Last modified: Tue Apr 1 13:10:57 PDT 2008
I write these editorials simply to record, for myself, my own
opinions and thought processes. People have a tendency to
correct
their memories to fit with the events after the
fact. (Ask people how they voted in an election when the winner
subsequently turned out to be unpopular, and you won’t get close
to the percentage that actually voted for that candidate.) By
writing down my thoughts, I seek to avoid such false
corrections. It is unlikely that I have any readership of these
commentaries (I have never checked my weblogs to see), except
for the occasional Google search hit, but they are out on the
web to keep me honest. You’re welcome to read them, but first
let me warn you that my opinions are bit unusual.
We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
…
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one’s opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it. Political predictions are usually wrong. But even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very illuminating. In general, one is only right when either wish or fear coincides with reality. If one recognizes this, one cannot, of course, get rid of one’s subjective feelings, but one can to some extent insulate them from one’s thinking and make predictions cold-bloodedly, by the book of arithmetic. In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one’s weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean world where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one’s political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality.
Anyway these are my humours, my opinions: I give them as things which I believe, not as things to be believed. My aim is to reveal my own self, which may well be different tomorrow if I am initiated into some new business which changes me. I have not, nor do I desire, enough authority to be believed. I feel too badly taught to teach others.
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
I've been writing things that have been posted in other forums, and neglecting this page. I intend to return to writing here, as writing to influence others is unsatisfying. However, for completeness here are some of my off-site comments:
As the new chair of the Air Resources Board, I believe you have a chance to make some needed changes in direction for California’s air regulations. My particular concern is the ARB’s ZEV mandate. This program has become severely dysfunctional, and should be looked at anew. Your arrival at the ARB presents this opportunity.
The ARB is tasked with ensuring California’s air is safe and clean, and recently with reducing our greenhouse gas emissions (AB32). The ZEV mandate was created to address clean air concerns, but it has become something quite different: it has become a fuel cell vehicle research program. The ARB’s job is clean air, not research, and I urge you to return to your mandate to provide us clean air, and not try to manage automaker research. The ARB may have entered into the ZEV “Alternative Path” believing it was a development program, not research, but the reality is now painfully apparent with the schedules now proposed by your staff in their latest recommendations. I support fuel cell research, but not as a gambit to delay clean air. Imagine if someone had succeeded in aborting California’s wind and solar initiatives, promising that fusion reactors would be better. In energy this fortunately did not happen, but in vehicles, fuel cells research has aborted real progress. You must not allow this to continue.
The entire ZEV program has become a sort of Rube Goldberg device, with gold, silver, bronze levels, credit ratios, Type I to IV, sliding scales for large vs. small automakers, and so on. Your staff proposes to further tinker with this contraption in response to automaker pressure. This will not result in clean air. The Rube Goldberg device should be dismantled, not tinkered with. In science, it can take years or decades to understand the consequences of fairly simple physical laws and systems. With a system as complicated as the ARB has created, no one can predict the consequences. It is an irresponsible approach that only serves to keep the ARB’s goals unmet.
The most direct and transparent method for clean air and reduced greenhouse gases (AB32) is a cap-and-auction system. ARB would cap the emissions of NOx, SOx, PM, and other pollutants, and also greenhouse gases for AB32, that California would tolerate each year, and then auction permits to automakers for new vehicles sales. Each vehicle would be certified for emissions based on current testing methods. To sell a vehicle, the automaker would need to possess permits for each of its pollutants for the years of the vehicle’s life (e.g. 10 years). By decreasing the pollutant cap over time, the ARB would be able to clean California’s air. It has been 40 years since the ARB was founded, and yet we still have smog in our cities, despite all the progress that has been made. Is it not time to consider an approach that is far more certain to achieve our air quality goals?
There are improvements that could be made to such an approach (e.g. credits for automakers that take old vehicles off the road, separating pollutants into urban and total, and taking into account the greening electricity supply over time for plug-ins), but this letter is already long, and I would prefer to elaborate if there is interest in this approach.
To be politically acceptable, this can be made revenue-neutral by rebating the auction revenue for a given year equally among the new vehicle purchasers for that year, thereby offsetting the auction cost markup of the automakers. The purchaser of a clean vehicle would see a net price reduction, and the purchaser of a dirty vehicle would pay a premium. This is appropriate.
This system also puts the automakers in competition with each other to produce cleaner vehicles. Today the automakers have only the incentive to meet quotas and limits, with the result that California’s air is dirtier and warmer than it would be if automakers compete.
This system also unifies the handling of conventional pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions, which I believe is an important simplification.
The attraction of ZEVs for the automakers under such a cap-and-auction system is obvious: there are no auction fees to be paid for urban pollutants, and very little for non-urban pollutants (since ZEVs, or BEVs at least, are so efficient). Since the pollutant cap would decrease with time and vehicle volumes would increase, ZEV technology would become increasingly important to meeting the targets. Initially plug-in hybrids would provide the necessary pollutant reductions (based on a standardized daily driving profile where some initial number of miles are zero emission). Eventually full ZEVs would become most appropriate. There are other, early ways to reward ZEVs within the auction system, but again I can elaborate depending upon your interest.
The best way to illustrate the working of such a system would be with an example. Let me know if you would like me to provide one.
If it is not possible to replace the existing ZEV mandate, I urge you to consider the above approach for AB32 implementation, and then radically simplify the ZEV mandate, eliminating the distinction between the original and Alternative Path, so that plug-ins can be returned to service while CARB conducts its fuel cell vehicle research program.
Lest you think my proposal is anti-ZEV, let me relate that my wife and I both drive battery electric vehicles, one of which, a RAV4-EV, was only produced in response to the ARB’s 1990s ZEV mandate. We are just as passionate about these vehicles as any the drivers seen in the movie Who Killed the Electric Car, if you have seen that. As much as I would love the ARB to simply require the production of more ZEVs, I believe the above approach is a much more straightforward response to the ARB’s legislative mandate and actually more likely to get ZEVs of some sort back on California’s roads.
Industry and many politicians and pundits tout the hydrogen economy as the answer to the transportation portion of our global warming problem. We just have to wait until it is ready, they say. The real value of hydrogen to these folks is that it is so distant in the future, they need not do much other than research today.
Hydrogen can store energy, but the energy has to come from somewhere. Almost no matter where the energy comes from, hydrogen is not a particularly efficient way to store it, when the efficiency of energy to hydrogen, shipment, and hydrogen back to energy are all multiplied. Here I summarize my understanding of hydrogen's efficiency for powering vehicles relative to other technologies. Others question the safety of hydrogen (e.g. the storage tanks and the fire potential). I think those are not real issues; solutions exist. However, if hydrogen cannot beat the cost and efficiency of alternatives, it has no place.
First, I digress and provide a vehicle categorization, explaining terminology and providing background:
My primary points of comparison below between hydrogen FCVs and the alternatives (PHEVs and BEVs) will be cost and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, primarily in the form of carbon-dioxide (CO2):
Given the inefficiency of hydrogen production and use, FCVs are inferior to PHEVs and BEVs. The only plausible reason that industry appears prefers inferior technology is that they delay having to produce alternatives to ICEVs in volume.
It is no wonder that the EV community calls them
fool cells
instead of fuel cells.
My next door neighbor of twelve years died last year
and her estate is subdividing her property to realize
a better sales price. I didn’t like portions of
their subdivision plan, so I challenged it at my
town’s Planning Commission meeting, and won.
That is, the Planning Commission approved their plan
with a change I requested. The estate trustee
decided to take the matter to the town council,
preferring the original plan. I won
again. So
why do I feel like everyone lost? Because the process
was so flawed that I probably won
for the
wrong reasons.
The process was far too adversarial from the very beginning. It began with the estate preparing a plan, at great cost, without ever consulting those who would be affected by the plan. Having invested quite a bit into their plan, the estate was naturally reluctant to change it, since any change would involve incremental cost. However, I fully understand how the estate’s trustee took that path, for when I was on the other side (I recently built a new house and went through a similar but not identical process), I did the same thing: I crafted my plans and then presented them to my neighbors. I was wrong to have done it that way, and the estate was wrong to do it as well, but I also think the process should have encouraged both of us to take a different approach. (I know I will next time.)
In my case there was also a failure of mechanism that was supposedly in place. Before the Planning Commission meeting, there was a meeting with town staff that I was supposedly invited to attend. I never received an invitation. I don’t know whether it was never sent, or lost in the mail, or lost in junk mail filtering, or lost by yet some other mechanism, but I was not aware of this town staff meeting until after it took place. A more robust invitation mechanism should be used, where one either accepts the invitation, declines it, or failing either of the above, the invitation is repeated (preferably by alternative means, such as telephone, email, etc.). Only multiple failures to respond would be taken as declining.
Another issue is that only residents within 500 feet of the property being changed needed to be notified. In this case, there are people who live thousands of feet away who are in fact very much affected. The simplistic distance rule was not sufficient. Perhaps no simple rule can suffice? Public notice is not the answer: People can barely pay attention to notices they may or may not receive in their mail (a consideration greatly influenced by the amount of junk mail we all receive—another problem). The town staff should have the discretion to include notification of others beyond the simplistic requirement, and also those notified should have had the ability (and been encouraged) to add still others to the notification process.
However, even an opportunity to attend the town staff review of the subdivision would not have addressed the issue that the applicant is highly invested in their single-minded approach by the time the review takes place. The town should have had a process where someone declares her intent to make a change before plans can be developed. Those affected should be consulted, and brainstorming take place about the best ways to accomplish the goals of the applicant while keeping the needs of those affected in mind. Only after such exchange of ideas should money be spent on developing detailed plans. The applicant would have the ability to develop plans just as before, in spite of opposition of those affected, but she would be forewarned that her plans would face opposition.
The adversarial process was especially problematic in that the judges in this process were poorly informed. When I presented my case before the Planning Commission (my first contact with the applicant), I had only three minutes to make my case. Just how informed can the Planning Commission members be after three minutes of input? An informed judgment in fact required, in this case, actually walking the property in question to look at the issues under dispute. The town staff did a little bit of this, but never required a meeting of all interested parties once my concerns became known. Moreover the town staff were not the decision makers. They might choose to present information to the decision makers or not. My three minutes were certainly not sufficient to properly present my side of things (fortunately my wife also had three minutes, but a single person would have had only three).
We were also fortunate that one Planning Commission member chose to spend a little extra time talking to both sides before the Commission meeting, so he had much more background on the matter. But I don’t think this fortuitous circumstance is the norm, and it certainly cannot be relied upon for everyone.
The Planning Commission decided in our favor on one
issue that we thought was most important to us. At
this point we finally started to have the discussion
with the estate’s representative that should have been
the starting point, not a near end-point. We began to
explore options that were neither the Planning
Commission victory we had won
nor their
original proposal. That was what should have occurred
in the first place. To my surprise, the estate pulled
back from these discussions, and decided to apply to
the Town Council to overrule the Planning Commission.
It was a very in your face
sort of approach.
At this point I started talking with others affected by the subdivision (looking for allies), because most of them had, to my surprise, not attended the Planning Commission meeting. Many had not been invited, for reasons mentioned above. Others had not been able to attend that particular night. It turned out that the small issue I was concerned about was probably not as important as some of the issues they made me aware of. We strategized and came up with a long set of issues that should be brought to the Council’s attention to properly decide this issue.
I prepared for the Town Council meeting based on my
Planning Commission experience, only to be surprised
to find out that the Town Council would take only two
minutes of input, not even three. Being the most
affected neighbors of the subdivision, the Mayor
kindly granted my wife and I three minutes each, but
even that was not sufficient to make both the prepared
points I wanted to make and impromptu responses to
what had been said earlier, and I was cut off about
half way through my prepared remarks. In contrast the
applicant had essentially unlimited time to make his
case. I found this asymmetry to be also be
problematic for making a proper decision. There was
also not opportunity to point out flat out wrong
facts
that were presented by others.
It was also clear from the questions and comments made
by the Council members how little they understood the
issue they were being asked to decide. Basically they
ended up ignoring all of the new issues that my
neighbors and I tried to raise, and concentrated on
the issue that had divided the applicant and me at the
Planning Commission hearing. In the end my reading of
the outcome is that they decided they really didn’t
want to get involved with the issue (they probably
understood how poorly suited they were to decide on
the information before them) and they decided to
ratify the Planning Commission’s decision (though they
mentioned that the applicant could return there if
they wanted). So I won
on the issue I had
originally had with the estate, but my neighbors and I
failed to bring the new issues raised by my
neighbors—potentially more significant—to
anyone’s attention.
The estate’s trustee may choose to take the matter
back to the Planning Commission, at which point we
might get a slightly better hearing on all
the issues (with a full
three minutes for the
opposition, but probably unlimited time for the
applicant), or they might choose to just live with the
Commission/Council decision, and bury the other
issues. Either way, the system did not perform well,
as I see it.
The answer is not to give those affected (such as myself) more time to make their case at Commission and Council meetings. Such meetings already go on late into the night. One could constitute decision making bodies on a per-case basis (like the jury in a criminal trial or civil case), which would allow the decision makers more time to hear the various sides, but after having gone through a legal dispute, I find just as many problem in that paradigm as the one I just experienced (unfortunately I never wrote down my very negative opinion of the legal process I endured). Simply letting town staff decide is not the answer either, even though they are better informed, because they are part of a hierarchical organization with its own interests. The answer must instead be to find a process whereby the parties interact more directly, with some mediation, and earlier.
So though I won
(so far) on one issue, it was
for the wrong reason and by the wrong process. When
we suffer broken processes, we are all losers.
Garrett Hardin wrote in Tactics in Tackling Taboos,
It takes five years for a person’s mind to change.
He based this observation on personal introspection of several
occurrences in his life, estimating the time from which he had
been in possession of all of the facts needed for the change to
the time he noticed his opinion had actually changed.
Based on his writings, I would consider Hardin to be an
intelligent, thoughtful person, who actually let facts affect
his opinions. I have observed others whom seem to have been
inoculated against the effects of facts. Even intelligent
people are capable of this; indeed often intelligence is pressed
into forced labor to invent rationales to explain away
inconvenient truths. Thus intelligence is not wisdom. I
therefore propose to extrapolate from Hardin’s Law
a wisdom quotient, or W.Q., analogous to the intelligence
quotient, or I.Q. The W.Q. could simplistically be computed as
500 divided by the average number of years it takes for facts to
affect one’s opinions. (A better measure would involve means
and standard deviations, as in the I.Q.) Garrett Hardin would
then have had a W.Q. of 100. Those completely impervious to
facts would have a W.Q. of zero.
Measuring the W.Q. is difficult, because there are also those
who change opinions to orient with the slightest puff or any
gentle zephyr. They are not responding to facts so much as
others opinions in an attempt to conform and fit in.
Such
vanes would not have a high W.Q., and a mechanism to exclude
such fashion-driven wafting would have to be devised.
There are those whose profession teaches adjusting to new facts, such as scientists. The best test of W.Q. for such professions would be to look how they react to facts outside of their profession.
More fundamentally, being open to the facts is a necessary but not sufficient condition for wisdom, so the above is merely a thought in progress.
What should the U.S. policy on immigration be? The issue is often looked at in isolation, separate from other issues, but that leads to inconsistencies. A related issue is sustainability, though the relation is not typically recognized. If we are to build a sustainable society in the U.S. then we should eliminate or strongly reduce our dependence upon foreign sources, which are at present unsustainable. This includes people: a sustainable U.S. would not need a guest worker program, or immigration from Mexico to staff its low-paying jobs. Instead it would have to adjust its wage scales so that these jobs would be filled by its own citizens.
Conversely, a policy position that the U.S. should not be self-sustaining, but should enrich itself at the expense of the rest of the world, might be appropriately coupled with some immigration, simply so that some lucky few of the exploited might be granted the opportunity to have their children graduate to exploiter status. Most in the U.S. would argue that we do not exploit foreign workers, but instead provide a market for their labor. We have euphemisms for everything ugly we do.
Of course contemporary politics can be a bit inconsistent. Republicans want minimal immigration, maximal exploitation, and minimal sustainability. Democrats don’t give much real priority to a sustainable society, at least not enough to do anything significant in that direction, but they might voice support for such a society (as long as it didn’t conflict with other goals more important to their investors). While offering verbal support for a more sustainable society, Democrats would also at the same time support more immigration than Republicans.
My priorities strongly favor sustainability, and so I would support policies that restrict both unsustainable imports and immigration. A supportable level of immigration is one that matches the level of emigration from the U.S.
After writing Collapse, I thought I should write down some further clarifications, since I left a lot unsaid.
First, not every bomb in the minefield, even if it detonates, is likely to cause collapse. Also, in my opinion, collapse is not likely in the next forty years (i.e. in my probable lifetime). I have no biological progeny either (though there are younger people I care about who might be affected). The first thing to address is then why should I be concerned about it all? The danger in attempting to answer this question may be that my concern is emotional, whereas any attempt at an answer will be intellectual, and simply a rationalization. That said, I believe there are three things that most bother me. First is the suffering of the innocents. Homo sapiens may deserve (in the sense of needing to learn a lesson for our collective stupidity) what may be coming, but we will hurt many other sentient beings along the way (we already are). The second is related; it is the destruction of things in general. We are busily destroying things we do not even understand, and once they are gone, they cannot be brought back. Non-sentient species, ecosystems, and even inanimate Earth systems fall under this category. Extinction is a great loss. Even if a niche is eventually refilled with something evolved from another branch of the tree, what it was and what it might have become will never be known. The third concern is the loss of scientific opportunity. I cannot say why exactly (I have reached the point at which intellectual effort fails), but it feels good to me that we are slowly deciphering our universe, and the collapse of civilization will set back much of that.
There are potential good things from collapse: Myths would be punctured, lessons would be learned, and homo sapiens would be reduced to a more sustainable population size. But new, potentially more pernicious, myths might be created, and the pain along the way might be massive. Joseph Tainter summarized collapse as follows in The Collapse of Complex Societies:
There is, first and foremost, and breakdown of authority and central control, revolts and provincial breakaways signal the weakening of the center. … The umbrella of law and protection erected over the populace is eliminated. Lawlessness may prevail for a time, as in the Egyptian First Intermediate Period, but order will ultimately be restored. Monumental construction and publicly-supported art largely cease to exist. Literacy may be lost entirely, or otherwise declines so dramatically that a dark ages follows. … Whether as a cause or as consequence, there is typically a marked, rapid reduction in population size and density. … The level of population and settlement may decline to that of centuries or even millennia previously.
And that is just the homo sapiens perspective; the marked,
rapid reduction
is likely to affect wildlife even more
dramatically than homo sapiens.
A breakdown of authority and central control, a reduction in population size could be considered good or bad, depending upon your point of view, but the loss of publicly-supported projects (the arts and sciences) and the loss of literacy and subsequent dark age are worrisome. The destruction of the myths of our age may be welcome, but the myths created by the dark age will not be. The eventual renaissance following the dark age would benefit from not being straight-jacketed by our civilization’s biases, but it would have the biases of its own dark age to overcome. It will be able to selectively sift from our ashes to fertilize its growth, but it will not be able to choose the ground upon which it grows. It may be hindered by religions that hold back scientific inquiry about the universe: Deities are failures of the imagination; they ask that we look no further than the will of the deity for the explanation of things.
If that is the worry, then what is the potential for collapse?
For the bombs
I listed (and most likely for the ones I
missed altogether, e.g. a pandemic bomb
), it is the
suddenness of change that may decide between collapse and
adaptation.
Tainter believes
that the declining marginal return of complexity is the primary
factor behind collapse. (In contrast,
Diamond believes
that environmental degradation is the primary factor. Of
course, it is not necessary that a single theory explain every
collapse, but Diamond’s thesis could be seen as an cause of
declining marginal return cited by Tainter.) Returning to the
suddenness of the bomb, as Tainter puts it:
There are two general factors that combine to yield a declining marginal return. First, stress and perturbation are a constant feature of any complex society, always occurring somewhere in its territory. Such a society will have a developed an operating regulatory apparatus that is designed to deal with such things as localized agricultural failures, border conflicts, and unrest. Since such continuous, localized stress can be expected to recur with regularity it can, to a degree, be anticipated and prepared for. Major, unexpected stress surges, however, will also occur given enough time, as such things as major climatic fluctuations and foreign incursions take place. To meet these major stresses the society must have some kind of net reserve. This can take the form of excess productive capacities in agriculture, energy, or minerals, or hoarded surpluses from past production. Stress surges of great magnitude cannot be accommodated without such a reserve.
Yet a society experiencing declining marginal returns is investing ever more heavily in a strategy that is yielding proportionately less. Excess productive capacity will at some point be used up, and accumulated surpluses allocated to current operating needs. There is, then, little or no surplus with which to counter major adversities. Unexpected stress surges must be dealt with out of the current operating budget, often ineffectually, and always to the detriment of the system as a whole. Even if the stress is successfully met, the society is weakened in the process, and made even more vulnerable to the next crisis. Once a complex society develops the vulnerabilities of declining marginal returns, collapse may merely require sufficient passage of time to render probable the occurrence of an insurmountable calamity.
In that context, I will look at the bombs in turn. I laid out the problem of the oil bomb earlier. The degree of stress this puts on the civilization depends upon the details of production. If peak oil has a long flat top, prices will perhaps increase slowly enough that civilization will adapt, substituting new energy sources for the old one. Existing consumers will pay more to command access to the flat production, preventing potential new consumers (i.e. the world’s poor) from receiving any product. Some current consumers may even be priced out of consumption, but not enough for catastrophic stress to the system. The rising prices will effect development of alternatives (things currently uneconomic). During this period civilization will draw down its surpluses (if it has any), but probably survive. The other possibility is that production begins to decline rather quickly, without a long period of flat production. Then prices will rise much faster to shed even current consumers (not just emerging ones). This economic dislocation will ripple through the system as a stress surge. It could cause civilization to collapse to a lower level of complexity.
The climate bomb is likely to be take place over an extended period of time. A tipping point might occur suddenly, but the consequences are probably slower; an analogy might be throwing someone from an airplane: the act is fast and irreversible, but the fall takes a while before it ends in impact with the ground. Billions of homo sapiens may have to relocate, and substitutes for lost resources of production (e.g. land) found, but this would be over a period of a century. The potential stress surge is one of magnitude, not timing. I don’t think the outcome can be predicted, but the magnitude of the stress appears to me capable of triggering collapse through wars and severe economic reversals.
The economics bomb is not a cause itself (and I probably should not have included it at all). It is rather a simplistic argument that our current economic system has theoretical problems, which is of course perhaps better demonstrated by the recurring history of collapse (Tainter goes through at least eighteen). Basically, the compound return argument suggests our economics has evolved in a world of periodic collapse, and so its sustainability has never been an issue. Should we avert all other reasons for collapse, either economics would evolve to something else, or some sort of bomb would result from the asymmetric accumulation of wealth. I cannot begin to predict which, though I suspect the latter.
The population bomb is primarily a problem of our civilization’s complexity. Wildlife populations grow exponentially until a resource limit is reached, and then oscillate about that limit. Human population could do the same (and has done so successfully, such as Japan reaching near zero population growth in the 18th and early 19th centuries), except our population is already far above the limits of the resources provided naturally; it is supported there only by the complexity of civilization (e.g. our unsustainable agriculture). Growth of population can be one input to Tainter’s declining marginal return thesis, creating a collapse, and therefore a return to a lower level of complexity, and therefore a return to a dramatically lower population. Thus population growth in our civilization may play out differently—with a more dramatic crash—from wildlife observations.
The technology bomb is the real odd-ball. Its potential for a stress surge is of high intensity due to suddenness created by the situation the day before a technological development and the day after. As such, it is hardest to anticipate, or counter with surpluses. As such, it may be something that could topple even civilizations not experiencing declining marginal returns.
The optimist’s view on all of this is that science and technology will solve our problems. Here is Tainter’s response:
It is not that R&D cannot potentially solve the problems of industrialism. The difficulty is that to do so will require an increasing share of GNP. The principle of infinite substitutability depends on energy and technology. With diminishing returns to investment in scientific research, how can economic growth be sustained? The answer is that to sustain growth resources will have to be allocated from other sectors of the economy into science and engineering. … The allocation of greater resources to science of course is nothing new, merely the continuation of a two centuries-old trend. Such investment, unfortunately, can never yield a permanent solution, merely a respite from diminishing returns.
…
Will we find, as have some past societies, that the cost of overcoming our problems is too high relative to the benefits conferred, and that not solving problems is the economical option?
Tainter concludes with the following observation about the global nature of the next collapse. It is worthwhile to keep this in mind.
In fact, there are major differences between the current and the ancient worlds that have important implications for collapse. On of these is that the world today is full. That is to say, it is filled by complex societies; these occupy every sector of the globe, except the most desolate. This is a new factor in human history. Complex societies as a whole are a recent and unusual aspect of human life. The current situation, where all societies are so oddly constituted, is unique. It was shown earlier in this chapter that ancient collapses occurred, and could only occur, in a power vacuum, where a complex society (of cluster of peer polities) was surrounded by less complex neighbors. There are no power vacuums left today. Every nation is linked to, and influenced by, the major powers, and most are strongly linked with one power bloc or the other.
…
Peer polities then then tend to undergo long periods of upwardly-spiraling competitive costs, and downward marginal returns. This is terminated finally by domination of one and acquisition of a new energy subsidy (as in Republican Rome and Warring States China), or by mutual collapse (as among the Mycenaeans and the Maya). Collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole. Competitors who evolve as peers collapse in like manner.
Our civilization should be more concerned about the possibility of its collapse. We must first reduce its probability. The most important step is to stop frittering away our inheritance, and instead live only off of our current income (and perhaps even to add to our natural capital after our long drawdown of it, similar to Japan’s reforestation efforts that started in 1666, as noted in Jared Diamond’s work). As an insurance policy, a second step would be to build arks to help our descendents recover from a collapse if our efforts to avoid it prove insufficient. And history suggests that the question is not whether the next collapse will occur, but rather when.
Civilization today has some challenges ahead. We’ve got the
oil bomb
, the climate bomb
, economics bomb
,
population bomb
, and the technology bomb
to
circumnavigate. It is a real mine field. Even if the
probability of avoiding each one is 80%, the probability of
avoiding all 5 would be a mere 33%. Of course these are not
independent; so the probabilities don’t strictly multiply
(e.g. avoiding the oil bomb may make avoiding climate
catastrophe more or less likely depending upon the solution).
The climate bomb
is of course climate change that occurs
too fast for the Earth species (including homo sapiens); the
result being catastrophe (e.g. world war resulting from the
massive relocations of billions of people). I think the
probability of avoiding the climate bomb is really much lower
than 80% (though I would put several of the others higher
— 80% is just meant to illustrative). I was actually
someone more optimistic on climate change until I saw the gross
under reaction to Katrina (after the gross over reaction to
the pinprick of 2001.09.11). Now I suspect we will not act
until it is too late. Recent science shows there may be a
tipping point that we are on the verge of broaching. This is a
non-linear feedback mechanism where a little bit more warming
may cause massive carbon dioxide releases that once started
cannot be stopped. Even if we do eventually pull back, we will
not be able to stop these natural processes, with the result
that the warming snowballs. In
Permafrost and the Global Carbon Budget
Sergey A. Zimov et al. point out that the carbon in Earth’s
atmosphere has recently increased from its pre-industrial level
of 560 Gt to 730 Gt today. This has resulted in warming that
is now beginning to melt the permafrost in Siberia and Alaska.
They estimate that the frozen yedoma deposits across Siberia and
Alaska contain approximately 500 Gt of carbon covering 1 million
km2 to an average depth of
approximately 25 m. Peatbogs contain 50 to 70 Gt of carbon, and
non-yedoma, non-peat permafrost contains approximately 400 Gt of
carbon. They further suggest when thawed most yedoma carbon
will be released within a century. Thus once thawing occurs, as
much as 4 Gt of carbon might enter the atmosphere each year, in
addition to what humankind adds. Even if humankind could
suddenly stop its 7 Gt per year emissions completely, the
permafrost might keep on going at more than half of this level.
Our only option at that point would be to run backward just to
stay in the same place; we would have to sequester up to 4 Gt
per year, a change of 11 Gt.
The chemical form of carbon emissions makes a difference. Methane has 23 times the global warming potential (GWP) of carbon dioxide, so it matters quite a bit whether permafrost carbon ends up as methane or CO2. In Methane bubbling from Siberian thaw lakes as a positive feedback to climate warming, Walter et al. present their surveys of methane release from sixty Siberian thaw lakes. Their more accurate method found 3.7 times the methane release than previous work on the same lakes. Since these northern latitudes had not been included in current wetland methane emission estimates, this represents a new, extremely worrisome, methane source. Their 0.004 Gt CH4 yr-1 estimate is equivalent to 0.087 Gt of CO2 in GWP. While these numbers are still small, Zimov’s data suggest that the potential exists for huge (non-linear) increases as the temperature increases just enough to increase the thawing.
The oil bomb
I refer to above is more commonly discussed
using the term peak oil.
It refers simply to the fact
that crude oil production may soon level off and then begin to
decline, while our appetite will grow ever larger. That gap
will of course be closed by market forces: prices so high that
consumption is strangled (this will be accomplished by pricing
it beyond the means of the poor). Since very basic needs,
including food production, are now very dependent upon oil, this
could lead to problems for the poor on a scale we have never
seen before. Having looked at the data from various sides of
the peak oil debate, I don’t know what to believe. I’ve yet to
see really convincing data. Even the USGS position (e.g.
Long Term World Oil Supply) seems
to be based on simplistic assumptions to me. However, unlike
the business as usual
crowd, I don’t think it is up to
Peak Oil folks to prove their peak prediction dates; prudence
calls for being prepared for the possibility of an early peak
when the data is so unclear. Also, if the oil bomb is avoided
by oil conservation, this helps delay the climate bomb.
(Conversely, if we switch to coal to avoid peak oil, we trigger
the climate bomb all the sooner.)
The population bomb
has been discussed since Malthus
wrote his warning in 1798. Overpopulation is indeed extermely
serious right now, but the lack of a dramatic catastrophe in the
years since 1798 has only made humankind complacent and
dismissive of the notion (Malthusian
has even entered the
lexicon). This complacency is lunacy, but the human mind has a
enormous difficultly grasping exponential growth, especially at
low rates of compounding. It is a characteristic of exponential
growth that it collides into its limits with the same subtlety
of a race car hitting a concrete abutment. What is worse is
that the population rate has been super-exponential; the growth
rate has been increasing. For example, the last four doublings
of world population took 500 years, 200 years, 60 years, and 36
years. The growth rate was 0.109% between 1 and 1950. When
Malthus wrote his warning in 1798, it was a scary 0.43%. Between
1950 and 2006 the population growth rate has been 1.41%, which
is almost unimaginable: we added 3 billion people to the planet
between 1960 and 1996. The growth rate is down to a mere
1.2% in recent years (between 2000 and 2005). The U.N. and
others estimate the population will stabilize around 2050, but
that may be just wishful thinking; predicting the future says
more about the seer than the future.
The economics bomb
is probably unfamiliar. I encountered
the notion in
George Monbiot’s
Manifesto for a New World Order in the form of a
gedanken: Invest a penny at 5% annual interest for 2,000
years.†
What do you get? The answer is so monstrously large it boggles
the imagination (again the human mind has trouble with even
simple exponentials). The value of a quantity of gold with the
same mass as the Earth is tiny in comparison. It implies
that the present capitalist system requires periodic resets
(e.g. the Dark Ages, Depressions, wealth destroying
wars, etc.) to avoid the problems of compound return.
1.052000 is roughly 2.4×1042 or
2,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
It is indeed a number of unimaginable scale. It is as
large as the Planck scale is small. For example, the
land area of the earth is only 148,939,100,000,000 m2.
I consider the 5% example cited in the book too high, given
inflation and taxes, so I repeated the calculation with a 2%
real return. 1.022000 is 160,000,000,000,000,000,
so after investing $1 at 2% real return for 2000 years
you’d have over $1000 for each square meter of land on
earth ($2.7 billion per sq mi). Still impressive. The mass of
the earth is
6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg.
It only takes 3% real interest to get numbers this large.
It is amazing that people took Marx’s arguments as proof
that capitalism would be relegated to the dustbin of history.
The above is a much simpler and stronger indictment. Of course
it does not relegate capitalism to the dustbin; rather it only
requires wars, depressions, and dark ages to periodically
intervene to destroy accumulations of wealth, such as that owned
by the hypothetical entity (e.g. a family or a corporation)
collecting 2% compound interest for 2000 years. Sustainable
capitalism of the sort we know is not possible. It can probably
go for only several hundred years to a thousand years at most
before requiring a reset. Perhaps we are almost due? This is
the potential economics bomb
.
The technology bomb
is simply the notion that as
technology advances, it becomes increasingly possible for a
small number of individuals or even a single individual to cause
enormous damage. A suicide bomber today can destroy a bus, a
cafe, or an office building. What will the suicide bomber of
tomorrow do? Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
gives one glimpse of what might be in store.
The conjunction of probabilities for walking this mine field is not encouraging. There’s a good chance for some serious negative outcomes. Very possibly any one might cause a collapse of civilization. That is of course not new; collapse has happened repeatedly and frequently throughout history. What is new is the degree to which our civilization is now global, and so a collapse has wide consequences.
I don’t think there is much that can be done to personally
prepare for collapse. The only sensible strategy is to work to
avoid it. Even if the probabilities where much different
(e.g. 95% chance of avoiding each bomb
gives 77% chance
of avoiding all of them if they are independent), it still makes
sense to work to increase our chances, since factoring in the
pain factor (i.e. the computing the expected value of 23%
collapse and 77% non-collapse) is still a very bad result.
Society could prepare the possibility of collapse by preparing a
sort of ark, but it is unlikely to do so.
† After writing the above commentary, I ran into an earlier gedanken along the same lines in Garrett Hardin’s 1963 essay The Cybernetics of Competition:
Suppose, for example, that the thirty pieces of silver which Judas earned by betraying Jesus had been put out at 3 percent interest. If we assume these pieces of silver were dollars, the savings account would today amount to a bit more than 2 × 1026 dollars, or 70 million billion dollars for every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth.
As usual, President Bush got it wrong. (Also as usual, the press did not even notice.) The U.S. is not addicted to oil; it is addicted to fossils. In 2005 85% of our energy use was from fossil fuels: 46 EJ of petroleum energy (40%), 25 EJ of coal energy (23%), and 24 EJ of natural gas energy (23%). Only 8% was nuclear and 6% renewable. To use a food analogy: we aren’t addicted to chocolate; we are addicted to sugar.
(Another way to look at it: we aren’t addicted to oil, we are addicted to spending our inheritance and fouling our own home, rather than spending only our current income.)
Is the distinction significant? If we consider not the energy content of the three fossil fuels above, but instead their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, then in 2005 petroleum was 2.5 gigatons (43%), coal was 2.1 gigatons (36%), and natural gas was 1.2 gigatons (21%). (The reason emissions don’t parallel energy content is due to the hydrogen content of the fuel; coal is mostly carbon without much hydrogen, natural gas is CH4 with a large hydrogen content, and petroleum is in between.) Total U.S. CO2 emissions are 5.945 gigatons, and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions amount to the equivalent of 1.139 gigatons of CO2. Even if we kicked the oil habit, our fossil addiction would still have plenty of consequences for the planet.
We will have to target all of our fossil addictions, while avoiding even worse temptations (e.g. methane clathrates), but if the ease of overcoming the addiction is factored in, then oil might not be the highest priority. Consider next our consumption by sector: electricity 40%, transportation 28%, industrial 22%, and residential 11%. Perhaps we have an electric addiction too. Or at least some of us do; some are gorging and some are leaner. Consider electricity use per person by state: Californians used 6,732 kWh per capita in 2003, whereas the U.S. average was 11,997 kWh per capita, or 78% more. The standard of living in California is no worse than in the rest of the nation; California is simply more efficient. This becomes clearer when we consider historical per capita electricity use (see page 12). In the 1960s California and the rest of the nation consumed about 4,000 kWh per person per year. By the 1970s the U.S. was up to 8,000 and California was less than 7,000. Over the next few decades, California’s per capita usage stayed almost flat while the rest of nation increased to almost 12,000 kWh per capita. The divergence is the result of California’s policies, incentives, and regulations that encouraged or required efficiency (e.g. appliance and housing efficiency standards). If these policies were implemented at the Federal level and the nation’s use fell to California’s levels over the next decades, the 44% reduction in electricity generation and consumption would result in gigatons (Gt) fewer carbon dioxide emissions. For example, if the 44% is applied equally to all generation types, then about 1.0 gigaton of CO2 emissions would be avoided. If the 44% reduction were applied selectively to coal generation (this would be best accomplished with carbon taxes or a cap and trade system), than about 1.6 gigatons of emissions would be avoided. We don’t sacrifice anything by being more efficient—indeed we end up with more money in our pockets due to lower electric bills—but we are much less destructive.
Most things that we can change take time. For the U.S. to reach California electrical efficiency may take 20-30 years for the nation to achieve. But the benefits begin to accrue soon after the change, and begin to support other changes. For example, getting rid of coal makes electricity enormously more attractive. Consider the table below of electric fuel sources before and after negawatts selectively applied to coal:
| Fuel | 2005 | After Negawatts | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TWh | % | Gt CO2 | % | TWh | % | Gt CO2 | % | |
| Coal | 1956 | 52.6% | 1.944 | 81.8% | 322 | 15.4% | 0.321 | 42.6% |
| Nuclear | 782 | 21.0% | 782 | 37.5% | ||||
| Natural Gas | 553 | 14.9% | 0.319 | 13.4% | 553 | 26.5% | 0.319 | 42.4% |
| Hydro | 260 | 7.0% | 260 | 12.4% | ||||
| Petroleum | 111 | 3.0% | 0.102 | 4.3% | 111 | 5.3% | 0.102 | 13.5% |
| Renewables | 59 | 1.6% | 59 | 2.8% | ||||
| Other | 0.012 | 0.5% | 0.012 | 1.5% | ||||
| Total | 3721 | 100% | 2.376 | 100% | 2088 | 100% | 0.753 | 100% |
The carbon dioxide per energy produced falls from 0.64 kg/kWh to 0.36 kg/kWh. Electricity gets a lot cleaner!
Proclaiming an addiction is one thing; doing something about it is another. Negawatts are a relatively painless way to get rid of a lot of coal. In contrast, getting rid of oil is a bit more complicated. One reason President Bush may have been willing to proclaim an oil addiction is that it only serves to highlight our dependency upon (and need to support) those who feed our addiction with the needed substance, or least some alternative (when the drug of choice becomes scarcer, the addict often switches to a similar substance.) The oil portion of our fossil addiction is primarily a personal transportation addiction (i.e. automobiles). There are many reasons why it might be best to cut back on this craving, but short of severe crisis, I don’t see this happening. Thus the question becomes can we find a non-fossil way to satisfy our personal transportation craving.
Fortunately automobiles need not be fossil fueled. The methadone analogs for personal transportation are biofuels, hydrogen from renewable sources, and electricity from renewable sources. Of these, electricity is the only alternative that is a here and now technology (though biodiesel is close). No new technology is required to produce battery electric vehicles (BEVs) that would replace most of the nation’s vehicle fleet. Electricity has the advantage of existing infrastructure and a trivial migration strategy (more on these later). BEVs appear to be the most efficient, and compare favorably to even the futures promised by biofuels and hydrogen. The only current disadvantage of BEVs is the cost of the batteries, a problem that will be solved with volume. Because volume depends on getting the cost down, the migration strategy is to start off with vehicles with modest battery requirements: plug-in hybrids.
The case against hydrogen as a fuel is quite simple. Hydrogen as a transportation fuel is a way of storing energy (batteries are a similar way to store energy). A hydrogen fuel cell vehicle (FCV) is the same as a battery electric vehicle (BEV) where a hydrogen storage tank and fuel cell replace some (but not all) of the batteries. This makes it relatively straight-forward to compare. Hydrogen is only economically produced today from natural gas (a fossil fuel). Hydrogen boosters claim natural gas hydrogen is simply a transition mechanism, and in the distant future we will substitute renewable production methods. The only renewable production methods that exist today is electrolysis of water from renewable electricity and the use of biogas as a substitute for natural gas (a biofuel method). For electrolysis from electricity, it seems clear that it is superior to simply transmit the energy across the electric grid to our garages (92% efficient), and then store and retrieve it in vehicle batteries (86%), for an plant to motor input efficiency of 80%. No conceivable electricity to hydrogen and back to electricity technology can match this 80% efficiency. A hydrogen booster’s claims are 70-75% efficient electrolysis and 50-70% efficient fuel cells, yielding at most 35-52% plant to motor input efficiency. Since the BEV and FCV are otherwise identical, the only way a FCV could beat a BEV is if the weight of the hydrogen storage tank and fuel cell were so much less than the weight of the Lithium batteries they displace to undo this 1.5 to 2.3 times efficiency disadvantage. In the real world, existing BEVs with NiMH batteries (which are much heavier than Lithium batteries) provide superior efficiency to existing FCVs. I have yet to see a hydrogen booster make the needed weight argument, and I doubt one can be made. Instead hydrogen boosters point at the limited range and long recharge times of old BEVs, ignoring the fact that new BEVs have largely solved the range problem with Lithium batteries (e.g. by Altairnano and A123 Systems) and that these batteries are likely to solve the recharge time problem as well.
From the vantage of the auto industry, the real advantage of the hydrogen FCVs is not that they are potentially better than BEVs (they are not), but they are clearly not ready for immediate deployment, and thus by espousing them as the future solution, they avoid the need to make changes today.
Biofuels are the other major thrust for future personal transportation. In the case of one biofuel, ethanol, the attraction is obvious. Ethanol is already a gasoline additive; increasing its concentration from 10% to 85% of automobile fuel requires almost trivial modifications of existing automobile designs (for example, Ford claims their entire current production is already E85 capable). For an addict, it is like substituting one amphetamine for another; the change is hardly noticed.
The problem with ethanol, as it is currently produced, is that it is essentially fossil fuel in disguise because it takes so much fossil fuel to produce ethanol from corn that experts actually argue whether the energy return on the fossil fuel is actually positive or negative (e.g. see page 28 of Fuel-Cycle Energy and Greenhouse Emission Impacts of Fuel Ethanol and pages 2-3 of Corn-Based Ethanol Does Indeed Achieve Energy Benefits). Ethanol boosters point to cellulosic ethanol as the future solution to this problem, but until this year’s publication of Carbon-Negative Biofuels from Low-Input High-Diversity Grassland Biomass there did not appear to be even a hypothetical way to produce ethanol sustainably (e.g. without carbon emissions). Like hydrogen, ethanol now appears to be a possible future solution, but not something here and now. Worse, even were a sustainable, carbon-neutral method of producing ethanol to emerge, the efficiency of burning ethanol in the internal combustion engine (ICE) is poor. Electric motors are a much better way to convert stored energy into motive power. For example, a direct comparison of the 2002 RAV4 (gasoline fueled) to the 2002 RAV4-EV (electricity stored in batteries) shows the BEV model to be 4.3 times more efficient than the ICE model. More efficient ICEs are possible, but a factor of 4.3 is not on even the distant horizon. This is also seen on the production side in Table S3 of the supplementary materials to the grassland biomass research cited above where producing ethanol is inferior to producing electricity. Thus even if grassland biomass becomes a real technology in the future, BEVs will still be a much more efficient use of that resource.
We must not think that ethanol is the only biofuel. Biodiesel from oilseed crops is already superior to corn ethanol with much better energy return on the fossil inputs. Moreover, producing oil for biodiesel from algae appears to be up to 30 times as efficient as growing oilseed crops. Thus algae biodiesel is a strong candidate for personal transportation. Moreover, it appears to on the verge of commercialization, like cellulosic ethanol (unlike FCVs). My only real argument against algae biodiesel is that BEVs are more efficient. Algae is about 7% efficient at turning sunlight into oil, and compression ignition engines (diesels) are at best 45% efficient. The corresponding figures for solar energy (e.g. the Stirling Energy Systems plants in the Mojave desert) are 30% efficient; grid delivery of this energy is 92% efficient, and the BEV is perhaps 60-80% efficient, yielding a sun-to-wheels efficiency over five times that of algae biodiesel. Algae biodiesel may still find a niche in long-distance freight transportation, where it is unclear how BEVs could be time-competitive.
The transition from internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) to battery electric vehicles (BEVs) is relatively simple. Car makers are already moving pure ICEVs to hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) where electric motors provide all or part of the wheel turning motive force. Though 100% of the energy to power these vehicles comes from gasoline, the electric drive provides such significant advantages in city driving (e.g. not burning fuel when stopped, and accelerating more efficiently) that the 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid gets 50 MPG compared to the 2006 Honda Civic’s 34 MPG—a factor of almost 1.5.
A trivial modification to HEVs is to add more battery storage and a plug, producing a gas-optional or plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV). This technology is so trivial that hobbyists and after-market kit companies have already produced such vehicles based on production HEVs. More radical PHEVs have been produced by University projects, such as Dr. Andy Frank’s work at U.C. Davis. The advantage of Frank’s PHEVs is that ICE power is not necessary, even at highway speeds, for 50 miles or more, so that the vehicle is essentially a BEV except on long trips. If fueled by ethanol from grassland biomass, the PHEV could be carbon neutral even on long trips, and the inefficiency of ethanol production compared to electricity is of concern only for a tiny fraction of the miles driven by the PHEV. The only disadvantage of such a PHEV compared to a pure BEV is that it carries the weight and cost of the ICE and the associated continuously variable transmission (CVT) for use on only a tiny fraction of the vehicle’s miles. The advantage of liquid fuel for long trips is simply to provide fast refueling. The Lithium batteries by A123 and Altairnano, already being designed into electric vehicles, allow much faster charging, almost competitive with liquid fueling. Some PHEVs may therefore eventually simplify into BEVs as highway fast-charging infrastructure becomes available (the ICE/CVT may become a furutre purchase option much the way manual vs. automatic transmissions is a purchase option today), but the advantages of electric drive in PHEVs will already have saved the planet long before this infrastructure is needed (unlike FCVs for example).
Converting the U.S. passenger car and other 2-axle vehicle fleet from gasoline to BEVs would save at least 0.6 gigatons (Gt) of carbon dioxide emissions; it would save much more if coal were eliminated entirely from the U.S. grid. How can we do that? Before answering that, we need to eliminate the other fuels that result from crude oil refining. Gasoline cannot be eliminated if diesel is still needed, since diesel is a byproduct of producing gasoline.
As I indicated above, battery electric vehicles may not be feasible for some time for long-distance freight transportation. (Short distance freight is already being electrified, as can be seen by the trucks and vans being produced by Azure Dynamics.) Here, I think we can turn to biofuels, in particular biodiesel from algae, as discussed above. Michael Briggs estimates to replace all of U.S. transportation fuel with algae biodiesel would require 15,000 mi2 of Sonora desert land (12.5%). But as I argued above, EVs are superior for passenger travel, and I estimate from Briggs’ work and being a little less optimistic that 7,000 mi2 might supply our freight needs. Algae biodiesel replacing 2005’s 63 billion gallons of diesel would save another 0.6 gigatons (Gt) of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
One fossil fuel for which a carbon-neutral strategy is still lacking is aviation fuel. Perhaps as in Diamond Age we will need to return to lighter than air travel?
PHEVs and BEVs of course require additional electricity to be generated. Table 2 below shows the estimated power required. It is less than the negawatts saved above, and so we could just reduce the negawatt savings by burning some of the coal we saved with efficiency, but coal is so destructive of the planet that it imperative to instead build wind and solar farms to generate power for these vehicles. In the 30 years it will take to convert the vehicle fleet, the U.S. could easily finance and build these farms. Just as an example of scale, it would take only 3,000 mi2 of Mojave desert land to replace all 140 billion gallons of gasoline burned each year with Sterling Energy Systems’ solar mirror generators. (And defending this 3,000 mi2 of U.S. land would be a lot easier than defending the 166,859 mi2 of Iraq. Our Iraq war spending would also be more than sufficient to pay for the construction.) Using renewable energy to power PHEVs and BEVs will save 1.2 Gt of carbon dioxide, as compared to only 0.6 Gt if the existing grid power mix is used.
| Vehicle Type | 2004 U.S. Trillion Vehicle Miles Traveled |
Estimated Wh/mi |
TWh needed |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Passenger Car | 1.705 | 260 | 443 | |
| Other 2-axle 4-tire vehicle | 1.014 | 370 | 375 | |
| Motorcycles | 0.013 | 150 | 2 | |
| Total | 2.732 | 300 | 821 |
The above strategy for eliminating petroleum is multifaceted, and involves battery storage of electricity in an enormous number of vehicles (the 2004 fleet was estimated at 234 million vehicles), whether BEVs or PHEVs. Even at 50% of the fleet having batteries, this represents a storage capacity of at least 16% of U.S. daily electric generation (after negawatts). This immense storage capability allows us to return to the grid and further eliminate emissions. As seen in Table 3 below, 30% would be renewable energy, which can be intermittent. Some sources estimate the grid can absorb 5-10% renewables without problem (e.g. Given wind’s intermittency, can the power grid handle much larger amounts of variable generation?), others 10-20%, but 30% renewable energy without storage is sure to be problematic. There are many energy storage possibilities, such as pumped hydro, flow batteries (e.g. VRBPower), and using the vehicle fleet. The last is called Vehicle to Grid (V2G), and it has been studied as a solution. Kempton and Tomic estimated in Vehicle-to-grid power implementation: From stabilizing the grid to supporting large-scale renewable energy that V2G could allow one half of electricity to be wind generated. So the 30% above is achievable with V2G technology.
| Fuel | After Negawatts | After BEVs | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TWh | % | Gt CO2 | % | TWh | % | Gt CO2 | % | |
| Coal | 322 | 15.4% | 0.321 | 42.6% | 322 | 11.1% | 0.321 | 42.6% |
| Nuclear | 782 | 37.5% | 782 | 26.9% | ||||
| Natural Gas | 553 | 26.5% | 0.319 | 13.4% | 553 | 19.0% | 0.319 | 42.4% |
| Hydro | 260 | 12.4% | 260 | 8.9% | ||||
| Petroleum | 111 | 5.3% | 0.102 | 13.5% | 111 | 3.8% | 0.102 | 13.5% |
| Renewables | 59 | 2.8% | 880 | 30.2% | ||||
| Other | 0.012 | 1.5% | 0.012 | 1.5% | ||||
| Total | 2088 | 100% | 0.753 | 100% | 2908 | 100% | 0.753 | 100% |
The next step is to get rid of the remaining coal and petroleum used in electricity generation (but not natural gas), since these are so dirty, replacing them with renewable energy. As shown in Table 4 below this substitution brings renewables up to 45% of the grid, still below the limit estimated by Kempton and Tomic. However, going all the way and replacing natural gas (the least dirty fossil fuel) brings renewables to 64%, and so further storage solutions (e.g. flow batteries) will probably be required.
| Fuel | After BEVs | More Renewables | No Fossil Fuels | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TWh | % | Gt CO2 | % | TWh | % | Gt CO2 | % | TWh | % | Gt CO2 | % | |
| Coal | 322 | 11.1% | 0.321 | 42.6% | ||||||||
| Nuclear | 782 | 26.9% | 782 | 26.9% | 782 | 26.9% | ||||||
| Natural Gas | 553 | 19.0% | 0.319 | 42.4% | 553 | 19.0% | 0.319 | 96.5% | ||||
| Hydro | 260 | 8.9% | 260 | 8.9% | 260 | 8.9% | ||||||
| Petroleum | 111 | 3.8% | 0.102 | 13.5% | ||||||||
| Renewables | 880 | 30.2% | 1313 | 45.2% | 1867 | 64.2% | ||||||
| Other | 0.012 | 1.5% | 0.012 | 3.5% | 0.012 | 100% | ||||||
| Total | 2908 | 100% | 0.753 | 100% | 2908 | 100% | 0.330 | 100% | 2908 | 100% | 0.012 | 100% |
The calculations presented above are simplistic. In reality we are unlikely to totally eliminate any of the fossil fuels. We would quite successful if we eliminated even 90% of gasoline, for example. In my calculations, I have simply used the extreme case rather than making guesses about percent adoption, so these should be taken as indications of where we might go, rather than specific predictions. The case for negawatts, PHEVs, BEVs, and renewables looks quite strong. It appears that the U.S. could eliminate about 3-4 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions (out of almost 6 gigatons total) each year without real changes in its standard of living or lifestyle. Whether we will do so is the question.
| Step | Eliminated | Added | Gt CO2 Savings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Negawatts to reduce coal electricity generation | 1633 TWh | 1.6 | |
| Conversion of gasoline vehicle fleet to BEVs | 140.4 billion gallons gasoline | 821 TWh from renewables | 1.2 |
| Algae biodiesel for long-distance freight | 63.1 billion gallons petroleum diesel | 64.4 billion gallons algae biodiesel | 0.6 |
| Replacing remaining coal and petroleum with renewables (enabled by PHEV/BEV fleet) | 322 TWh of coal electricity 111 TWh of petroleum electricity |
433 TWh of renewable electricity | 0.4 |
| Total | 3.8 |
Note that these estimates are just for the vehicle tailpipe or the power plant. For gasoline and diesel powered vehicles they do not include refinery emissions and electric power use. For PHEVs and BEVs they do not include emissions getting fuel to the power plant. Thus the actual carbon dioxide savings would be substantially higher than the numbers above suggest.
References:
Thank you for Steve Lohr’s article, The Cost of an Overheated Planet. Something usually overlooked in discussions of this issue is the role efficiency has to play in solving the problem. Sure, Mr. Lohr gives a nod to compact fluorescent bulbs, but if you are like me a few years ago, you probably wrote that off as a nice feel-good sort of response, but one that would not really dent the problem. Indeed, Mr. Lohr quickly turns to other topics (albeit important ones) such as the tax vs. cap and trade proposals.
What I, like so many other people, did not realize until recently is that the efficiency opportunity is huge. Consider that each person in California and the rest of the U.S. used about 6,000 kWh of electricity each year in the 1970s. Since then California has kept its per capita kWh usage roughly flat while the rest of the nation’s usage has doubled. In 2003, California was 50th in the nation in electricity use at 6,732 kWh per capita, while the nation was using almost double that amount (11,997 kWh). That was the result of policies, incentives, and regulations implemented by California. States with similar policies, such as New York, had similarly low usage (NY was 48th in 2003).
Is a few thousand kWh per person a big deal? In fact it is huge. If California’s policies were implemented at the Federal level and U.S. per capita kWh fell to California’s level, there would be a 44% reduction in electrical generation, resulting in approximately one gigaton of carbon dioxide not being put into the atmosphere each year, a reduction of one sixth of all carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. (which are 83% of all greenhouse gas emissions). If we used the efficiency reduction to selectively close coal power plants, the savings are much larger, approximately 1.6 gigatons. All of this could be accomplished while putting money in consumer’s pockets (since their monthly bills would be lower).
Could such a program survive the onslaught of electric utility fury? What industry likes its revenues cut 44%? Here is where California was particularly savvy. It decoupled utility profits from revenue. The utilities profit more from negawatts (efficiency savings) than they do from megawatts. My local utility is constantly telling its customers about how to save electricity, and even subsidizes the purchase of compact fluorescent light bulbs. Duke Energy would no doubt be even more willing to solve the problem with such a system in their states. This idea deserves equal attention to carbon taxes and cap and trade proposals. It is refreshing to see states that recognize how important market-oriented solutions are to our problems.
References:
Here is a system for reducing and then eliminating greenhouse gas emissions. (Note however that it is unclear how this could be implemented without the cooperation of fossil fuel extracting national governments.)
This system has many desirable consequences:
Eventually it may be necessary to implement a similar system for fresh water.
These thoughts are primarily relevant to politics as they are (e.g. the two-party system), and not to the way they should be (a more frequent source of reflection recently).
The close election in Mexico after two close elections in the U.S. stimulates me to reconsideration of the phenomenon. First, there is the question of why elections are close, and second the question of what to do when they happen.
To state the obvious, using a two-faction election scenario, a close election means that the electorate is almost evenly divided on their perceptions of the factions. This can result from the factions adjusting either their underlying candidates and policies or from adjustment of the electorate’s perceptions. To the extent that factions adjust actuality to capture sufficient votes to win an election, they are working to represent the electorate (though some would say they pandering to it instead of leading). In a system where perceptions are accurate, one might expect two factions to adjust their policies to make every election a close election. (That is at least what the thought patterns of Economists would predict.) Close elections might be then seen as a good thing—a sign that the factions are representing the electorate.
However, the electorate’s perceptions are for the most part not accurate. The factions often exploit this by seeking to adjust the electorate’s perceptions rather than their actual positions. Greater differences between the position required to win an election and the actual positions of a faction require greater perceptual manipulation. This produces weak feedback, as described in My Party Right or Wrong. (Plutocracies with weak feedback are now called Democracies.) Battles to manipulate perception can also result in close elections as the enormous manipulation required to produce a landslide may be infeasible and is certainly not worth the effort.
In these two close election scenarios, the question is what to
do about the inevitable irregularities, questionable results,
etc. (hanging chads, mismarked ballots and so forth)? When the
electorate correctly perceives the actual policies of the
factions and is evenly divided, I think which faction is handed
temporary power is not of primary importance, as each has
similar support for its positions. Changes of the weather or
other unrelated events could have as much effect as a hanging
chad here or there. In my opinion, votes are not sacred. It is
the process of submitting the power of the elites to popular
inspection that is important, as that introduces weak feedback
that causes factional positions to adjust to electoral concerns.
What may appear terribly important to the factions is less
important than the requirement that the factions submit to the
process. The system should then be the winner, and for this to
be so, the results must be respected by the populace. The
process should then give appropriate deference to the idea
every vote is sacred,
to maintain the appearance of
legitimacy. The factions need to avoid
Ends Choosing Principles, which is to
say arguing for process that benefits their short-term position
at the expense of long-term principle. Too often if the
chad situation were reversed, the factions would simply adopt
whatever principles benefit them at the moment in question.
In the second situation, where manipulation of perception trumps actualities, the system is not functioning well. It is in danger of devolving toward less and less feedback. What the system needs is a good jolt or crisis to get the electorate to take a closer look at what is going on in the ruling class. Perhaps a closer look will even lead a few to realize how much they are being duped.
Of course, real world situations are never binary. They are not black or white; they are always some shade of grey. That complicates the prescription.
I am rather ignorant of Mexico’s policies, but I suspect at the moment the first prescription would apply there. In the U.S. the shade of grey is much closer to black than white, and what is most needed is a crisis to get the electorate questioning the system. In the U.S., the fourth estate is unfortunately delivering the first prescription.
Direct democracy is too burdensome, and so representative government is required: that is conventional wisdom. But is it necessary for representative government to consist of individuals elected for terms to decide each issue before them? The necessity of choosing a set of individuals to represent me on issues as diverse as economics, liberty, security, public infrastructure, etc. is fraught with tradeoffs. As a result, the idea that multidimensional political thought is possible does not even occur to most. Instead our politicians group into parties, and artificially align their positions. From agreement on a few primary issues, agreement on many secondary issues is forced. The result is a failure of representation.
For most of my life, I have spe