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Some reading for those not familiar with the concept of ‘Peak Oil’: Wikipedia’s Peak Oil Page.
As with so many things in the world today, the USA is leading the way on modeling what happens to a countries oil demand after the easy to access oil it uses from its own fields starts to let it down.
As the national production of oil declined the US didn’t start to think of new products to replace oil, it just started to buy it from other countries. The reason Americans complain about $3 (approx. £1.50 or 33 pence a litre) a gallon prices is because they are used to much, much cheaper prices from their own fields. The US peaked in 1971, so the old, cheap petrol is still very much in the memories of a lot of motorists who are much more used to a dollar a gallon or less. While those in the US complained about their $3 a gallon, in the UK we were paying $8 a gallon.
If anyone has tried to push their car for any sort of distance they will understand what petrol provides us. As Richard Heinberg points out in this short clip, a gallon of petrol can push a standard car 20 miles (more efficient cars will get more, less efficient will get lesss). If you’re going to try to push your car 20 miles you’d better be exceptionally fit. But a gallon of petrol does that work and is exceptionally cheap for the work it does. Imagine trying to find someone or a group of people to push your car 20 miles. It’d cost you a lot more than £4.50. I doubt you could regularly find people willing to do it for less than a few hundred pounds. This is just an illustration of what petrol provides us with and why it’s so insanely cheap.
Here’s another Richard Heinberg clip which I think is interesting and on-topic.
As the graph above nicely demonstrates, we can demonise China all we like for their use of oil, but the US is still head and shoulders above them. The crown of world energy user is still firmly in the West.
The amount of oil an OPEC nation is allowed to drill and sell is directly proportionate to the amount of reserves that country has. A measure designed to stop the market getting flooded with cheap oil and so keep prices at a level that makes insane profits for a few massive companies. As you can imagine, this means that OPEC member states have a big impetus to lie about their reserves. The years after this rule was adopted most OPEC members revised the size of most of their oil fields upwards quite sharply so they could pump more oil and earn more money. This makes the information on this Wikipedia page doubly dubious, but it gives an indication that the largest oil fields in the world are starting to or have already peaked.
This problem isn’t one that might see fruition, maybe, possibly. It’s a fact, a certainty. From the instant the first drop of oil, the first flake of coal, the first whiff of natural gas was extracted and burnt to provide energy it was inevitable that one day we would be here. This is because of the simple fact that coal, natural gas and oil all take millions of years to form and are finite. We know this, it’s a fact we have known for a long time.
Yet the answers to peak oil have been electric cars (powered by electricity generated by fossil fuels), hydrogen fuel cells (created using electricity generated by fossil fuels), and bio-fuels (grown on fields which use a lot of petro-chemicals[1] in order to make their yield higher and harvested by machines using fossil fuels). The point I’m making is that the solutions to the peak oil problem is invariably using other fossil fuels or the oil in a less efficient way. Insanity.
Then there are the people who say we can run our cars on electricity generated by nuclear power. Forgetting, perhaps by accident, perhaps on purpose, that nuclear power doesn’t just appear from nowhere by magic and that uranium is also finite and a lot more scarce. Estimates are that the Earth has about enough for the use of humans for 12 years. A real good alternative, I think you’ll agree.
Maybe we could make enough renewable energy sources, such as wind, tidal, hydroelectric, solar, etc, to run our cars in the future. Since these sources, especially the sun, will be with us for as long as we can live on the Earth, they are a good alternative to be thinking about. Yet NIMBYs are allowed to stop the production of these simply because they don’t like the look of them! Oh, also many of the materials needed for their production come form oil so we’re still screwed as it’s another short term fix. Once we’re out of oil we wont be able to make any more of them and wont be able to repair the ones we’ve made already.
Finally, the catch-22? The worst possible outcome is that we find large reserves of oil to exploit. Allowing our current business as normal to continue. Allowing the exploitation and destruction of natural environments to continue. Allowing the release of yet more carbon dioxide. Allowing the further pollution of our planet. Allowing the further increase of our population and further population overshoot to happen.
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[1] The ratio of calories out in the form of food and calories in in the form of fossil fuels for many agricultural methods is in the region of 1:25, or 25 times more energy used than produced. Sometimes this can be as bad as 1:150, if the food is air-freighted. Interesting reading about how food is oil.
Since I never intended for this blog to be all about climate change, I decided to post my current thoughts about the leadership troubles facing the Labour party at the current time.
The first question people keep asking is “should Brown be PM?” My initial answer is “don’t care, none of the potentials is any better or worse, none will bring about the fundamental change we need, so it doesn’t matter.” However, if I were to attack the question assuming I care about the well-being of the Labour party and want them to have a future, this would be my answer:
Yes, Brown should be PM until the next election. There is no point in getting a new guy in to take the mauling that the Labour party will be handed at the next election. There is no point in wasting a potential leader by having their credibility ruined by the defeat Labour is certain to suffer at the next elections.
Are Labour certain to lose? Yes. They have been in power for over a decade. They can’t blame any of the problems they are facing on the other guys and they can’t tell the truth, that the problems are so outside of their control that it gives them nightmares. The problems they are currently facing – increased petrol prices, increased household energy prices, increased costs to insurance companies of natural disasters, crazy economic conditions – are not within the control of our government, they are world problems which the whole planet must combat and isn’t.
So, Brown should captain the sinking ship. He should do his best and then hand over to fresh blood after the defeat so that the Conservatives can show the problems aren’t to do with which colour party is in power, but to do with the changes going on world-wide. Then Labour might have a chance of securing a win after only one term out of power.
Firstly, what do I mean by a religion? I agree to a certain extent with the English legal system’s definition of a religion as any system of beliefs which concerns man’s relationship with god. However, I would also argue that religion must deal with man’s relationship to his landbase. Almost all religions have aspects of this, Christianity, Islam, Judaism all do due to their shared roots. However, the landbase which the Abrahamic religions teach us to live on isn’t the landbase of most people in the world. It’s the landbase which it sprang up from.
The Jewish and Islamic positions on pork and the preparation of meat is due entirely to the cleanliness of food within a very hot climate. Whether you believe that God told them these things in order to keep them safe from the dangers of eating, for example, pork which is rancid, or if you believe that the people responsible for formulating the religion had been told by their parents (who had been told by theirs, etc) about the dangers and so formulated these dangers into rules, it doesn’t matter. The religion teaches the adherent how to live in the land it came from.
For the rules of a religion to be good rules they must deal with the way a person should live with the land they live on. If the religion you follow either doesn’t do this or does this for the land you don’t live on, then the rules you are following are probably stupid, possibly dangerous, certainly the wrong rules.
I don’t have a problem with a religion, per se, practiced in the right context. What I do have a problem with is monolithic religions which are practiced out of context. The Abrahamic religions are such religions. They moved from their landbase and from their context and are now dictating how I live my life. They are applying the wrong rules in the wrong places for the wrong reasons.
Religion, like everything, should be local. It should have come form the land you live on and relate to the way you should live in harmony with the land you live on. Chances are if you’re following a religion and move that you should change your religion to suit your new locality.
I am not a religious person. I do not follow the dogma of any of the religions of the world, since none of the religions of the world came from my landbase.
I see monolithic religions which claim to have The Only Answer to be a large part of the problem we are facing. If people can be so passionate about being so wrong, how can anyone convince them of anything they don’t want to hear?
“Scientists once tried to build a sealed living world – nicknamed biosphere 2 – from scratch in a big greenhouse in the Arizona desert. They failed. As carbon dioxide levels rose within the sealed greenhouses, Biosphere 2’s human inhabitants must have reflected on the lessons they were learning as they gasped for air. Functioning ecosystems cannot be created artificially. Life keeps us alive, and we lay waste to it at our peril.” — Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Out Future on a Hotter Planet, pg 106.
I don’t want to pick on Biosphere 2 specifically. I want more to focus on the idea that technologies are going to save us. Biosphere 2 is simply a good example of how limited our knowledge of the world around us is. We believe we are masters of all we survey, that we are special and steer our own destiny, that we are apart from other life on this planet and can therefore do with other life as we please.
We can’t use other life as we please. We don’t know the impacts of what we are doing. We often don’t accept that what we are seeing is an impact from an action we have taken. For too long there was a debate in the mass media which didn’t exist in scientific circles. As Al Gore says on the DVD, Inconvienient Truth, there were no questions against the conclusions of the scientific papers linking global climate change with human activity. Over the same time period around 50% of the articles published in mass media news stated that the findings were inconclusive or that there was a debate over the findings of these scientific reports. In other words, the mass media lied. Nothing new there.
There will not be a technological fix for the problems we are creating. For many of the problems, the really, really big problems, which we are creating, we aren’t even looking for solutions.
“Today, we are sort of in the middle of a mass experiment,” says Bralower. “With the oceans warming, we do not really know what the end result will be, but we can look to the fossil record to see how they were affected in the past. It appears that abrupt climate change affects plankton with selectivity and most of the organisms bounce right back after the change.” — Source: ScienceDaily
The article does tell us the climatic change range that the research considered: 11 degrees over 1,000 years, which is very, very fast in geological time frames. It translates into 1.1 degree every 100 years. In other words 0.11 degreed every 10 years. Mark Lynas believes we are looking at 0.4 degrees of climate change every 10 year, 4 degrees every 100 years or 40 degrees over 1,000 years. Comparable? No. Especially as one of the changes which was studied wasn’t geologically rapid climate change due to increased levels of carbon dioxide, it was the K/T boundry, the extinction of the dinosaurs due to ‘nuclear winter’ effect, or masses of dust and crap up in the atmosphere blocking out the sun.
Why is the lack of carbon dioxide related climate change important? Surely a rapid shift in climate temperature is as bad as the next? Well, no. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is taken out of the atmosphere in a large number of ways, one of which is disolving into the ocean. This raises the acidity of the ocean because the carbon dioxide forms carbonic acid when combined with water (H2O + CO2 = H2CO3). Acidification of the ocean makes it a more hostile environment for shell forming organisms, such as plankton.
If man-made carbon dioxide emissions cause the ocean to become too hostile for plankton then we may be looking at the total collapse of oceanic ecosystems – everything in the ocean needs these little guys for their existence, from the largest whales to smallest fish. This may not be very likely to happen, as water doesn’t disolve that much carbon dioxide and thus doesn’t become very acidic. However, the amount it disolves increases with temperature, hotter water disolves more than cold water. Also the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide influences how much is disolved in the ocean. As I have said previously, we are entering unprecidented levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so it’s impossible to say what will happen.
