part of the culture around here." We don't need to change to meet the new technology; the new technology must change to meet us. That's how it's always been. Someone, somewhere, has studied our behaviors and patterns and then shaped new systems or altered old ones to meet our existing demands (and, if they were really 'forward thinking,' our future ones as well).
Now, those "someones" are playing by a whole new set of rules. Sir Richard Branson, Michael Bloomberg, and the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, have called for a central clearinghouse for technological innovation and legislative implementation, with Branson careful to add that innovation is worthless without political support.50 CEOs for 160 U.S. corporations, including Exxon Mobil and General Motors, formed a Business Roundtable in 2007 and called for the White House to take immediate action on global warming.51 (We can assume they meant the next White House, given who was in the Oval Office at the time.) The BRT, like Branson, noted that U.S. companies couldn't solve anything alone, and that a "global response" from other world leaders was crucial.52
Across the ocean, R.S. Sharma, CEO of the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation in India, was the first oil industry executive to openly acknowledge the reality of an oil peak, writing in The Economic Times that "day-by-day incremental demand is outstripping incremental supply" and admitting that "many oil geologists believe that 90% of the globe's oil fields have already been tapped and many are already exhausted." Part of the solution, Sharma explained, included "bit[ing] the bullet and go[ing] for energy demand management with a vengeance."53 "Demand management" is known in other sectors by the less friendly term, demand destruction. It's similar to the way that the DeBeers cartel creates an artificially inflated "value" for diamonds by simply withholding the surplus from the market, but unlike diamonds, in the oil industry's case there really isn't enough product to go around. What do you do when you have a dozen boxes of product and three dozen customers lined up to buy them? Destroy the demand by raising the price. Some customers will learn how to make a box stretch to five times its former use. Others will just do without.
But this is oil we're talking about—the lifeblood of civilization. "Doing without" isn't an option, so even as we slowly, grudgingly, even fearfully acknowledge that it's reaching or has even passed a peak in production, we turn our attention to oil alternatives. Sir Terry Leahy, quoted in an epigraph to this chapter, says that our challenge requires "a revolution in technology and a revolution in thinking." In the United States, the Bush administration, never adept at revolutionary thinking, simply shifted its attention from the oil fields to the corn fields and said, "Let there be ethanol"—36 billion gallons of it, required by law, by 2022. Never mind that corn goes into almost half of all foods on grocery store shelves, and turning it from food to fuel raises prices through a whole series of roofs. Corn also sucks up huge amounts of water—an already diminishing resource—takes even more water to be turned into fuel, and sends mountains worth of nitrogen fertilizer into the water of the Mississippi River and eventually into the water of the Gulf of Mexico, where the nitrogen creates an expanding "dead zone" of H2O containing no O, and no plant or fish life. As corn ethanol production increases, the dead zone spreads by 8,000 square miles per year.54
And since oil alternatives can also equate with alternative profit, a global land grab takes place as anyone with a parcel of dirt and a chainsaw sees dollar signs where current forests exist. At the 2007 Bali conference on climate change, deforestation was cited as a bigger contributor to global warming than all of the cars and trucks on the planet.55 Internal combustion engines don't get to dance out of blame range by any means, though, because deforestation has ramped up in proportion to calls for oil alternatives—i.e. biofuels —to run them. And a study by the World Land Trust concludes that when biofuels are grown in fields that used to be forests, the total process from seed to tailpipe emits nine times more CO2 than fossil fuels.56
See the problem?
Oil has just been so damned convenient and efficient, with a 100:1 energy out/energy in ratio in its earliest days and still a 20:1 ratio as peak production approaches. Ferocious waves, howling winds, and scorching sun can yield a 30:1 ratio, but since all are typically more steady and moderate, the ratio dips to about 10:1. Nuclear energy yields an average of 9:1. Sugar cane biofuels in Brazil yield 7:1, and corn biofuels put out 4:1 at best but, depending on manufacture and transport factors, can dip as low as half that 57 — a ratio skating dangerously close to a futile one-to-one exchange of energy for energy. Then, because both corn and sugar cane are grown in cleared woodlands, add the factor of nine from the study cited above, and you're in a clear benefits-to-energy deficit.
The problem, in all of this, isn't technology. It's the application of it. Our ideological blinders are firmly in place as we look for new forms of the same old things.
====SOURCES====
43 Ofri Ilani, "Tapped Out." Haaretz, Feb. 14, 2008.
44 William Broad, "The Energy Challenge: Exotic Visions for Cooling a Planet (Maybe)." The New York Times, June 27, 2006.
45 Martin LaMonica, "'Small Wind' Turbines Blow Onto Rooftops." C/Net News, Oct. 26, 2007.
46 Charles Choi, "Study: Making Solar Cells Is Pretty Green." LiveScience, Feb. 27, 2008.
47 "Hydrogen Via Wind? Project Will Test It." Associated Press, July 19, 2007.
48 "A Box to Make Biofuel from Car Fumes." Reuters, July 19, 2007.
49 Erick Schonfeld, "Segway Creator Unveils His Next Act." CNN Money, Feb. 16, 2006.
50 "U.N. Chief: Action on Climate Needed This Year." Associated Press, Feb. 11, 2008; "'War Room' to Battle Warming Proposed." Associated Press, Feb. 12, 2pp8.
51 Scott Malone, "Action Needed on Climate Change: Business Group." Reuters, July 18, 2007.
52 Jim Lobe, "Act Now on Global Warming: Top US Companies." InterPress Service, July 18, 2007.
53 R.S. Sharma, "Double Digit Oil Price Is History." The Economic Times, March 24, 2008.
54 Andrea Thompson, "Study: Corn Ethanol Will Worsen 'Dead Zone.'" LiveScience, March 18, 2008.
55 Thomas Friedman, "It's Too Late for Later." The New York Times, Dec. 16, 2007.
56 Renton Righelato and Dominick Spracklen, "Carbon Mitigation by Biofuels or by Saving and Restoring Forests?" Science, Aug. 17, 2007.
57 Jack Santa-Barbara, "Peak Oil and Alternative Energy." Canadian Dimension, July/Aug. 2006.
-Noam Segal, School of Environmental Studies, Tel Aviv University 43
Of course, I'm not suggesting that no technology can work. In fact, there's so much tech research and development taking place on any given day now that no one can possibly keep up with it all. Fake trees and giant vacuum cleaners are probably not good stock bets; neither are "geoengineering" schemes like enormous solar screens in space, injections of sulfur particles into the atmosphere to block sunlight, or dumping iron into the oceans to make them absorb more carbon dioxide. 44 But battery design is changing almost by the hour, house-sized wind turbines are ready for suburban roofs,45 solar panel production uses steadily fewer amounts of toxic materials (and the panels reduce CO2 output by 90%, even with manufacturing processes accounted for), and methods for storing excess solar power are being tested in dozens of R&D labs.46 Direct wind-to-hydrogen plants have gone up in North Dakota, 47 and three fishermen in Wales have developed a "Greenbox"—an updated catalytic converter that can convert car exhaust into an algae-based biofuel with a clean byproduct: water.48 Electronic reusable "paper" will eliminate newsprint, green roofs can restore photosynthetic processes to urban canyons, and inventor Dean Kamen has followed up on the Segway scooter with a water filtration unit powered by any organic material (cow dung in the product's first field tests) to generate clean electricity along with purified water.49
The most exciting of times is born from the most terrifying of times. All of a sudden the "quaint" customs of the plains Indians, especially that one about using every last scrap of the buffalo to make something, are no longer by definition quaint - i.e. obsolete, strange, odd, old-fashioned. Instead, they're fantastic. Poultry processors save random bird scraps to make biofuel. Paper and lumber companies look anew at mountains of wood chips left over from processing—more fuel there, too. Cattle and pig farmers look at their gigantic lagoons of manure and see methane conversion. And the amount of ideological shifting that's had to take place, to get these industries thinking of refuse as resources, is significant and remarkable. They're no different from us; they would prefer the convenience of throwing trash into the trash and staying focused on their main jobs, their main products. But they know that the days when both garbage and a single purpose were possible are gone. Everything counts.
I have two friends who work in a city that has no curbside recycling program—there's a recycling facility near downtown, but you have to drive your own stuff over. They share an office. One keeps a huge box under her desk and recycles everything (Right Thought, Right Action), then takes the box home when it's full, because she lives in another city that has an excellent recycling program in place. The other, who lives in the city without a program, recycles nothing, and when I asked him why, he just laughed and said, "It isn't part of the culture around here."
Without realizing it, he identified the core issue behind the massive ideological shifting that six (soon to be seven) billion people need to make at once. Like my son who trusts that "they" will come up with "some technology," and the huddled and terrified masses at the end of Latham's story, we're all secretly or overtly "waiting hopefully for the light that has always returned"—even as the existing lights go out one after another. The current culture for developed countries consists of unlimited electricity, so when each exciting announcement about new forms of wind, wave, or solar power also mentions that the breakthrough technology will power "only" 900, 1,500, or 6,000 homes, we don't realize that this is at current rates of consumption. If we reduced, then those numbers would double or triple, and power for a neighborhood could become power for a community.
But reduction "isn't part of the culture around here." We don't need to change to meet the new technology; the new technology must change to meet us. That's how it's always been. Someone, somewhere, has studied our behaviors and patterns and then shaped new systems or altered old ones to meet our existing demands (and, if they were really 'forward thinking,' our future ones as well).
Now, those "someones" are playing by a whole new set of rules. Sir Richard Branson, Michael Bloomberg, and the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, have called for a central clearinghouse for technological innovation and legislative implementation, with Branson careful to add that innovation is worthless without political support.50 CEOs for 160 U.S. corporations, including Exxon Mobil and General Motors, formed a Business Roundtable in 2007 and called for the White House to take immediate action on global warming.51 (We can assume they meant the next White House, given who was in the Oval Office at the time.) The BRT, like Branson, noted that U.S. companies couldn't solve anything alone, and that a "global response" from other world leaders was crucial.52
Across the ocean, R.S. Sharma, CEO of the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation in India, was the first oil industry executive to openly acknowledge the reality of an oil peak, writing in The Economic Times that "day-by-day incremental demand is outstripping incremental supply" and admitting that "many oil geologists believe that 90% of the globe's oil fields have already been tapped and many are already exhausted." Part of the solution, Sharma explained, included "bit[ing] the bullet and go[ing] for energy demand management with a vengeance."53 "Demand management" is known in other sectors by the less friendly term, demand destruction. It's similar to the way that the DeBeers cartel creates an artificially inflated "value" for diamonds by simply withholding the surplus from the market, but unlike diamonds, in the oil industry's case there really isn't enough product to go around. What do you do when you have a dozen boxes of product and three dozen customers lined up to buy them? Destroy the demand by raising the price. Some customers will learn how to make a box stretch to five times its former use. Others will just do without.
But this is oil we're talking about—the lifeblood of civilization. "Doing without" isn't an option, so even as we slowly, grudgingly, even fearfully acknowledge that it's reaching or has even passed a peak in production, we turn our attention to oil alternatives. Sir Terry Leahy, quoted in an epigraph to this chapter, says that our challenge requires "a revolution in technology and a revolution in thinking." In the United States, the Bush administration, never adept at revolutionary thinking, simply shifted its attention from the oil fields to the corn fields and said, "Let there be ethanol"—36 billion gallons of it, required by law, by 2022. Never mind that corn goes into almost half of all foods on grocery store shelves, and turning it from food to fuel raises prices through a whole series of roofs. Corn also sucks up huge amounts of water—an already diminishing resource—takes even more water to be turned into fuel, and sends mountains worth of nitrogen fertilizer into the water of the Mississippi River and eventually into the water of the Gulf of Mexico, where the nitrogen creates an expanding "dead zone" of H2O containing no O, and no plant or fish life. As corn ethanol production increases, the dead zone spreads by 8,000 square miles per year.54
And since oil alternatives can also equate with alternative profit, a global land grab takes place as anyone with a parcel of dirt and a chainsaw sees dollar signs where current forests exist. At the 2007 Bali conference on climate change, deforestation was cited as a bigger contributor to global warming than all of the cars and trucks on the planet.55 Internal combustion engines don't get to dance out of blame range by any means, though, because deforestation has ramped up in proportion to calls for oil alternatives—i.e. biofuels —to run them. And a study by the World Land Trust concludes that when biofuels are grown in fields that used to be forests, the total process from seed to tailpipe emits nine times more CO2 than fossil fuels.56
See the problem?
Oil has just been so damned convenient and efficient, with a 100:1 energy out/energy in ratio in its earliest days and still a 20:1 ratio as peak production approaches. Ferocious waves, howling winds, and scorching sun can yield a 30:1 ratio, but since all are typically more steady and moderate, the ratio dips to about 10:1. Nuclear energy yields an average of 9:1. Sugar cane biofuels in Brazil yield 7:1, and corn biofuels put out 4:1 at best but, depending on manufacture and transport factors, can dip as low as half that 57 — a ratio skating dangerously close to a futile one-to-one exchange of energy for energy. Then, because both corn and sugar cane are grown in cleared woodlands, add the factor of nine from the study cited above, and you're in a clear benefits-to-energy deficit.
The problem, in all of this, isn't technology. It's the application of it. Our ideological blinders are firmly in place as we look for new forms of the same old things.
====SOURCES====
43 Ofri Ilani, "Tapped Out." Haaretz, Feb. 14, 2008.
44 William Broad, "The Energy Challenge: Exotic Visions for Cooling a Planet (Maybe)." The New York Times, June 27, 2006.
45 Martin LaMonica, "'Small Wind' Turbines Blow Onto Rooftops." C/Net News, Oct. 26, 2007.
46 Charles Choi, "Study: Making Solar Cells Is Pretty Green." LiveScience, Feb. 27, 2008.
47 "Hydrogen Via Wind? Project Will Test It." Associated Press, July 19, 2007.
48 "A Box to Make Biofuel from Car Fumes." Reuters, July 19, 2007.
49 Erick Schonfeld, "Segway Creator Unveils His Next Act." CNN Money, Feb. 16, 2006.
50 "U.N. Chief: Action on Climate Needed This Year." Associated Press, Feb. 11, 2008; "'War Room' to Battle Warming Proposed." Associated Press, Feb. 12, 2pp8.
51 Scott Malone, "Action Needed on Climate Change: Business Group." Reuters, July 18, 2007.
52 Jim Lobe, "Act Now on Global Warming: Top US Companies." InterPress Service, July 18, 2007.
53 R.S. Sharma, "Double Digit Oil Price Is History." The Economic Times, March 24, 2008.
54 Andrea Thompson, "Study: Corn Ethanol Will Worsen 'Dead Zone.'" LiveScience, March 18, 2008.
55 Thomas Friedman, "It's Too Late for Later." The New York Times, Dec. 16, 2007.
56 Renton Righelato and Dominick Spracklen, "Carbon Mitigation by Biofuels or by Saving and Restoring Forests?" Science, Aug. 17, 2007.
57 Jack Santa-Barbara, "Peak Oil and Alternative Energy." Canadian Dimension, July/Aug. 2006.
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