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 If we could see the world with a particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one of its most prominent features at the moment would be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a lark. As yet — as we shall see — it’s unfortunately largely invisible to us.

In compensation, though, we have some truly beautiful images made possible by new technology.  Last month, for instance, NASA updated the most iconic photograph in our civilization’s gallery: “Blue Marble,” originally taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. The spectacular new high-def image shows a picture of the Americas on January 4th, a good day for snapping photos because there weren’t many clouds.

It was also a good day because of the striking way it could demonstrate to us just how much the planet has changed in 40 years. As Jeff Masters, the web’s most widely read meteorologist,explains, “The U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s.”

In fact, it’s likely that the week that photo was taken will prove “the driest first week in recorded U.S. history.” Indeed, it followed on 2011, which showed the greatest weather extremes in our history — 56% of the country was either in drought or flood, which was no surprise since “climate change science predicts wet areas will tend to get wetter and dry areas will tend to get drier.” Indeed, the nation suffered 14 weather disasters each causing $1 billion or more in damage last year. (The old record was nine.) Masters again: “Watching the weather over the past two years has been like watching a famous baseball hitter on steroids.”

In the face of such data — statistics that you can duplicate for almost every region of the planet — you’d think we’d already be in an all-out effort to do something about climate change. Instead, we’re witnessing an all-out effort to… deny there’s a problem.

 

Our GOP presidential candidates are working hard to make sure no one thinks they’d appease chemistry and physics. At the last Republican debate in Florida, Rick Santorum insisted that he should be the nominee because he’d caught on earlier than Newt or Mitt to the global warming “hoax.”

Most of the media pays remarkably little attention to what’s happening. Coverage of global warming has dipped 40% over the last two years. When, say, there’s a rare outbreak of January tornadoes, TV anchors politely discuss “extreme weather,” but climate change is the disaster that dare not speak its name.

And when they do break their silence, some of our elite organs are happy to indulge in outright denial. Last month, for instance, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by “16 scientists and engineers” headlined “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” The article was easily debunked. It was nothing but a mash-up of long-since-disproved arguments by people who turned outmostly not to be climate scientists at all, quoting other scientists who immediately said their actual work showed just the opposite.

It’s no secret where this denialism comes from: the fossil fuel industry pays for it. (Of the 16 authors of the Journal article, for instance, five had had ties to Exxon.) Writers from Ross Gelbspanto Naomi Oreskes have made this case with such overwhelming power that no one even really tries denying it any more. The open question is why the industry persists in denial in the face of an endless body of fact showing climate change is the greatest danger we’ve ever faced.

Why doesn’t it fold the way the tobacco industry eventually did? Why doesn’t it invest its riches in things like solar panels and so profit handsomely from the next generation of energy? As it happens, the answer is more interesting than you might think.

Part of it’s simple enough: the giant energy companies are making so much money right now that they can’t stop gorging themselves. ExxonMobil, year after year, pulls in more money than any company in history. Chevron’s not far behind. Everyone in the business is swimming in money.

Still, they could theoretically invest all that cash in new clean technology or research and development for the same. As it happens, though, they’ve got a deeper problem, one that’s become clear only in the last few years. Put briefly: their value is largely based on fossil-fuel reserves that won’t be burned if we ever take global warming seriously.

When I talked about a carbon bubble at the beginning of this essay, this is what I meant. Here are some of the relevant numbers, courtesy of the Capital Institute: we’re already seeing widespread climate disruption, but if we want to avoid utter, civilization-shaking disaster, many scientists have pointed to a two-degree rise in global temperatures as the most we could possibly deal with.

If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons — five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground.

Put another way, in ecological terms it would be extremely prudent to write off $20 trillion worthof those reserves. In economic terms, of course, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil (and people in places like Venezuela).

If you run an oil company, this sort of write-off is the disastrous future staring you in the face as soon as climate change is taken as seriously as it should be, and that’s far scarier than drought and flood. It’s why you’ll do anything — including fund an endless campaigns of lies — to avoid coming to terms with its reality. So instead, we simply charge ahead.  To take just one example, last month the boss of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Thomas Donohue, called for burning all the country’s newly discovered coal, gas, and oil — believed to be 1,800 gigatons worth of carbon from our nation alone.

What he and the rest of the energy-industrial elite are denying, in other words, is that the business models at the center of our economy are in the deepest possible conflict with physics and chemistry. The carbon bubble that looms over our world needs to be deflated soon. As with our fiscal crisis, failure to do so will cause enormous pain — pain, in fact, almost beyond imagining. After all, if you think banks are too big to fail, consider the climate as a whole and imagine the nature of the bailout that would face us when that bubble finally bursts.

Unfortunately, it won’t burst by itself — not in time, anyway. The fossil-fuel companies, with their heavily funded denialism and their record campaign contributions, have been able to keep at bay even the tamest efforts at reining in carbon emissions. With each passing day, they’re leveraging us deeper into an unpayable carbon debt — and with each passing day, they’re raking in unimaginable returns. ExxonMobil last week reported its 2011 profits at $41 billion, the second highest of all time. Do you wonder who owns the record? That would be ExxonMobil in 2008 at $45 billion.

Telling the truth about climate change would require pulling away the biggest punchbowl in history, right when the party is in full swing. That’s why the fight is so pitched. That’s why those of us battling for the future need to raise our game. And it’s why that view from the satellites, however beautiful from a distance, is likely to become ever harder to recognize as our home planet.

To receive a Ph.D in industrial chemistry in the United States, no American university requires candidates to take even a single toxicology class as part of their course work. We churn out new chemists with the divine power to manipulate the very structure of nature itself, without teaching them the divine wisdom of how to wield that power.

Nearly everything we consume or even interact with these days is made of plastic. The industry that produces plastic, largely represented by the American Chemistry Council (ACC), has an annual budget of over $120 million to protect its interests. But as the plague of plastic that wreaks havoc on our environment slowly gains the attention of policymakers, concerned citizens and the media, the makers of plastic resins and the companies that package their products have become increasingly aggressive about defending their respective bottom lines.

Taking tactics from Big Tobacco's playbook, the industry engages in bully tactics, politician buys and wide-scale misinformation campaigns meant to confuse the public and turn truth to speculation. Big Plastic is big money and survives regulatory scrutiny by creating big spin.

Because of slashed budgets to regulatory agencies, little private-sector money for watchdogging industry, and a lazy mainstream press that simply regurgitates its claims, the petrochemical industry goes largely unchecked. Here are some of the biggest whoppers.

Lie #1: Plastics are safe.

To date, we use over 248,000 chemicals in commerce and we don't know which ones are harmful or safe. Why? Because the vast amount of research on plastics we use in our lives comes from the plastic industry.

Much of the plastic we see on a daily basis we know by its designated recycling numbers 1 through 7. These plastics are not pure; rather, they're a proprietary formulation of additives, some of which have been shown to be endocrine disrupters, carcinogenic and pose countless other health concerns, but very, very little data exists on additives, toxicologically speaking. In the United States, chemicals that make plastics are innocent until proven guilty, leaving the burden of proof of toxicity to the vastly underfunded and under-staffed Environmental Protection Agency. With 248,000 chemicals on the market, don't expect any light shed here anytime soon.

Perhaps the best-known additive is bisphenol-A, or BPA. Though it's gained media traction having been shown to cause sexual mutations, cardiovascular disorders, obesity, and diabetes, the $6 billion annual industry makes the plastics industry protect it fiercely, even though Centers for Disease Control studies have shown that 93 percent of the adult population has BPA present in their urine. BPA has been on the radar of environmentalists for years but few policy victories have been won because industry-funded studies repeatedly don't show adverse effects, though all the independent studies do.

Lie #2: The so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch does not exist.

In a 25-page report for the Save the Bag Coalition, meant to refute claims made by the media and environmentalists about the presence of plastic in the ocean, attorney Stephen Joseph wrote that the "so-called 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch,' which is alleged to be twice the size of Texas, does not exist." To keep the speculation on the table, industry hammers on a single point; in early 2011, Oregon State University issued a press release titled, "Oceanic "Garbage Patch' Not Nearly As Big As Portrayed By Media" and a huge media storm ensued calling out environmentalists as a result.

Why this press release was so widely distributed is strange, because the woman who issued it isn't even a relevant name in the plastics research world. But seeing an opportunity to pound environmentalists, the plastic industry created a PR blitz sending press releases to media and form letters to lawmakers. What's interesting is that no one can attribute who first made the Texas-sized analogy, and no primary source for the quote exists, though it certainly went viral.

The researcher from OSU, Angelique White, is correct in her assessment from the best available data, but the data available isn't enough by several degrees of scale to accurately predict spatial distribution of plastics in the gyres (which any scientist who works on the issue will tell you, explicitly), or the ocean in general. To do so would mean that 70 percent of the surface of the earth surface had been sampled.

Well, that's not going to happen anytime soon, as research vessels cost about $30,000 a day and funding is very limited in this field, because so many corporate interests that might sponsor such research depend on plastic to deliver their products. What scientists do know is that 200 billion pounds of plastic are produced each year, and that number is on the rise, and mitigation strategies for keeping plastics out of the ocean are failing, horribly. Greenpeace estimates that of the 200 billion pounds produced annually, 10 percent makes it into the ocean.

To date, the best estimate of how much plastic is in the gyres comes from Columbia University. Researchers took all the major data sets (of which there are very, very few) that exist and calculated 73,878,000 pounds of plastic in the area of the gyres, which accounts for just 16 million of the earth's 315 million square kilometers of ocean surface.

Another problem with determining the scale of plastic pollution is that half of the plastics that are made sink and to date no data exists on how much plastic lies beneath the surface of the water. But when speaking only of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) water bottles, a type of plastic that sinks, we know that Americans alone discard 22 billion a year. Scientists who work on plastic in the ocean often refer to it as, "the world's largest dump." But without "conclusive" data, industry can stay on the offensive.

Lie #3: Plastics don't kill sea life or pose a threat to people eating fish.

While occasionally industry will acknowledge that marine animals do eat plastics from time to time, they make a point of stating that they don't know if the plastics are definitively responsible for the animal's death. To date, 177 species of marine life have been shown to ingest plastics and the number is likely to get much higher as more research is done. Recently published evidence has shown that shards of plastic eroded from synthetic clothing in the washing machine is so small that it can enter an animal at the cellular level. 

But determining death, or eventual death of an animal based on a necropsy (autopsy for animals) is notoriously difficult in some cases. What's at issue is that again, industry takes advantage of the "unknowns" to make the assertion that their products don't cause morbidity. Scientists can't absolutely know what causes an animal's death unless it lives and dies in a controlled environment. But opening up a turtle stomach and finding pounds of plastic in it might give them a clue. How long would a turtle have survived with this much plastic garbage in his guts?

We know that most types of plastic aren't passed by a turtle and that it wreaks havoc on their digestive systems. We also know that carrying around a stomach full of plastic is going to slow him down and change his natural buoyancy. Sharper plastics, cause gut impaction and the potential for stomach wall and intestinal perforation. In the wild, everything about an animal's health and agility matters in determining his survival quotient.

In December, a study was published in Science Of The Total Environment that looked to see if the digestive juices of turtles could make plastic bags decay. Three common types of shopping bags (including bioplastic) were subjected to the gastrointestinal fluids of Green and Loggerheads turtles. Without exception, the ubiquitous High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) bag showed "negligible" biodegradability -- which means if a turtle can't pass it, he's stuck with it forever.

Beyond turtles, 9 percent of base food chain fish (which represents as much as 50 percent of the biomass of fish in the entire ocean) sampled in the North Pacific have been shown to ingest plastics, and along with it a toxic soup of PAHs, flame retardants, DDE (a persistent form of the outlawed DDT) and PCBs. Concentrations of these chemicals in ocean-borne plastics have been shown to be up to a million times higher than the ambient sea water around it.

Bigger fish eat the fish that eat these toxic bombs and so do humans at the top of the food chain. All humans have levels of these toxins in their blood and men can't get rid of them. Women can only pass the chemicals through the umbilical chord and through breast milk, and thus, a higher and higher chemical burden in the human body will result from generation to generation.

Lie #4: It shouldn't be called "plastic pollution" but rather "marine debris."

What's the most common type of plastic found on the surface of the ocean? According to the Ocean Conservancy's annual report, 11 percent of beach litter is plastic bags. But what happens when a plastic bag enters the ocean? Plastic doesn't biodegrade in any meaningful timeframe, but it photo-degrades. Thin, flimsy plastic like HDPE with a lot of surface area (like the common bag from grocery stores) photo-degrades faster than thicker plastic. Ultraviolet rays from the sun break the polymer chains of hydrocarbon molecules into smaller pieces and what you end up with is small fragments. So, you might not find a plastic bag in the "garbage patch" but you surely will find the remnants of them. Plastic bags are of the class of plastics recyclers refer to as "blow trash" as they tend to be picked up by the wind and blown out to sea. They're huge offenders of plastic pollution as Americans consume more than 100 billion a year.

Keith Christman, managing director for plastics markets at the ACC, maintained that "marine debris" is a better phrase than "plastic pollution" for describing the trash in the ocean even though 90 percent of the contents of the gyres is plastic. Christman, understanding the negative implications of his product's association with the word "pollution," mentioned that it's not just plastic, but derelict fishing gear as well. All modern fishing gear is made of polypropylene, i.e. plastic. This is a sore spot for the ACC, and marine plastics research and education groups that receive funding from the ACC are typically "mandated" to refer to oceanic trash as marine debris to keep the burden of guilt from resting squarely on their shoulders.

Lie #5: "Plastic retail carry-out bags are 100-percent recyclable and made from clean natural gas."

This is a direct statement issued by the American Progressive Bag Alliance to the city of Dana Point, California in a letter regarding a proposed bag ban. That plastic bags are 100 percent recyclable isn't the issue; it's that by and large, they are not recycled. Plastic bag recycling is governed by supply and demand. People assume that if they place a bag in a recycling receptacle this means the bag will in fact be recycled. That's not necessarily true. In order to show (very) modest positive trending in recycling, industry lops all polyethylene (PE) films, wraps and bags all into one category. But for bags discretely, which are high-density polyethylene, the numbers are atrocious. In 2009, the rate for recycling is 6.1 percent; in 2010, the rate is 4.3 percent.

Thus one of the main targets legislatively, is plastic shopping bags. The biggest player in the bag market, Hilex Poly, has become a master of spin tactics to attempt to paint a rosy picture of its business. Hilex, the largest recycler in the US, writes posts on its Web site patting itself on the back for increased recycling rates claiming that PE rates are up from 2009 to 2010. What it fails to mention is the distinction between the different types of PE, and that EPA itself doesn't independently audit the recycling industry, it just compiles industry's reporting.

There's another problem with plastic bag recyclability. According to Mark Daniels of Hilex Poly, only 30-percent post-consumer HDPE can be used to make a new bag, which means 70 percent of a "recycled" plastic bag comes from virgin sources (natural gas). Sometimes, recycled HDPE gets down-cycled into other products like decking materials. The problem here is that plastic decking materials have a lifespan as well, and no strategy for reclaiming them at the end of their lifespan has been introduced to the recycling markets.

When speaking of plastics in general (including plastic bags), even when there is a modest gain in recycling rates, those rates are far outpaced by higher consumption. From 2009 to 2010, plastics generated in the municipal waste stream jumped from 59,660,000 to 62,080,000 pounds. This is an increase of 2,420,000 pounds. In terms of recycling gains, the EPA reports 440,000 more pounds of all plastics recovered from 2009 to 2010.

So, if we subtract the increase in gains in recovery from the increase in generation we still get an increase of plastic generation of 1,980,000 pounds. This is the central conspiracy of the plastics industry tactically. If industry can convince the public that the environmental consequences of their consumption habits are offset by the industry-backed solution of recycling, industry is guaranteed that its bottom line will grow by hoodwinking the public into believing the myth of recycling.

What about natural gas, the stock for plastic bags? It is becoming scarcer and dirtier to get. According to the US Energy Information Administration, 35 percent of domestic natural gas drilling comes from fracking, and will reach 47 percent by 2035. Though natural gas burns cleaner than other fossil fuels, getting it out of the ground by fracking creates potent greenhouse gas emissions of methane and other undesired consequences. According to a congressional report released in April, the 14 biggest fracking companies released 3 billion liters of fracking fluid into the environment, including 29 chemicals known or suspected to be carcinogenic to humans. This is where your plastic bag comes from -- or at least 70 pecent of it.

Lie #6: Reusable bags are dangerous.

The American Chemistry Council is worried that Americans might not understand the danger of things when they get dirty. Like your underwear, if you don't wash your reusable bag, bacteria might grow in it. So, rather than issue a press release telling people to wash their bags, they funded a study looking at bacterial contamination of reusable bags.

Bacteria are myriad on everything we touch, but the presence of bacteria is natural and the microbe kingdom has a pretty good system of checks and balances. The study found that 12 percent of its 84-bag sample size found E. coli, and all samples but one contained bacteria. This finding spawned scary headlines in newspapers such as the Washington Post that read "Reusable Bags Found To Be Full Of Bacteria." But here's the problem: None of the bacteria (salmonella and listeria were not found), or the strains of E. coli present in reusable bags are harmful to humans.

The ACC, though absolutely knowing this, still went ahead on a PR blitz trying to scare the hell out of people about bacterial exposure. Thankfully, the study was officially debunked by Consumer Reports. My favorite bit from the article comes from a senior staff scientist at Consumer Reports, who said, "A person eating an average bag of salad greens gets more exposure to these bacteria than if they had licked the insides of the dirtiest bag from this study."

Lie #7: We care about polar bears and recycling.

Coca-Cola is one the world's largest producers of plastic waste. Coke creates cause marketing campaigns with corporate-aligned NGOs like World Wildlife Fund which is working with the Canadian government to to find an area of ice that can withstand climate change to create a sort of polar bear refuge, hoping to save the white bears from drowning because Artic ice is melting.

In total, Coke has pledged $2 million and another $1 million matching funds to consumer donations. What's ironic is that Coke uses a plastic bottle for much of its product's packaging and one-third of the volume of a plastic Coke bottle is what it takes to produce it from oil, and another third is what it takes to transport it to market. That's a lot of fossil fuel burning. Fossil fuel burning that melts polar ice that kills polar bears.

But perhaps the most egregious offense is that Coke vehemently opposes the only program proven to reduce its bottles' impact on the environment: bottle bills. Statistically, for states that have bottle deposits, the recovery rates for recycling are off the charts compared to those that don't. In California, recovery rates top 70 percent for PET bottles.

So what's a citizen to do? Unfortunately, cutting through the spin is a difficult task, but as always, when there is a lot of money to be had, injecting oneself with a healthy does of skepticism about the intentions of chemical companies that manipulate nature for profit is a good start. What's the best solution? Remember this: if you don't consume it in the first place, it can't damage you or the environment.

Avoiding plastics is not just a personal responsibility, it's an environmental mandate and should be as common in our global society as turning off the lights when you leave the room. There is no silver bullet solution to plastic pollution, more like a silver buckshot, but it all starts with you saying two words: "No Plastic."

 WASHINGTON — High levels of pollution may be turning the planet's oceans acidic at a faster rate than at any time in the past 300 million years, with unknown consequences for future sea life, researchers said Thursday.

The acidification may be worse than during four major mass extinctions in history when natural pulses of carbon from asteroid impacts and volcanic eruptions caused global temperatures to soar, said the study in the journal Science.

An international team of researchers from the United States, Britain, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands examined hundreds of paleoceanographic studies, including fossils wedged in seafloor sediment from millions of years ago.

They found only one time in history that came close to what scientists are seeing today in terms of ocean life die-off -- a mysterious period known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum about 56 million years ago.

Though the reason for the carbon upsurge back then remains a source of debate, scientists believe that the doubling of harmful emissions drove up global temperatures by about six degrees Celsius and caused big losses of ocean life.

Oceans are particularly vulnerable because they soak up excess carbon dioxide from the air which turns the waters more acidic, a state that can kill corals, mollusks and other forms of reef and shell organisms.

"We know that life during past ocean acidification events was not wiped out -- new species evolved to replace those that died off," said lead author Barbel Honisch, a paleoceanographer at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

"But if industrial carbon emissions continue at the current pace, we may lose organisms we care about -- coral reefs, oysters, salmon."

Honish and colleagues said the current rate of ocean acidification is at least 10 times faster than it was 56 million years ago.

"The geological record suggests that the current acidification is potentially unparalleled in at least the last 300 million years of Earth history, and raises the possibility that we are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change," said co-author Andy Ridgwell of Bristol University.

The UN Environment Program released a report in 2010 that warned carbon emissions from fossil fuels may bear a greater risk for the marine environment than previously thought.

Rising acidity levels have an impact on calcium-based lifeforms, ranging from tiny organisms called ptetropods that are the primary food source, to crabs, fish, lobsters and coral, it said.

The UN report called for cuts in human-made CO2 emissions to reduce acidification and support for further work to quantify the risk and identify species that could be most in peril.

A new report from the Cornell University's Global Labor Institute shows how theKeystone XL tar sands pipeline is an economic liability with the potential to cause significant job losses from a major tar sands spill.  Because tar sands oil is more corrosive and toxic than conventional oil, it can increase the frequency of pipeline spills.  Moreover, a  tar sands spill causes far more damage than a conventional oil spill. Take, for example, the 1.2 million gallon tar sands spill on the Kalamazoo River in Marshall Michigan in 2010 where the clean up costs have been 10 times higher than a typical conventional oil spill. 

While there has been a lot of attention to the possible jobs created from the Keystone XL pipeline – far less than what proponents claim – there has been very little attention to jobs that could be lost from a tar sands spill. Keystone XL is expected experience up to 91 significant spills over a 50-year period.    Which jobs are at risk?  Hundreds of thousands of workers in the agricultural and tourism sectors contribute ten of billions of dollars to the economy in the Keystone XL pipeline states.  The Cornell report helps illustrate yet one more reason why the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline should be rejected.   

Here are some of the key findings from the report:

Tar sands spills more likely

Tar sands oil is more corrosive and toxic than conventional oil and can therefore increase the frequency of pipeline spills.  According to the Cornell report, “Between 2007 and 2010, pipelines transporting tar sands oil in the northern Midwest have spilled three times more per mile than the U.S. national average for conventional crude.”

Keystone XL likely to experience significant spills

An independent analysis conducted by the University of Nebraska concluded that Keystone XL over a 50-year period is expected to experience 91 significant spills (greater than 50 barrels).  In fact, the University of Nebraska study found Keystone XLcould spill as much as 6.9 million gallons of raw tar sands crude oil at the Yellowstone River crossing.  In just its first year of operation, the first Keystone pipeline operated by TransCanada has spilled 35 times in the United States and Canada in 2010.  This spill frequency is 100 times higher than forecast by TransCanada.

A spill from Keystone XL threatens jobs and the economy in pipeline states

While tar sands spills can have a tremendous impact on the environment, a tar sands spill on the Keystone XL pipeline through America’s agricultural heartland could cause significant economic damage and job losses.  The farming, ranching, and tourism sectors are major sources of employment along the pipeline’s route employing 571,000 workers with an output of $76 billion.  The pipeline will also cross over 90 miles of recreational lands in the pipeline state including state parks, national historic trails, and wildlife refuges.  

 

“Despite TransCanada’s assurances, we know there will be leaks and spills…It is not a matter of it, it is a matter of when, how often, and how much leakage there will be…When a leak happens, it will be [the farmers’] drinking water, their livestock water supply, and their irrigation supply that will be contaminated.  Their economic well-being is directly impacted by spills and leaks.” Nebraska Farmers Union

 

Tar sands spills more devastating than conventional oil spills

The Cornell report also looked closely at the largest tar sands spill in U.S. history on the Kalamazoo River in Michigan in 2010 where the costs have escalated to $750 million –10 times as much per litre as conventional crude.  The clean up of the Kalamazoo river spill which has lasted almost two years has been especially difficult because conventional oil response techniques have been ineffective according to the EPA.   Today, 20 months since the tar sands spill, the entire length of the river (35+ miles) remains closed.   While conventional oil floats on the surface, tar sands is thick and heavy and sinks in water making it very difficult to clean up.

 

“Enbridge compensated us for the initial shutdown of our business, but we are concerned about the long-term impact that the spill has had on our business…one and a half years later our business is still suffering financially…" Debra Miller, Carpet Story Owner

 

An accurate assessment of the economic risks still needed

Ultimately, the report said that while there has been significant attention to the Keystone XL pipeline’s potential to create jobs, “scant attention has been given to how existing jobs and economic sector would be impacted from Keystone XL leaks and spills.”  The report said a more detailed risk assessment of the Keystone XL pipeline – one that considers job losses and economic harms from one or more tar sands spills – has not been completed.

Until such as assessment is completed and a full accounting of potential job losses from pipeline spills are considered, the Obama administration should not issue any approvals allowing TransCanada to move ahead with construction of the pipeline.  

The following piece is a joint TomDispatch/Nation article and will appear in print in the new issue of that magazine. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.  

Oil prices are now higher than they have ever been -- except for a few frenzied moments before the global economic meltdown of 2008. Many immediate factors are contributing to this surge, including Iran’s threats to block oil shipping in the Persian Gulf, fears of a new Middle Eastern war, and turmoil in energy-rich Nigeria. Some of these pressures could ease in the months ahead, providing temporary relief at the gas pump.  But the principal cause of higher prices -- a fundamental shift in the structure of the oil industry -- cannot be reversed, and so oil prices are destined to remain high for a long time to come.

In energy terms, we are now entering a world whose grim nature has yet to be fully grasped.  This pivotal shift has been brought about by the disappearance of relatively accessible and inexpensive petroleum -- “easy oil,” in the parlance of industry analysts; in other words, the kind of oil that powered a staggering expansion of global wealth over the past 65 years and the creation of endless car-oriented suburban communities. This oil is now nearly gone.

The world still harbors large reserves of petroleum, but these are of the hard-to-reach, hard-to-refine, “tough oil” variety. From now on, every barrel we consume will be more costly to extract, more costly to refine -- and so more expensive at the gas pump.

Those who claim that the world remains “awash” in oil are technically correct: the planet still harbors vast reserves of petroleum. But propagandists for the oil industry usually fail to emphasize that not all oil reservoirs are alike: some are located close to the surface or near to shore, and are contained in soft, porous rock; others are located deep underground, far offshore, or trapped in unyielding rock formations. The former sites are relatively easy to exploit and yield a liquid fuel that can readily be refined into usable liquids; the latter can only be exploited through costly, environmentally hazardous techniques, and often result in a product which must be heavily processed before refining can even begin.

The simple truth of the matter is this: most of the world’s easy reserves have already been depleted -- except for those in war-torn countries like Iraq.  Virtually all of the oil that’s left is contained in harder-to-reach, tougher reserves. These include deep-offshore oil, Arctic oil, and shale oil, along with Canadian “oil sands” -- which are not composed of oil at all, but of mud, sand, and tar-like bitumen. So-called unconventional reserves of these types can be exploited, but often at a staggering price, not just in dollars but also in damage to the environment.

In the oil business, this reality was first acknowledged by the chairman and CEO of Chevron, David O’Reilly, in a 2005 letter published in many American newspapers. “One thing is clear,” he wrote, “the era of easy oil is over.” Not only were many existing oil fields in decline, he noted, but “new energy discoveries are mainly occurring in places where resources are difficult to extract, physically, economically, and even politically.”

Further evidence for this shift was provided by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in a 2010 review of world oil prospects. In preparation for its report, the agency examined historic yields at the world’s largest producing fields -- the “easy oil” on which the world still relies for the overwhelming bulk of its energy. The results were astonishing: those fields were expected to lose three-quarters of their productive capacity over the next 25 years, eliminating 52 million barrels per day from the world’s oil supplies, or about 75% of current world crude oil output. The implications were staggering: either find new oil to replace those 52 million barrels or the Age of Petroleum will soon draw to a close and the world economy would collapse.

Of course, as the IEA made clear back in 2010, there will be new oil, but only of the tough variety that will exact a price from us all -- and from the planet, too.  To grasp the implications of our growing reliance on tough oil, it’s worth taking a whirlwind tour of some of the more hair-raising and easily damaged spots on Earth.  So fasten your seatbelts: first we’re heading out to sea -- way, way out -- to survey the “promising” new world of twenty-first-century oil.

Deepwater Oil

Oil companies have been drilling in offshore areas for some time, especially in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caspian Sea. Until recently, however, such endeavors invariably took place in relatively shallow waters -- a few hundred feet, at most -- allowing oil companies to use conventional drills mounted on extended piers. Deepwater drilling, in depths exceeding 1,000 feet, is an entirely different matter.  It requires specialized, sophisticated, and immensely costly drilling platforms that can run into the billions of dollars to produce.

The Deepwater Horizon, destroyed in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010 as a result of a catastrophic blowout, is typical enough of this phenomenon. The vessel was built in 2001 for some $500 million, and cost around $1 million per day to staff and maintain. Partly as a result of these high costs, BP was in a hurry to finish work on its ill-fated Macondo well and move the Deepwater Horizon to another drilling location. Such financial considerations, many analysts believe, explain the haste with which the vessel’s crew sealed the well -- leading to a leakage of explosive gases into the wellbore and the resulting blast. BP will now have to pay somewhere in excess of $30 billion to satisfy all the claims for the damage done by its massive oil spill.

Following the disaster, the Obama administration imposed a temporary ban on deep-offshore drilling.  Barely two years later, drilling in the Gulf’s deep waters is back to pre-disaster levels. President Obama has also signed an agreement with Mexico allowing drilling in the deepest part of the Gulf, along the U.S.-Mexican maritime boundary.

Meanwhile, deepwater drilling is picking up speed elsewhere. Brazil, for example, is moving to exploit its “pre-salt” fields (so-called because they lie below a layer of shifting salt) in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean far off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. New offshore fields are similarly being developed in deep waters off Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.

By 2020, says energy analyst John Westwood, such deepwater fields will supply 10% of the world’s oil, up from only 1% in 1995. But that added production will not come cheaply: most of these new fields will cost tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to develop, and will only prove profitable as long as oil continues to sell for $90 or more per barrel.

Brazil’s offshore fields, considered by some experts the most promising new oil discovery of this century, will prove especially pricey, because they lie beneath one and a half miles of water and two and a half miles of sand, rock, and salt.  The world’s most advanced, costly drilling equipment -- some of it still being developed -- will be needed. Petrobras, the state-controlled energy firm, has already committed $53 billion to the project for 2011-2015, and most analysts believe that will be only a modest down payment on a staggering final price tag.

Arctic Oil

The Arctic is expected to provide a significant share of the world’s future oil supply. Until recently, production in the far north has been very limited. Other than in the Prudhoe Bay area of Alaska and a number of fields in Siberia, the major companies have largely shunned the region. But now, seeing few other options, they are preparing for major forays into a melting Arctic.

From any perspective, the Arctic is the last place you want to go to drill for oil. Storms are frequent, and winter temperatures plunge far below freezing. Most ordinary equipment will not operate under these conditions. Specialized (and costly) replacements are necessary. Working crews cannot live in the region for long. Most basic supplies -- food, fuel, construction materials -- must be brought in from thousands of miles away at phenomenal cost.

But the Arctic has its attractions: billions of barrels of untapped oil, to be exact. According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the area north of the Arctic Circle, with just 6% of the planet’s surface, contains an estimated 13% of its remaining oil (and an even larger share of its undeveloped natural gas) -- numbers no other region can match.

With few other places left to go, the major energy firms are now gearing up for an energy rush to exploit the Arctic’s riches. This summer, Royal Dutch Shell is expected to begin test drilling in portions of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas adjacent to northern Alaska. (The Obama administration must still award final operating permits for these activities, but approval is expected.) At the same time, Statoil and other firms are planning extended drilling in the Barents Sea, north of Norway.

As with all such extreme energy scenarios, increased production in the Arctic will significantly boost oil company operating costs. Shell, for example, has already spent $4 billion alone on preparations for test drilling in offshore Alaska, without producing a single barrel of oil. Full-scale development in this ecologically fragile region, fiercely opposed by environmentalists and local Native peoples, will multiply this figure many times over.

Tar Sands and Heavy Oil

Another significant share of the world’s future petroleum supply is expected to come from Canadian tar sands (also called “oil sands”) and the extra-heavy oil of Venezuela. Neither of these is oil as normally understood.  Not being liquid in their natural state, they cannot be extracted by traditional drilling materials, but they do exist in great abundance.  According to the USGS, Canada’s tar sands contain the equivalent of 1.7 trillion barrels of conventional (liquid) oil, while Venezuela’s heavy oil deposits are said to harbor another trillion barrels of oil equivalent -- although not all of this material is considered “recoverable” with existing technology.

Those who claim that the Petroleum Age is far from over often point to these reserves as evidence that the world can still draw on immense supplies of untapped fossil fuels. And it is certainly conceivable that, with the application of advanced technologies and a total indifference to environmental consequences, these resources will indeed be harvested. But easy oil this is not.

Until now, Canada’s tar sands have been obtained through a process akin to strip mining, utilizing monster shovels to pry a mixture of sand and bitumen out of the ground. But most of the near-surface bitumen in the tar-sands-rich province of Alberta has now been exhausted, which means all future extraction will require a far more complex and costly process.  Steam will have to be injected into deeper concentrations to melt the bitumen and allow its recovery by massive pumps. This requires a colossal investment of infrastructure and energy, as well as the construction of treatment facilities for all the resulting toxic wastes. According to the Canadian Energy Research Institute, the full development of Alberta’s oil sands would require a minimum investment of $218 billion over the next 25 years, not including the cost of building pipelines to the United States (such as the proposed Keystone XL) for processing in U.S. refineries.

The development of Venezuela’s heavy oil will require investment on a comparable scale. The Orinoco belt, an especially dense concentration of heavy oil adjoining the Orinoco River, is believed to contain recoverable reserves of 513 billion barrels of oil -- perhaps the largest source of untapped petroleum on the planet. But converting this molasses-like form of bitumen into a useable liquid fuel far exceeds the technical capacity or financial resources of the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. Accordingly, it is now seeking foreign partners willing to invest the $10-$20 billion needed just to build the necessary facilities.

The Hidden Costs

Tough-oil reserves like these will provide most of the world’s new oil in the years ahead. One thing is clear: even if they can replace easy oil in our lives, the cost of everything oil-related -- whether at the gas pump, in oil-based products, in fertilizers, in just about every nook and cranny of our lives -- is going to rise.  Get used to it.  If things proceed as presently planned, we will be in hock to big oil for decades to come.

And those are only the most obvious costs in a situation in which hidden costs abound, especially to the environment. As with the Deepwater Horizondisaster, oil extraction in deep-offshore areas and other extreme geographical locations will ensure ever greater environmental risks. After all, approximately five million gallons of oil were discharged into the Gulf of Mexico, thanks to BP’s negligence, causing extensive damage to marine animals and coastal habitats.

Keep in mind that, as catastrophic as it was, it occurred in the Gulf of Mexico, where vast cleanup forces could be mobilized and the ecosystem’s natural recovery capacity was relatively robust. The Arctic and Greenland represent a different story altogether, given their distance from established recovery capabilities and the extreme vulnerability of their ecosystems. Efforts to restore such areas in the wake of massive oil spills would cost many times the $30-$40 billion BP is expected to pay for the Deepwater Horizon damage and be far less effective.

In addition to all this, many of the most promising tough-oil fields lie in Russia, the Caspian Sea basin, and conflict-prone areas of Africa. To operate in these areas, oil companies will be faced not only with the predictably high costs of extraction, but also additional costs involving local systems of bribery and extortion, sabotage by guerrilla groups, and the consequences of civil conflict.

And don’t forget the final cost: If all these barrels of oil and oil-like substances are truly produced from the least inviting of places on this planet, then for decades to come we will continue to massively burn fossil fuels, creating ever more greenhouse gases as if there were no tomorrow.  And here’s the sad truth: if we proceed down the tough-oil path instead of investing as massively in alternative energies, we may foreclose any hope of averting the most catastrophic consequences of a hotter and more turbulent planet.

So yes, there is oil out there. But no, it won’t get cheaper, no matter how much there is. And yes, the oil companies can get it, but looked at realistically, who would want it?

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and author of the just publishedThe Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources (Metropolitan Books).  To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Klare discusses his new book and what it means to rely on extreme energy, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

The Rio+20 conference in Rio de Janeiro this June will be a major event in the world’s ecological history. The event, officially the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, will provide an opportunity for the world’s nation’s to take stock of what has happened to the environment since an earlier, landmark conference in Rio in 1992 – climate change, loss of biodiversity, species extinctions, desertification, etc., etc. – and to plot ambitious strategies to save the planet in the coming decades.

But don’t hold your breath. The world’s governments are not likely to come up with anything significant. The G-20 nations, which have been described as the “executive board of the world,” have little interest in bold political and institutional reform. That would only disrupt the desperate search for economic growth. An open, candid inquiry into the growth economy, consumerism and the finite carrying capacity of Earth’s biophysical systems would be far too politically explosive. It is far easier to talk about a “green economy,” as if greater efficiencies alone will save the planet.

The real goal of governments at Rio+20 will be to make it look as if they are doing something significant for the environment. No one expects that Rio+20 will result in serious, practical government commitments to “sustainable development” (whatever that means), let alone new forms of multilateral governance that could arrest the planet’s ecological decline.

Given these credible expectations, a lot of people are looking to the alternative People’s Summit Rio+20, which in late May will convene a wide spectrum of international environmental, social justice and indigenous rights advocacy groups. These are the people with a serious commitment to change and a willingness to grapple with ecological realities.

In preparation for the conference, a wide array of these groups, many of them associated with the World Social Forum, recently met in Porto Alegre, Brazil, to do some advance planning for Rio+20.

One significant thing that came out of these meetings was a sense that the commons will have an important role to play in sketching a new vision of governance and pro-active strategies. There is a realization that it is no longer enough to denounce globalization or rail against capitalism. Realistic alternatives must be set forth. For many, it would appear that the commons can provide a useful framework and vocabulary for starting a very different conversation – one that at once addresses politics, economics, culture and our individual aspirations and energies.

The following text was produced by one of the 17 working groups at the Thematic Social Forum which took place between January 24 and January 29 in Porto Alegre. Commoners from Brazil, Germany, France, India, Argentina and Bolivia took place in producing this “open document,” which will evolve in coming weeks and months.

The version published below will serve as input for a more general and comprehensive document that will be prepared for Rio+20 by the Thematic Social Forum. (More on this process here.) Translations into Spanish, French and Portuguese have been done already, and a German version is in the works. A grateful salute to my colleague Silke Helfrich for her role in this process, and for her blog post about this.

Here is the insightful document produced by the working group. Highly recommended!

Challenges of the current context: the dangerous conspiracy between state and market

State and market, at least in its hegemonic shape, are closely linked and it is hard to differentiate their actions. Even those of us who believe that it is possible for a democratic state to guarantee the general well-being, we see ourselves confronted with states that have no shame in catering to the banking sector –the chief culprit for the recent economic crises– while cutting social expenditures. Both state and market share the same ideological commitment to progress and competition. Both are committed to a model of development and economic growth that destroys the planet and the richness of the commons. Both dismantle our culture and livelihoods in order to convert us into consumers of goods. This inevitably leads to such outrages as the Brazilian mining company VALE’s construction of the Belo Monte dam in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, which will have a devastating impact on the biodiversity and the indigenous people of the region.

This threat to what is common to us are achieved through diverse mechanisms:

>> Legal: through agreements on free trade and investment protections and intellectual property, and international bodies like the WTO and the WIPO;

>> Economic: through private appropriation of territories (landgrabbing);

>> Technological:through genetically modified organisms (GMOs), restrictive systems of access to culture (DRM),geoengineering, etc.

All these phenomena are part of a grand, still untold story of our time: the process of enclosure of the commons, which goes beyond the privatization because it involves expulsion, disenfranchisement and social fragmentation. Enclosures are expanding and intensifying, and, “when the last tree is cut, when the last river has been poisoned” they will go on with the enclosure of the fundamentals of life at a scale of nanotechnology.

Meanwhile, the same states and markets have prepared the trap of the “green capitalism,” which they will try to enforce through the Rio+20 conference. This will signal the next round of enclosure, commodification and financialization of nature.At the same time, states and corporations are conducting a war against the right to share by means of agreements like ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), proposed laws like SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (ProtectIP Act), direct attacks against citizen organizations like Wikileaks, regulations that impede the reuse and exchange of seeds, and more patents on traditional knowledge. This is the the moment we are living in.

The concept of the commons and the convergence of the social movements

The commons (some call it common goods) are not simply shared “goods.” The term refers to social practices based on the principle of commoning (the making of a commons). The goals of a commoning-process are clearly different from the typical practices of the state / market duopoly. Furthermore, the commons are a useful conceptual framework to analyse the future that we want. The commons functions like a different operating system at the level of community and probably (here is where the challenge lies) for the entire society, provided we devise appropriate institutions and policies.Hence, the construction of this conceptual framework is a dynamic process. It requires everyone to listen to what each social movementunderstands to be a commons. It is necessary to know more about the specific practices of commoning, whether they be embodied in indigenous and peasant communities, local seed banks, non-market-based initiatives of urban housing, or communities of developers of digital culture and software. We must understand the similarities of enclosure that each field is suffering, the silent as well as the well-known ones. This mutual awareness can help us to find a way to overcome crippling dualisms like public and private, state and market, individual and collective. In this way we aspire to create new settings that are structured according to creative principles of governance that arise from the bases.

Resistance and construction: commons, commoning

The processes of enclosure face resistance. And most of them can be analysed from a commons perspective. On each continent, organized communities are confronted with these challenges. In Bolivia, for example, there is the emblematic case of TIPNIS, the indigenous territory and national park threatened by the construction of a highway that would split in half a pristine park. Indigenous organizations marched more than 600km during two months in defence of this park and long-standing ways of life based on the communion with nature and on self-government, receiving extraordinary support and urban solidarity.As in this local struggle, the resistance is global. Attacks on water as a commons are encountering organized community resistance in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa. Twentyseven million signatures were collected in a referendum on “water as a commons” in Italy in 2011.

On each continent movements like Occupy, the Indignados and others are arising that do not simply resist, but actively search for alternatives. All over the world people are cooperating via the Internet to create shared works and tools –Wikipedia and free software are the most visible examples– and new forms of social mobilization. Each can be thought of and connected to each other by a larger vision of the commons.

The resistance is also propelled by proposals for alternatives that emanate from the social practices of the commons. These practices form an alternative framework for the transformation of daily life as well as for the design of new public norms and policies that recognize self-management as the central element for a necessary social transformation.

Some examples of the variety of experiences, innovations and productions based on the commons are, among many others: strategies of collaborative consumption associated with barter and the practice of sharing; systems of community management of shared resources like forests, waterways and fishing grounds; and numerous initiatives that are building digital commons.Together these commons constitute a rich kaleidoscope of working models based on self-determination and collective management of shared resources.The social practices related to this paradigm naturally vary and yet they also have common features. A principal one is that they exemplify the idea that one’s self-fulfillment depends on the fulfillment of the others, and vice versa, and that this mutual concern blurs the borders between individual and collective interests.

Contradictions, concerns and challenges

Obviously, during this process of building a Commons Sector, the challenges are manifold. On one side, there is no clear consensus for many things. On the other side, many nuances of the commons paradigm have not yet been explored – and further exploration is necessarily going to be part of the ongoing social construction of the commons framework.

There are divergent perspectives among the stewards of various commons. Many digital commoners do not recognize their dependency on the “analogue” world on the one hand (computers cannot produce food), and many ecologists and traditional communities tend to underestimate the potential for social transformation that free technologies and culture can provide, on the other hand. Some commoners believe that the right to share and self-management can achieve the universal desire for social justice without exhausting the natural resources. Others in good faith are skeptical. Some argue that the idea of the commons continues to (re)trace the pathologies of property and the domination of nature and thus tend to be anthropocentric; others that see in the commons the possibility of a greater communion between nature and culture.

There are also many unresolved concerns: One of the most recurrent is the tension between the local, the regional and the global. It is impossible to think of commoning without thinking about a social subject, a “community.” It is therefore easiest to think about the commons paradigm at a local level. But thinking about the commons at a global level is a great challenge, and even impossible to escape because there is only one earth, and we have not only the right but the responsibility to share it. Confronted with this challenge, it is fair to ask what should be the role of a state that conceives itself as a defender of the commons?

Even while these explorations must proceed, it is necessary to name the commons in order to consolidate alternatives to the current state/market model and to visualize and communicate the alternatives. Nevertheless, our language is so permeated by the terminology of the state/market system and that of ideologies having a different mindset, that a major challenge is to develop a new vocabulary that truly describes the world we want. Resolving the conundrum of “common goods that are not goods” cannot be a closed process. Which is why we invite you to help us collectively build this vocabulary in a way that we can adapt to the diversity of contexts in which we each act.

The commons are right before our eyes. Together we will find methods for naming them and, even more important, for converting them into a diversity of governance systems based on the principles of commoning.

David Bollier is an author, activist, blogger and consultant who spends a lot of time exploring the commons as a new paradigm of economics, politics and culture. He is co-founder of the Commons Strategy Group, a consulting project that works to promote the commons internationally. His blog is http://bollier.org

Having looked at the major alternatives to fossil fuel energy production (summarized here), we come away with the general sentiment that the easy days of cheap energy are not evidently carried forward into a future without fossil fuels. That’s right, fossil fuels will be dead and gone. Is it time to pile them on the cart to be hauled away?

In the slapdash scoring scheme I employed in the alternative energy matrix, the best performers racked up 5 points, whereas by the same criteria, our traditional fossil fuels typically achieved the near-perfect score of 8/10. The only consistent failing is in the abundance measure, which is ultimately what brings us all together here at Do the Math. Fossil fuels are presently used in abundance—85% of current energy use—but this is a short-term prospect, ending within the century. The first effects of decline may be close at hand. Do I hear talk of nursing homes?

The gulf between fossil fuels and their alternatives tends to be rather large in terms of utility, energy density, practicality, ease of use, versatility, energy return on energy invested, etc. In other words, we do not merrily step off the fossil fuel ride onto the next one by “just” allowing the transition to happen. The alternatives come at a cost, and we will miss the golden days of fossil fuels. But wait…what’s that murmur? Not dead yet?

Still Got It?

Before we leave fossil fuels for dead, we should understand that peak oil happens around the time that the resource is half-depleted. So we’ll have many decades of conventional oil, albeit at dwindling rates. Likewise for gas and coal, whose peaks may be decades away still (but likely this century all the same). My main concern is how we cope with the decline stage of fossil fuels, which is not as final as being dead, but effectively forces us into a new era of energy transition. Because conventional oil will begin its decline first, a chief concern is how we might replace its function for transportation. Rather than write off fossil fuels completely, some see promise in what alternative fossil fuels might offer.

Indeed, a number of non-conventional fossil fuels may represent our most convenient next step in energy. The low-hanging fossil fuel fruit has been plucked, so that the conventional sources get progressively harder and more expensive to acquire. Meanwhile, the ground is full of sub-prime fossil energy that becomes exploitable as the conventional resources wane (and become more expensive). If inferior replacements for conventional oil turn out to be exploitable at scale, our concern may shift more to the climate change side of the story: many fear that we may run out of atmosphere before we run out of hydrocarbons—and they could be right.

In a strictly quantitative sense, the notion that we have an abundance of hydrocarbons yet may be accurate enough. I used the following plot in the post on peak oil, adapted from Brandt & Farrell. Dark shades indicate reliable resources, while light shades represent increasingly speculative holdings.

We are about halfway through the conventional oil endowment—thereby near the production peak assuming the usual symmetric performance history. But perhaps we can recover a much greater fraction of the oil in the ground through advanced oil recovery technologies. Then we have tar sands and heavy oil from Canada and Venezuela. Or we can liquefy natural gas to cover the oil shortage. And as the Nazis and Apartheid South Africans demonstrated, liquid fuel can be produced from coal. Finally, we have a potential option in oil shale. Resource estimates vary, but even taking the dark green segments in the picture above (reliable lower-bounds), we at least triple the remaining “liquid” hydrocarbon resource available.

By the way, I recommend totally ignoring the vertical axis on the plot. Cost of extraction tends to rise as energy prices rise, and these estimates are rooted in a cheap energy economy. At the very least, the lines should slope upward, as the tail end of a resource is always more costly to extract than the early stuff. In any case, I consider the cost estimates to be unreliable.

Let’s just put a timescale on this resource. Three trillion barrels, at today’s rate of petroleum use, would last about 100 years. But it does not work this way. In most aggregate resource situations, the peak rate of production is reached when half the resource is gone. In this case, our total 4 trillion barrel “liquid” resource would be halfway depleted in 30 years, assuming the alternative fossil fuels can step up to the rates we enjoy today. And this does not allow for competing uses for gas and coal, acting to reduce the time-to-peak if fully exploited. By another measure, if we resumed our growth track of energy use, for instance at 2% per year (more modest than historically typical 3% per year), we would burn through three trillion barrels of liquid fuel in 55 years. Either way you cut it, chasing after sub-prime hydrocarbons is another short ride that has the ill side effect of putting us deeper in the climate hole.

The Hirsch Report

In 2005, the U.S. Department of Energy commissioned a study of peak oil and its ramifications. Called the Hirsch Report (summary) after its lead author, the focus centered not on when the peak would occur, but rather on what we could do to mitigate the damaging effects. The report rightly identified the peak oil predicament as a liquid fuels problem, since electricity and heat are more easily substituted by alternative means—though not trivially so.

For liquid fuel replacement, biofuels, electric cars, and hydrogen-based transport were considered not to be technologically ready and/or of insufficient scale. The five options deemed to be ready for large-scale implementation were:

1. Increased vehicle efficiency
2. Enhanced oil recovery
3. Heavy oil & oil sands
4. Coal liquefaction
5. Gas-to-liquids

Note that not one of these options represents a departure from fossil fuel transport. At some level, this speaks to a desperation in our predicament: we simply are not ready to be weened from the fossils, even as it becomes ever more imperative that we do so.

So what? If the resources are abundant enough, as the figure above suggests, then why not adopt this list of mitigation strategies and just get started?

I’ll make a few global comments before discussing each option in turn.

The most significant point is that the declining fossil fuel supply will be experienced not according to the total amount in the ground, but rather according to how quickly that resource is extracted and made available. We face a rates shortage more so than a resource shortage. To illustrate, in 1973, the U.S. was experiencing a declining rate of domestic oil production and got slapped with a Middle-Eastern oil shock that more than tripled the price of oil practically overnight. At the time, approximately 100 billion barrels of oil sat below American soil, most of it already known to exist, and with thousands of wells already accessing many of the deposits. 100 billion barrels would have been enough to satisfy all of domestic demand for over 15 years. Yet imports increased over the next several years while domestic production continued to decline.

Was this some sort of masochism, or the anagrammatically similar machismo? No. All the incentives were there for increasing domestic production, but nature did not care. Real oil wells—as opposed to the hypothetical ones conjured by economists—struggle to move viscous oil through porous rock, and are not amenable to extraction at arbitrary rates set by human demand. There is no spigot: no straw in some underground lake of oil.

Similarly, the raw amount of hydrocarbons in the ground is only part of the story. Can they be extracted and processed at a rate that makes up for conventional oil decline? That’s the key question.

The second global point, as stressed in the Hirsch Report, is that the scale of oil consumption is so breathtakingly large that even a modest decline rate of a few percent per year represents a staggering energy shortfall. Globally, a 3% annual decline in a resource that constitutes a power consumption of 5.5 TW means a yearly decline of 165 GW, or about 40 GW in the U.S. It is a tall order to scale the mitigation strategies up to a point that they could backfill this annual shortfall. For this reason, the report advocated starting a crash program 20 years before the onset of decline in order to assure sufficient scale in time to match the decline when it starts. The report concluded that a lead time of only 10 years risks major disruptions to economies. Beginning the crash program at the onset of decline was considered to be a catastrophic option. And a show of hands: who here thinks we would start an all-out mitigation program at the scale of World War II mobilization before resource decline sets in? If I weren’t typing, I’d be sitting on my hands, even while hoping that I am being too cynical.

A third point is that many of the scales I discuss below are based on a 3% annual decline of conventional oil. For a net oil importer like the U.S., the available oil may go down even faster if any countries reduce their export rate. At least one major oil-exporting country will make the calculation that at double the price, they can afford to sell half as much oil and still keep their economy humming (observing that they are not hurting at present). Oil prices rise higher as a result, tempting others to preserve their black gold for their own uses, only exacerbating the problem. How long will this go before military seizure takes place? In any case, oil importers may face an even steeper decline rate at the hands of geopolitical factors. Such things are not unknown to humankind.

Collecting some thoughts, the mere existence of alternative hydrocarbons in the ground does not translate to a storehouse of resources ready to satisfy our demand at the time and scale we need without decades of steady preparation. Think of a farmer in the flush of late summer waving off concerns of the coming winter because there’s lots of corn on the field, but not bothering to spend the fall preparing for the winter by actually harvesting the grain. An imperfect analogy, but the point is that the scale of the problem requires substantial preparation well ahead of our time of desperate need.

Now let’s look at the Hirsch Report options, recognizing that at best, all but the first are stopgap “solutions” based on a finite resource.

Improved Efficiency

Not technically a finite fossil fuel resource, improving the efficiency of our current automotive fleet does not represent a departure from fossil fuels, but aims to slow down their rate of use. I am a big fan of efficiency gains, and think there are always places to cut. On the other hand, efficiency gains tend to be slow, and do not have unlimited potential, as detailed in the post on limits to economic growth.

Consider that improved efficiency has been an ever-present goal of our car industry. Few people want their vehicle to be explicitly inefficient: an SUV that got 50 MPG would sell like hotcakes. Indeed, we have seen a steady improvement in the fuel economy of a typical family car, amounting to a factor-of-two improvement over the last 3–4 decades. This translates to an annual rate of improvement of 1% per year. As explained in an earlier post, fuel efficiency boils down to aerodynamics and speed. Embracing smaller, slower, more streamlined cars is the only obvious path forward for improved economy. The Prius is primarily as successful as it is because of its small, wedge-shaped form.

Largely, efficient transport is a well-squeezed lemon. Sure, we’ll get more drops out and should make every effort to do so: 1% per year can make a respectable dent in a 3% decline. Accepting behavioral changes could bring a fresh lemon to the scene. Another way to say this is that we will only see substantial improvements in vehicle efficiency if we change our expectations about what a car is supposed to do (or migrate away from personal cars as a primary means of transportation).

Enhanced Oil Recovery

A number of techniques exist to improve the fraction of oil in a well that can be brought to the surface. Of course oil developers use every practical tool at hand to stimulate oil flow: pressurized water injection, horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and injection of gas like CO2 to dissolve into the oil and allow it to flow more easily. This last technique generally goes under the heading of Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), and can improve the extraction of oil by about 10% of the original in-ground amount. It runs a bit on the expensive side, but future energy will be expensive anyway. So this technique will help offset the decline, if employed at large scale, and has the advantage of delivering light crude oil that our infrastructure is geared to process.

Heavy Oil and Tar Sands

Some oil, like the stuff in Venezuela, is substantially more viscous than conventional oil, approximating tar. Additionally, tar sands in Canada offer similar raw material for making synthetic crude oil. These two resources combined may supply something like half-a-trillion barrels of feedstock. California has a bit as well. Presently, Canadian production is a little over 1 million barrels per day (Mbpd), while Venezuelan production is a little less than this. Optimistic projections expect 3–4 Mbpd by 2020 in Canada. For scale, ten years of conventional oil decline at 3% per year will leave a shortfall over 20 Mbpd. Venezuela is not expected to move so quickly. Put together, these might be able to offset a quarter of the conventional decline—having a head start over other options.

Heavy oil and tar sands require more effort to extract and process than conventional oil, lowering the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) to something in the neighborhood of 5:1 (reference). At least it’s net-positive, but nowhere near the 100:1 originally enjoyed by conventional oil, or even the 20:1 levels we find in conventional fields of today’s caliber.

Heavy oil and tar sands will no doubt relieve some pressure on declining conventional oil, but they are capable of only partial relief. In other words, just because we believe the resource to be half-a-trillion barrels, rate-limited extraction will limit its ability to mitigate conventional oil decline. Did anyone notice that the U.S. does not own either of the large heavy deposits? Hey. Don’t discount Canada: last time we were in a war with them they burned down our White House!

Coal Liquefaction

When pressed, societies have in the past resorted to synthesizing gasoline out of coal, in a method known as the Fischer-Tropsch (F-T) process. Coal, which is mostly carbon, is partially combusted, or “gasified,” to make carbon monoxide. The CO is combined with hydrogen gas to make long-chain alkanes like octane, spitting the oxygen out in the form of water. One typically uses CO also to create the hydrogen gas from water via CO + H2O → H2 + CO2. Thus only one of every two carbon atoms winds up in the synthetic fuel, the other lost to CO2.

The National Mining Association, strongly advocating our using more coal as fast as we can, estimates a refinery cost pushing $1B, yielding 10,000 bpd production. For scale, a 3% per year conventional oil decline would leave the U.S. short by 600,000 barrels per day, requiring 60 such new plants to be built every year to plug the gap—each costing about the same as a 1 GW coal-fired plant (and processing 0.6 GW-worth of liquid fuel energy per day). It’s a big deal. Obviously, I’m not suggesting that coal liquefaction—or any of these alternatives—carry the full weight of replacement, but simply use full-scale numbers to establish the bounds and set the scale.

Compounding the problem of the required rate at which new processing plants would have to be built, consider the numerous downsides of coal. We would desperately like to shake our addiction to the dirtiest, most CO2-intense fossil fuel. How’s that workin’ out for us? Mountaintops razed flat, mine tailings, sulfur, mercury, and other toxins leaching into streams and rivers: expanding coal production is not high on the list of things we want to do.

We should also be careful about assuming that we are up to our ears in coal. It’s true that the U.S. has ample coal resources compared to its remaining oil endowment. But consider that the estimated total U.S. resource has declined from about 3000 Gt (gigatons) prior to 1950 to half that amount around 1960, lately sitting around 300 Gt. This isn’t due to depletion of the resource (70 Gt so far), as the number I’m quoting is total resource: past production plus estimated resource.

A similar story unfolded in the UK—whose leading role in the industrial revolution owed to vast amounts of coal in the ground. For over fifty years leading up to 1970, British coal was repeatedly estimated to total about 200 Gt. Over the next few decades, the estimates collapsed to about 30 Gt. The biggest shock is that this happened when 25 Gt had already been consumed, suddenly leaving about 5 Gt of recoverable coal when it had been imagined to be about 170 Gt. Imagine you’ve got $17,000 in the bank and you are contemplating buying a new car—only to realize that your latest bank statement puts you at $500: 3% of what you thought you had, and maybe not enough to even buy a old beater that still runs. As we’ve learned more about what kind of coal seams are accessible, downgrading estimates has been a global systematic phenomenon. Many folks, unfortunately, still carry around the old concept that we’ve got more coal than we could possibly know how to use (to the chagrin of the climate-concerned).

To date, the U.S. has used 70 Gt of coal, at a current rate of about 1 Gt/yr. If the current official estimates are right, then we have about 230 Gt left. Simple math suggests this means 230 years, or 86 years at a 2% annual increase. But other compelling evidence put together by David Rutledge suggests that we are now about halfway through the resource, having only 60 Gt left. The same analysis puts remaining global coal at 370 Gt, having used about 310 Gt to date. This estimate of remaining global coal is a little less than half of conventional estimates. I’m not prepared to judge which estimate is correct, but take seriously the possibility that we have much less coal than is assumed—especially in light of the dramatic trend of reduced resource estimates over the decades. If you’re going to err, it’s best to err on the safe side.

How do these numbers translate into oil production? One kilogram of coal, containing perhaps 0.7 kg of carbon, via Fischer-Tropsch, will commit 0.35 kg of carbon to about 0.4 kg of octane (C8H18), producing about 0.6 liters of fuel. One barrel (160 ℓ) of fuel then requires about 250 kg of coal, leading to the association that each ton of coal yields 4 barrels of fuel. Replacing a 3% shortfall of about 200 million barrels per year in the U.S. requires an annual uptick in coal production of 50 Mt/yr, or a 5% increase, year over year, for a doubling time of 14 years. In a related measure, if the U.S. wanted to (or were forced to) cease oil imports, it would mean doubling coal production, giving the U.S. perhaps as little as 30 years of resource.

Could we imagine ramping up coal production at anything approximating this scale? Again, it could certainly contribute to easing the decline, but is likely incapable of carrying the load on its own—if we would even want it to do so, given the many downsides of coal. We are presently striving to use less, not more.

Gas to Liquids

As with coal, methane gas can be synthesized into liquids like octane via the Fischer-Tropsch method. In this case, steam is mixed with methane (CH4) to produce CO and hydrogen gas. Then the CO is combined with hydrogen in the usual F-T dance. This time, all the carbon goes into the fuel since the necessary hydrogen is provided by methane, and is therefore a more efficient process. In either the coal or natural gas route, all the carbon ends up in the atmosphere after combustion anyway (unless one of the carbons is captured in the coal version), so no big difference there.

The U.S. uses about 20 tcf of natural gas per year, where a tcf is a trillion cubic feet. One cubic foot is 28 liters, and at 16 grams per mole, 22.4 liters per mole at standard temperature/pressure, methane has a density of 0.7 g/ℓ. Each liter of methane can create 0.64 g of octane, so that a liter of octane (at 700 grams) requires 1100 liters of natural gas. Replacing a 3% annual shortfall of 200 million barrels (at 160 ℓ/bbl) would then require 35 trillion liters of methane, or 1.2 tcf: a 6% annual increase in natural gas production—similar to the impact on coal. This isn’t too surprising since we currently get comparable amounts of net energy from gas and coal, and each being roughly half what we get from oil. So a 3% decline in energy from oil would need to be replaced by something like a 6% uptick in either replacement.

Estimates of how much natural gas is available is all over the map. Conventional natural gas development is in decline in the U.S., but a recent surge in hydraulic fracturing (fracking) has many folks giddy over the prospect of a seemingly inexhaustible resource. But beware of the low-hanging fruit phenomenon. If we base our enthusiasm on the earliest, easiest to exploit examples (akin to gushers in the early days of oil), we may find ourselves disappointed. See the illuminating report by David Hughes for a more sober assessment of our likely natural gas resource.

For example, the U.S. Energy Information Agency projects that shale gas—currently at about 15% of domestic gas production— will nearly triple by 2035 to be our single biggest resource for natural gas. This is on top of a conventional supply that falls by 29% over the same period. In aggregate, the rapid expansion of shale gas allows a slow net growth rate of 0.4% per year. The faith in shale gas to deliver already seems stretched a bit, so that it is difficult to assess the likelihood of net gas production growth at all. And even if it does grow, the 0.4% per year projection falls far short of the 6% level that would be needed to offset a 3% per year decline in oil.

Where Does this Leave Us?

We built this world on fossil fuels. It is distressing to realize that our primary fuels will begin an inexorable decline this century. The result is that we will have difficulty even maintaining our current energy expenditure rate—let alone continuing our historical 3% annual energy growth rate. A major adjustment is in the offing. Economic growth, look out!

Yes, we can re-purpose other fossil fuels (coal, gas, heavy oil/tar) to help plug the gap in liquid fuels, meanwhile accelerating their depletion. We can use liquid fuels more efficiently. We can try every trick to tease more oil out of depleted wells. All these things will happen. Their collective effort will ease the pain (and bring on new hurts), but it is not clear whether all efforts in tandem can arrest the decline, given practical, political, end economic realities. They are all more expensive, all lower EROEI, all harder, and with the exception of efficiency improvements keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. Although the pain may be eased, the problem does not go away. I’ve never had a hangover, but I imagine this is what such an existence would feel like: a fossil fuel hangover. When will we decide to pull the plug?

My cynical prediction is that concerns over climate change are unlikely to hold sway over energy scarcity. Heck, climate change has had little influence over our current energy mix even when energy is cheap and abundant. In some sense, this track record only highlights the difficulty we have in finding suitable alternatives to fossil fuels. Maybe declining fossil fuels will provide the impetus that climate change has not succeeded in delivering: for us to finally embark in earnest in a deliberate departure from our old friends.

But we may decide instead to cling to the lowborn cousins of the royal fossil fuels: the kings of old. No matter what mix we decide to pursue, if we wait until the decline starts before seriously ramping up all viable efforts in tandem, we will find economic hardship, job loss, energy volatility as demand flags and then resurges, etc. The unpredictable environment will not be conducive to large investments in risky alternatives. In short, we could get caught with our pants down. And if you’ve ever tried to run in this state, you know what happens next.

So I don’t look at the hydrocarbon resource figure above and feel cause to breathe (cough?) a sigh of relief. If we’re going to try following that route, though, we’d best hold our noses and get on with it. Failing this, an advisable strategy is to start transforming our personal lives to be less dependent on energy—because then we’ll be less disappointed with failure and skyrocketing energy prices when that comes.

Tom Murphy is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. An amateur astronomer in high school, physics major at Georgia Tech, and PhD student in physics at Caltech, Murphy has spent decades reveling in the study of astrophysics. He currently leads a project to test General Relativity by bouncing laser pulses off of the reflectors left on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts, achieving one-millimeter range precision. Murphy’s keen interest in energy topics began with his teaching a course on energy and the environment for non-science majors at UCSD. Motivated by the unprecedented challenges we face, he has applied his instrumentation skills to exploring alternative energy and associated measurement schemes. Following his natural instincts to educate, Murphy is eager to get people thinking about the quantitatively convincing case that our pursuit of an ever-bigger scale of life faces gigantic challenges and carries significant risks.

Breathe, Neo. I’ve been running a marathon lately to cover all the major players that may provide viable alternatives to fossil fuels this century. Even though I have not exhausted all possibilities, or covered each topic exhaustively, I am exhausted. So in this post, I will provide a recap of all the schemes discussed thus far, in matrix form. Then Do the Math will shift its focus to more of the “what next” part of the message.

The primary “mission” of late has been to sort possible future energy resources into boxes labeled “abundant,” “potent” (able to support something like a quarter of our present demand if fully developed), and “niche,” which is a polite way to say puny. In the process, I have clarified in my mind that a significant contributor to my concerns about future energy scarcity is not the simple quantitative scorecard. After all, if it were that easy, we’d be rocking along with a collective consensus about our path forward. Some comments have asked: “If we forget about trying to meet our total demand with one source, could we meet our demand if we add them all up?” Absolutely. In fact, the abundant sources technically need no other complement. So on the abundance score alone, we’re done at solar, for instance. But it’s not that simple, unfortunately. While the quantitative abundance of a resource is key, many other practical concerns enter the fray when trying to anticipate long-term prospects and challenges—usually making up the bulk of the words in prior posts.

For example, it does not much matter that Titan has enormous pools of methane unprotected by any army (that we know of!). The gigantic scale of this resource makes our Earthly fossil fuel allocation a mere speck. But so what? Practical considerations mean we will never grab this energy store. Likewise, some of our terrestrial sources of energy are super-abundant, but just a pain in the butt to access or put to practical use.

In this post, we will summarize the ins and outs of the various prospects. Interpretation will come later. For now, let’s just wrap it all up together.

The Matrix

Would you like to know what the matrix is? Okay. I’ll tell you—in a bit. For each of the major energy hopefuls I have discussed on Do the Math, I characterize their various attributes in a three-tier classification: adequate (green); marginal (yellow); or insufficient (red)—possibly a showstopper. The scheme is qualitative, and I am sure some will disagree with my assignments. Before I go any further, let me say that I will not entertain comments griping about why I made a certain square the color I did. I won’t have time to respond at that level, given that there are 200 colored boxes in the matrix. But the beauty is, you can change the matrix any way you see fit and make your own custom version. Go buy some crayons today!. The matrix I’ve created is not without its biases and subjectivity. Whose would be?

Okay, I’ll keep the suspense going a bit by describing the fields.

Abundance: This is essentially the “abundant,” “potent,” and “niche” classification scheme reflected in the preceding posts. Green means that the resource can in principle produce far more power than we currently use and keep it up for many centuries. Red means a bit-player at best. Yellow is the stuff that can be useful, but is incapable of carrying the full load—not that we require everything to do this. We can tolerate a mix of of items, but will not get far by mixing reds together.

Difficulty: This field tries to capture the degree to which a resource brings with it large technical challenges. How many PhDs does it take to run the plant? How painful is it to maintain or keep churning? This one might translate into economic terms: difficult is another term for expensive.

Intermittency: Green if rock-steady or there whenever we need it. If the availability is beyond our control, then it gets a yellow at least. The possibility of going without for a few days earns a red.

Demonstrated: I don’t mean on paper, and I don’t mean a prototype that exhibits some of the technology. To be green, this has to be commercially available today, and providing useful energy.

Electricity: Can the technology produce electricity? Most of the time, the answer is yes. Sometimes it would make no sense to try. Other times, it is seriously impractical.

Heat: Can the resource produce direct heat? Yellow if only through electric means.

Transport: Does the technology relieve the liquid fuels crunch? Anything that makes electricity can power an electric car, earning a yellow score. Liquid fuels are green. Some may get tired of the broken record in the descriptions that follow that a particular resource does not help transportation, wanting to shout “electric cars, fool” every time I say it. But our large-scale migration to electric cars is not in the bag. They may remain too expensive to be widely adopted. Meanwhile, this does not help air travel or heavy transport.

Acceptance: Is public opinion (I can really only judge U.S. attitudes) favorable to this method? Will there likely be resistance—whether justified or not?

Backyard?: Is this something that can be done domestically, in one’s backyard or small property, managed by the individual?

Efficiency: Over 50% gets the green. Below about 10% gets red. It’s not the most important of criteria, as the abundance score incorporates efficiency expectations. But we will always view low efficiency negatively.

Okay, enough holding out—here’s the matrix (click to expand).

Yellow boxes tend to deserve explanation. It is usually clear why something would swing red or green, but yellow often has several things tugging at it. If green boxes are given a +1 score, yellow boxes zero, and red boxes -1, adding the boxes with equal weight yields the scores on the right, by which measure the table is sorted: best to worst. The only place I cheated was to give D-D fusion a -2 for difficulty. It’s the hardest thing on the list, given our decades of massive effort invested to date on D-T fusion, while D-D is too hard to even attempt.

Now, equal weighting on all ten criteria is boneheaded. But the assessment is imprecise enough not to warrant a more elaborate weighting scheme. I do not stand firm behind the order that results, and am half-tempted to monkey with weighting schemes until a more preferred order emerges. But I would be cooking the books to further match my preferences. Feel free to weight any way you see fit, and change anything else while you’re at it. Just remember. No griping.

Fossil Fuels, Compared

Note that conventional fossil fuels, matrixed-out above, score green in almost every category, except—unfortunately—abundance. The efficiency is high for direct heating (most often natural gas), and middling for electricity or transport. Coal gets no points for transportation, and natural gas is of limited use here (although the bus I’m riding as I type this is powered by natural gas, so I can’t entirely nix its transportation capability). All things considered, all of the fossil fuels get a score of 7 or 8. Note the striking gap we face between fossil fuels and their alternatives, topping out at a score of 5. One might ding the fossil fuels a point or two for their greenhouse gas contributions, closing the gap a bit. None of the options in the alternatives matrix are intrinsic carbon emitters.

Quick Lessons

Looking at some of the main trends, very few options are both abundant and easy. Solar PV and solar thermal qualify. A similar exclusion principle often holds for abundant and demonstrated/available. There is a reason why folks (myself included) like solar.

Intermittency mainly plagues solar and wind resources, with mild inconvenience appearing for many of the natural sources.

Electricity is easy to produce. We have loads of ways to do it, and are likely to pick the easiest/cheapest. We won’t necessarily get far down the list if we’re covered by things at the top end (assuming my rankings have any validity and some economic correlation).

Transport is hard. Concerns over peak oil played a huge role in making me sit up to pay attention to our energy challenges. Electric cars are the most obvious way out, but don’t do much for heavy shipping by land or sea, and leave airplanes on the ground.

Few things face serious barriers to acceptance: especially when energy scarcity is at stake.

A few options are available for the homestead. A passive solar home with PV panels, wind, and some method to produce liquid fuels on site would be a dream come true. Here’s hoping for artificial photosynthesis!

The missing category here is cost, although difficulty may be an imperfect proxy. As a result, some of the high-scoring options may more be costly than we’d like. Actually, some of the lowest-scoring options are the costliest! If you’re expecting that we’ll replace fossil fuels and do it on the cheap, you might as well learn to bawl on the floor kicking and pounding your fists, tears streaming. This is our predicament. We have to buck up and deal with it, somehow.

Individual Discussion

For each topic, the link at the beginning points to a more complete discussion on Do the Math. Here, I just briefly characterize each resource in relation to the matrix criteria.

Solar PV: Covering only 0.5% of land area with 15% efficient PV panels provides the annual energy needs of our society, qualifying solar PV as abundant. It’s not terribly difficult to produce; silicon is the most abundant element in Earth’s crust, and PV panels are being produced globally at 25 GW peak capacity per year (translating to 5 GW of average power added per year). Intermittency is the Achilles Heel of solar PV, requiring storage solutions if adopted at large scale. Solar PV produces electricity directly, which could be converted to heat or transport. Most people do not object to solar PV on rooftops or over parking areas, or even in open spaces (especially desert). I’ve got some on my garage roof as we speak (with storage), so they’re well-suited to individual operation/maintenance. Clocking in at an efficiency of 15%, don’t expect PV to vastly exceed this ballpark.

Solar Thermal: Achieving comparable efficiency to PV, but using more land area, generating electricity from concentrated solar thermal energy automatically fits in the abundant category—though somewhat more regionally constrained. It’s relatively low-tech: shiny curved mirrors tracking on (often) one axis, heating oil or other fluid to run a plain-old heat engine. Intermittency can be mitigated by storing thermal energy, perhaps even for a few days. Because a standard heat-engine follows, fossil fuels can supplement in lean times using the same back-end. A number of plants are already in operation, producing cost-competitive electricity—and heat if anyone cares. As with so many of the alternatives, transportation is not directly aided. Public acceptance is no worse than for PV, etc. But don’t expect your own personal solar thermal electricity plant.

Solar Heating: On a smaller scale, heat collected directly from the sun can provide domestic hot water and home heating. In the latter case, it can be as simple as a south-facing window. Capturing and using solar heat effectively is not particularly difficult, coming down to plumbing, insulation, and ventilation control. Technically, it might be abundant, but since it is usually restricted to building footprints (roof, windows), I take it down a notch. There will be lean days, but my friends in Maine do not complain about their solar heating comfort (with occasional propane backup). Solar heating is useless for electricity or transport, but has no difficulty being accepted and almost by definition is a backyard-ready technology.

Hydroelectric: We have seen that super-efficient hydroelectric is doomed to remain a small player (in the rubric that we maintain today’s energy consumption levels). It’s the low-hanging fruit of the renewable world, and has therefore already seen large-scale development. It has seasonal intermittency (typical capacity factor for a hydro plant is 40%), does not directly provide heat or transport, and can only rarely be implemented personally, at home. Acceptance is fairly high, although silting and associated dangers—together with habitat destruction—do cause some opposition to expanded hydroelectricity.

Biofuels from Algae: I was somewhat surprised to see this entry rank as highly as it did in my admittedly unsophisticated scoring scheme. Because it captures solar energy—even at < 5% efficiency—the potential scale is automatically enormous. But it’s not easy, at present. Dealing with slime will bring challenges of keeping the plumbing clean, possible infection in a genetic arms race with evolving viruses, contamination by other species, etc. At present, we don’t have that magic algal sample that secretes the fuels we want. Heady talk of genetic engineering pledges to solve these problems, but we’re simply not there yet and cannot say for sure that we will get there. Otherwise, the ability to provide transportation fuel is the big draw. Heat may also be efficiently produced, though electricity would represent a misallocation of liquid fuel. Can it be done in the backyard? I could imagine a slime pond in the yard, but care and feeding and refining the product may be prohibitively difficult.

Geothermal Electricity: This option makes sense primarily at geological hotspots, which are rare. It will not scale to be a significant part of our entire energy mix. Aside from this, it is relatively easy, steady, and well-demonstrated in many locations. It can provide electricity, and obviously direct heat—although far from heat demand, generally. It provides no direct help on transportation. Objections are slim to non-existent. I don’t think houses tend to be built on the hotspots, so don’t look for it in a backyard near you.

Wind: Wind is a sensible option that I imagined would float higher in the list than it did. It’s neither abundant nor scarce, being one of those options that can provide a considerable fraction of our present needs under large-scale development. It’s pretty straightforward, reasonably efficient, and demonstrated the world over in large farms. The biggest downside is its intermittency. It will not be unusual to have a few days in a row with little or no regional input. Like so many other things, electricity is naturally produced, while heat and transport is only available via electricity. I sense that objections to wind are more serious than for many other alternatives. Windmills are noisy and tend to be located in prominent places (ridge-tops) where they are extremely visible and scenery-altering. You can’t hide wind in a bowl, or you end up hiding from the wind at the same time. Another built-in conflict emerges on wind-rich coastlines, where many like to take in unspoiled scenery. Small-scale wind is viable in your own backyard.

Artificial Photosynthesis: A very appealing future prospect for me is artificial photosynthesis, combining the abundance of direct solar with the self-storing flexibility of liquid fuel. Intermittency is thus eliminated to the extent that annual production meets demand: storage of a liquid fuel for many months is possible. The dream result of a panel sitting on your roof that drips liquid fuel could provide both heating and transportation fuel. In a pinch, one could also produce electricity this way, but what a waste of precious liquid fuel, when we have so many other ways to make electricity! The catch is that it doesn’t exist yet, that it may never exist, and that feeding it the right ingredients and processing/refining the fuel may eliminate the backyard angle. Still, we all have to have something to gush over. For some, it’s thorium and for others it’s fusion, etc. This one excites me by its potential to satisfy so many purposes.

Tidal Power: Restricted to select coastal locations, tidal will never be a large contributor on the global scale. The resource is intermittent on daily and monthly scales, but in a wholly predictable manner. Extracting tidal energy is not terribly hard—sharing technology with similarly efficient hydroelectric installations—and has been demonstrated in a number of locations around the world. It’s another electricity technique, with no direct offering of heat or transportation. No unusual level of societal objection exists, to my knowledge, but it’s not something you will erect in your backyard and expect to get much out of it.

Conventional Fission: Using conventional uranium reactors and conventional mining practices, nuclear fission does not have the legs for a marathon. On the other hand, it is certainly well-demonstrated, and has no problems with intermittency—unless we count the fact that it has trouble being intermittent in the face of variable load. Compared to other options, nuclear runs a tad on the high-tech side. By this I mean that design, construction, operation, and emergency mitigation require more brains and sophistication than the average energy producer. Nuclear fission directly produces heat (seldom utilized), and is primarily used to generate electricity via the standard steam-driven heat engine, but offers no direct help on transportation. Acceptance is mixed. Germany plans to phase out its nuclear program even though they are serious about carbon reduction. No new plants have been built in the U.S. for over thirty years in part due to public discomfort. Some of this is irrational fear over mutant three-eyed fish and the like, but some is genuine political difficulty relating to the pesky waste problem that no country has yet solved to satisfaction. Nuclear power is not possible on a personal scale.

Uranium Breeder: Extending nuclear fission to be able to use the 140-times more abundant 238U (rather than 0.7% 235U) gives uranium fission the legs to run for at least centuries if not a few millennia, so abundance issues disappear. Breeding has been practiced in military reactors, and indeed some significant fraction of the power in conventional uranium reactors comes from 238U turned 239Pu. But no commercial power plants have been built to deliberately access the bulk of uranium, turning it into plutonium at scale for the purpose of power production. Public acceptance of breeders will face even stiffer hurdles because plutonium is more easily separated into bomb material than is 235U, and the trans-uranic radioactive waste from this option is nastier than for the conventional cousin.

Thorium Breeder: Thorium is more abundant than uranium, and only comes in one flavor naturally, so that abundance is not an issue. Like all reactors, thorium reactors fall into the high-tech camp, and include new challenges (e.g., liquid sodium) that conventional reactors have not faced. There have been a few instances of small-scale demonstration, but nothing in the commercial realm, so that we’re probably a few decades away from being able to bring thorium online. Public reaction will be likely be similar to that for conventional nuclear: not a show stopper, but some resistance on similar grounds. It is not clear whether the newfangled aspect of thorium will be greeted with suspicion or with an embrace. Though also a breeding technology (making fissile 233U from 232Th), the proliferation aspect is severely diminished for thorium due to highly radioactive 232U by-product and virtually no easily separable plutonium. Of the future nuclear prospects, I am most optimistic about this one—although it’s no nirvana to me.

Geothermal Heating with Depletion: A vast store of thermal energy sits in the crust, locked in the rock and moving slowly outward. Being the impatient lot that we are, we could drill down and grab the energy out of the rock on our own schedule, effectively mining heat as a one-time resource. In the absence of water flow to convect heat around, dry rock will deplete its heat within 5–10 meters of the borehole in a matter of a few years, requiring another hole 10 meters away from the first, and so on and so on. I classify this as moderately difficult, requiring a never-ending large-scale drilling operation across the land. The temperatures are pretty marginal for running heat engines to make electricity with any respectable efficiency (especially given so many easier options for electricity), but at least the thermal resource will not suffer intermittency problems during the time the hole is still useful. Given its inconvenience (kilometers of drilling), I do not know if examples abound of people having tried this for the purpose of providing heat in arbitrary (not geologically hot) areas. Public acceptance may be less than lukewarm given the scale of drilling involved, dealing with tailings and possibly groundwater contamination issues on a sizable scale. While such a hole could fit in a backyard, it would be far more practical to use the heat for clusters of buildings rather than for just one—given the amount of effort that goes into each hole (and considering short-term lifetime of each hole). I gave this technique high marks for efficiency if used for heat, but it would drop to reddish-yellow if we tried to use this resource for electricity.

Geothermal Heating, Steady State: If we turn our noses up at depletion-based geothermal heat, steady state offers far less total potential, coming to about 10 TW of flow if summed acrossall land. And to access temperatures hot enough to be useful for heating purposes, we’re talking about boreholes at least 1 km deep. It is tremendously challenging to cover any significant fraction of land area with thermal collectors 1 km deep. So I am probably being too generous to color this one yellow for the abundance factor. That’s okay, because I’m hitting it hard enough on the other counts. To gather enough steady-flow heat to provide for a normal U.S. home’s heat, the collection network would have to span a square 200 m on a side at depth, which seems nightmarish to me. But at least depletion would not be an issue in this circumstance. Otherwise, this category shares similar markings and rationale as the depletion scenario.

Biofuels from Crops: We’ve seen that corn ethanol is a loser of a scheme on energy grounds, although sugar cane and vegetable oils fare better. But these compete with food production and arable land availability, so biofuels from crops can only graduate from “niche” to “potent” in the context of plant waste or cellulosic conversion. I have thus split the abundance and demonstration in two: food crop energy is demonstrated but severely constrained in scale. Celluosic matter becomes a potent source, but undemonstrated (perhaps this should even be red). I do not label the prospect as an easy one, because growing and harvesting annual crops on a relavent scale constitutes a massive, perpetual job. If exploiting fossil fuels is akin to spending our inheritance, growing and harvesting our energy on an annual basis is like getting a real job—a real hard job. The main benefit of biofuels from crops is that we get a liquid fuel out of it—so hard to come by via other alternatives. Public acceptance hinges on competition with food or just land in general. Scoring only about 1% efficient at raking in solar energy, this option requires commandeering massive tracts of land. A small-time farmer may make useful amounts of fuel for themselves in their back “yard,” if refining does not create a bottleneck.

Ocean Thermal: The ocean thermal resource uses the 20–30°C temperature difference between the deep ocean (a few hundred meters down) and its surface to drive a ridiculously low-efficiency heat engine. The heat content is not useful for warming any home (it’s not hot). But all the same, it’s a vast resource due to the sheer area of the solar collector. Large plants out at sea will be difficult to access and maintain, and transmitting power to land is no picnic either. The resource suffers seasonal intermittency at mid-latitudes, but let’s imagine putting these things all in the tropics to get around this. Sound hard, you say? Well yeah! That’s part of what makes ocean thermal difficult! No relevant/commercial scale demonstration exists. Like so many others, this is electricity only (and this time, far from demand). Probably nobody cares what we put to sea: out of sight, out of mind. Ocean thermal isnot a backyard solution!

Ocean Currents: Large-scale oceanic currents are slower than wind by about a factor of ten, giving a kilogram of current 1000 times less power than a kilogram of wind. Water density makes up the difference to make ocean current comparable to wind in terms of power per rotor area. Not all the ocean has currents as high as 1 m/s, so I put the total abundance in the same category as wind. Maybe accessing a thicker column of water than we can for wind should bump ocean currents up a bit, but the currents are relatively confined to surfaces. But why dunk a windmill underwater where it’s far from demand and difficult to access and maintain, when a comparable power can be had in dry air? So I classify this as difficult. On the plus side, the current should be rock solid, eliminating intermittency worries, unlike wind. Still, not one bit of our electricity mix comes from ocean currents at present, so it cannot be said to have been meaningfully demonstrated. For the remaining categories: it’s electricity only; who cares what’s underwater; and no backyard opportunity.

Ocean Waves: While they seem strong and ever-present, waves are a linear-collection phenomenon, and not an areal phenomenon. So there really isn’t that much arriving at shores all around the world (a few TW at best). It’s not particularly difficult to turn wave motion into useful electricity at high efficiency, and the proximity to land will make access, maintenance, and transmission far less worrisome than for the previous two cases. There will be some intermittency—largely seasonal— as storms and lulls come and go. I’ve seen a diverse array of prototype concepts, and a few are being tested at commercial scale. So this is further along then the previous two oceanic sources, but not so much as to get the green light. There will be moderate push-back from people whose ocean views are spoiled, or who benefit from natural wave energy hitting the coast. There are no waves in my backyard, and I hope to keep it this way!

D-T Fusion: The easier of the two fusion options, involving deuterium and tritium, represents a longstanding goal under active development for the last 60 years. The well-funded international effort, ITER, plans to accomplish a 480 second pulse of 500 MW power by 2026. This defines the pinnacle of hard. Fusion brings with it numerous advantages: enormous power density; moderate radioactive waste products (an advantage?!); abundant deuterium (though tritium is zilch); and surplus helium to liven up children’s parties. Fusion would have no intermittency issues, can directly produce heat (and derivative electricity), but like the others does not directly address transportation. The non-existant tritium can be knocked out of lithium with neutrons, and even through we are not awash in lithium, we have enough to last many thousands of years. We might expect some public opposition to D-T fusion due to the necessary neutron flux and associated radioactivity. Fusion is the highest-tech energy we can envision at present, requiring a team of well-educated scientists/technicians to run—meaning don’t plan on building one in your backyard, unless you can afford to have some staff PhDs on hand.

D-D Fusion: Replacing tritium with deuterium means abundance of materials is no concern whatsoever for many billions of years. As a trade, it’s substantially harder than D-T fusion (or we would not even consider D-T). D-D fusion requires higher temperatures, making confinement that much more difficult. It is for this reason that I gave D-D fusion a -2 score for difficulty. It’s not something we should rely upon to get us out of the impending energy pinch, which is my primary motivation.

End of an Era

Not only does this conclude the end of the phase on Do the Math where we evaluate the quantitative and qualitative benefits and challenges of alternatives to fossil fuels, it also points to the fact that we face the end of a golden era of energy. Sure, we managed to make scientific and cultural progress based on energy from animals, slaves, and firewood prior to discovering the fossil fuels. But it was in unlocking our one-time inheritance that we really came into our own. Soon, we will see a yearly decrease in our trust fund dividend, forcing us to either adapt to less or try to fill the gap with replacements. What this post and the series preceding it demonstrates is that we do not have a delightful menu from which to select our future. Most of the options leave a bad taste of one form or the other.

When I first approached the subject of energy in our society, I expected to develop a picture in my mind of our grandiose future, full of alternative energy sources like solar, wind, nuclear, biofuels, geothermal, tidal, etc. What I got instead was something like this matrix: full of inadequacies, difficulties, and show-stoppers. Our success at managing the transition away from fossil fuels while maintaining our current standard of living is far from guaranteed. If such success is our goal, we should realize the scale of the challenge and buckle down now while we still have the resources to develop a costly new infrastructure. Otherwise we get behind the curve, possibly facing unfamiliar chaos, loss of economic confidence, resource wars, and the unforgiving Energy Trap. The other controlled option is to deliberately adjust our lives to require fewer resources, preferably abandoning the growth paradigm at the same time. Can we manage a calm, orderly exit from the building? In either case, the first step is to agree that the building is in trouble. Techno-optimism keeps us from even agreeing on that.

Tom Murphy is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. An amateur astronomer in high school, physics major at Georgia Tech, and PhD student in physics at Caltech, Murphy has spent decades reveling in the study of astrophysics. He currently leads a project to test General Relativity by bouncing laser pulses off of the reflectors left on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts, achieving one-millimeter range precision. Murphy’s keen interest in energy topics began with his teaching a course on energy and the environment for non-science majors at UCSD. Motivated by the unprecedented challenges we face, he has applied his instrumentation skills to exploring alternative energy and associated measurement schemes. Following his natural instincts to educate, Murphy is eager to get people thinking about the quantitatively convincing case that our pursuit of an ever-bigger scale of life faces gigantic challenges and carries significant risks.

http://www.countercurrents.org/gliskson220212.pdf The combustion by humans of fossil fuels, representing photo-synthetically stored solar energy, increases entropy in nature by many orders of magnitude, at a greenhouse gas rise rate which exceeds that of the 55 million years-old Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, some 55 million years ago, driving the current mass extinction event.

Tensions, threats, and the danger of a U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran are escalating dangerously. The U.S. and Israel say Iran presents a grave danger because it is enriching uranium and?they claim?may be developing the technical capability to build nuclear weapons. ?We're not going to take any options off the table,? President Obama said in an interview broadcast during the Super Bowl, ?and I've been very clear that we're going to do everything we can to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon...?

Nuclear weapons in anyone's hands are dangerous. And Iran 's Islamic Republic is a repressive and reactionary theocracy driven by its own interests to increase its influence and standing (even while those aspirations are well within the operation of the current oppressive world order). But since the U.S. and Israel have raised the issue of nuclear weapons, it's only fair to look at what the facts actually show about just who is the biggest nuclear threat to the planet by far .

How much does Iran spend on its military?

$7,044,000,000.

How much does the U.S. spend on its military?

$687,105,000,000 (not counting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ). This is nearly 100 times what Iran spends.

How many military bases does Iran have outside its borders?

None.

How many bases does the U.S. have overseas?

Officially there are 737 U.S. military bases in 132 of the 190 member states of the United Nations. The actual number may be more than 1,000.

How many nuclear weapons does Iran have?

None.

How many nuclear weapons does Israel have?

Between 75 and 200 nuclear warheads.

How many nuclear weapons does the U.S. have?

Approximately 5,113 active and inactive nuclear warheads and approximately 3,500 warheads retired and awaiting dismantlement. The 5,113 active and inactive nuclear warhead stockpile includes 1,790 deployed strategic warheads, approximately 500 operational tactical weapons, and approximately 2,645 inactive warheads.

Hasn't Iran ?violated its non-proliferation (NPT) obligations??

Iran and others dispute that claim, but what about Israel ? Israel refuses to sign the NPT or allow any of its nuclear facilities to be inspected. On September 18, 2009 , the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) called on Israel to join the NPT and open its nuclear facilities to inspection. Israel ?backed by the U.S. ?refused.

Which is the only country to have ever dropped a nuclear bomb?

The United States . In August 1945, it dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan , killing 150,000-240,000 people (with many more dying of the effects of radiation for years after).

Isn't it true that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki , the U.S. has never used nuclear weapons?

Not really. Former Pentagon analyst (turned anti-war activist) Daniel Ellsberg wrote that since then, ?Again and again, generally in secret from the American public, U.S. nuclear weapons have been used, for quite different purposes: in the precise way that a gun is used when you point it at someone's head in a direct confrontation, whether or not the trigger is pulled.... [I]n 1981 I summed up a listing of eleven instances for which there was authoritative evidence in which the American nuclear gun had been pointed,? when a U.S. president ?felt compelled to consider or direct serious preparations for possible imminent U.S. initiation of tactical or strategic nuclear warfare, in the midst of an ongoing, intense, non-nuclear conflict or crisis.?

Even if the U.S. has many nuclear weapons, aren't ?our? leaders rational people who seek to avoid conflict, while Iran 's leaders are unstable lunatics who can't be trusted to possess nuclear weapons? (Or as Obama said in 2009 at Oslo , ?modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale.?)

Let's look at a few of those men threatening the world with nuclear destruction: Daniel Ellsberg exposed that during the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. drew up plans to wage a nuclear war that would have obliterated ?most cities and people in the Northern Hemisphere.? Ellsberg wrote, ?The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China , would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts.?

Former U.S. President Richard Nixon nearly started a nuclear war in 1969 by carrying out his ?madman? theory of brinksmanship?whereby he made a conscious decision that it would be good if the U.S. 's opponents perceived he was crazy enough to actually use nuclear weapons as part of playing nuclear ?chicken? with them.

In 1984, U.S. President Ronald Reagan (promoted as an American icon by the leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties) ?joked???My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.? He also talked of welcoming Armageddon?the end of the world. Amitabh Pal wrote, ?In 1971, he proclaimed to a dinner companion, ?For the first time ever, everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ.' In 1980, he told evangelist Jim Bakker on his television program, ?We may be the generation that sees Armageddon.'?

What about today under Obama? Aren't nuclear weapons being phased out of the U.S. arsenal and U.S. military planning?

No. The U.S. has reduced the size of its nuclear arsenal, but it's still enormously destructive and still central to U.S. military strategy. The 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance plan prepared by the Obama administration states: ?We will field nuclear forces that can under any circumstances confront an adversary with the prospect of unacceptable damage.? Obama's defense strategy, called ?Priorities for 21st Century Defense,? keeps all three legs of the U.S. nuclear weapons ?triad,? enabling nuclear weapons to be launched ?from ballistic missile submarines, from underground silos housing intercontinental ballistic missiles, and from B-52 and B-2 bombers.? Obama's proposed 2013 budget calls for the highest level of spending on nuclear weapons in U.S. history.

Reactionary Islamic fundamentalists are irrational and callous toward human life. But so are those who rule the U.S. ?with one major difference being that the rulers of the U.S. have exponentially more capacity to unleash nuclear horrors. Any nuclear attack would be irrational (and immoral) from the standpoint of humanity. But the rulers of the U.S. are driven by the logic and dynamics of their system of global exploitation and oppression. That capitalist-imperialist system is enforced with violence and the threat of violence. And that is why the rulers of the U.S. demand a monopoly on the ability to unleash nuclear devastation.

Sources for this article:

SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

Bush's Amazing Achievement, Jonathan Freedland, New York Review of Books, June 14, 2007

Nuclear Weapons: Who Has What at a Glance, Arms Control Association

Q&A: Iran nuclear issue, BBC News Middle East, January 12, 2012

A Hundred Holocausts: An Insider's Window Into U.S. Nuclear Policy, Daniel Ellsberg, Truthdig.org, September 10, 2009

Nixon's Madman Strategy, James Carroll, Boston Globe, June 14, 2005

More Troops in Afghanistan and Preserving U.S. Nuclear Dominance... Is This the Path to Ending the Horrors of War?, Larry Everest, Revolution #187, December 27, 2009

Bombing Iran Is not the Answer, Amitabh Pal, The Progressive, February 3, 2012

Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense , U.S. Department of Defense, January 2012

? U.S. to fight modern wars with Cold War machines, Pentagon says, Robert Burns, Associated Press, February 1, 2012

Questioning Obama's nuclear agenda, Marylia Kelley, San Francisco Chronicle, February 15, 2012

Larry Everest is a correspondent for Revolution newspaper (revcom.us), where this article first appeared, and author of Oil, Power & Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda (Common Courage, 2004)

Changes in ice thickness (in centimeters per year) during 2003-2010 as measured by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, averaged over each of the world’s ice caps and glacier systems outside of Greenland and Antarctica. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Colorado

Global Ice Loss from 2003-2010 Could “Cover the Entire United States in One and Half Feet of Water”

In the first comprehensive satellite study of its kind, a University of Colorado at Boulder-led team used NASA data to calculate how much Earth’s melting land ice is adding to global sea level rise.

Using satellite measurements from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), the researchers measured ice loss in all of Earth’s land ice between 2003 and 2010, with particular emphasis on glaciers and ice caps outside of Greenland and Antarctica.

The total global ice mass lost from Greenland, Antarctica and Earth’s glaciers and ice caps during the study period was about 4.3 trillion tons (1,000 cubic miles), adding about 0.5 inches (12 millimeters) to global sea level. That’s enough ice to cover the United States 1.5 feet (0.5 meters) deep.

“Earth is losing a huge amount of ice to the ocean annually, and these new results will help us answer important questions in terms of both sea rise and how the planet’s cold regions are responding to global change,” said University of Colorado Boulder physics professor John Wahr, who helped lead the study. “The strength of GRACE is it sees all the mass in the system, even though its resolution is not high enough to allow us to determine separate contributions from each individual glacier.”

About a quarter of the average annual ice loss came from glaciers and ice caps outside of Greenland and Antarctica (roughly 148 billion tons, or 39 cubic miles). Ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica and their peripheral ice caps and glaciers averaged 385 billion tons (100 cubic miles) a year. Results of the study will be published online Feb. 8 in the journal Nature.

Traditional estimates of Earth’s ice caps and glaciers have been made using ground measurements from relatively few glaciers to infer what all the world’s unmonitored glaciers were doing. Only a few hundred of the roughly 200,000 glaciers worldwide have been monitored for longer than a decade.

One unexpected study result from GRACE was that the estimated ice loss from high Asian mountain ranges like the Himalaya, the Pamir and the Tien Shan was only about 4 billion tons of ice annually. Some previous ground-based estimates of ice loss in these high Asian mountains have ranged up to 50 billion tons annually.

“The GRACE results in this region really were a surprise,” said Wahr, who is also a fellow at the University of Colorado-headquartered Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. “One possible explanation is that previous estimates were based on measurements taken primarily from some of the lower, more accessible glaciers in Asia and extrapolated to infer the behavior of higher glaciers. But unlike the lower glaciers, most of the high glaciers are located in very cold environments and require greater amounts of atmospheric warming before local temperatures rise enough to cause significant melting. This makes it difficult to use low-elevation, ground-based measurements to estimate results from the entire system.”

“This study finds that the world’s small glaciers and ice caps in places like Alaska, South America and the Himalayas contribute about 0.02 inches per year to sea level rise,” said Tom Wagner, cryosphere program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “While this is lower than previous estimates, it confirms that ice is being lost from around the globe, with just a few areas in precarious balance. The results sharpen our view of land-ice melting, which poses the biggest, most threatening factor in future sea level rise.”

The twin GRACE satellites track changes in Earth’s gravity field by noting minute changes in gravitational pull caused by regional variations in Earth’s mass, which for periods of months to years is typically because of movements of water on Earth’s surface. It does this by measuring changes in the distance between its two identical spacecraft to one-hundredth the width of a human hair.

The GRACE spacecraft, developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and launched in 2002, are in the same orbit approximately 137 miles (220 kilometers) apart. The California Institute of Technology manages JPL for NASA.

For more on GRACE, visit: http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace and http://grace.jpl.nasa.gov

As we saw in the previous post, the U.S. has expanded its use of energy at a typical rate of 2.9% per year since 1650. We learned that continuation of this energy growth rate in any form of technology leads to a thermal reckoning in just a few hundred years (not the tepid global warming, but boiling skin!). What does this say about the long-term prospects for economic growth, if anything?

World economic growth for the previous century, expressed in constant 1990 dollars. For the first half of the century, the economy tracked the 2.9% energy growth rate very well, but has since increased to a 5% growth rate, outstripping the energy growth rate.

The figure at left shows the rate of global economic growth over the last century, as reconstructed by J. Bradford DeLong. Initially, the economy grew at a rate consistent with that of energy growth. Since 1950, the economy has outpaced energy, growing at a 5% annual rate. This might be taken as great news: we do not necessarily require physical growth to maintain growth in the economy. But we need to understand the sources of the additional growth before we can be confident that this condition will survive the long haul. After all, fifty years does not imply everlasting permanence.

The difference between economic and energy growth can be split into efficiency gains—we extract more activity per unit of energy—and “everything else.” The latter category includes sectors of economic activity not directly tied to energy use. Loosely, this could be thought of as non-manufacturing activity: finance, real estate, innovation, and other aspects of the “service” economy. My focus, as a physicist, is to understand whether the impossibility of indefinite physical growth (i.e., in energy, food, manufacturing) means that economic growth in general is also fated to end or reverse. We’ll start with a close look at efficiency, then move on to talk about more spritely economic factors.

Exponential vs. Linear Growth

First, let’s address what I mean when I say growth.  I mean a steady rate of fractional expansion each year.  For instance, 5% economic growth means any given year will have an economy 5%  larger than the year before.  This leads to exponential behavior, which is what drives the conclusions.  If you object that exponentials are unrealistic, then we’re in agreement.  But such growth is the foundation of our current economic system, so we need to explore the consequences.  If you think we could save ourselves much of the mess by transitioning to linear growth, this indeed dramatically shifts the timeline—but it’s also a death knell for economic growth.

Let’s say we lock in today’s 5% growth and make it linear, so that we increase by a fixed absolute amount every year—not by a fixed fraction of that year’s level.  We would then double in 20 years, and in a century would be five times bigger (as opposed to 132 times bigger under exponential 5% growth).  But after just 20 years, the fractional growth rate is 2.5%, and after a century, it’s 1%.  So linear growth starves the economic beast, and would force us to abandon our current debt-based financial system of interest and loans. This post is all about whether we can maintain our current, exponential trajectory.

Squeezing Efficiency: Rabbits out of the Hat

It seems clear that we could, in principle, rely on efficiency alone to allow continued economic growth even given a no-growth raw energy future (as is inevitable). The idea is simple. Each year, efficiency improvements allow us to drive further, light more homes, manufacture more goods than the year before—all on a fixed energy income. Fortunately, market forces favor greater efficiency, so that we have enjoyed the fruits of a constant drum-beat toward higher efficiency over time. To the extent that we could continue this trick forever, we could maintain economic growth indefinitely, and all the institutions that are built around it: investment, loans, banks, etc.

But how many times can we pull a rabbit out of the efficiency hat? Barring perpetual motion machines (fantasy) and heat pumps (real; discussed below), we must always settle for an efficiency less than 100%. This puts a bound on how much gain we might expect to accomplish. For instance, if some device starts out at 50% efficiency, there is no way to squeeze more than a factor of two out of its performance. To get a handle on how much there is to gain, and how fast we might expect to saturate, let’s look at what we have accomplished historically.

The Good, the Bad, and the Average

A few shining examples stand out. Refrigerators use half the energy that they did about 35 years ago. The family car that today gets 40 miles per gallon achieved half this value in the 1970′s. Both cases point to a 2% per year improvement (doubling time of 35 years).

Not everything has seen such impressive improvements. The Boeing 747 established a standard for air travel efficiency in 1970 that has hardly budged since. Electric motors, pumps, battery charging, hydroelectric power, electricity transmission—among many other things—operate at near perfect efficiency (often around 90%). Power plants that run on coal, natural gas, or nuclear reactions have seen only marginal gains in efficiency  in the last 35 years: well less than 1% per year.

Taken as a whole, we might then loosely guess that overall efficiency has improved by about 1% per year over the past few decades—being bounded by 0% and 2%. This corresponds to a doubling time of 70 years. How many more doublings might we expect?

Potential Gains and Limits

Many of our large-scale applications of energy use heat engines to extract useful energy out of combustion or other source of heat. These include fossil-fuel and nuclear power plants operating at 30–40% efficiency, and automobiles operating at 15–25% efficiency. Heat engines therefore account for about two-thirds of the total energy use in the U.S. (27% in transportation, 36% in electricity production, a bit in industry). The requirement that the entropy of a closed system may never decrease sets a hard limit on how much efficiency one might physically achieve in any heat engine. The maximum theoretical efficiency, in percent, is given by 100×(T_h?T_c)/T_h, where T_h and T_c denote absolute temperatures (in Kelvin) of the hot part of the heat engine and the “cold” environment, respectively. Engineering limitations prevent realization of the theoretical maximum. But in any case, a heat engine operating between 1500 K (hot for a power plant) and room temperature could at most achieve 80% efficiency. So a factor of two improvement is probably impractical in this dominant domain.

The reverse of a heat engine is a heat pump, which uses a little bit of energy to move a lot. Air conditioners, refrigerators, and some home heating systems use this technique. Somewhat magically, moving a certain quantity of heat energy can require less than that amount of energy to accomplish. For cooling applications, the thermodynamic limit to efficiency is given by 100×T_c/(T_h?T_c), again expressing temperatures on an absolute scale. A refrigerator (usually a freezer with a piggybacked refrigerator) operating at room temperature can theoretically achieve 1100% efficiency. The Energy Efficiency Ratio (EER), which is displayed for most new cooling devices, is theoretically bounded by 3.4×T_c/(T_h?T_c),  which in this example is 36. Today’s refrigerators achieve EER values of about 12, so that only a factor of three remains. The same can be said for the Coefficient of Performance (COP) for heat pumps, which is bounded by T_h/(T_h?T_c). Like refrigerators, these are performing within a factor of 2–3 of theoretical limits.

Lighting has seen dramatic improvements in recent decades, going from incandescent performances of 14 lumens per Watt to compact fluorescent efficacies that are four times better, at 50–60 lumens per Watt. LED lighting currently achieves 60–80 lumens per Watt. An ideal light source emitting a spectrum we would call white (sharing the exact spectrum of daylight) but contrived to have no emission outside our visible range would have a luminous efficacy of 251 lm/W. The best LEDs are now within a factor of three of this hard limit.

The efficiency of gasoline-powered cars can not easily improve by any large factor (see heat engines, above), but the effective efficiency can be improved significantly by transitioning to electric drive trains. While a car getting 40 m.p.g. may have a 20% efficient gasoline engine, a battery-powered drive train might achieve something like 70% efficiency (85% efficiency in charging batteries, 85% in driving the electric motor). The factor of 3.5 improvement in efficiency suggests effective mileage performance of 140 m.p.g. One caution, however: if the input electricity comes from a fossil-fuel power plant operating at 40% efficiency and 90% transmission efficiency, the effective fossil-to-locomotion efficiency is reduced to 25%, and is not such a significant step.

As mentioned above, a broad swath of common devices already operate at close to perfect efficiency. Electrical devices in particular can be quite impressively frugal with energy. That which isn’t used constructively appears as waste heat, which is one way to quickly assess efficiency for devices that do not have heat generation as a goal: power plants are hot; car engines are hot; incandescent lights are hot. On the flip side, hydroelectric plants stay cool, LED lights are cool, and a car battery being charged stays cool.

Summing it Up

Given that two-thirds of our energy resource is burned in heat engines, and that these cannot improve much more than a factor of two, more significant gains elsewhere are diminished in value. For instance, replacing the 10% of our energy budget spent on direct heat (e.g., in furnaces and hot water heaters) with heat pumps operating at their maximum theoretical efficiency effectively replaces a 10% expenditure with a 1% expenditure. A factor of ten sounds like a fantastic improvement, but the overall efficiency improvement in society is only 9%. Likewise with light bulb replacement: large gains in a small sector. We should still pursue these efficiency improvements with vigor, but we should not expect this gift to provide a form of unlimited growth.

On balance, the most we might expect to achieve is a factor of two net efficiency increase before theoretical limits and engineering realities clamp down. At the present 1% overall rate, this means we might expect to run out of gain this century.  Some might quibble about whether the factor of two is too pessimistic, and might prefer a factor of 3 or even 4 efficiency gain.  Such modifications may change the timescale of saturation, but not the ultimate result.

Faith in Technology

We have developed an unshakable faith in technology to address our problems.  Its track record is most impressive.  I myself can sit at my dining room table in California and direct a laser in New Mexico to launch pulses at the astronaut-placed reflectors on the moon and measure the distance to one millimeter.  I built much of the system, so I am no stranger to technology, and embrace the possibilities it offers.  And we’ve seen the future in our movies—it’s almost palpably real.   But we have to be careful about faith, and periodically reexamine its validity or possible limits.  Following are a few key examples.

What About Substitutions?

The previous discussion is rooted in the technologies of today: coal-fired power plants, for goodness sake! Any self-respecting analysis of the long term future should recognize the near-certainty that tomorrow’s solutions will look different than today’s. We may not even have a name yet for the energy source of the future!

First, I refer you to the previous post: the continued growth of any energy technology—if consumed on the planet—will bring us to a boil. Beyond that, we hit astrophysically nonsensical limits within centuries. So energy scale must cease growth. Likewise, efficiency limits will prevent us from increasing our effective energy available without bound.

Second, you might wonder: can’t we consider solar, wind and other renewables to be more efficient than fossil fuel power, since the energy has free delivery?  It’s true that unlike the business model for the printer (cheap printer, expensive ink cartridges that ruin you in the end), the substantial cost for renewables is in the initial investment, with little in the way of consumables.  But fossil fuels—although a limited-time offer—are also a free gift of nature.  We do have to put effort into retrieving them (delivery not free), although far less than the benefit they deliver.  The important metric on the energy/efficiency front is energy return on energy invested (EROEI).  Fossil fuels have enjoyed EROEI values typically in the range of 20:1 to 100:1, meaning that less than 5% of the eventual benefit must be invested up front.  Solar and wind are less, at 10:1 and 18:1, respectively.  These technologies would avoid wasting a majority of the energy in heat engines, but the lower EROEI means it’s less of a freebee than the current juice.  And yes, the 15% efficiency of many solar panels does mean that most of the remaining 85% goes to heating the dark panel.

What About Accomplishing the Same Tasks with Less?

One route to coping with a fixed energy income is to invent new devices or techniques that accomplish the same tasks using less energy, rather than incrementally improve on the efficiency of current devices.  This works marvelously in some areas (e.g., generational changes in computers, cell phones, shift to online banking/news).

But some things are hard to shave down substantially.  Global transportation means pushing through air or water over vast distances that will not shrink.  Cooking means heating meal-sized portions of food and water. Heating a home against the winter cold involves a certain amount of thermal energy for a fixed-size home. A hot shower requires a certain amount of energy to heat a sufficient volume of water.  Can all of these things be done more efficiently with better aero/hydrodynamics or traveling more slowly; foods requiring less heat to cook; insulation and heat pumps in homes; and taking showers using less water?  Absolutely.  Can this go on forever to maintain growth?  No.  As long as these physically-bounded activities comprise a finite portion of our portfolio, no amount of gadget refinement will allow indefinite economic growth. If it did, eventually economic activity would be wholly dominated by us “servicing” each other, and not the physical “stuff.”

What About Paying More to Use Less?

Owners of solar panels or Prius cars have elected to plunk down a significant amount of money to consume fewer resources. Sometimes these decisions are based on more than straight dollars and cents calculations, in that the payback can be very long term and may not be competitive against opportunity cost. Could social conscientiousness become fashionable enough to drive overall economic growth? I suppose it’s possible, but generally most people are only interested in this when the cost of energy is high to start with. Below, we’ll see that if the economy continues its growth trend after energy use flattens, the cost of energy becomes negligibly small—deflating the incentive to pay more for less.

The Unphysical Economy

In a future world where energy growth has ceased, and efficiency has been squeezed to a practical limit, can we still expect to grow our economy through innovation, technology, and services? One way to approach the problem is to demand that we maintain 5% economic growth over the long term, and see what fraction of economic activity has to come from the non-energy-demanding sector. Of course all economic activity requires some energy, so by “non-energy” or “unphysical,” I mean those activities that require minimal energy inputs and approach the economist’s dream of “decoupling.”

We start by setting energy to flatten out as a logistic function (standard S-curve in population studies), with an inflection point at the year 2000 (halfway along). We then let efficiency boost our effective energy at the present rate of 1% gain per year, ultimately saturating at a factor of two. The figure below provides a toy example of how this might look.

Projected contribution to a steadily growing economy from non-energy-related activities in the face of flattening raw energy available and efficiency saturation. The green curve represents the scale of raw energy available each year, while the blue curve is the effective energy available through gains in efficiency. Regardless of timescale, the key feature is that the fraction of the economy that is independent of energy availability must grow to dominate all other activities in order to keep growth alive, here reaching 98% by the end of the century. This is an untested—and possibly physically untenable—economic state. Note that the vertical axis for the economic scale curves is logarithmic.

The timescale is not the important feature of the figure. The important result is that trying to maintain a growth economy in a world of tapering raw energy growth (perhaps accompanied by leveling population) and diminishing gains from efficiency improvements would require the “other” category of activity to eventually dominate the economy. This would mean that an increasingly small fraction of economic activity would depend heavily on energy, so that food production, manufacturing, transportation, etc. would be relegated to economic insignificance. Activities like selling and buying existing houses, financial transactions, innovations (including new ways to move money around), fashion, and psychotherapy will be effectively all that’s left. Consequently, the price of food, energy, and manufacturing would drop to negligible levels relative to the fluffy stuff.  And is this realistic—that a vital resource at its physical limit gets arbitrarily cheap?  Bizarre.

This scenario has many problems. For instance, if food production shrinks to 1% of our economy, while staying at a comparable absolute scale as it is today (we must eat, after all), then food is effectively very cheap relative to the paychecks that let us enjoy the fruits of the broader economy. This would mean that farmers’ wages would sink far lower than they are today relative to other members of society, so they could not enjoy the innovations and improvements the rest of us can pay for. Subsidies, donations, or any other mechanism to compensate farmers more handsomely would simply undercut the “other” economy, preventing it from swelling to arbitrary size—and thus limiting growth.

Another way to put it is that since we all must eat, and a certain, finite fraction of our population must be engaged in the production of food, the price of food cannot sink to arbitrarily low levels. The economy is rooted in a physical world that has historically been joined at the hip to energy use (through food production, manufacturing, transport of goods in the global economy). It is fantastical to think that an economy can unmoor itself from its physical underpinnings and become dominated by activities unrelated to energy, food, and manufacturing constraints.

I’m not claiming that certain industries will not grow: there will always be growth in some sector. But net growth will be constrained. Winners will not outpace the losers.   Nor am I claiming that some economic activities cannot exist virtually independent of energy.  We can point to plenty of examples of this today.  But these things can’t grow to 90%, then 99%, then 99.9%, etc. of the total economic activity—as would be mandated if economic growth is to continue apace.

Where Does this Leave Us?

Together with the last post, I have used physical analysis to argue that sustained economic growth in the long term is fantastical. Maybe for some, this is stating the obvious. After all, Adam Smith imagined a 200-year phase of economic growth followed by a steady state.  But our mentality is currently centered on growth. Our economic systems rely on growth for investment, loans, and interest to make any sense. If we don’t deliberately put ourselves onto a steady state trajectory, we risk a complete and unchoreographed collapse of our economic institutions.

Admittedly, the argument that economic growth will stop is not as direct a result of physics as is the argument that physical growth will stop, and as such represents a stretch outside my usual comfort zone. But besides physical limits, I think we must also apply notions of common sense and human psychology. The artificial world that must be envisioned to keep economic growth alive in the face of physical limits strikes me as preposterous and untenable. It would be an existence far removed from demonstrated modes of human economic activity. Not everyone would want to participate in this whimsical society, preferring instead to spend their puffy paychecks on constrained physical goods and energy (which is now dirt cheap, by the way, so a few individuals could easily afford to own all of it!).

Recognizing the need to ultimately transition to a non-growth economy, I am personally disconcerted by the fact that we lack a tested economic system based on steady-state conditions.  I would like to take a conservative, low-risk approach to the future and smartly place ourselves on a sustainable trajectory. There are well-developed steady-state economic models, pioneered by Herman Daly and others. There are even stepwise plans to transition our economy into a steady-state. But not one of those steps will be taken if people (who elect politicians) do not crave this result. The only way people will crave this result is if they understand (or experience) the impossibility of continued growth and the consequences of not acting soon enough. I hope we can collectively be smart enough to make this transition.

Note: A later post on the meaning of sustainability is a natural follow-on to this post.

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Brian Pierini for his review and comments.

So far on Do the Math, I’ve put out a lot of negative energy—whatever that means. Topics have often focused on what we can’t do, or at least on the failings or difficulties of various ambitious plans. We can’t expect indefinite growth—whether in energy, population, or even growth of the economic variety. It is not obvious how we maintain our current standard of living once fossil fuels begin their inexorable decline this century. And as I’ve argued before, achieving a steady-state future implies approximate equity among the peoples of the Earth, so that maintaining today’s global energy consumption translates to living at one-fifth the power currently enjoyed in the U.S.

In this post, I offer a rosy vision for what I think we could accomplish in the near term to maximize our chances of coming out shiny and happy on the tail end of the fossil fuel saga. I’m no visionary, and this exercise represents a stretch for a physicist. But at least I can sketch a low-risk, physically viable route to the future. I can—in part—vouch for its physical viability based on my own dramatic reductions in energy footprint. I cannot vouch for the realism of the overall scheme. It’s a dream and a hope—a fool’s hope, really—and very, very far from a prediction or a blueprint. I’ve closed all the exits to get your attention. Now we’ll start looking at ways to nose out of our box in a safe and satisfying way.

The Chief Problems

To recapitulate, the principal challenges we face in confronting our transition from fossil fuels while living on a finite planet are (with links to earlier posts):

>> The growth paradigm must end. A finite world with finite resources will not continue to support growth. Fossil fuels enabled a growth explosion, but those days are closing out. Even futuristic energy sources cook us in mere centuries on a continued growth trajectory. Folks who think the solution is to expand into space can step off the train now, since my primary interest is in addressing this century’s problems. Adios, space-migos.

>> Conventional oil production will soon begin terminal decline. Our most important energy currency will no longer keep up with demand. This will quite possibly be accompanied by instability and loss of confidence in long-term growth, bringing damaging economic consequences.

>> Alternatives do not stack up to the practical perks of fossil fuels. We will not simply migrate to the new sources without discomfort (in part, higher or even unaffordable costs).

>> Transportation is hard. Most alternatives allow direct production of heat and/or electricity, but few result in liquid fuels to perpetuate our mobile economy. Electric vehicles offer expensive work-arounds for some parts of the transportation sector, but not without sacrificed capabilities.

>> The Energy Trap exacts a toll on a late realization that we really should take energy resource shortages seriously. Given the tendency of societies to react to crises, rather than anticipate them, we will likely find ourselves wishing we had started decades before the crisis—preparing for a transition of unprecedented scale.

>> Complexity cannot be ignored. Before we actually get off our duffs to address a decline in liquid fuels, economies may already be reeling from energy shortfall, and may not be in a position to carry out an expensive, large-scale build-out of a new energy infrastructure. This is exacerbated by the likely situation that we will not collectively agree on the route forward, and market omniscience will be similarly confused by volatility and the inability of a high-unemployment society to afford the more expensive alternatives.

>> Many people point to the global population boom as the fundamental problem that must be addressed. I have not covered this directly in Do the Math, except in the context of evaluating exactly what sustainability means. I see the population explosion as a predictable reflection of surplus energy, which revolutionized agriculture and promoted more mouths in the world. On the flip side, energy scarcity translates to ugly population pressures via reduced food production and possibly hoarding.

Be Positive, Dude!

There I go again. I promised to offer a rosier picture of the future, rather than keep pounding the problematic side. But what I am going to propose may not sit well with the average citizen, so it is important to remind everyone what we are up against: a host of interrelated problems that are not easily waved off. I like the characterization that what we face here is a predicament, rather than a problem. Problems call for solutions. Predicaments must settle for responses. Our predicament is that we rode the fossil fuel bonanza to the highest possible heights, without a plan for what to do when the inheritance tapers off. Surely we mustn’t entertain the notion of getting a job when the inheritance wanes!

So imagine a world where we responded to these challenges: not by technology fixes, but by altering our expectations and behaviors.

If we elect to abandon growth as a central tenet of our existence, we would immediately veer from our collision course. We would still likely need to reduce our physical throughput of natural resources and services, but adopting a steady state economic platform would be a vital first step.

At the same time, we would be wise to take deliberate steps to arrest population growth—for instance by consciously deciding not to have kids, recognizing that the world of the future may not share the prosperity and stability of today. Maybe it doesn’t seem fair that we should cede part of the core nature of being human. Perhaps it helps to consider that we didn’t choose to come along just in time for the biggest transition humanity has faced, but oh well—here we all are. Are our brains big enough to offset our primal directive? Many Americans huff at the suggestion that we need alter our own population trajectory, when it is the developing world that hosts dangerously high birth rates. Yet a newborn American will use 100 times as much energy as an infant born to a poor village, leveraging the resource burden squarely back on home soil.

Continuing our adjustments, if we suddenly made choices that resulted in half as much transportation, we would just as suddenly put off concerns over oil decline at the level of a few percent per year. Much of our transportation is discretionary or can be consolidated (pooled) without ruinous consequences.

If we tended to focus more on needs vs. wants, we could eliminate unnecessary and resource-wasting consumerism. Ideally, the things we buy would last decades, and would be built to support repair rather than disposal. No more planned obsolescence.

If we did not demand as much electricity and heat at home and at work, we could more easily tolerate the relative shortcomings of alternative energy sources, while taking our foot off the fossil fuel gas-pedal. It is generally far short of debilitating to reduce home energy use by a factor of two or more (I’ve done a factor of 3–4, and could easily do more). It’s not what we’re used to, but no matter what choices we make, we’re going to be dealing with new challenges we’re not used to. I, for one, want to be in control of my adaptations.

If we changed our diet expectations, so that meat is a treat reserved for special occasions, or as an accent in our dishes rather than a main course, we would dramatically ease pressure on our lands, water resources, and the energy required to support our food industry. Many people in the world live this way already, without shriveling up.

By voluntarily adopting substantial reductions in energy in the manner described above, we free up significant amounts of energy to dedicate toward building an alternative energy infrastructure of solar, wind, etc.—thereby evading the jaws of the Energy Trap. It’s only a trap if energy shortages are imposed by failure of the supply to meet demand. But if demand melts away faster by voluntary means, we’re fine.

The secret for the raccoon to get out of the nail-in-hole trap described in Where the Red Fern Grows is to first let go of the shiny trinket inside. Unrelenting demand is our enemy here, and completely under our own control. Want phenomenal gas mileage? Slow the truck down. The velocity-squared term in drag/energy matters. There’s a gas pedal. We have control.

What’s Rosy about this Picture?

Maybe this “future” doesn’t sound all that great to the average reader. But consider it in this light. If we step off the growth train and simultaneously reduce our material demands, we won’t have to work quite as hard to keep life on an even keel. The competitive urge for a business to grow disappears, so that employees would spend less time slaving for the boss in the name of profit, and more time enjoying friends and family. In this world, people are interested in satisfying their needs rather than their wants, and people already know what they need, so there is no need to advertise in order to create demand for a product. The economy settles down into a system where needs are met by normal (more often local) market forces, but the ambition to grow for the sake of growth (and shareholder dividends, etc.) is gone. The 99% take the driver’s seat.

As part of the rubric for achieving a steady state economy (see Herman Daly’s ten-step plan), labor is not taxed, but resource extraction and disposal carries a stiff charge. Incentives shift to providing quality goods that will last a lifetime, since buying new items will invoke the resource charge, and it is simultaneously costly to dispose of the old. Repair returns as an industry, since labor is cheaper than new materials. The satisfaction that accompanies quality and craftsmanship return, in lieu of mass production.

More people would occupy their time with the art of living well. They would farm their yards (rather than mow grass?) and feel more intimately connected with the land. The world would become less abstract and more rooted in intrinsically meaningful activities (investment, marketing, office work, etc. occupy less attention).

Rather than isolating ourselves in self-sufficient castles, we would work together more often to complement each others’ talents, resources, or tools. The emergent sense of community may make us happier people and more resilient during tough spells. We would more often see neighbors gathering for community projects, potlucks, and inevitably more games of horseshoes and croquet.

In many ways, what I describe is a return to a simpler time. But with some key differences. We have made important advances in science, medicine, and technology that we treasure and would work hard to maintain and improve. The future I imagine does not give up on all our pursuits—just the ones aimed at growth and commanding a high resource throughput. Those activities centered on developing knowledge, and understanding what it means to be human, would thrive.

Yeah, Right

I know. What I describe may cut against human nature. What business owner would not want to expand territory, income, power, etc.? What about the people who would not welcome a simpler lifestyle? What about the folks who already live in a manner somewhat like what I describe and would actually prefer a more go-go lifestyle? Politically, what competitive party would adopt no growth (or negative growth) as a primary platform? Okay, the Green Party has done so, and hats-off to a courageous stance—attracting 0.2% of registered voters in the U.S. (although implementing instant runoff voting would unmask more true supporters). Business interest—which finances both political and advertising campaigns—would be hard-set against this folding-the-tents approach. There are all kinds of reasons why this future path has little chance of deliberate adoption.

Yet, from a physical point of view, I feel very strongly that we should ease pressure on the system and free up resources to make a more viable, sustainable, long term plan. That’s the first necessary condition to meet: a future compatible with physical and resource constraints. I know from personal experience that it’s possible to cut energy use substantially and still be a scientist doing real research. Whether this is possible to maintain on a societal scale, I am not able to say.

One key point about reducing demand is that it becomes far easier to accomplish a transition to alternative energy if we ratchet down the target level. Many posts that exposed shortcomings of wind, battery storage at a national or personal level, etc. were predicated on maintaining our current scale. Reduce the scale by a goodly factor and suddenly an alternative energy future is vastly more feasible. I am not going to be specific about a technology prescription that accompanies this future, but decentralized resources fit most naturally. So solar and wind do well (and other backyard-compatible approaches, as described in the alternative matrix). Self-sufficiency—at least at a community level—is most attractive to me in this “vision.”

But if a physically viable future is fundamentally incompatible with human nature, we may be fated to boom and bust cycles. To say this is to proclaim that humans are incapable of achieving the feat called “sustainability”—a disappointing shame, if true. We’ve seen civilizations boom and bust repeatedly through history, but the civilizations were always somewhat isolated, preventing the busts from being global. This time, more is at stake in a bust. Frustratingly, I know there is a way for us to do better. I hope we find ourselves to be capable of taming our expectations and desires and moving in a smart direction.

A Values Shift

So if we want to guarantee our ability to cope with physical constraints, we increase our chances of success if we change our values first. Today, we admire the individual who rises to the top of the corporate ladder—owning mansions and yachts and a business empire. What if our values shifted so that we considered such extravagance to be immoral? Today, we esteem the premier status of the frequent flyer racking up 100,000 miles each year. What if we considered this level of travel inexcusable? No red carpet for you! You must board the plane through a gauntlet of passengers swatting at you with boarding passes! Presently, we feel that eating meat at every meal means we’ve earned a desired status in the world. But what if it was considered indulgent to do so, unless you or your immediate community raised the livestock yourselves. Today, driving solo at freeway speeds is seen as an inalienable right and a reflection of our freedom. What if the prevailing attitude was that such activities on a routine basis were wasteful and selfish? Rearing families of two children is currently considered to be a responsible, replacement practice. If replacement is ultimately understood to be too taxing, we may come to value numbers like zero or one more than we do two. Consider the leisure activities of jet skiing, motorcycling, or snowmobiling and compare to kayaking, mountain-biking or cross-country skiing. Now imagine that the former activities are not considered to be responsible ways to enjoy yourself in nature.

Sure, some people have similar sets of values already today. We have names for such people. Surely I’m not suggesting that a world filled with “those people” would be a better place? Well, if the only way to assure that we do not overshoot and collapse is by adopting less obtrusive behaviors, then I would rather those behaviors stem from within as part of a values system than be imposed on us by some authority—even if said authority has our best interests at heart. The latter situation is unstable, albeit often effective.

Along the same vein, I initially wrote this post as a set of rules that, if adopted, may put us on a sustainable path. Then I realized that if I were a reader confronted with a list of rules for how I should modify my behaviors, I would likely chafe at being told what I should do, and dismiss the “rules.” It’s much better to set out the goals and the rationale, and let people invent for themselves ways in which they can meet those goals if they decide that the rationale is desirable. In this way, the responses become personal ones, bringing with them a vested interest in seeing them succeed. In posts to follow, I will outline some of the adjustments I have made that may serve to seed ideas for others: suggesting rather than bossing. I recognize that I’m falling into the classic mind-trap: if everyone would just behave like me, the world would be a fine place.

Worth a Try?

If we alter our values and behaviors, only later to develop technologies and solutions that obviate the need to maintain such a lifestyle, then fine: get on with the new ways—to the extent that the proposals are sound. A population sharing the new value set will be better able to judge the sustainable nature of some new direction (fusion, or what have you). Perhaps the very act of easing off the pressures on society are the thing that frees us up to find better ways or technologies. And as long as I’m dreaming—more time devoted to living well may also mean a better-educated, better-read, critically-thinking society; less obsessed with maintaining a frantic pace of life. Taking the growth imperative out of life will shift focus to content rather than profit. News will be about substance and informed debate rather than about entertainment for bucks. We could build on the better angels of our nature, rather than appealing to base instincts like greed.

And in the end, what would be the downside of slowing down for a bit? The natural world will obviously thank us. We may be more fulfilled as humans because we are operating in a community-oriented mode harnessing traits of the tribal crucible in which we evolved. As long as we do not lose valuable knowledge/lessons in the process (as we risk doing in a collapse scenario), what is the harm?

When the World Trade Towers were attacked on September 11, 2001, I was at a technical conference on Maui. Air travel stopped for the next several days, silencing the skies. Only then was I aware of the absence of the drone that had been a companion of normal life. I felt stuck, and no one knew what might happen next. But pretty soon, people realized there was nothing to be done, and lived in the moment. I spent a lot of time breathing through a snorkel. The pace instantly slowed, and this brought with it a few perks.

A Conservative Road

The picture of the world I paint here is unfamiliar, and quite frankly, unlikely. But my motivation is to devise a strategy that is not a game of chicken between growth and finite resources. I advocate swerving away—the sooner the better: what have I got to prove? Otherwise we are destined to lose the fight with nature. My suggestions may not represent an optimal response, but the benefit is that it’s an approach to life that I believe is far more likely to succeed than is the current path of trying to maintain business as usual. In that sense, the plan is a conservative one. Pulling back on the throttle gives us the opportunity to take stock, collectively assess what a viable future looks like, and plot some sensible course. It’s a plea to use our big brains rather than enslaving ourselves to a trajectory out of our control.

As pointed out in the post on sustainability, while I focus most of my attention on energy as a tangible physical concept, our challenges extend far beyond energy into long-term maintenance of fisheries, forests, soil, fresh water, climate stability, and other vital natural services that we may not yet appreciate.

When we reflect on the fact that we are at a special place in history approaching the peak rate of our one-time fossil fuel inheritance, it is hard to swallow overconfident statements about how our amazing ingenuity will propel us into a spectacular high-tech future beyond our dreams. The narrative is an attractive one, I’ll admit. The fact that we cannot plot an assured map along this route even for the rest of this century could either tell us that we lack faith, lack foresight, lack imagination, or that perhaps we should call for a timeout and regroup. I’m gonna vote for the timeout. But enough of us need to heed the call to make it effective. Future posts will explore specific ways in which we might collectively give our future a better chance at a fulfilling life.

A Better Future; More or Less

I’ll leave with a montage to illustrate why the slower world I describe may in fact be more fulfilling than the current scheme: emphasizing the good of one and the bad of another. One could naturally make up an inverse set. If you’re looking for utopia, you’ve come to the wrong shop—sorry.

Expect More:

Reading; story-telling; gardening; connection with nature; community; fishing; whittling; lemonade; sitting on the front porch; cross-breezes; seasonal adjustment; blankets; wool socks; sweaters; connection to sunrise/sunset; local governance; mom & pop stores; crafts; goats and chickens; bicycles; train rides; pies cooling on the sill; music; singing and playing musical instruments; rain catchment; canning; craftsmanship; repair; durable goods.

Expect Less:

Waiting for airplanes; commuting; abstract/meaningless jobs; Wal-Mart; fast food; strip malls; four-car families; climate change; dominance of banks; capital gains; disposable junk; junk mail; species extinction; minibar charges; traffic jams; identity theft; freeway noise; advertisements; consumerism; faddish gizmos; cheap plastic crap; outsourcing; industrial effluent; credit card debt.

Tom Murphy is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. An amateur astronomer in high school, physics major at Georgia Tech, and PhD student in physics at Caltech, Murphy has spent decades reveling in the study of astrophysics. He currently leads a project to test General Relativity by bouncing laser pulses off of the reflectors left on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts, achieving one-millimeter range precision. Murphy’s keen interest in energy topics began with his teaching a course on energy and the environment for non-science majors at UCSD. Motivated by the unprecedented challenges we face, he has applied his instrumentation skills to exploring alternative energy and associated measurement schemes. Following his natural instincts to educate, Murphy is eager to get people thinking about the quantitatively convincing case that our pursuit of an ever-bigger scale of life faces gigantic challenges and carries significant risks. He blogs on Do The Math

The world’s oceans may be turning acidic faster today from human carbon emissions than they did during four major extinctions in the last 300 million years, when natural pulses of carbon sent global temperatures soaring, says a new study in Science. The study is the first of its kind to survey the geologic record for evidence of ocean acidification over this vast time period.

“What we’re doing today really stands out,” said lead author Bärbel Hönisch, a paleoceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “We know that life during past ocean acidification events was not wiped out—new species evolved to replace those that died off. But if industrial carbon emissions continue at the current pace, we may lose organisms we care about—coral reefs, oysters, salmon.”

The oceans act like a sponge to draw down excess carbon dioxide from the air; the gas reacts with seawater to form carbonic acid, which over time is neutralized by fossil carbonate shells on the seafloor. But if CO2 goes into the oceans too quickly, it can deplete the carbonate ions that corals, mollusks and some plankton need for reef and shell-building.

That is what is happening now. In a review of hundreds of paleoceanographic studies, a team of researchers from five countries found evidence for only one period in the last 300 million years when the oceans changed even remotely as fast as today: the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, some 56 million years ago. In the early 1990s, scientists extracting sediments from the seafloor off Antarctica found a layer of mud from this period wedged between thick deposits of white plankton fossils. In a span of about 5,000 years, they estimated, a mysterious surge of carbon doubled atmospheric concentrations, pushed average global temperatures up by about6 degrees C, and dramatically changed the ecological landscape.

The result: carbonate plankton shells littering the seafloor dissolved, leaving the brown layer of mud. As many as half of all species of benthic foraminifers, a group of single-celled organisms that live at the ocean bottom, went extinct, suggesting that organisms higher in the food chain may have also disappeared, said study co-author Ellen Thomas, a paleoceanographer at Yale University who was on that pivotal Antarctic cruise. “It’s really unusual that you lose more than 5 to 10 percent of species over less than 20,000 years,” she said. “It’s usually on the order of a few percent over a million years.” During this time, scientists estimate, ocean pH—a measure of acidity--may have fallen as much as 0.45 units. (As pH falls, acidity rises.)

In the last hundred years, atmospheric CO2 has risen about 30 percent, to 393 parts per million, and ocean pH has fallen by 0.1 unit, to 8.1--an acidification rate at least 10 times faster than 56 million years ago, says Hönisch. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that pH may fall another 0.3 units by the end of the century,to 7.8, raising the possibility that we may soon see ocean changes similar to those observed during the PETM.

More catastrophic events have shaken earth before, but perhaps not as quickly. The study finds two other times of potential ocean acidification: the extinctions triggered by massive volcanism at the end of the Permian and Triassic eras, about 252 million and 201 million years ago respectively. But the authors caution that the timing and chemical changes of these events is less certain. Because most ocean sediments older than 180 million years have been recycled back into the deep earth, scientists have fewer records to work with.

During the end of the Permian, about 252 million years ago, massive volcanic eruptions in present-day Russia led to a rise in atmospheric carbon, and the extinction of 96 percent of marine life. Scientists have found evidence for ocean dead zones and the survival of organisms able to withstand carbonate-poor seawater and high blood-carbon levels, but so far they have been unable to reconstruct changes in ocean pH or carbonate.

At the end of the Triassic, about 201 million years ago, a second burst of mass volcanism doubled atmospheric carbon. Coral reefs collapsed and many sea creatures vanished. Noting that tropical species fared the worst, some scientists question if global warming rather than ocean acidification was the main killer at this time.

The effects of ocean acidification today are overshadowed for now by other problems, ranging from sewage pollution and hotter summer temperatures that threaten corals with disease and bleaching. However, scientists trying to isolate the effects of acidic water in the lab have shown that lower pH levels can harm a range of marine life, from reef and shell-building organisms to the tiny snails favored by salmon. In a recent study, scientists from Stony Brook University found that the larvae of bay scallops and hard clams grow best at pre-industrial pH levels, while their shells corrode at the levels projected for 2100. Off the U.S. Pacific Northwest, the death of oyster larvae has recently been linked to the upwelling of acidic water there.

In parts of the ocean acidified by underwater volcanoes venting carbon dioxide, scientists have seen alarming signs of what the oceans could be like by 2100. In a 2011 study of coral reefs off Papua New Guinea, scientists writing in the journal Nature Climate Change found that when pH dropped to 7.8, reef diversity declined by as much as 40 percent. Other studies have found that clownfish larvae raised in the lab lose their ability to sniff out predators and find their way home when pH drops below 7.8.

“It’s not a problem that can be quickly reversed,” said Christopher Langdon, a biological oceanographer at the University of Miami who co-authored the study on Papua New Guinea reefs. “Once a species goes extinct it’s gone forever. We’re playing a very dangerous game.”

It may take decades before ocean acidification’s effect on marine life shows itself. Until then, the past is a good way to foresee the future, says Richard Feely, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who was not involved in the study. “These studies give you a sense of the timing involved in past ocean acidification events—they did not happen quickly,” he said. “The decisions we make over the next few decades could have significant implications on a geologic timescale.”

The study was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

According to UNC Chapel Hill researchers who just crunched 10 years’ worth of data, climate change is throwing bird migration patterns just a tiny bit off-kilter — and that small disruption could have major effects on the health of bird populations.

Allen Hurlbert and Zhongfei Liang used more than 48 million observations from amateur birdwatchers to conclude that every 1.8-degree rise in temperature makes birds reach their migration milestones 0.8 days earlier on average (though much more for some species in some locations). That’s less than 11 hours per degree, so who gives a titmouse’s mouse tit? Well, birds do, or would if they had brains big enough to contain a large-scale self-preservation instinct. Says Hurlbert:

Timing of bird migration is something critical for the overall health of bird species. They have to time it right so they can balance arriving on breeding grounds after there’s no longer a risk of severe winter conditions. If they get it wrong, they may die or may not produce as many young. A change in migration could begin to contribute to population decline, putting many species at risk for extinction.

So small changes in climate can lead to small changes in migration patterns which can have dire effects. It’s like the butterfly effect, only with no Ashton Kutcher and more birds going extinct. Which sounds like a wash, frankly.

Jess Zimmerman is the editor of Grist List.

 

Pro-coal, pro-gas  Australian PM Julia Gillard has an appalling record of climate change inaction falsely dressed up as the opposite. The biggest and most outrageous untruth of Gillard Labor is that it is "tackling  climate change" for a "clean energy future", as systematically set out below.

1. Among PM Gillard's first acts in June 2010,  after the Coup that removed the very popularly elected PM Kevin Rudd, was to approve export of dried brown coal from Victoria to Asia that is expected to generate  59 million tonnes of CO2 annually by 2020.

2. In Australian Federal politics the Liberal Party-National Party Coalition Opposition and the Labor Government (aka the Lib-Labs) have the same official climate change policy of a derisory 5% off Australia's 2000 domestic GHG pollution by 2020 and unlimited GHG pollution through coal and gas exports.  The Labs differ from the Libs in how they will attempt to achieve this appalling outcome. Thus the Coalition has a Direct Action policy involving biochar,  re-afforestation and subsidies for a transition to lower GHG pollution. In stark contrast,  Labor under PM Julia Gillard has actually no intention of even achieving  this derisory 5% reduction in GHG pollution in 2020 relative to that in 2000.  Labor has legislated  a Carbon Tax-Emissions Trading Scheme  that as shown by Treasury analysis (see its 2011 report "Strong Growth, Low Pollution": http://cache.treasury.gov.au/treasury/carbonpricemodelling/
content/report/downloads/Modelling_Report_Consolidated.pdf ) will mean that Australia's domestic GHG pollution in 2020 will be 1.1 times bigger than that in 2000 rather than 5% smaller.

3. Success in ?tackling climate change? is surely measured in terms of GHG pollution reduction but Australia's Domestic plus Exported GHG pollution was 1,077 Mt CO2-e (CO2 equivalent) in 2000  and is expected under Labor policy to reach about 1,799 Mt CO2-e annually by 2020 (a 1.7-fold increase) and 4,490 Mt CO2-e annually in 2050 (a  4.2-fold increase) (see ?2011 Climate Change Course?: https://sites.google.com/site/300orgsite/2011-climate-change-course ) .

4. It can be estimated that the domestic plus exported GHG pollution by Australia between 2010 and 2050 will total 100 billion tonnes CO2-e, 17% of the World's terminal CO2 pollution budget of 600 billion tonnes CO2 as adjudged by the WBGU that advises the German Government on climate change. Thus Australia with currently about 22 million x 100/7,000 million = 0.3% of the World's population will produce 17% of the last 600 billion tonnes of CO2  pollution permitted for the whole World between now and zero emissions in 2050. Australia is assuming a right to pollute (100 millions tonnes /22 million people)/(500 million tonnes /6,978 million people) = 63 times more per capita than other human beings over the next 40 years.

5. Labor's plan essentially ignores Agriculture whereas World Bank analysts have recently estimated that Livestock alone contributes over 5!% of global man-made GHG pollution,  which in turn they estimate to be about 50% bigger than hitherto thought (see Robert Goodland and Jeff Anfang. ?Livestock and climate change. What if the key actors in climate change are ? cows, pigs and chickens??, World Watch, November/December 2009: http://www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/Livestock%20and%20Climate%20Change.pdf  ) . The Carbon Tax is mostly a futile cycle of taxing major polluters and then returning most of the receipts to consumers to pay for elevated prices for power, goods and services. The ETS approach has been empirically unsuccessful, is disastrously counterproductive and is inherently fraudulent because the Australian Government will dishonestly issue licences for Australians  to pollute the one common atmosphere of all countries on Earth. Labor's dishonest, spin-driven Carbon Tax-ETS- Ignore Agriculture (CTETSIA) policy is a disastrous scheme for actual climate change inaction while pretending to do the opposite.

6. PM Gillard repeatedly talks of "160 million tonnes" of CO2-e to be saved in 2020. However Treasury modelling has found, and Labor has confirmed, that this will largely come from international purchase of Carbon Credits from tropical Third Word topical countries.

7. Under Labor policy Queensland coal exports will rise from 156 million tonnes in 2011 to 944 million tonnes in 2020 (see Gideon Polya, "Australian, Canadian & US oil & gas threaten Mankind, Barrier Reef & Biosphere", Bellaciao: http://bellaciao.org/en/spip.php?article21767 ).

8. Under Labor policy, Queensland coal shipping will increase from 1,722 ships in 2011 to 10,150 in 2020, this increased traffic and port dredging endangering the World Heritage Great Barrier Reef. (see Greenpeace report entitled ?Boom Goes the Reef. Australia 's coal export boom and the industrialisation of the Great Barrier Reef ?, March 2012: http://www.greenpeace.org/australia/Global/australia/reports/Download%20the%20report.pdf  ). 

9. Several weeks ago Gillard Labor renewed its commitment of $100 million towards the proposed, dirty,  coal-fired HRL power station in Victoria .

10. Under Gillard Labor coal exports are increasing at 2.4% annually and Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) exports at 9% annually.

11. Gillard Labor's last climate change betrayal has been to abolish the solar hot water subsidy, a retrograde move that is set to wipe out the green solar hot water industry.

12. Gillard Labor declares that ?gas is clean? or ?gas is cleaner? and believes that its Carbon Tax-ETS strategy will hasten a coal burning to gas burning transition. This  ignores the latest science that says that gas burning for power can be much dirtier GHG-wise than coal burning . In short, methane is the major component of natural gas, leaks (3.3% US average, 7.9% if derived from hydraulic fracturing or ?fracking? for coal seam gas) and is 105 times worse than CO2 as a GHG  on a 20 year time scale with aerosol impacts considered (Drew T. Shindell , Greg Faluvegi, Dorothy M. Koch ,   Gavin A. Schmidt ,   Nadine Unger and Susanne E. Bauer , ?Improved Attribution of Climate Forcing to Emissions?, Science, 30 October 2009:

Vol. 326 no. 5953 pp. 716-718: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/326/5953/716  ). With existing plants in Victoria, Australia,  3.3% leakage means that gas burning is just as dirty greenhouse gas (GHG)-wise as burning coal but at 7.9% systemic leakage the GHG pollution from gas burning will be twice that from burning coal (see "Gas is not clean energy": https://sites.google.com/site/gasisnotcleanenergy/home  ) .

13. Gillard Labor is supporting the huge roll-out of Coal Seam Gas (CSG) in Eastern Australia that is set to despoil landscapes, salinize and otherwise pollute agricultural land , deplete and pollute aquifers, increase GHG pollution through systemic gas leakage and add to Australia 's already huge and disproportionate GHG pollution.

14. In 2009 the German Advisory Council on Climate Change (WBGU) determined that for a 75% chance of avoiding a 2 degree C temperature rise, the World must pollute less than 600 billion tonnes of  CO2 between 2010 and essentially zero emissions in 2050. Unfortunately, Australia (through disproportionately huge annual fossil fuel burning and exports) had  already used up its  ?fair share? of this terminal greenhouse gas (GHG) budget by mid-2011 and it now stealing the entitlement of impoverished nations such as Somalia and Bangladesh (see Gideon Polya, ?Shocking analysis by country of years left to zero emissions:, Green Blog, 1 August 2011: http://www.green-blog.org/2011/08/01/shocking-analysis-by-country-of-years-left-to-zero-emissions/  ).

15. Greens leader Dr Bob Brown is in dispute with PM Julia Gillard over her backsliding over an agreement on logging of Tasmanian forests: ? "She signed off on the 7th of August (2011) that there would be an immediate halt to the destruction of the high-conservation value forests of Tasmania. When she keeps up her word on that matter - her signed public word on that matter - we'll be having meetings with her.? (The Australian, 11 January 2012:   http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/bob-brown-has-boycotted-regular-meetings-with-julia-gillard-until-action-is-taken-on-logging/story-e6frg6nf-1226241972670 ).  The South East Australian Eucalyptus regnans forests are the best forest carbon sinks in the world (see Heather Keith, Dr Brendan Mackey, and Dr. David Lindenmayer (ANU), ?Re-evaluation of forest biomass carbon stocks and lessons from the world's most carbon-dense forests?, PNAS July 14, 2009 vol. 106 no. 28 11635-11640: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/28/11635.abstract?sid=c2645cfb-f32c-4e89-8323-5bf507db88a0 ).  

16. Ultimately one must judge a government on how well it has been prepared to ?tackle climate change? by the annual GHG pollution during its administration. Labor came to power at the end of 2007  when Australia's domestic plus exported GHG pollution was about 1,363 million tonnes CO2-e and will face the electorate in 2013 when, after 6 years, it will be about 1,497 million tonnes CO2-e, or roughly 10% bigger than under the conservative Liberal Government back in 2007. Labor will have had 6 years to "tackle climate change", is facing utter failure and should be kicked out following the principle "punish the incompetent incumbent".

PM Julia Gilard's broken pre-election pledge that "There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead", her pre-Coup pledges of loyalty to PM Kevin Rudd, her backsliding on promised poker machine gambling reforms, and her recent assertion that stories of an offer to get former NSW Premier Bob Carr as a Senator and Foreign Minister were "completely untrue" are the least of  the incorrect assertions of PM Julia Gillard. To paraphrase the title of a song from the Broadway musical "Paint Your Wagon" (1951), "They call the wind Ju-liar".

Utterly betrayed, pro-environment Labor voters will vote 1 Green and put Labor last .until it reverts to decent Labor values, not the least of which is being truthful.

Dr Gideon Polya has been teaching science students at a major Australian university for 4 decades. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003). He has published ?Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950? (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ); see also his contributions ?Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality? in ?Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics? (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007): http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1445960.htm ) and ?Ongoing Palestinian Genocide? in ?The Plight of the Palestinians (edited by William Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/4047-the-plight-of-the-palestinians.html ). He has published a revised and updated 2008 version of his 1998 book ?Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History? (see: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ) as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price increases threaten a greater famine catastrophe than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7 million Indians in the ?forgotten? World War 2 Bengal Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving Dr Polya, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others: http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/ bengalfamine_programme.html ). When words fail one can say it in pictures - for images of Gideon Polya's huge paintings for the Planet, Peace, Mother and Child see: http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/gideonpolya/ .

The loss of Arctic summer sea ice and the rapid warming of the Far North are altering the jet stream over North America, Europe, and Russia. Scientists are now just beginning to understand how these profound shifts may be increasing the likelihood of more persistent and extreme weather.

Does it seem as though your weather has become increasingly “stuck” lately? Day after day of cold, rain, heat, or blue skies may not be a figment of your imagination. While various oceanic and atmospheric patterns such as El Niño, La Niña, and the North Atlantic Oscillation have been blamed for the spate of unusual weather recently, there’s now a new culprit in the wind: Arctic amplification. Directly related to sea-ice loss and earlier snowmelt in the Far North, it is affecting the jet stream around the Northern Hemisphere, with potentially far-reaching effects on the weather.

Arctic amplification describes the tendency for high Northern latitudes to experience enhanced warming or cooling relative to the rest of the Northern Hemisphere. This heightened sensitivity is linked to the presence of snow and sea ice, and the feedback loops that they trigger. For example, as sea ice retreats, sunshine that would have been reflected back to space by the bright ice is instead absorbed by the ocean, which heats up, melting even more ice. As the world has warmed since the fossil-fuel revolution after World War II, Arctic temperatures have increased at more than twice the global rate. A dramatic indicator of this warming is the loss of Arctic sea ice in summer, which has declined by 40 percent in just the past three decades. The area of lost ice is about 1.3 million square miles, or roughly 42 percent of the area of the Lower 48 United States.

Extra heat entering the vast expanses of open water that were once covered in ice is released back to the atmosphere in the fall. This has led to an increase in near-surface, autumn air temperatures of 2 to 5 degrees C (3.6 to 9 degrees F) over much of the Arctic Ocean during the past decade. All that extra heat being deposited into the atmosphere cannot help but affect the weather, both locally and on a large scale. And there are growing indications that some weather phenomena in recent years — such as prolonged cold spells in Europe, heavy snows in the northeastern U.S. and Alaska, and heat waves in Russia — may be related to Arctic amplification.

But if so, how does it work?

The Arctic region is of course colder than the temperate zones, and it is this difference in temperature that propels the west-to-east river of fast-moving air known as the jet stream. This atmospheric feature separates warm air to its south from cold air to the north, and tends to follow a wavy path as it flows around the Northern Hemisphere between about 30o N and 60o N. It usually resides near the altitude where jets fly, hence its name. As high latitudes warm more than mid-latitudes, however, this north-south temperature difference weakens, which has two impacts on the jet stream.

The first effect is to slow the west-to-east speed of the jet stream, a phenomenon that already appears to be occurring. Upper-level winds around the Northern Hemisphere have slowed during autumn, from October to December, which is exactly when sea ice loss exerts its strongest effect on the north-south temperature gradient. Some regions exhibit even larger drops in wind speed, such as over North America and the North Atlantic, where winds have slowed by about 14 percent since 1980. Theory tells us that a decrease in the west-east flow tends to slow the eastward progression of waves in the jet stream. Because these waves control the formation and movement of storms, slower wave progression means that weather conditions will be more persistent. In other words, they will seem more “stuck.” This effect appears to play an important role mainly in autumn, because as sea ice reforms in winter, the north-south temperature difference gradually returns to more normal values.

The second way that Arctic amplification is expected to influence the jet stream and our weather is by increasing the “waviness” of the jet stream. Because of Arctic amplification, the northern peaks of waves, called ridges, will experience more warming than the southward dips, called troughs. This is expected to cause the ridges to stretch northward, which will increase the size of the waves. Larger swings in the jet stream allow frigid air from the Arctic to plunge farther south, as well as warm, moist tropical air to penetrate northward. These wavy flows often lead to record-breaking temperatures. Meteorologists have also known for a long time that larger jet-stream waves progress eastward more slowly, as will the weather systems associated with them. Consequently this represents another mechanism that will cause weather conditions to linger.

Increased waviness seems to be occurring during summer, as well; but instead of sea ice loss, the culprit appears to be the progressively earlier melt of snow on Arctic and sub-Arctic land in the spring. As snow disappears, bare soil is exposed to the strong spring sunshine earlier, which allows it to dry and warm sooner. This effect is at least partly responsible for the approximately 2 degrees C of warming over high-latitude land areas since the mid-1980s. This heat contributes to Arctic amplification during summer, which is expected once again to stretch ridges northward, increase waviness, and promote sluggish weather.

There have been many examples of “stuck” weather patterns during the past few years. Deep troughs in the jet stream hung over the U.S. east coast and Western Europe during the winters of 2009/2010 and 2010/2011, bringing a seemingly endless string of snow storms and teeth-chattering cold. In the early winter of 2011/2012, in contrast, these same areas were under ridges, or northward bulges of the jet stream, which brought unusually warm and snowless conditions over much of North America. At the same time, however, a deep trough sat over Alaska, dumping record snows. In early February this year, the jet stream plunged unusually far southward over Europe, bringing frigid Arctic air and snow to some areas that hadn’t seen those conditions in over half a century. During summer, persistent weather patterns are responsible for droughts and heat. The record heat waves in Europe and Russia in the past several years have been linked to early snowmelt in Siberia, and a sluggish high-pressure area caused last summer’s sweltering conditions in the south-central U.S.

While it’s difficult to point the finger at Arctic amplification in causing any of these weather events, they are the types of phenomena that are expected to occur more frequently as the world continues to warm and the Arctic continues to lose its ice. Further research may find ways to predict which regions will experience which conditions. But in the meantime, it’s increasingly likely that the weather you have today will stick around awhile.

Jennifer Francis is a research professor at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University, where she studies Arctic climate change and the link between Arctic and global climates. She has authored more than 40 peer-reviewed publications on these topics. She was also the co-founder of the Rutgers Climate and Environmental Change Initiative.

© 2008-2012 Yale University

Oil prices are now higher than they have ever been -- except for a few frenzied moments before the global economic meltdown of 2008. Many immediate factors are contributing to this surge, including Iran’s threats to block oil shipping in the Persian Gulf, fears of a new Middle Eastern war, and turmoil in energy-rich Nigeria. Some of these pressures could ease in the months ahead, providing temporary relief at the gas pump. But the principal cause of higher prices -- a fundamental shift in the structure of the oil industry -- cannot be reversed, and so oil prices are destined to remain high for a long time to come.

In energy terms, we are now entering a world whose grim nature has yet to be fully grasped. This pivotal shift has been brought about by the disappearance of relatively accessible and inexpensive petroleum -- “easy oil,” in the parlance of industry analysts; in other words, the kind of oil that powered a staggering expansion of global wealth over the past 65 years and the creation of endless car-oriented suburban communities. This oil is now nearly gone.

The world still harbors large reserves of petroleum, but these are of the hard-to-reach, hard-to-refine, “tough oil” variety. From now on, every barrel we consume will be more costly to extract, more costly to refine -- and so more expensive at the gas pump.

Those who claim that the world remains “awash” in oil are technically correct: the planet still harbors vast reserves of petroleum. But propagandists for the oil industry usually fail to emphasize that not all oil reservoirs are alike: some are located close to the surface or near to shore, and are contained in soft, porous rock; others are located deep underground, far offshore, or trapped in unyielding rock formations. The former sites are relatively easy to exploit and yield a liquid fuel that can readily be refined into usable liquids; the latter can only be exploited through costly, environmentally hazardous techniques, and often result in a product which must be heavily processed before refining can even begin.

The simple truth of the matter is this: most of the world’s easy reserves have already been depleted -- except for those in war-torn countries like Iraq. Virtually all of the oil that’s left is contained in harder-to-reach, tougher reserves. These include deep-offshore oil, Arctic oil, and shale oil, along with Canadian “oil sands” -- which are not composed of oil at all, but of mud, sand, and tar-like bitumen. So-called unconventional reserves of these types can be exploited, but often at a staggering price, not just in dollars but also in damage to the environment.

In the oil business, this reality was first acknowledged by the chairman and CEO of Chevron, David O’Reilly, in a 2005 letter published in many American newspapers. “One thing is clear,” he wrote, “the era of easy oil is over.” Not only were many existing oil fields in decline, he noted, but “new energy discoveries are mainly occurring in places where resources are difficult to extract, physically, economically, and even politically.”

Further evidence for this shift was provided by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in a 2010 review of world oil prospects. In preparation for its report, the agency examined historic yields at the world’s largest producing fields -- the “easy oil” on which the world still relies for the overwhelming bulk of its energy. The results were astonishing: those fields were expected to lose three-quarters of their productive capacity over the next 25 years, eliminating 52 million barrels per day from the world’s oil supplies, or about 75% of current world crude oil output. The implications were staggering: either find new oil to replace those 52 million barrels or the Age of Petroleum will soon draw to a close and the world economy would collapse.

Of course, as the IEA made clear back in 2010, there will be new oil, but only of the tough variety that will exact a price from us all -- and from the planet, too. To grasp the implications of our growing reliance on tough oil, it’s worth taking a whirlwind tour of some of the more hair-raising and easily damaged spots on Earth. So fasten your seatbelts: first we’re heading out to sea -- way, way out -- to survey the “promising” new world of twenty-first-century oil.

Deepwater Oil

Oil companies have been drilling in offshore areas for some time, especially in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caspian Sea. Until recently, however, such endeavors invariably took place in relatively shallow waters -- a few hundred feet, at most -- allowing oil companies to use conventional drills mounted on extended piers. Deepwater drilling, in depths exceeding 1,000 feet, is an entirely different matter. It requires specialized, sophisticated, and immensely costly drilling platforms that can run into the billions of dollars to produce.

The Deepwater Horizon, destroyed in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010 as a result of a catastrophic blowout, is typical enough of this phenomenon. The vessel was built in 2001 for some $500 million, and cost around $1 million per day to staff and maintain. Partly as a result of these high costs, BP was in a hurry to finish work on its ill-fated Macondo well and move the Deepwater Horizon to another drilling location. Such financial considerations, many analysts believe, explain the haste with which the vessel’s crew sealed the well -- leading to a leakage of explosive gases into the wellbore and the resulting blast. BP will now have to pay somewhere in excess of $30 billion to satisfy all the claims for the damage done by its massive oil spill.

Following the disaster, the Obama administration imposed a temporary ban on deep-offshore drilling. Barely two years later, drilling in the Gulf’s deep waters is back to pre-disaster levels. President Obama has also signed an agreement with Mexico allowing drilling in the deepest part of the Gulf, along the U.S.-Mexican maritime boundary.

Meanwhile, deepwater drilling is picking up speed elsewhere. Brazil, for example, is moving to exploit its “pre-salt” fields (so-called because they lie below a layer of shifting salt) in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean far off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. New offshore fields are similarly being developed in deep waters off Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.

By 2020, says energy analyst John Westwood, such deepwater fields will supply 10% of the world’s oil, up from only 1% in 1995. But that added production will not come cheaply: most of these new fields will cost tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to develop, and will only prove profitable as long as oil continues to sell for $90 or more per barrel.

Brazil’s offshore fields, considered by some experts the most promising new oil discovery of this century, will prove especially pricey, because they lie beneath one and a half miles of water and two and a half miles of sand, rock, and salt. The world’s most advanced, costly drilling equipment -- some of it still being developed -- will be needed. Petrobras, the state-controlled energy firm, has already committed $53 billion to the project for 2011-2015, and most analysts believe that will be only a modest down payment on a staggering final price tag.

Arctic Oil

The Arctic is expected to provide a significant share of the world’s future oil supply. Until recently, production in the far north has been very limited. Other than in the Prudhoe Bay area of Alaska and a number of fields in Siberia, the major companies have largely shunned the region. But now, seeing few other options, they are preparing for major forays into a melting Arctic.

From any perspective, the Arctic is the last place you want to go to drill for oil. Storms are frequent, and winter temperatures plunge far below freezing. Most ordinary equipment will not operate under these conditions. Specialized (and costly) replacements are necessary. Working crews cannot live in the region for long. Most basic supplies -- food, fuel, construction materials -- must be brought in from thousands of miles away at phenomenal cost.

But the Arctic has its attractions: billions of barrels of untapped oil, to be exact. According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the area north of the Arctic Circle, with just 6% of the planet’s surface, contains an estimated 13% of its remaining oil (and an even larger share of its undeveloped natural gas) -- numbers no other region can match.

With few other places left to go, the major energy firms are now gearing up for an energy rush to exploit the Arctic’s riches. This summer, Royal Dutch Shell is expected to begin test drilling in portions of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas adjacent to northern Alaska. (The Obama administration must still award final operating permits for these activities, but approval is expected.) At the same time, Statoil and other firms are planning extended drilling in the Barents Sea, north of Norway.

As with all such extreme energy scenarios, increased production in the Arctic will significantly boost oil company operating costs. Shell, for example, has already spent $4 billion alone on preparations for test drilling in offshore Alaska, without producing a single barrel of oil. Full-scale development in this ecologically fragile region, fiercely opposed by environmentalists and local Native peoples, will multiply this figure many times over.

Tar Sands and Heavy Oil

Another significant share of the world’s future petroleum supply is expected to come from Canadian tar sands (also called “oil sands”) and the extra-heavy oil of Venezuela. Neither of these is oil as normally understood. Not being liquid in their natural state, they cannot be extracted by traditional drilling materials, but they do exist in great abundance. According to the USGS, Canada’s tar sands contain the equivalent of 1.7 trillion barrels of conventional (liquid) oil, while Venezuela’s heavy oil deposits are said to harbor another trillion barrels of oil equivalent -- although not all of this material is considered “recoverable” with existing technology.

Those who claim that the Petroleum Age is far from over often point to these reserves as evidence that the world can still draw on immense supplies of untapped fossil fuels. And it is certainly conceivable that, with the application of advanced technologies and a total indifference to environmental consequences, these resources will indeed be harvested. But easy oil this is not.

Until now, Canada’s tar sands have been obtained through a process akin to strip mining, utilizing monster shovels to pry a mixture of sand and bitumen out of the ground. But most of the near-surface bitumen in the tar-sands-rich province of Alberta has now been exhausted, which means all future extraction will require a far more complex and costly process. Steam will have to be injected into deeper concentrations to melt the bitumen and allow its recovery by massive pumps. This requires a colossal investment of infrastructure and energy, as well as the construction of treatment facilities for all the resulting toxic wastes. According to the Canadian Energy Research Institute, the full development of Alberta’s oil sands would require a minimum investment of $218 billion over the next 25 years, not including the cost of building pipelines to the United States (such as the proposed Keystone XL) for processing in U.S. refineries.

The development of Venezuela’s heavy oil will require investment on a comparable scale. The Orinoco belt, an especially dense concentration of heavy oil adjoining the Orinoco River, is believed to contain recoverable reserves of 513 billion barrels of oil -- perhaps the largest source of untapped petroleum on the planet. But converting this molasses-like form of bitumen into a useable liquid fuel far exceeds the technical capacity or financial resources of the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. Accordingly, it is now seeking foreign partners willing to invest the $10-$20 billion needed just to build the necessary facilities.

The Hidden Costs

Tough-oil reserves like these will provide most of the world’s new oil in the years ahead. One thing is clear: even if they can replace easy oil in our lives, the cost of everything oil-related -- whether at the gas pump, in oil-based products, in fertilizers, in just about every nook and cranny of our lives -- is going to rise. Get used to it. If things proceed as presently planned, we will be in hock to big oil for decades to come.

And those are only the most obvious costs in a situation in which hidden costs abound, especially to the environment. As with the Deepwater Horizon disaster, oil extraction in deep-offshore areas and other extreme geographical locations will ensure ever greater environmental risks. After all, approximately five million gallons of oil were discharged into the Gulf of Mexico, thanks to BP’s negligence, causing extensive damage to marine animals and coastal habitats.

Keep in mind that, as catastrophic as it was, it occurred in the Gulf of Mexico, where vast cleanup forces could be mobilized and the ecosystem’s natural recovery capacity was relatively robust. The Arctic and Greenland represent a different story altogether, given their distance from established recovery capabilities and the extreme vulnerability of their ecosystems. Efforts to restore such areas in the wake of massive oil spills would cost many times the $30-$40 billion BP is expected to pay for the Deepwater Horizon damage and be far less effective.

In addition to all this, many of the most promising tough-oil fields lie in Russia, the Caspian Sea basin, and conflict-prone areas of Africa. To operate in these areas, oil companies will be faced not only with the predictably high costs of extraction, but also additional costs involving local systems of bribery and extortion, sabotage by guerrilla groups, and the consequences of civil conflict.

And don’t forget the final cost: If all these barrels of oil and oil-like substances are truly produced from the least inviting of places on this planet, then for decades to come we will continue to massively burn fossil fuels, creating ever more greenhouse gases as if there were no tomorrow. And here’s the sad truth: if we proceed down the tough-oil path instead of investing as massively in alternative energies, we may foreclose any hope of averting the most catastrophic consequences of a hotter and more turbulent planet.

So yes, there is oil out there. But no, it won’t get cheaper, no matter how much there is. And yes, the oil companies can get it, but looked at realistically, who would want it?

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and author of the just published The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources (Metropolitan Books). To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Klare discusses his new book and what it means to rely on extreme energy, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

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Copyright 2012 Michael Klare

With increasing velocity, since the advent of the post-Second World War national security state, then gaining speed with the incessant search and destroy mission waged on the U.S. Constitution known as the War on Drugs, and kicking into a runaway trajectory in the post Sept. 11, 2001 era -- the increase in totalitarian impulses, among both the general population and corporate and governmental elite of the nation, has proceeded at an alarming rate. Yet, baffling as the fact remains to those possessing a modicum of political awareness, large numbers of U.S. citizens persist in believing they dwell in a representative republic, governed by the principles of individual rights and civil liberties.

While Republicans desire to set clocks back to the Bronze Age -- Democrats now run on Republican Standard Time, as collectively, the nation's citizenry continues to roll over and hit the snooze button.

On an individual basis, if a sizable number of the nation's citizenry's concept of freedom of expression translates into little more than the act of casting a vote by iPhone involving a choice between a gaggle of cloying, longing-to-be-commodified crooners on American Idol -- it follows that the egregious assault on civil liberties posed by H.R. 347 (the so-call Anti Occupy Wall Street Bill…that has now made many acts of free speech and freedom of assembly a federal crime) will mean little within such a dim cosmology of diminished perception and even more dismal musical sensibility.

Reflecting how dire the assault on civil liberties has become: The aforementioned bill passed The House of Representatives by a 388 to 3 margin (and was signed, shortly thereafter, by President Obama, on Friday March 9, 2012).

Just what portion of the following admonitions contained within The Bill of Rights remains ambiguous to these legislators: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Notice: The opening sentence: "Congress shall make no law…" Notice as well: The right to "peaceably assemble" is guaranteed as prominently as any other right on the list.

The intent of this bill is clear: Despots and their operatives secure and retain power by rendering opposition to their rule unpleasant for dissenters. Systems of reward and punishment are maintained. For example, a right-wing radio demagogue will reap vast fortunes for his service, while truth tellers will be marginalized, or if they start to grow effective…be crushed by police state tactics and legislative caprice (e.g., the manner that enforcers of the current order have attempted to systemically repress the Occupy Wall Street Movement).

Make no mistake regarding the times we have been given. This struggle will be long and difficult. Despotic personality types, as a rule, are not struck by life-altering epiphanies regarding the emptiness of a life attendant to autocratically imposing repressive measures upon the powerless to ensure the continuance of their privileged status. Do not expect to hear the lamentation of the greedy as they awaken to how their addiction to wealth has isolated them Midas-style in a mode of mind wherein their souls exist in a state of starvation, because the soul is not nourished by hoarded gold (or funneling formations of electronic pixels representing commodity transactions).

On a personal basis, if you insist on standing opposed to despotism, expect trouble. In that case, one loses all certainties…save one: The retention of a viable sense of self.

"So little pains do the shallow take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand."—Thucydides, from The History of the Peloponnesian War

When one attempts to stand against surging social and political tides, feelings of powerlessness can flood one with anxiety. Accordingly, a single individual can become inundated with feelings of unease and uncertainty. As a result, the social pressure to drown angst-creating individual doubt within the mindless certainties of a mob can become overwhelming. Often, brick by brick, in an attempt to withstand these powerful inner feelings and outward pressures, we build a structure of false consciousness…that we, often, mistake for our convictions, and tragically mistake this dismal dwelling for the whole of existence.

How then is it possible to withstand feelings of powerlessness?

Put one foot in front of the other. Write one word after the next on your protest sign. Make your life a flaming arrow aimed at the dry and rotted heart of the system or make your own heart a warm hearth of compassion for its victims, as you negotiate its cold realities. 

Thus, hope becomes a process of engagement, not a comforting lie; not the stuff of public relations hustlers and political hacks but a quality of honest conviction and persistent labor; and not a cynical marketing tool.

Relentlessly, from early childhood on, our hopes and longings are subject to commodification by the dream-usurpers of the corporate state. The process of mental colonization by the commercial hologram is as pervasive within us as was the dogmatic influence of The Church within the psyches of Dark Age peasants.

The present order's litany of economic inequity affords few the option of committing the heresy of questioning (or even apprehending) the exploitative and destructive nature of the system. As an example, citizenship as defined by consumerism has created a landscape devoid of public space. (The attempt to redefine what constitutes public space is one of the many threatening aspects of the Occupy Wall Street movement to the current power structure.)

Therefore, the inherent human need for a sense of place and belonging can be easily warped into a belligerent nationalism that deadens the heart as it warps an individual's libidinous drive for communal engagement into displaced rage, conveniently appropriated by political demagogues into a lust for perpetual war.

Under such conditions, one's life is not one's own. A disassociation occurs, an attempt to distance oneself from the demeaning demands of exploitative social arrangements. Under these circumstances, a kind of cultural amnesia can occur. Perhaps, this relates to the U.S. populace's difficulty involving collective memory, expressed in the well-known witticism that U.S. citizens inhabit: "The United States of Amnesia".

When one's authentic identity is not engaged in creating the criteria of one's life, even one's memories seem the dismal, evanescent dream of a stranger; it is difficult to store and recall unfolding events when one is in a trance of false consciousness.

Hence, one must insist upon regaining possession of one's life…to regain memory and engage imagination.

Distinct from self-indulgent navel-gazing, this is a call to action. At this critical point, the situation involves more than a search for meaning and resonance (although those things arrive as byproducts of the effort) -- for we have been presented with a worldwide crisis involving not only the nature of our lives as individuals -- but also a radically worsening crisis involving the health of our environmentally besieged planet.

"Psychological awareness rises from errors, coincidences, indefiniteness, from the chaos deeper than intelligent control."--James Hillman

Therefore, pardon this writer's brief digression into personal memory.

I buried a turtle in the sky.

While exploring a creek near my home in Georgia, one spring afternoon, when I was ten, I happened upon a group of boys defiling the corpse of a massive--easily five feet in circumference--snapping turtle, by detonating firecrackers, cherry bombs, and M-80s that they had placed in the creature's putrescent flesh.

Overwhelmed with mortification, I turned and staggered from the scene, before the boys, entranced in vicious revelry, noticed my presence. I retreated to the cover of a swath of scrub brush and pine saplings and vomited.

At that time, I lacked the lexicon, both verbal and emotive, to come to grips with what I had witnessed.

Years later, I had this enigmatic dream. I'm ascending in an elevator into a high tower, a modernist structure that serves as "a college dorm room in the sky".

I proceed to the top floor. Upon entering the room, after passing two pretty, brunette, female twins in their mid-twenties, who dismiss me as "a poor prospect in a material regard", I came upon an individual, who, in the waking world, in the years to come, I would mentor and I would come to write the bulk of a spoken word act he still tours with to this day.

Outside the window of this dorm in the sky, earthbound transportation vehicles, such as passenger, freight, and subway trains, made a path through the heavens.

Then, descending from above, with increasing velocity, an object appeared that was on a collision course with our perch. Before we had time to react, it crashed through the ceiling of the room…revealing itself to be the corpse of a massive tortoise, its shell affixed with wings constructed of papier-mâché.

Apparently, during childhood, to paraphrase the poet, the world was too much with me. Its casual cruelty and inherent brutality caused me to retreat skyward…I was a poor prospect in the "material" realm, with its attendant rotting flesh and vicious laughter. I chose to ensconce myself in a psychic university above the stupid and brutal…to find a means to bury the corpse of that poor turtle in heaven.

The temptation is still great…to stay above it all. But, unlike a child, I now have the lexicon to remain on earth…to hold my ground when I am mortified and give voice to my sorrows and outrage.

Therefore, to be true to myself, I must give wings to the living and dead. I must address matters that are hard to stomach.

It is a hard slog…I proceed along, at times, at a turtle's pace…but there are moments when a terrapin brings me images from the brackish depths, and, on occasion, I can make mundane thoughts fly.

But this is not only about me. On an environmental level, as a global-wide business model and a personal mode of being in the world, we, in our demented revelry, are treating the earth as if it is a dead thing, a corpse we happened upon, and, like those cruel, ignorant boys of my childhood memory, we are blasting our world to bits (e.g., bombing, mining, fracking, defoliating…and the hideous list goes on and on) without reflection or regret.

Given, the rapidly declining ecological balance of our planet, a balance of diverse, interrelated systems that are essential for the continuance of conditions favorable for our species to thrive, an individual can no longer afford to bury one's outrage in heaven or vault it in the depths of oneself. It is selfish to believe that one's angst and alienation are exclusively one's own.

One of the powerful attractions of the OWS movement has been its emphasis on reclaiming the public commons from the corporate state, and the dire need for cultural communion beyond the commercial sphere. Thus, for an atomized, alienated populace, the movement has provided a refresher course in the act of simply being human, on existing together in communal space.

OWS is not about "winning" political advantage…that approach plays into the fallacy of the winner/loser dichotomy of the capitalist superstate. Conversely, by acting in the world in a manner that is unique to one's character, one awakens memory and reanimates imagination, thereby allowing an individual to occupy his own life and times, and serving to help ameliorate the noxious effects of the internalized false consciousness of corporate state authoritarianism.

Unless we start to see the world and our role in it with new eyes, we will be unable to alter the structure of the present system. Withal, it is imperative to be in full possession of one's humanity when facing the desperate, dehumanizing forces of an order that has grown ever more brutal in direct proportion to its rapidly declining purpose and legitimacy.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil’s website: http://philrockstroh.com/ or at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=100000711907499

Annie Leonard is one of the most articulate, effective champions of the commons today. Her webfilm The Story of Stuff has been seen more than 15 million times by viewers. She also adapted it into a book.

Drawing on her experience investigating and organizing on environmental health and justice issues in more than 40 countries, Leonard says she’s “made it her life’s calling to blow the whistle on important issues plaguing our world.”

She deploys hard facts, common sense, witty animation and an engaging “everywoman” role as narrator to probe complex problems such as the high costs of consumerism, the influence of corporate money in our democracy, and government budget priorities.

In 2008, she founded the Story of Stuff Project, to help people get involved in making the decisions that affect their future and to create new webfilms on critical issues such as The Story of Citizens United and The Story of Bottled Water. Her most recent film The Story of Broke , provides a riveting rebuttal to claims that America can no longer afford health and social protections.

Here Leonard answers a few questions from OTC about the importance of the commons in her life, work and the world.

What are a few of the most beloved commons in your life and community?

I asked this question to our Story of Stuff team over lunch recently and the conversation lit up as we each called out commons we cherish most. We identified cultural commons that add such richness to our lives (music, recipes, the amazing murals in San Francisco), physical commons that we use daily (the library, bike lanes and dog parks ranked high); social commons that make the broader society better for all (teachers, health care providers, the woman who helps pedestrians cross the street at a particularly busy intersection near our office). We also thought of another category, which I’ll call aspirational commons: hope, passion, commitment, the future. These belong to all of us, and it is up to all of us to protect and nourish them—because a society without hope and passion, and without a possibility-rich future, is a dreary society indeed. And, of course, our democracy: it belongs to all of us and only works when we all engage.

For us at The Story of Stuff Project, the commons is also an orientation; it is about how we do things, how we work together as much as the assets that we all share. It is the act of figuring out solutions together and ensuring diverse voices are engaged in planning processes. It is a commitment to collective action, collective wellbeing and having each other’s backs. It is the realization that no one is as smart as everyone. It’s the realization that we all do better when we all do better.

How did you first learn about the commons?

I first learned about the commons as a kid using parks and libraries. I didn’t assign the label “commons” to them, but I understood early on that some things belong to all of us and these shared assets enhance our lives and rely on our care. I also learned that investments in the commons pay back manyfold: if we organize a litter clean up, we get a super fun park to play in.

Like many other college students, my first introduction to the word “commons” was sadly in conjunction with the word “sheep” and “tragedy.” That lousy resource management class tainted the word for me for years, until I heard Ralph Nader address a group of college students. He asked them to yell out a list of everything they own. This being the pre-i-gadget 1980’s, the list included “Sony Walkman…boombox… books…bicycle…clothes…bank account.” When the lists started to peter out, Ralph asked about National Parks and public air waves. A light went off in each of our heads, and a whole new list was shouted out: rivers, libraries, the Smithsonian, monuments. That’s when I realized that the commons isn’t an overgrazed pasture; it really is all that we share.

How does the commons influence your work?

The commons is a key piece of building a sustainable, healthy and fair society. At the Story of Stuff Project, we’re concerned about the hyper-individualization and consumer-mania that has taken over our society. It’s a problem because we’re consuming more resources than the planet can produce each year and creating more waste than it can assimilate. The Global Footprint Network says we’re using 1.5 planets worth of resources a year. Basic physics dictates that we simply can’t keep consuming at this rate. In addition to depleting the very planet on which life depends, our consumer culture isn’t making us happy. We’re working longer hours than in just about any other industrialized country, we’re constantly stressed, tired and burdened by debt. It’s no coincidence that rates of social isolation, loneliness and depression are also on the rise. A thriving commons helps on all these fronts.

Shared things means we use less resources overall; that we can slow down the frenzied work-watch-spend treadmill; and that we’re investing in community rather than clutter and consumer debt. For example, my town has a Tool Lending Library as part of the public library system. Rather than every household needing to own a power drill and jackhammer, we can just borrow them for the few times a year we need them. This could be extended to include all sorts of things. Shared public resources means less resources consumed overall, less waste generated, less money spent and more time chatting with our neighbors – building community.

How does the commons affect your life?

Recognizing and nurturing the commons makes my life sweeter, easier, richer, lighter, happier. I end up with less stuff and more friends.

What strategies do you recommend for making more people aware of the importance of the commons?

Talking about the commons is a critical first step. We’re so indoctrinated in an individualist focused approach to stuff and private property that we need to be reminded—like my college class mentioned above—that there’s much more that we share and, that for a wide range of things, sharing is better. So, let’s introduce the term into public discourse, slip it into conversations, include it in letters to the editor and blog posts. Talking more about the commons will make it more visible.

It’s hard to love what we don’t see, so let’s bring the commons right out into the spotlight!

I also fear that I am not alone in having associated the “commons” with a sheep-filled pasture for too long. We need to think of more ways to explain what the commons is, to create a new frame for the word, so that the full richness of the commons comes to mind when we hear the term. I love the phrase “all that we share.” That’s clear, accessible and makes us feel good thinking about all that we share. That’s what we want people to feel when they think of the commons.

What do you see as the biggest obstacle to creating a commons-based society right now?

There are so many interrelated aspects of our current economic and social systems which undermine the commons. Some obstacles are structural, like government spending priorities that elevate military spending and oil company subsidies over maintenance of parks and libraries. Others are social, including the erosion in social fabric and community-based lifestyles. Actually, even those have structural drivers; for example, land use planning which eliminates sidewalks and requires long commutes to work contribute to breakdown of social commons by impeding social interactions. It’s all so interconnected!

A huge obstacle is the shift towards greater privatization and commodification of physical and social assets. Many things that used to be shared – from open spaces for recreation to support systems to help a neighbor in need – have been privatized and commodified; they’ve been moved out of the community into the market place. This triggers a downward spiral. Once things become privatized, or un-commoned, we no longer have access to them without paying a fee. We then have to work longer hours to pay for all these things which used to be freely available – everything from safe afterschool recreation for kids to clean water to swim in to someone to talk to when you’re feeling blue. And since we’re working longer hours and spending more time alone, we have less time to contribute to the commons to rebuild these assets: less volunteer hours, less beach-clean-up days, less time for civic engagement to advocate for policies that protect the commons, less time to invite a neighbor over for tea. And on it goes.

What is the greatest opportunity to strengthen and expand the commons right now?

In spite of real obstacles, we have a lot on our side as we advance a commons-based agenda. First, we have no choice. There’s a very real ecological imperative weighing down on us. Even if we wanted to continue this overconsumptive, hyper individualistic and vastly unequal way of living, we simply can’t. We have to learn to share more and waste less, to find joy and meaning in shared assets and experiences rather than in private accumulation, to work together for a better world, rather than to build bigger walls around those who can. And the good news is that these changes not only will enable us to continue to live on this planet, but they will result in a happier, healthier society overall.

There’s another shift emerging which offers some real opportunities for building support for the commons. People in the overconsuming parts of the world are getting fed up with the burden of trying to own everything individually. We used to own our stuff and increasingly our stuff owns us. We work extra hours to buy more stuff, we spend our weekends sorting our stuff. We’re constantly needing to upgrade, repair, untangle, recharge, even pay to store our stuff. It’s exhausting.

The shift I see emerging is from an acquisition focused relationship to stuff, to an access- focused relationship. In the acquisition framework, the more stuff we had, the better, as captured in the 1990s bumpersticker “He Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins.” Having spent a couple decades being slaves to our stuff, we are rethinking. Now it is “He Who dies with the Most Toys Wasted His Life Working to Buy Them and Lived in a Cluttered House When He Could have been Investing in Community with which to Share Toys.”

Increasingly people want access to stuff, not all the burden that comes with ownership. Instead of owning a car and dealing with all that comes with it, we get one just when we want through city car share programs. Instead of hiring a plumber, we swap music lessons with one through skillsharing networks. Why buy something to own alone, when we can share it with others? Why signup for an even more crushing mortgage for a house with a big back yard, when we can instead share public parks? From coast to coast, there’s a resurgence of sharing, so much that it even has a fancy new name: collaborative consumption.

I’m really excited about this. A whole new generation of people is realizing that access to shared stuff is easier on one’s budget and on the planet, then individual ownership. Now, that’s liberating.

Today there is growing agreement that all of humanity is undergoing a basic transformation of awareness, moving toward a different way of experiencing ourselves, our relation to history, to Nature, and to other people. These processes of coming into a healthy relationship with the natural world and of renewing human culture are going on at the same time and are closely related trends. World Citizens - Senegal However, we must not skirt the severity or the complexity of the problems facing humankind today. With a global human population of seven billion, with topsoil being swept away and thousands of species in danger of disappearing, we have gone about as far as we can go in the direction of imposing our human domination on Nature.

Thus in order to re-establish a healthy equilibrium, we need a new awareness of humans as a part of Nature but with a special duty of care and respect for the earth’s interrelated life-support system.

We have every reason to believe that it is possible for us to achieve a stable, sustainable, and fulfilling mode of life based on the enduring values of empathy and nurturance if we make the necessary efforts. Therefore, we need a revitalized sense of who we are as human beings — an image of humanity that is uplifting and inclusive.

This renewal of our awareness of Nature will require that we get in touch with our deepest needs and that we find our own internal source of meaning. As we express more fully this inner source of meaning, we will develop a more health culture which connects people to one another and to the land. Thus a healthy culture is a sustainable culture going from generation to generation.

Earth is Our Common Home. Therefore we must protect it together.

Aujourd'hui s'élève l'accord que toute l'humanité subit une transformation de base de conscience, se déplaçant vers une manière différente de s'éprouver, notre relation à l'histoire, à la nature, et à d'autres personnes. Ces processus d'hériter un rapport sain avec le monde normal et de remplacer la culture humaine continuent en même temps et sont des tendances étroitement liées.

Citoyens du monde - Sénégal Cependant, nous ne devons pas aborder la sévérité ou la complexité des problèmes se posant à l'humanité aujourd'hui. Avec une population humaine globale de sept milliards, avec le terrain végétal étant balayé et les milliers d'espèces en danger de la disparition, nous sommes allés environ dans la mesure où nous pouvons aller dans la direction d'imposer notre domination humaine à la nature.

Ainsi afin de rétablir un équilibre sain, nous avons besoin d'une nouvelle conscience des humains comme partie de la nature mais avec un devoir de diligence spécial et en respectant la terre en corrélation vie-soutenons le système. Nous avons chacun raison de croire qu'il est possible de réaliser un stable, soutenable, et mode accomplissant de la vie basé sur les valeurs durables de l'empathie et de la bienveillance si nous faisons les efforts nécessaires. Par conséquent, nous avons besoin d'un sens revitalisé de qui nous sommes comme êtres humains - une image de l'humanité qui est élevante et entière.

Ce renouvellement de notre conscience de nature exigera que nous contactons nos besoins plus profonds et que nous trouvons notre propre source interne de signification. Car nous exprimons plus entièrement cette source intérieure de signification, nous développerons plus de culture de santé qui relie des personnes à d' autres sur la terre. Ainsi une culture saine est une culture soutenable allant de génération en génération. La terre est notre maison commune. Par conséquent nous devons la protéger ensemble.

hoy alumno acuerdo que todo humanidad súbito una transformación básica de conciencia, desplazándose hacia una diferente manera de probar, nuestra relación a historia, a la naturaleza, y a d' otras personas. Estos procesos heredar un informe sano con el mundo normal y de sustituir a la cultura humana siguen al mismo tiempo y son tendencias estrechamente vinculadas.

Ciudadanos del mundo - Senegal sin embargo, no debemos abordar la severidad o la complejidad de los problemas que se plantean a humanidad aujourd' hoy. Con una población humana global de siete mil millones, con el terreno vegetal bárrese y los millares especies en peligro de la desaparición, fuimos alrededor en la medida en que podemos ir en la dirección imponer nuestra soberanía humana a la naturaleza.

Así con el fin de restablecer un equilibrio sano, tenemos necesidad una nueva conciencia del humanos como parte de la naturaleza pero con un deber de diligencia especial y respetando la tierra en correlación vida-sostienen el sistema. Tenemos cada uno razón creer que es posible realizar un estable, sostenible, y método realizando de la vida basado en los valores duraderos de empathie y de la benevolencia si hacemos los esfuerzos necesarios. Por lo tanto, tenemos necesidad un sentido revitalizado de que somos como seres humanos - una imagen de humanidad que es que eleva y entera.

Esta renovación de nuestra conciencia de naturaleza exigirá que contactamos nuestras necesidades más profundas y que encontramos nuestra propia fuente interna de significado. Ya que expresamos más enteramente esta fuente interior de significado, desarrollaremos más cultura de salud que conecta personas a otro sobre la tierra. Así una cultura sana es una cultura sostenible que va de generación en generación. La tierra es nuestra casa común. Por lo tanto debemos protegerla juntos

hoje aluno acordo que qualquer humanidade súbita uma transformação básica de consciência, deslocando-se para uma maneira diferente de provar, a nossa relação à história, à natureza, e à outras pessoas.

Estes processos herdar um relatório são com o mundo normal e de substituir a cultura humana continua ao mesmo tempo e é tendências estreitamente ligadas.

Cidadãos do mundo - o Senegal contudo, não devemos abordar a severidade ou a complexidade dos problemas que põem-se à humanidade aujourd' hoje. Com uma população humana global de sete mil milhões, com o terreno vegetal varrido e os milhares d' espécies em perigo do desaparecimento, fomos cerca de na medida em que podemos ir na direcção impôr a nossa dominação humana à natureza. Assim a fim de restabelecer um equilíbrio são, temos necessidade uma nova consciência do humanos como parte da natureza mas com um dever de aplicação especial e respeitando a terra em correlação vida-apoiam o sistema. Temos cada um razão de crer que é possível realizar um estável, sustentável, e modo que realiza da vida baseado nos valores duradouros de empathie e da benevolência se fazemos os esforços necessários.

Por conseguinte, temos necessidade um sentido revitalizado de que somos como seres humanos - uma imagem de humanidade que é criando e inteira. Esta renovação da nossa consciência de natureza exigirá que contactar as nossas necessidades mais profundas e que encontramos a nossa própria fonte interna de significado. Porque exprimimos mais inteiramente esta fonte interna de significado, desenvolveremos mais cultura de saúde que ligar pessoas à outro sobre a terra. Assim uma cultura sã é uma cultura sustentável que vai de geração em geração. A terra é a nossa casa comum. Por conseguinte devemos proteger-o juntos.

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Syria has a secular government as did Iraq prior to the American invasion. Secular governments are important in Arab lands in which there is division between Sunni and Shi’ite. Secular governments keep the divided population from murdering one another.

US Instigation of Perpetual Wars

When the American invasion, a war crime under the Nuremberg standard set by the US after WWII, overthrew the Saddam Hussein secular government, the Iraqi Sunnis and Shi'ites went to war against one another. The civil war between Iraqis saved the American invasion. Nevertheless, enough Sunnis found time to fight the American occupiers of Iraq that the US was never able to occupy Bagdad, much less Iraq, no matter how violent and indiscriminate the US was in the application of force.

The consequence of the US invasion was not democracy and women’s rights in Iraq, much less the destruction of weapons of mass destruction which did not exist as the weapons inspectors had made perfectly clear beforehand. The consequence was to transfer political power from Sunnis to Shi’ites. The Shi’ite version of Islam is the Iranian version. Thus, Washington’s invasion transferred power in Iraq from a secular government to Shi’ites allied with Iran.

Now Washington intends to repeat its folly in Syria. According to the American secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, Washington is even prepared to ally with al-Qaeda in order to overthrow Assad’s government. Now that Washington itself has al-Qaeda connections, will the government in Washington be arrested under the anti-terrorism laws?

Washington’s hostility toward Assad is hypocritical. On February 26, the Syrian government held a referendum on a new constitution for Syria that set term limits on future presidents and removed the political monopoly that the Ba’ath Party has enjoyed.

The Syrian voter turnout was 57.4%, matching the voter turnout for Obama in 2008. It was a higher voter turnout (despite the armed, western-supported rebellion in Syria) than in the nine US presidential elections from 1972 through 2004. The new Syrian constitution was approved by a vote of 89.4%. But Washington denounced the democratic referendum and claims that the Syrian government must be overthrown in order to bring democracy in Syria.

Washington’s allies in the region, unelected oil monarchies such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have issued statements that they are willing to supply weapons to the Islamist rebels in order to bring democracy – something they do not tolerate at home – to Syria.

America’s Meaning of Democracy

For Washington “democracy” is a weapon of mass destruction. When Washington brings “democracy” to a country, it means the country’s destruction, as in Libya and Iraq. It doesn’t mean democracy. Libya is in chaos, a human rights nightmare without an effective government. Washington installed Nouri al-Maliki as president of Iraq. He lost an election, but remained in power. He has declared his vice president to be a terrorist and ordered his arrest and is using the state police to arrest Sunni politicians. Syria’s Assad is more democratic than Iraq’s Maliki.

For a decade Washington has misrepresented its wars of naked aggression as “bringing democracy and human rights to the Middle East.” While Washington was bringing democracy to the Middle East, Washington was destroying democracy in the US. Washington has resurrected medieval torture dungeons and self-incrimination. Washington has destroyed due process and habeas corpus. At Obama’s request, Congress passed overwhelmingly a law that permits American subjects to be imprisoned indefinitely without a trial or presentation of evidence. Warrantless searches and spying, illegal and unconstitutional at the turn of the 21st century, are now routine.

Obama has even asserted the right, for which there is no law on the books, to murder any American anywhere if the executive branch decides, without presenting any evidence, that the person is a threat to the US government. Any American anywhere can be murdered on the basis of subjective opinion in the executive branch, which increasingly is the only branch of the US government. The other two “co-equal” branches have shriveled away under the “war on terror.” Why is Washington so determined to bring democracy to the Middle East (with the exception of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and the Emirates), Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, and China, but is hostile to constitutional rights in America?

The rights that Americans gained from successful revolution against King George III in the 18th century have all been taken away by Bush/Obama in the 21st century. One might think that this would be a news story, but it isn’t. Don’t expect the Ministry of Truth to say anything about it.

Paul Craig Roberts [send him mail], a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random House. Visit his website. March 3, 2012

Copyright © 2012 Paul Craig Roberts
Mohammad Basir-ul Haq Sinha, Journalist,
E mail:mohammad_b_haq@yahoo.co.uk