OK, my little Calculator Commandos, time to whip out your Texas Instruments- and HP-logoed units and join me on a sanity check of something that popped up in the news yesterday.
From Utilities say grid can handle rechargeable cars:
Which draws more juice from the electric grid, a big-screen plasma television or recharging a plug-in hybrid car?
The answer is the car. But the electricity drawn by plasma televisions is easing the minds of utility company executives across the nation as they plan for what is likely to be a conversion of much of the country’s vehicle fleet from gasoline to electricity in the coming years.
Rechargeable cars, industry officials say, consume about four times the electricity as plasma TVs. But the industry already has dealt with increased electric demand from the millions of plasma TVs sold in recent years. Officials say that experience will help them deal with the vehicle fleet changeover.
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Since most electric cars will likely be charged during off-peak electric use times, utilities should have no problem generating enough electricity. But since people with the means to buy electric cars likely will live in the same areas, utilities worry about stress on their distribution systems, Ornelas said.
That means consumers will face a lot of choices about when and where they charge up their cars and how much they want to pay for the electricity.
The choice for consumers will come because utilities likely will raise rates to charge cars during peak use times, generally from around noon to 8 p.m., and lower them for charging during low-use hours, industry officials say.
The first problem we have is the imprecision of the language. Is “juice” power consumption (as in watts) or energy consumption (as in kilowatt hours)? Before I run the numbers, let me guess that the article is talking about total energy consumption. Sounds like it’s time to play with the numbers a bit.
For a plasma TV, I chose a screen size of 50 inches, and took the average of the units measured and reported on this cnet page. That’s 340 watts when being used.
The article talks about a plug-in hybrid, not a full EV, so we should assume a 40-mile battery range (e.g. Chevy Volt specification), at about 5 miles/kWh, or a total of 8kWh storage capacity. Assume that the battery is 75% depleted each day (30 miles driven/day), we have to use 6kWh to top off the battery. Over a 12-hour charge cycle that gives us 500 watts.
So, in terms of power consumption (watts when plugged in) the car is 47% greater than the TV.
But what about energy? If you run the TV for 6 hours/day, that’s 2.04kWh/day, vs. the 6kWh/day for the PHEV recharge, or just about a 3:1 ratio, reasonably close to the 4:1 value in the article. At 10 cents/kWh (roughly US average electricity cost) the TV is 20 cents/day, and the PHEV is 60 cents/day. You can run your own numbers about what a purely gasoline fueled car costs to drive 30 miles/day.
How much does this change if we’re considering an EV instead of a PHEV? If anything, the electricity demand for the vehicle will likely decline slightly. Combine the same number of miles driven per day with a vehicle that consumes less energy per mile driven, since EV designs don’t have the luxury of an on board motor to run a generator and recharge the battery on the fly, and the numbers get even better. One recent test with Mitsubishi’s upcoming iMiEV car got 6.22 miles/kWh over a 533 mile trip. For 30 miles/day that gives us 4.82kWh/day, or about 400 watts over a 12-hour recharge cycle, or just about double the plasma TV’s energy consumption. The consumer cost is now just 48 cents/day.
Conclusions:
From NewGeography.com, Sprinting Blindfolded to a New Equilibrium:
Everyone except the fabulously wealthy and the truly disconnected knows energy has become much more expensive in recent years, but it’s worth taking a step back and examining just how much it has jumped and what we should (and should not) conclude about the impact on nearly all aspects of modern life.
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Virtually everything we buy depends on the price of oil to some degree. Raw materials, finished goods, customers, and the people who perform services all need to be transported. Oil and natural gas are also critical components in making plastics and many chemicals and fertilizers, and fossil fuels provide 70 percent of the energy consumed to generate electricity in the U.S. In most applications, trying to find a substitute for fossil fuels on the scale and immediacy we’d prefer is impossible without paying a very high price. (As the old line goes, I can do a job for you quickly, cheaply, or well — pick any two.)
When the price of such a significant and unique resource rises so much and so quickly we’ve pole vaulted over a mild jostle to the system and gone straight to a deep, pervasive, game-changing shock.
The sheer magnitude of this shock explains why there is so much talk in the financial press lately about which of the Big Three car companies could file for bankruptcy within a year. Ford, GM, and Chrysler are in a desperate race against time. Can they radically overhaul their product lines to meet the rapidly shifting demands of their customers before they run out of cash?
Given the high cost and long development time to create a new car model, this is a daunting task, to say the least. By comparison, the commercial airline industry is in far worse shape, as they don’t have the potential to save themselves via converting to electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids. Even using biofuels to run their jets is more wishful thinking than a real-world solution, and is at least a decade away from widespread application. Unless the price of jet fuel drops dramatically and fairly soon, the downsizing and bankruptcies we’ve already seen among airlines will be only the beginning of their “adjustment.”
So, all is gloom and doom, right? Well, no, and this is the point that’s so easy to overlook. Even though energy prices have been rising for years, we’re still in the very early stages of the U.S. economy’s reaction; what we’ve seen to date is much more the initial impact than our individual and collective response.
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The last thing we should do is fall into the trap of making simplistic, linear extrapolations. You can barely Google any energy related topic without finding references to the impending “death of the suburbs,” a topic Joel Kotkin addressed recently and I commented on both here and on my own site. Similarly, you can find numerous other opinions that grossly underestimate the inherent flexibility (and therefore unpredictability) of entire economies. Many of them are based on a fallacy that roughly says: “We use a lot of oil to do X. Oil will get more expensive, so therefore we won’t be able to do X.” These comments almost never mention the possibility that we’ll find ways to do X with far less oil, or that we’ll fill the same need by doing Y, or that savings in oil consumption in other, less critical, parts of the economy will buy us time to change how we do X.
In more concrete terms, how many people really think that more expensive oil will stop us from making medical supplies or fueling trucks that deliver food? Isn’t it more sensible to assume that we’ll cut back on far less critical uses, like pleasure boating or flying for vacations, and keep the increasingly scarce oil flowing to life-and-death applications?
Humanity has just begun an unprecedented, expensive, painful, and, above all else, unpredictable journey. The end of the age of cheap energy will no doubt reshape almost everything we do, from decisions about personal consumption to our governments and public policies, to our institutions and businesses, to our cities. Our collective future will be a lot of things, but “dull” isn’t on the list.
Damn, this guy is good. And I bet he’s incredibly handsome, a dedicated lacrosse fan, and funny as hell in person, too:
Clifford Wirth, peak oil specialist, thinks we reached peak already; 2007 was the magic year. If you look at the run-up in oil prices in terms of peak oil, it might really make sense.
Peak oil doesn’t mean there won’t be more oil out there, nor does it mean that we won’t continue to use too much of it; it means we will find less additional oil than we use up. But as prices rise, we will economize (probably why prices went “down” this week), i.e. we will use less wherever we can. But peak oil means that what will be discovered will be less than what has been discovered already, that total reserves will dwindle, that what we use will be more than what we find to replace it, and the oil left to extract will cost more and more, like the deep sea oil requiring platforms costing billions of dollars to construct. Or oil extracted from shale and tar sands, extremely expensive and energy intensive just to produce. It’s a lot different from the Texas or Arabian oil fields where all you had to do was drill a hole a few hundred feet down and out would come a gusher, oil that would literally cost only a few dollars a barrel to produce.
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Yes, we are facing major changes if peak oil is a reality, but if we are going to cut our carbon emissions enough to have an impact on global warming, we’ll have to make those changes anyway.
Oh boy, here we go again.
Everyone, please open a text editor/word processor window, and copy and paste the following bolded sentences, and then save it on your desk top and refer to it whenever someone comes up with yet another interpretation of what peak oil is.
Peak oil is the all-time peak in world oil production. It has no direct correlation to price. It is not the point at which “demand exceeds supply”. It is purely a measure of the rate of oil production. Period.
As for the article quoted above: Imagine that in late 2003 or early 2004, with the US mired in Iraq, that US/Iran relations got very ugly. Both countries are saber rattling like nothing we’ve seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis; the US is threatening to turn Iran into fused glass, and Iran is threatening to sink tankers in the Strait of Hormuz and use radiological (”dirty”) bombs on the Saudi oil fields. Ever the helpful friend, Russia is siding with Iran, and China is just looking for the cheapest oil. The situation continues to deteriorate for a few weeks, but with no one firing so much as a BB gun, let alone a gun or a missile, and not one drop of oil being delayed on its way to the market. I suspect that under those conditions we would have seen the price of oil reach truly astronomical levels. $500/barrel? $1,000? Who knows. A few very tense weeks later, the situation unwinds, and the price of oil recedes to pre-stupidity levels. This entire situation would have said absolutely nothing about our proximity to peak oil.
Similarly, the current oil price doesn’t say that we’re at peak oil now. I’m sure people will scream that I’m cooking up an artificial example. Am I? Does anyone reading this think that the sudden backpedaling by the Bush administration on their Iran policy might have a little to do with the recent pullback in oil prices, in addition to the ongoing signs of demand leveling off? Here’s a hint: In any complex situation where different camps are arguing over which factor is the only one controlling the situation, the answer is almost always that all sides are wrong and it’s a combination of the factors.
And as for the contention that we hit the peak in 2007, that’s even more problematic. See the July Oilwatch Monthly report from the ASPO [22-page PDF], particularly charts 2 and 3 (both on page 2) which show that we hit all-time highs for both crude and condensate or all liquids (pick your own definition for relevant oil numbers) in 2008.
“Peak oil doesn’t mean there won’t be more oil out there, nor does it mean that we won’t continue to use too much of it; it means we will find less additional oil than we use up.” Uh, no. We’ve been finding less oil than we used virtually every year since the early 1980’s. “Oil found” is a stock, oil used is a flow. Peak oil is purely a flow concept. If we had found an immense oil field with 5 trillion barrels of oil in 1980, but then found not a single oil field since, that would say nothing about our proximity to peak oil. All peak oil measures is the rate at which we can turn oil in the ground to oil above ground.
The author above does highlight one issue that I’ve hammered many times in the past but still gets far too little attention, in my opinion: The fact that we’ll use the cheap oil first and rely on the more expensive stuff when forced to by rising demand and declining cheap production. I’m always amazed by what a new concept this is to mainstream consumers. Nearly all of them assume that all oil is the same, and all oil costs the same to extract.
“Yes, we are facing major changes if peak oil is a reality, but if we are going to cut our carbon emissions enough to have an impact on global warming, we’ll have to make those changes anyway.” This puts far too cozy a spin on the situation, and is very reminiscent of the “peak oil is really a good thing!” line I hear from hard core enviros all the time. (I wonder how many of them would feel if I told them that global warming was a “good thing” because it would force us to use less oil? I’ll have to try that some time.) The increase in energy prices thanks to peak oil are a very sharp kick to the world economy, causing us to spend a lot of money over the next two or three decades that we would surely prefer to spend some other way–on reducing CO2 emissions, building schools or hospitals, etc.
The “it’s a good thing” argument basically boils down to saying that peak oil will force us to do things we would have to do anyway, in time, to deal with global warming. There is some truth here, in that burning less oil because of conservation or switching to alternative fuels means emitting less CO2. And if the US is to get to the most often cited goal, an 80% CO2 reduction by 2050, there’s no way we can do it without cutting back on oil consumption; in 2006 burning petroleum accounted for 43.8% of US CO2 emissions. The problem is the word “force”; the economic pressures of peak oil will greatly limit our options and make our entire low-carbon adaptation much more difficult.
One particularly nasty interaction between global warming and peak oil is CTL (coal to liquids). If we really are facing a near-term peak in world oil production, then the temptation for the US to turn some of our vast coal reserves into motor fuel will be overwhelming. The only thing that will prevent it, in fact, is if we have the spine to put a high enough price on the copious CO2 emissions from CTL to either force the use of carbon capture and sequestration or simply price CTL out of the market. Anyone care to bet how the “we should use domestic resources right now!” argument will go in the US?
In summary: Global warming and peak oil are two real and deadly serious challenges that are effectively here right now. We can’t afford to think one is the “real problem” while the other is “something we can deal with later”.
By now, most readers of this site are likely aware that Al Gore gave a Very Important Speech today[1], in which he presented a Kennedy-esque, moonshot-like challenge for the US (emphasis added):
The quickest, cheapest and best way to start using all this renewable energy is in the production of electricity. In fact, we can start right now using solar power, wind power and geothermal power to make electricity for our homes and businesses.
But to make this exciting potential a reality, and truly solve our nation’s problems, we need a new start.
That’s why I’m proposing today a strategic initiative designed to free us from the crises that are holding us down and to regain control of our own destiny. It’s not the only thing we need to do. But this strategic challenge is the lynchpin of a bold new strategy needed to re-power America.
Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.
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To be sure, reaching the goal of 100 percent renewable and truly clean electricity within 10 years will require us to overcome many obstacles. At present, for example, we do not have a unified national grid that is sufficiently advanced to link the areas where the sun shines and the wind blows to the cities in the East and the West that need the electricity. Our national electric grid is critical infrastructure, as vital to the health and security of our economy as our highways and telecommunication networks. Today, our grids are antiquated, fragile, and vulnerable to cascading failure. Power outages and defects in the current grid system cost US businesses more than $120 billion dollars a year. It has to be upgraded anyway.
We could further increase the value and efficiency of a Unified National Grid by helping our struggling auto giants switch to the manufacture of plug-in electric cars. An electric vehicle fleet would sharply reduce the cost of driving a car, reduce pollution, and increase the flexibility of our electricity grid.
At the same time, of course, we need to greatly improve our commitment to efficiency and conservation.
That’s the best investment we can make.
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Of course, we could and should speed up this transition by insisting that the price of carbon-based energy include the costs of the environmental damage it causes. I have long supported a sharp reduction in payroll taxes with the difference made up in CO2 taxes. We should tax what we burn, not what we earn. This is the single most important policy change we can make.
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If you want to know the truth about gasoline prices, here it is: the exploding demand for oil, especially in places like China, is overwhelming the rate of new discoveries by so much that oil prices are almost certain to continue upward over time no matter what the oil companies promise. And politicians cannot bring gasoline prices down in the short term.
However, there actually is one extremely effective way to bring the costs of driving a car way down within a few short years. The way to bring gas prices down is to end our dependence on oil and use the renewable sources that can give us the equivalent of $1 per gallon gasoline.
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This is a generational moment. A moment when we decide our own path and our collective fate. I’m asking you — each of you — to join me and build this future. Please join the WE campaign at wecansolveit.org. We need you. And we need you now. We’re committed to changing not just light bulbs, but laws. And laws will only change with leadership.
On July 16, 1969, the United States of America was finally ready to meet President Kennedy’s challenge of landing Americans on the moon. I will never forget standing beside my father a few miles from the launch site, waiting for the giant Saturn 5 rocket to lift Apollo 11 into the sky. I was a young man, 21 years old, who had graduated from college a month before and was enlisting in the United States Army three weeks later.
I will never forget the inspiration of those minutes. The power and the vibration of the giant rocket’s engines shook my entire body. As I watched the rocket rise, slowly at first and then with great speed, the sound was deafening. We craned our necks to follow its path until we were looking straight up into the air. And then four days later, I watched along with hundreds of millions of others around the world as Neil Armstrong took one small step to the surface of the moon and changed the history of the human race.
We must now lift our nation to reach another goal that will change history. Our entire civilization depends upon us now embarking on a new journey of exploration and discovery. Our success depends on our willingness as a people to undertake this journey and to complete it within 10 years. Once again, we have an opportunity to take a giant leap for humankind.
Before I get into the numbers, let me indulge in a little reaction from the other side of my brain and from my heart.
So, what exactly are we talking about here, numbers-wise?
US CO2 emissions from energy use, 2006: 5,890.3 million metric tons.
US Co2 emissions from just the electricity generating sector, 2006: 2,343.9 million metric tons
The top three contributors to the electricity generation CO2 emissions: Coal: 1,937.9 million metric tons; natural gas: 339.5; oil: 54.5.
Number of coal-fired plants, 2006: 1,493
Number of natural gas-fired plants, 2006: 5,470
Number of oil-fired plants, 2006: 3,744
Total electricity generation, 2007: 3,827.5 billion kWh
Coal-fired electricity output, 2007: 1,965.1 billion kWh (51.3% of total)
Natural gas-fired electricity output, 2007: 684.8 billion kWh (17.9% of total)
Oil-fired electricity output, 2007: 56.6 billion kWh (1.5% of total)
In short, it will take one hell of an effort to convert the fossil fuel electricity generation in the US to use CCS (carbon capture and sequestration) or replace it entirely with zero-carbon sources, all in 10 years. That’s 10,707 generating plants cranking out a combined 2,706 billion kWh/year, or 70.7% of all the electricity the US consumes in a year, and spewing 2,331.9 million metric tons of CO2/year. And, just to make it a really interesting challenge, he wants no new nuclear power, according to this article:
To meet his 10-year goal, Gore said nuclear energy output would continue at current levels while the nation dramatically increases its use of solar, wind, geothermal and so-called clean coal energy.
About that $1 gasoline claim. Assume your Civic-size electric vehicle gets 5 miles/kWh of electricity, and you buy your electrons at 10 cents/kWh. That’s 2 cents/mile. That’s the fuel cost equivalent of a 50 MPG vehicle (e.g. Prius), running on $1/gallon gasoline. My sincere apologies to everyone who just salivated all over his or her keyboard.
In summary, even if you want to argue with the exact timing involved, I think this is clearly a desperately needed effort, and that it’s actually doable. We have the technology and we have the policy prescriptions; all we need is the determination and the enlightened self-interest to use them.
It all boils down to whether we (as in We the People) can force our elected representatives to sign up for something this ambitious. If nothing else, the people who hate Al Gore simply because he’s Al Gore, plus the fossil fuel industries and their friends who have so much to lose, are surely e-mailing each other lists of wildly misleading talking points to battle this proposal, even as I type this sentence.
I’ve been writing this blog for over 3.5 years, and I’ve said many times either here or in private correspondence (including an exchange just this morning, in fact) that we need someone like Al Gore to take the lead on accelerating us away from oil. It never occurred to me that in the guise of addressing the other growling monster under our bed, global warming, we wouldn’t get an Al Gore, but the Al Gore.
So. What will you do to help us all dig out of this hole?
[1] I’ve linked to the copy of Gore’s speech at ClimateProgress.org, as it’s the only one I could at the moment. I’ve had to guess at the placement of some paragraph breaks because of wonky formatting in that copy, and I apologize to one and all for any errors.
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High Oil Prices? Blame Ethanol, OPEC Says:
Ethanol is on the ropes because of the food versus fuel debate, but now a new heavyweight just stepped into the ring and this one has got some really big guns.
OPEC president Chakib Khelil has a new culprit for the rising cost of oil–ethanol. Mr. Khelil says about 40% of the recent rise in oil prices can be chalked up to ethanol, which accounts for about 1% of the world’s transportation fuel. The other 60%, apparently, is due to a weak dollar and “geopolitical worries.” The problem: OPEC’s boss doesn’t lay out the logic explaining why ethanol blended into gasoline is to blame for high oil prices.
Why ethanol falls afoul of big oil producers and oil companies is easier to explain. Oil companies don’t want to be forced to shell out for a whole new infrastructure for ethanol, from pipelines to special gas pumps. And ethanol blends in gasoline do make gas supplies go further–not good news for producers at a time when high prices are already starting to dent demand for gasoline, in the U.S. at least.
Just so there’s no misunderstanding, let me say this up front: I’m one of the last people on the planet who would defend the continued use of food crops to produce ethanol. I think this is about as greedy, myopic, and just plain brain damaged as public policies get.
But seriously, OPEC, this is the fight you want to start? You want to blame 40% of the rise in oil prises on the 1% of transportation fuels provided by ethanol? Really? That has to be the purest example of a PIDOOMA[1] I’ve seen in a very long time.
So, let me offer OPEC some free advice: Show some enlightened self-interest for once and shut up. Even before this laughable ethanol claim you weren’t winning the PR war with your constant talk of how you have no guaranteed market for your products or how nothing on the planet is your fault, etc. Escalating the discussion to this level of absurdity does nothing more than make your entire organization look like a Three Stooges impersonator convention after happy hour. You’ve been running one hell of a good will deficit for months, so it’s time to resort to the Rule of Holes: When you’re in a hole, stop digging.
[1] PIDOOMA: noun, referring to a purely made up “fact”; acronym derived from Pulled It Directly Out Of My Ass
From Energy tsunami coming, ex-policymakers warn:
A bipartisan group of 27 elder statesmen is sending an open letter to both presidential candidates and every member of Congress saying the country faces “a long-term energy crisis” that threatens the security and prosperity of future generations if swift action isn’t taken.
The group includes Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and six other former secretaries of state or defense, former senators of both parties and a half dozen former senior White House advisers and other Cabinet officers for both Republican and Democratic presidents.
“We must re-examine outdated and entrenched positions,” the group says in the letter to be sent Wednesday to the campaigns of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and to his GOP rival John McCain, as well as members of Congress and all 50 governors.
“…Foremost we must rise above a partisan differences and be united in our efforts,” they wrote.
A copy of the letter was provided Tuesday to The Associated Press.
The call to action comes amid widespread anger over high energy costs from $4-plus a gallon gasoline to the certainty of record heating costs next winter and the prospect that America’s energy priorities will have to be revamped in coming decades to address global warming.
Despite volumes of rhetoric — often on largely meaningless proposals — partisan disagreements have stymied action on energy issues in Congress this year.
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It’s not only politicians who are faulted in the critique.
“We demand more energy and complain about high prices, but we restrict energy exploration and production. We embrace the promise of energy efficiency, but we are slow to make adjustments in our energy-intensive lifestyles,” the letter says.
Production of electricity, for example, is taken “almost for granted.” At the same time, people oppose new power plants and don’t want to invest adequately in energy technology research, the writers say.
You can (and really should) read the entire letter here.
In general, I think the authors of this letter have a point: Both the left and the right are playing petty political games with America’s energy policy, to everyone’s detriment.
The problem is in the details one has to wrestle with in translating such generalities into specific policies, of course. I get very nervous when I read something like this passage in the letter (under the heading “Reduce the Environmental Impact of Energy Consumption and Production”): “We must address the impact of our growing energy consumption on the environment and climate, while recognizing that any approach must be both economically viable and environmentally effective. We must not set targets for which technology does not yet exist or which threatens major economic displacement.” Someone define for me, in crisp terms, what “economically viable” and “economic displacement” means in the context of the climate horrors we could be signing up for if we don’t rein in CO2 emissions enough in the next few decades.
I’m also very uneasy with the mix of solutions they propose. More efficiency and more investment in technology? Those get a big thumb’s up from me. But “Commit to and Expand Nuclear Energy Use” and “Commit to the Use of Clean Coal”? Really? Those are very narrow and technology-specific recommendations, and they include a long list of highly questionable assumptions.
The hottest issue they address is under the heading “Immediately Expand Domestic Oil and Gas Exploration and Production”, which I quote in its entirety:
Expanding domestic production will reduce our dependence on foreign oil and gas and significantly reduce the billions of dollars we send abroad each year. As our reliance on oil and natural gas will necessarily continue for the foreseeable future, we can no longer rule out the value of our own significant proven oil and gas reserves nor the value of a future significant discovery anywhere in or off the shores of the United States. Doing so will create new investment and new jobs here at home. New federal and state partnerships are needed, and new revenue sharing models must be developed to build local support for environmentally sound energy exploration and production.
The notion that domestic oil exploitation will “significantly reduce the billions of dollars we send abroad each year” sounds like yet another, albeit milder, variation of the “we can achieve energy independence” silliness, and it completely misses the point. The crux of the “should we drill or not” question is something I’ve been meaning to revisit for a couple of weeks, and this seems like as good a time as any to bring it up.
I’ve expressed the view here that we should leave that oil in the ground as long as we possibly can. My reasoning was: More oil in the ground means less CO2 in the air, at least slightly higher oil prices (which in turn means a greater incentive to transition to a post-oil world), and more of an emergency supply if things get really bad, post-peak. After reading and thinking about Jim Kinsdale’s piece Democrat and Environmentalist Turns Traitor on Drilling for Oil, I’m beginning to doubt my prior position. Specifically, Jim says:
The main reason the Democrats are wrong about [not wanting to drill] is actually the central argument that they themselves make: that it will not produce oil for ten years. But, hey guys and gals, that’s exactly when we are REALLY going to need it. Maybe a little earlier. But believe me in ten years oil will be well over $500 a barrel - maybe $1,000 a barrel - and scarcer than you can imagine. We will have stopped driving not only Hummers but even light pick-up trucks, except when totally necessary. We will no longer be profligate users of oil. We’ll be driving small cars and electric cars, taking public transportation, car-pooling, and adopting all sorts of good habits.
And still the price of oil will be sky high because the Chinese and Indians and Russians and Saudis will all have six times as many cars on their roads as they do now. And the Mexicans will not be exporting any oil - in fact they will need to import it. Only the Russians, the Canadians, and some OPECers (like the Saudis but not the Iranians) will be exporting oil, and not nearly as much as they do now. (And the Brazilians will be a bright spot too).
In other words, and to recall a theme I sound constantly on this site yet somehow managed to overlook in this instance: It’s the timing, stupid. If you believe, as I do, that we’re headed for a worldwide peak in oil production around 2011, then by the time the oil is coming out of the ground in those offshore areas and ANWR, it’s inescapably clear that we’ll desperately need it. The only way you can avoid that conclusion is to invoke a sea change in the entire US economy or a stunning reversal of the energy trends in China, India, and many oil exporting countries. And right now those seem like exceedingly low probability events.
So, the only way to get that extra production as soon as possible is to throw open the gates to those offshore areas, right? Well, that’s where things get even more complicated. As Joe Romm, no fan of additional drilling, to put it mildly, points out in The cruel offshore-drilling hoax, Part 1, the US Department of Energy has said that the amount of oil and natural gas in outer continental shelf areas already available for leasing is estimated to be far greater than that in the off-limits areas. (Follow the link and see the blue table Joe embedded as a graphic.) The numbers: 40.92 of the 59.09 billion barrels of oil and 210.37 of the 287.54 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the OCS areas are already available for leasing. Which begs the question: What the hell is holding things up? Why are the oil companies and their friends on the right wing of American politics screaming for all these other areas to be opened, when the bulk of available reserves are already available? Could it be nothing more than yet another money grab, yet another case of corporations and political ideologues exploiting an economic situation and demands from the public for government to “do something” to further their own narrow interests? Perish the thought!
This quickly growing mess is yet another reason why one of the things I’m thankful for every morning when I wake up is that I’m not the current (or next) president of the US.
From an e-mailed press release received this afternoon:
**MEDIA ADVISORY**
For immediate release: July 14, 2008
Press contact: Gabe Roth, 202-295-0125, groth@gloverparkgroup.com
Gore to Lay Out Unprecedented Challenge on Energy and Climate Address Will Set National Goal for Clean Energy Future
Washington, DC – Former Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore will outline his bold vision for the future of America’s energy needs at D.A.R. Constitution Hall this Thursday, July 17. The speech will be hosted by the “We” Campaign, a fast-growing organization focused on solutions to the climate crisis.
The speech will offer a new way of thinking about our energy production and consumption and a new sense of what is possible when we choose to work together. It will propose a means of tapping America’s innovative skills to build a more secure energy future.
Who: Former Vice President Al Gore
What: A discussion on the future of America’s energy needs
Where: D.A.R. Constitution Hall – 1776 D St., NW, Washington, DC
When: Thursday, July 17 at 12:00 p.m. EDT:About the “We” Campaign:
The “We” Campaign is a commercial-scale organizing and mobilizing effort using paid advertising, grassroots partnerships and online activation to build strong support for solutions to the climate crisis. The scale of the campaign is unprecedented: it is on track to be the largest public policy advocacy campaign ever and expects to reach 10 million members within three years. “We” is the work of the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit group founded by Al Gore, who currently serves as the chairman of the bipartisan board of directors. For more information, please visit www.wecansolveit.org.
I was beginning to wonder when Al would pop up again, and here he is. Good. We need him.
One of the most closely held notions of many in the online peak oil community is the article of faith that peak oil means the death of the suburbs. I’ve joked many times (albeit not on this site until today) that it’s effectively part of the Apocalypticon catechism. A piece in today’s LA Times, Suburbia’s not dead yet, indicates that I’m not the only one who’s highly skeptical of this idea. This piece, by Joel Kotkin, is a must read:
The ominous predictions that the end of suburbia is at hand echo those in the 1970s, when there was also a run-up in gasoline prices. Then it was neo-Malthusians such as biologist Paul Ehrlich, the author of “The Population Bomb,” who argued that the idea of suburbia was unsustainable because it eats up so much land and energy. But suburban growth continued as people bought more fuel-efficient cars and companies moved jobs to the periphery, which cut commuting times. Contrary to pundits’ forecasts, during this decade of high energy prices, the country’s urban populations, for only the first time in recent history, actually fell, according to a census analysis by economist Jordan Rappaport at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
But today’s gas prices, at more than $4 a gallon, are the highest ever, and the prospects of them significantly dropping any time soon are slight. The conditions for an exodus from suburbia to the cities would seem ideal once again.
Nevertheless, since 2003, when gas prices began their climb, suburban population growth has continued to outstrip that of the central cities, with about 90% of all metropolitan growth occurringin suburban communities, according to the 2000 to 2006census. And the most recent statistics from the annual American Community Survey, which is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, show no sign of a significant shift of the population to urban counties, at least through 2007.
…
But the biggest reason the suburb-to-city narrative is not following the script of the urban boosters and theorists has to do with employment. Living close to your workplace makes sense, not only because it cuts commuting costs and reduces greenhouse-gas emissions — by saving time, it also gives people more time for family and leisure activities.
The problem for many cities is that they lack the jobs for people to move close to. Since the 1970s, the suburbs have been the home for most high-tech jobs and now the majority of office space. By 2000, only 22% of people worked within three miles of a city center in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas.And from 2001 to 2006, job growth in suburbia expanded at six times the rate of that in urban cores, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics by the Praxis Strategy Group, a consulting firm with which I work.
…
The suburb-to-the-city narrative faces other obstacles. By the early part of the next decade, the large millennial generation born since the early 1980s will begin to form families, and they will, as have previous generations, probably seek open space and good schools for their children — and that means they will settle in the suburbs. And there is no census evidence suggesting that immigrants have reversed their decade-old pattern of moving to the suburbs.
The growth of telecommuting, fed by technological advances, further ensures that suburbia has a future. By 2006, the expansion of home-based workers had grown twice as quickly as in the previous decade. And by 2015, according to demographer Wendell Cox, there will be more people in the country working electronically from home full time than are taking public transit.
…
Continuing high energy prices will likely change the nation’s geography, but not in ways some urban theorists are predicting. Rather than cramming more people and families into cities, they may instead foster a more dispersed, diverse archipelago of self-sufficient communities. From here, that looks like a far more pleasant scenario not only for suburban and exurbanites but for urban dwellers who don’t want to live under dense conditions reminiscent of 19th century industrial cities or the teeming metropolises of the contemporary Third World.
I wholeheartedly agree, and would add that looming energy and environmental challenges make the suburbs even less likely to go away. The short version goes like this:
Peak oil means the general trend in gasoline prices will be up. We might see a short-term dip in prices, but beyond a year or 18 months from now, all evidence points to continued galloping demand from China, India, and some oil exporting countries, coupled with a challenged supply picture. Net result: Higher prices and a huge incentive to electrify personal transportation as soon as the EV’s and PHEV’s hit the market.
Global warming means we’ll be desperate to clean up not only transportation, providing an additional incentive for public policy to encourage and ease the adoption of electrified cars. There will also be a big public policy push toward diversified, distributed electricity generation–net metering laws, solar PV rebates, and even laws requiring electric utilities to lease panels to customers, as was passed recently in Massachusetts. We will also see cheaper solar PV and more expensive fossil fuel generation.
The result? People will buy EV’s and PHEV’s, which will radically lower their fuel cost/mile, and therefore reduce their incentive to move, even if doing so would get them closer to work (more on this below).[1] But that will add to their electricity bill, giving them yet another incentive on top of those mentioned above to add solar PV panels. And who will be most likely to need the cost savings of a (PH)EV and have control over a large roof to accommodate PV panels? Those very same suburbanites that many people are telling us will be driven by high gasoline costs to abandon their homes.
In short, the situation is more complex than a mindlessly simple, linear extrapolation of our current situation implies.
I want to take just a minute to stress something that Kotkin mentions, the proximity of the suburbs to destinations. Many people technically live in “the ‘burbs” but are still close enough to work that gasoline at $4, $6, or $8/gallon isn’t an undue burden. And for many of those people, the other places they often must visit, like grocery stores, doctors, dentists, dry cleaners, schools, etc. are also relatively close. In fact, when the US government surveyed people about their driving distances they found that people in the suburbs drove only 3.4 more miles per day, per driver, amounting to an additional 11.2%, compared to those living in a “center city”. Compared to all drivers, our suburbanites drove only 0.8 miles (2.4%) more per day. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how much of a financial impact that is at various gasoline prices.
So where does this notion of suburbanites fleeing their neighborhoods because of high fuel prices come from? This is just a blatant guess, but I think it’s largely due to an inaccurate mental model of what “living in the suburbs” really means. Just as so many of the ‘”we all doomed!” peak oil predictions are based on an implicit assumption that “peak oil means no oil” and “we’re not smart enough to adjust in any way whatsoever to rising prices”, I think many are also laboring under the misconception that “living in the suburbs means you’re far from everything, by definition”. Or maybe some people just hate the suburbs.
Finally, let me say that which should not have to be said: I’m not, in any way, shape, or form saying or implying that dealing with the twin nightmares of peak oil and global warming will be easy, cheap, or fun. These are extremely serious problems that will combine to form the greatest challenge humanity has faced to date. My point in this post is to plead for a more complete, more fact-based view of our evolving situation, as that’s our best bet for taking the needed steps to minimize the human pain caused by these problems.
[1] A Civic costs about 13 cents/mile for fuel when gasoline is $4/gallon, compared to about 2 cents/mile for 10 cent/kWh electricity for a car of similar size. That’s the equivalent of gassing up the Accord at 60 cents/gallon. After reading that some of you might want to take a few deep breaths and collect your thoughts before returning to the main part of the post.
Update: As Jim Kingsdale points out in an update in the post linked below: “J. Peter Lynch, author of the essay posted below, is not the famous former manager of Fidelity’s Magellan Fund named Peter S. Lynch. Nonetheless he has addressed an important topic, the full cost of our use of fossil fuels.” I’ve left the rest of this post unchanged.
Jim Kingsdale has a post up that includes a longish piece by the financial deity Peter Lynch on the cost of energy. Please go read the whole thing, but let me present just a few snippets to entice you to do so:
In my opinion, “Energy” is the number one problem facing the U.S and the world as we move forward into the 21st century. In fact, I think that it may be the greatest problem that mankind has ever faced. All the other “problems” we hear about on the evening news – health care, social security, housing crisis, credit crunch etc. are ALL “small change” compared to the looming worldwide energy crisis. The problem facing us is so large that I am really beginning to believe that people, as well as, governments are simply in mass denial and refuse to believe the magnitude of the approaching problem. Keep in mind that reasonably priced, available energy is what gave birth to our mighty industrial revolution and is what separates the U.S. and the rest of the developed world from becoming third world countries.
This is a problem that CANNOT be ignored and must be addressed rapidly, with a detailed long term plan that MUST be based upon a comprehensive accurate evaluation and assessment. There is still time to move forward, but time is running out and we have to stop with the politics as usual and start to focus on what we ALL need to do for the common good.
What is the price you pay to purchase a gallon of gasoline for your car? Depending on what part of the country you live in, it is probably between $4.00 and $4.50 per gallon.
But what is the “real cost” of that gasoline? Does it count ALL of the direct AND indirect costs to the consumer, society and the nation of our continued and insane dependence on fossil fuels?
I think not.
Everyone knows the posted price, but very few realize or stop to think about the true costs. There are a number of “hidden” costs that most of us do not realize. It may not be obvious but we are quietly paying these additional costs every day. These additional indirect costs actually make the “real” cost of the gasoline and all other fossil fuel related items many times higher than it seems at first glance.
Unfortunately our government does not utilize all of the necessary cost components in order to arrive at an accurate “true cost” number. As a result, they are using a faulty equation, which, of course, will result, EVERY SINGLE TIME, in an incorrect answer and subsequently a fault ridden policy that is based upon error after error.
Some of these costs and associated penalties:
- Health Related Costs
- Air Pollution
- Water and Land Pollution
- Thermal Pollution
- Macro Economic Costs
- National Security
- Global Warming
[Lynch then addresses each item in the above list.]
We can lower our healthcare costs, reduce our air, water and thermal pollution, develop a more stable economy, create an enormous number of U.S. based jobs and become a far more secure nation if we just begin this inevitable process of evolution toward renewable energy sources - solar, wind, biomass, ocean power, energy efficiency and conservation.
We need to educate the American people about the real truth of the current situation and then apply, what has always been America’s greatest “assets” - technical ingenuity, creative innovation and our “can do” attitude.
Now you can see what the “real costs” of our addiction to fossil fuels are. We need to be preemptive and undertake this NOW, before we find ourselves in the midst of a worst-case scenario.
Please go read it all.
I’ve argued perhaps a billion or so times on this site that we need a wide range of actions to deal with our looming energy and environmental issues. We can’t rely on just a grass roots movement or just government action or just leave it all to “the free market”. We need them all, which means we have to be smart about how we combine their costs and benefits; we’re quickly running out of time for stupid or half-hearted measures.
Part of our action has to be expressing our collective will through elected officials, i.e. government action. The nastiest reality of all is that while some people will do what’s right on energy and environmental issues simply because they know it’s the right thing or they get satisfaction because doing it proves their moral superiority, not nearly enough people will act that way. For every member of the Sierra Club or Greenpeace (or regular reader of this site, frankly), there are many more Americans who want nothing more than the cheapest out-of-pocket expense for energy possible, and they reject everything else as a plot by the New World Order or environuts or (gasp!) Al Gore to take over their lives.[1]
Therefore, we need voters and consumers to educate and activate themselves, and force politicians seeking their support as well as corporations seeking their money, to adopt a longer planning horizon and a more enlightened approach and do the right thing.[2]
We also need people to make the myriad of changes I’ve been screaming about on this site for years, like using compact fluorescent bulbs, driving fewer miles, hunting down and killing electricity vampires[3], improving the insulation of their homes, using as little space heating or cooling as possible, etc.
And above all, Lynch is right: We need to do those things now.
(Lest anyone miss the enormous, neon sign hanging over this discussion, let me point to it explicitly: About four years ago when I started this web site and project, I chose the name “The Cost of Energy” precisely because I wanted people to adopt a more expansive and encompassing mindset and consider all the costs of our energy use, not just the immediate and obvious ones measured in cash flow.)
[1] And for the life of me, I have never figured out why the people who say such inane things believe for a moment that other people would want control of their lives. That’s a stupefyingly weird alloy of paranoia and egomania.
[2] For those of you who just laughed at the planning horizon and enlightened approach stuff, answer me this: How much better off would Ford, GM, and Chrysler be today if they challenged Toyota and Honda in developing hybrid vehicles in the 1990’s instead of dismissing it? For that matter, how much healthier would they be, and how many fewer people would they be laying off directly and indirectly, if they had simply put more emphasis on smaller, more efficient vehicles instead of binging on trucks for years, like an unsupervised kid in a candy store? It’s easy to be smug and make fun of calls for the kind of change in corporate boardrooms that I think we need, at least until corporations are greedy and willfully ignorant and then reality bites them on the ass. Then everyone starts wailing about “could GM really declare bankruptcy???” instead of treating this as a huge and very painful object lesson in how companies should be run.
[3] These are all those little things around your home that suck a little (or a lot of) electricity all the time, even when they’re not being used. Do you really need to have your cable modem and router turned on all the time? Do you need to leave your PC on 24/7, even though Windows doesn’t boot so much as it gestates? Walk through your house and do a quick inventory of what’s plugged in, and how often you really use it, and I’m willing to bet you’ll find a good $5 of monthly electricity you can painlessly eliminate. And if that’s too much trouble, then please send me that $5/month (PayPal to lougrinzo [at sign] rochester.rr.com), as I need it to keep this project afloat.
rjacobsen0 pointed out over on the discussion board (post) that one of the 14 candidate questions in Science Debate 2008 is right in our wheelhouse:
3. Energy. Many policymakers and scientists say energy security and sustainability are major problems facing the United States this century. What policies would you support to meet demand for energy while ensuring an economically and environmentally sustainable future?
While I have serious reservations about our chances of getting a meaningful response to that question from presidential and Congressional candidates, I wholeheartedly support the effort.
Just to be clear, by “meaningful answer” I mean one that’s informed, BS- and (relatively) pander-free, and avoids nonsense like saying the US has to “achieve energy independence”. I know that’s an unreasonably high standard to hold almost any politician to, but an energy geek can dream, can’t he?
My letter to the IEA Press Office, sent just moments ago:
I would like to know what the IEA’s official response is to a story that’s just starting to make its way around the Internet regarding the Bush Administration stopping the IEA from updating its projections until after this November’s US presidential election.
I ran into this accusation on The Oil Drum, in this post (http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4241), in which the author says:
——————————————-
I have been told by a reliable source that the IEA has been forbidden by the US administration from updating their absurdly cornucopian oil supply and demand scenarios until the report that comes out late this year (after the election); that report, which will publish the result of a “bottom-up” analysis (ie a summary of all existing oil fields, their production and/or prospects) is expected to show that oil production is unlikely to reach the levels that so many have blithely assumed - notably on the basis of previous optimistic IEA reports. The IEA, which was deeply unhappy about the current lies to was supposed to present and support, has been leaking word of the expected content of that new report for many weeks now, including an increasingly alarmist tone in its official reports, such as today’s Medium Term Market Outlook:“Structural demand growth in developing countries and ongoing supply constraints continue to paint a tight market picture over the medium-term,” the IEA said in its Medium-Term Oil Market Report, released on Tuesday in Madrid.
“Poor supply-side performance since 2004, in the face of strong demand pressures from developing countries, has forced oil prices up sharply to curb demand,” the watchdog added.
——————————————-The author is “Jerome a Paris”, a very widely read and respected blogger on The Oil Drum and Daily Kos. Because of his high profile and the trust many people place in him, this accusation will very likely take on a life of its own in various online communities. Therefore, I would like to receive an on-the-record response from the IEA so I can cover this developing story on my own site (link below) in an appropriate manner.
Sincerely,
Lou Grinzo——————————————————
The Cost of Energy blog: http://www.grinzo.com/energy
——————————————————
Let me add a little commentary to this.
I have a pretty high level of trust in Jerome a Paris, having read his work for quite some time. He’s by no means one of the Crazy People on the ‘net, or if he is, he’s hiding it extraordinarily well. I believe he’s said that he works on financing things like wind farms, so he certainly has some high-level contacts in the energy field.
On the other hand, I find it a little hard to believe that the Bush Administration can exert this kind of influence over an international organization with 27 members–unless they have some sort of veto power, ala the United Nations. As for incentive–would Bush want to delay the bad news and/or action, and dump it on the desk of the next president, in effect? Absolutely, and he’s built quite a track record on energy and environmental (and other) issues of doing just that. But that pattern of behavior doesn’t prove he did it in this particular case.
Frankly, this sounds like the birth of a classic Internet urban myth, in that it’s plausible (at least to those who have a sufficiently low opinion of the current administration and are willing to believe in such plots in general), but it’s virtually impossible to either prove or disprove definitively. And I think we all know what response I’ll get from the IEA, assuming I get one at all: They’ll categorically deny it, which is what I would expect them to say regardless of the underlying facts of the matter. But I felt that with such a huge accusation about a US president and an international organization coming from a trusted author, I was obligated to ask for an official response.
I’ve seen weirder news days than today, but not many and not by much.
To recap the highlights:
Dizzy yet? If not, hang on–you will be soon enough.
[1] Because some news outlets report sales trends based on “daily sales rate” and some just go by raw monthly totals, the measures of how well each car company did will vary a lot, as June 2008 had three fewer selling days than June 2007.
[2] I qualify this because I believe the IEA is talking about the oil market remaining extremely tight until then, and I’m not sure if that’s the end of their projection or if they’re saying the market will loosen up afterwards.
The IEA sent out the following press release about the latest Medium-Term Oil Market Report, which I’m quoting in its entirety (emphasis in the original):
Despite Slowing Oil Demand, IEA Sees Continued Market Tightness Over the Medium Term
“Record prices in the oil market in recent months have become a threat to the global economy and social welfare of millions of people – some are calling it the third oil shock. While we have seen some weakening in demand in the OECD, supply constraints, refinery limitations and continued demand growth in key emerging markets will maintain pressure in the market over the medium term”, Nobuo Tanaka, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) said today in Madrid at the launch of the IEA Medium-Term Oil Market Report (MTOMR). Speaking at a press conference at the World Petroleum Congress, Mr. Tanaka emphasized that market fundamentals were the main underlying factor behind high oil prices. “OPEC production is at record highs and non-OPEC producers are working at full throttle, but stocks show no unusual build. These factors demonstrate that it is mainly fundamentals pushing up the price,” he added.
The third issue of the IEA Medium-Term Oil Market Report analyses market developments to 2013, building on the short-term analysis of the monthly IEA Oil Market Report. The MTOMR offers a fresh appraisal of upstream and downstream projects worldwide, incorporating recent changes in demand dynamics. The report includes in-depth analyses of price formation, transport trends, non-OECD economies, non-OPEC production decline, project slippage, biofuels and a stronger emphasis on product supply bottlenecks. “We look closely at what investments are committed, which projects are underway, whether demand will continue to surge and where potential risks lie looking forward to 2013,” said Mr. Tanaka.
Supply
Supply growth deriving from a concentration of new project start-ups during 2008-2010, allied to weaker economic growth, sees potential spare capacity rise in excess of 4 mb/d. However, this expansion slows from 2011 onwards when global demand growth recovers, leading to a narrowing of spare capacity to minimal levels by 2013. Since the 2007 MTOMR, significant downward revisions have been made to both non-OPEC supplies and OPEC capacity forecasts. Project delays averaging 12 months, coupled with global average decline of 5.2% - up from 4% last year – are the factors behind these revisions. Over 3.5 mb/d of new production will be needed each year just to hold global production steady. “Our findings highlight again the need for sustained, and indeed, increased investment both upstream and downstream — to assure that the market is adequately supplied,” stated Mr. Tanaka.
Biofuels
Although biofuels will add to supply growth, increasing from 1.35 mb/d in 2008 to 1.95 mb/d by 2013, announced capacity additions may be difficult to achieve given available feedstock and growing concerns due to rising food prices. “Biofuels have helped to diversify energy supply. They cannot be blamed for all of the increase in grain prices, even if they have had an impact. However, we remain cautious in regard to the future growth of 1st generation biofuels as there will be growing competition for feedstocks and we see increased difficulties to expansion of biofuels in some places,” said Mr. Tanaka.
Demand
Global demand for oil products will grow by an average of 1.6% per year to 2013, from 86.9 mb/d in 2008 to 94.1 mb/d. Contrary to supply trends, demand growth will be weakest in the first two years of the period, building as global GDP growth strengthens from 2010 on. “We continue to see a significant shift in demand away from the OECD countries,” Mr. Tanaka noted. “Developing countries will drive demand growth, their total consumption equalling that of mature economies by 2015.” Asia, the Middle East and Latin America will account for nearly 90% of demand growth over the five-year forecast period.
Refining
An anticipated 8.8 mb/d of crude distillation capacity will be added to the refinery system by 2013. These additions should cover supply increases over this period and help ease current refinery tightness, which limits the flexibility of the industry to meet the structurally-strong demand growth for middle distillate fuel. A doubling of costs and longer lead times for delivery of key upgrading units have led to greater uncertainty over project plans in the refining sector. New capacity additions are primarily in China, Asia and the Middle East. Additional investment is expected in upgrading capacity and desulphurisation units. “This medium-term analysis sheds light on where the oil market is headed over the next five years. The better we understand current trends, the more we can do to ensure we have adequate oil supply at affordable prices,” Mr. Tanaka said.
I’ve requested a copy of the actual report (which they apparently don’t distribute automatically to everyone on their press list), and will comment further once I have it.
See also:
Speculation not to blame for oil - report
OPEC growth stalls despite record prices- IEA
Bill McKibben, one of Those Who Must Be Read, in my opinion, has a thoughtful, moving piece up at Orion Magazine’s site, “When Words Fail” (emphasis added):
I almost never write about writing—in my aesthetic, the writing should disappear, the thought linger. But the longer I’ve spent working on global warming—the greatest challenge humans have ever faced—the more I’ve come to see it as essentially a literary problem. A technological and scientific challenge, yes; an economic quandary, yes; a political dilemma, surely. But centrally? A crisis in metaphor, in analogy, in understanding. We haven’t come up with words big enough to communicate the magnitude of what we’re doing. How do you say: the world you know today, the world you were born into, the world that has remained essentially the same for all of human civilization, that has birthed every play and poem and novel and essay, every painting and photograph, every invention and economy, every spiritual system (and every turn of phrase) is about to be . . . something so different? Somehow “global warming” barely hints at it. The same goes for any of the other locutions, including “climate chaos.” And if we do come up with adequate words in one culture, they won’t necessarily translate into all the other languages whose speakers must collaborate to somehow solve this problem.
…
In a PowerPoint presentation [James Hansen] gave at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco last December, he named a number: 350 parts per million carbon dioxide. That, he said, was the absolute upper bound of anything like safety—above it and the planet would be unraveling. Is unraveling, because we’re already at 385 parts per million. And so it’s a daring number, a politically unwelcome one. It means, in shorthand, that this generation of people—politicians especially—can’t pass the problem down to their successors. We’re like patients who’ve been to the doctor and found out that our cholesterol is too high. We’re in the danger zone. Time to cut back now, and hope that we do it fast enough so we don’t have a stroke in the meantime. So that Greenland doesn’t melt in the meantime and raise the ocean twenty-five feet.
…
But a number works. And this is a good one. Arcane, yes—parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere. But at least it means the same thing in every tongue, and it even bridges the gap between English and metric. And so we secured the all-important URL: 350.org. (Easier said than done.) And we settled on our mission: To tattoo that number into every human brain. To make every person on Planet Earth aware of it, in the same way that most of them know the length of a soccer field (even though they call it a football pitch or a voetbal gebied). If we are able to make that happen, then the negotiations now under way, and due to conclude in Copenhagen in December of 2009, will be pulled as if by a kind of rough and opaque magic toward that goal. It will become the definition of success or of failure. It will set the climate for talking about climate.
This basic issue: How do you get the enormity of the problems we’re facing, including global warming and peak oil, across to enough people and at a sufficiently visceral level that they realize “this time it’s different”, is one that I, also, wrestle with constantly. We’ve all grown jaded over the years, those of us over about the age of 30, and most would say with good reason. We’ve all seen countless examples of Really Serious Problems hyped to death in the media and by people selling books or with some other, less obvious agenda, only to see those world-changing threats turn out to be wrong (i.e. the problem never really was a problem) or self-correcting or easily solved with a minor public policy adjustment or solved with a big, concentrated effort that didn’t hurt us (Y2k, anyone?). We’re lucky enough, most of us and most of the time, that a high percentage of the horror stories about the monsters under our beds dissolved into nothing more than harmless noise in our mental bandwidth that dissipates after a while, leaving us to go about our lives.
Another factor is the defense mechanism of proximity. You hear a news report of a bad chain reaction accident on a fog-obscured highway that you drive several times a week, and you have the typical human reaction–you’re sorry to hear about those 35 drivers, and you feel a momentary twinge of sympathy for the three people who died and the couple of dozen who were sent to various local hospitals. But just as quickly you move on to the next story or some errand you have to run, at least until you find out later that day that a good friend was in that accident and had to be cut out of the twisted shell of his totaled car and air lifted to a hospital, where he’s still in guarded condition. You’re suddenly focused on the house painting party he had planned to host this weekend, and how you and some other friends were planning to play a trick on him by bringing a can of paint in a conspicuously wrong color and telling him one of the rooms had been finished in that color. It’s no longer a two-minute local news item but a personal tragedy; you’re gripped by the nearness of the accident, the “there but for the grace of God go I” mix of genuine sorrow that such a good person was so seriously and needlessly injured, and embarrassed thankfulness that it wasn’t someone even closer to you, or you yourself struck by this random tragedy.
And right now, as you read this, you’re wondering about these specific details–is this just a fabricated example or did this really happen? You’re balanced on the razor’s edge between dismissing the story or surrendering to even momentary emotional investment; does Lou have a close friend clinging to life? Is he callous enough to use it as an example on his web site?
The answer is another question: Why does it matter? Why do you care any more or less about highway safety or how safely you drive depending on whether you know someone who was injured in an accident? Why does it have to be “personal” for us to care? Why do so many people assume that only parents care enough about humanity’s future to try to reverse our behaviors that exacerbate the effects of global warming and peak oil? Isn’t it enough to say that all the children of the world belong to all of us, whether or not they share our DNA?
Will the 350.org campaign be successful at breaking the conceptual logjam and globalizing our world view enough that many more of us “get” it? I don’t know, but it’s certainly worth the effort to find out.
Joe Romm touched on a critical point in a post at Climate Progress this morning, “Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 6: What the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner bill debate tells us”:
Equally important, conservatives now have a very potent political issue to beat back advocates of an economy-wide cap & trade system — high gasoline prices. And gasoline prices are probably going to be much higher over the next few years (see “Must read CIBC report: $7 gas by 2010, 10 million cars off the road, 1970s style GDP growth“). That is one reason I would leave transportation out of an economy-wide cap & trade, but that will be the subject of another post.
As I said on CP in response to that post, this is one of the things I feared the most, that our sense of urgency about GW and the pain of higher oil prices would arrive simultaneously and cause policy paralysis. If we’re not at that point as one might conclude from many of the examples Joe cites in his post, we’re way too close (and getting close) for comfort.
This is a big deal because of the way large groups of people, most notably Americans in this shiny, happy 21st century, deal with major crises. We have a terribly hard time dealing more than one Big Conceptual Issue at a time, and both global warming and peak oil certainly qualify as BCI’s. Even worse is how hard it can be to get us to focus on action now to avert a catastrophic, but not yet present, Issue 2 when Issue 1 is not just big and scary, but hitting us hard in our weekly finances right now.[1]
On top of this foundation of psychological weirdness is everyone’s favorite nasty detail: Perception is reality. Most notably for our purposes GW and PO have taken very different paths through the obstacle course that is public perception space, paths that I suspect virtually no one would have predicted 10 years ago.
Global warming made the leap from science geek and enviro issue to a widely recognized, and even largely accepted, mainstream concept thanks almost entire to An Inconvenient Truth. Yes, many other people have been shouting about this topic for a long time, including some people I respect greatly, like Bill McKibben and James Hansen, plus we’ve seen tireless contributions to this effort from organizations like the NRDC and Greenpeace. And all this happened before the people who were educated and/or convinced were directly affected by global warming. Sure, Uncle Al and others had some compelling imagery to work with–stranded polar bears, disappearing glaciers, US state-size chucks of Antarctica breaking off, implications of more and stronger hurricanes–but the considerable conceptual progress we’ve seen has all been at a distance, with the consequences removed, in both space and time, from those people undergoing a shift in the world view.
Peak oil is a nearly opposite situation. The effects are being felt right here, right now, and in ways that mainstream consumers and voters can’t ignore. So surely people would be clamoring for information about peak oil, and then pressuring their politicians to take appropriate action, right? Of course that hasn’t happened; we have no Al Gore, with or without his nifty presentation and movie, and we have endless debate about What’s Really Causing High Oil Prices, which only feeds the populist streak in Americans as well as our DNA-level belief in infinity. We can’t be running out of cheap oil! There’s plenty of it in the ground! It’s just OPEC or Exxon or Bush or the New World Order or Speculators screwing us again!
Public perception seems to have solidified. The mainstream public sees global warming as a real problem we’ll just have to ignore for now while we get those oil prices down. Peak oil isn’t even on their radar screen, and to the extent people have even heard of it nearly all of them are convinced it’s nothing more than just another of those Internet-fueled conspiracy theories.[2] I’ve said for a long time that peak oil needed our own equivalent of Al Gore, but I think it’s too late for anyone to fill that role.
The biggest problem here is not the disparity of perception about global warming vs. peak oil, but how those two things interact, as Joe Romm pointed out. People are so squeezed by higher energy prices that they’re demanding their elected representatives Do Something Right Now, and I pity the politician who supports a policy that his or her opponent can paint as being a new tax, no matter how well thought out and necessary the policy might be.
What a startling chain reaction. We become global warming aware, but then peak oil keeps us from taking serious action on global warming, and that budding awareness of global warming is at least partly to blame for our inability to deal with peak oil (that “only one crisis at a time” thing).
How do we break that cycle and shun our comfort zone and deal with these twin problems in realistic terms? How much can we expect mainstream consumers and voters to change and pressure their elected representatives? Or is the answer simply to hope that we elect people who know what’s going on, haven’t been bought by special interests, and are willing to do unpopular things that are in everyone’s long-term best interest? I don’t know, and that’s a mix of questions I’m thinking about more than ever not just in connection with my writing here, but also in my current book project, where I’m currently deciding how much of a “crash course in energy analysis” I should include as an explicit section.
[1] This is not to say that I think American consumers are being selfish or too wrapped up in their personal finances. If anything, more attention and careful planning on that front would have helped lessen the impact of the current mess.
[2] The fact that so many people think peak oil is a conspiracy theory and that the “real” explanation is one of their quarter-baked fantasies about a New World Order or oil companies ruling the world (i.e. keeping 100MPG cars off the road), surely deserves to be a first-ballot entry into the Irony Hall of Fame. And yes, I blame both the Cor