The Road to Copenhagen, Route to Failure

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." - Jonathan Swift

Please consider signing your organization on to a new international effort to prevent nuclear power from claiming any benefits and incentives during the December 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. Called Ni Nucléaire, Ni Effet de Serre (neither nuclear nor the greenhouse effect) in France, where the campaign is based, and Don't Nuke the Climate, in English, the goal is to create a campaign document signed by organizations from across the world to be used in Copenhagen.

Nuclear power has been kept outside of climate change mitigation mechanisms to date. However, some evidence shows that the nuclear lobby could be preparing its comeback in Copenhagen to have this dirty energy labeled as clean or carbon-free and thus benefit from new subsidies. - Beyond Nuclear

Fortunately nuclear power will be represented in Copenhagen. In July, Kirk Sorensen traveled to Manchester, England, where he gave a presentation on the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, to a pannel that was preparing a report, called the Manchester Report, on alternative AGW mitigation technologies. Kirk talked to the Manchester Report Panel about The Thorium energy cycle, and using the Liquid Fluoride Thorium reactor as a source of low-carbon energy. No doubt this was considered a quite exotic message by the Report Panel, but it appeared to be well received. We will know more when the report is published sometime between now aqnd the beginning of the Copenhagen Conference in December.

It is too soon to expect that Kirk's message, transmitted to the UN conference, will by itself bring about big changes in thinking about climate change mitigation. Still the fact that the message will be presented at all on an international stage.

From the early 19th the end of the 20th century modern society relied on fossil fuels for most of its energy. The reliance on fossil fuels had by the end of the 20th century brought an enormous transformation in human material life. Yje transformation first occurred in Europe and North America, but by the end of the 20th century, the transformation appeared to have spread to Japan and South Korea, and to be spresding to China, India and much of South East Asia. At the same time the fossil fuel sector of the world's economy began to face a double crisis. First the world's fossil fuel resources appear to be reaching or will soon reach the point peak production. Especially in the case of fuel oil, we can expect to see an increase in demand from Asian consumers during the next few years, while many experts believe that wold oil production will peak and then begin to drop.

Coal an Natural gas will noit creat the sort of near run problem that Oil will, but debatyed about the World's coal reserve has started.

The second issue with fossil fuels is that of Greenhouse Gas emissions. Burning Fossil Fuels produces CO2, and armospheric CO2 is a major driver for Anthroogenic Global Warming. Scientist believe that adverse consequences, that could effect ti some, most or even all of the world's population could come about as a result of continued CO2 emissions asa the result of burning fossil fuels.

During the 19th and 20th centuries practices related to and dependent on the burning of fossil fuels, transformed the lives of a large minrity of the human populzation and inpated the lives of most of the human population. Most of the changes were deemed beneficial, but others were viewed as deleterious. A whole way of life emerged that entailed the use of large amounts of energy. Most people thought that such an energy rich would continue in its present form for a long time to come. There was a characteristic set of attitudes, beliefs, symboles and brehaviors that centered around energy and regulated both the individual relationship toward enery, and ordered social life with energy, Those patterns, beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, ad symbols solved most human problems as peoples lives became entangled with energy use. Voices were raised, however, suggesting that the first energy paradigm, the first pattern of attitudes, beliefs, symboles and behaviors engaged with energy.

In 1956 Geologist M. King Hubbert predicted that ther production of oil would peak soon and then decline:

A year latter In December 1957 Edward Teller was invited to address the Annual meeting of the American Chemical Society. Teller was at the height of his fame. He was an honest to God celebrity, with reporters at his side, jotting down his comments, photographers snapping his picture, and as disgusting as it might seem now, women volunteering to sleep with him on the basis of his fame. (I know this because a beautify but wayward woman once describe an encounter with Teller to me. She would have slept with Teller had he consented to the arrangement.) He was referred to in the press as the Father of the "H-Bomb." He was also a darling of the American right-wing. No doubt the ACS thought by getting Teller to speak, they had achieved some coup. They must have been a little bit bewildered then when Teller started to talk about carbon dioxide and global climate. Teller told the assembled chemists that continued burning of carbon based fuels would increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, eventually warming the planet to the extent that the polar ice caps would melt, and the resulting rise in sea level would submerge costal cities under water.

Ways of life are forms of being. They do not die quickly and they die with much confusion, We only understand things, the philosopher Hegel told us, after they stop working. By then it is too late to save them. By the 1970's harbingers of the impending death of the fossil fuel energy paradigm had begun to emerge, but its replacement was far from certain. I will in my next post point how the fossil fuel paradigm was able to survive into the next century but probably will not survive much longer.

I hoop to continue my account of the Road to copenhagen before the week is over.

Obama's Greatest Task: Winning the Energy War

The American Election is over and the next president, Mr. Barack Obama, faces an extremely daunting set of problems. The most obvious is an economic crises that still threatens to spiral into an international depression. It is not yet clear that the disaster has been avoided, but quite obviously the problems that lie at the heart of the crises are still with us. The real problem is the structure of the world economy. The current world economy is unsustainable because it depends on American borrowing to purchase foreign manufactured goods. Since American businesses have decided that they can keep prices lower, by shipping manufacturing jobs abroad. But since we no longer manufacture things, we have nothing to trade for the goods we want. Since we Americans cannot pay for things we buy through trade, we have to borrow money to buy Japanese cars, and Chinese manufactured TV sets. But we have ultimately no way to repay the loans.

Foreign lenders are hungry for investment opportunities in the United States, and hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign loans are pouring into the American economy. Americans are no ones fools, and if a bank is willing to offer me a mortgage to pay for a much larger home at a fire sale rate, we are going to take the money and run. Foreign investment has paid for American real estate inflation, but the bubble, in an unproductive economy, could not last forever. The Obama Administration must address the structural problems of the international trading system, but beyond that it must lay the groundwork for a new American Industrial revolution, one which again makes the United States a center of international industrial production, and a major source of industrial goods in the world trading system. Those structural changes in the world and the American economies will not come without a great deal of pain.

In order for the United States to restore its industrial productivity, its energy problems must be solved. Our political leadership already knew in the 1970's that we faced an energy crises. M. King Hubbert had projected an eventual decline in both American and world oil production in 1949. In December 1957 when Edward Teller spoke to the American Chemical Society, he noted a that world use of carbon based fuels posed a serious problem for the future of society. Teller simply stated what scientist knew for all of the 20th century, that carbon dioxide was a greenhouse gas, and by adding it to the atmosphere we were creating a condition that would make our planet warmer.

Today, both Hubbert's and Teller's predictions are coming to pass. World production of oil can only keep pace with world oil production in a depressed economy. The world transportation economies are based on technologies that are unsustainable. With ever declining oil production, oil fueled air, sea and land transportation systems will start grinding to a halt, unless substitute power systems are designed and put in place. World society has not even begun to do that yet, and we have already seen the first wave of the peek oil crisis.

Facing the peak oil and global warming crises will require a great deal of rethinking about our basic assumptions about the economy, society and the political system. M. King Hubbart pointed out:

"The world's present industrial civilization is handicapped by the coexistence of two universal, overlapping, and incompatible intellectual systems: the accumulated knowledge of the last four centuries of the properties and interrelationships of matter and energy; and the associated monetary culture which has evloved from folkways of prehistoric origin.

"The first of these two systems has been responsible for the spectacular rise, principally during the last two centuries, of the present industrial system and is essential for its continuance. The second, an inheritance from the prescientific past, operates by rules of its own having little in common with those of the matter-energy system. Nevertheless, the monetary system, by means of a loose coupling, exercises a general control over the matter-energy system upon which it is super[im]posed.

"Despite their inherent incompatibilities, these two systems during the last two centuries have had one fundamental characteristic in common, namely, exponential growth, which has made a reasonably stable coexistence possible. But, for various reasons, it is impossible for the matter-energy system to sustain exponential growth for more than a few tens of doublings, and this phase is by now almost over. The monetary system has no such constraints, and, according to one of its most fundamental rules, it must continue to grow by compound interest. This disparity between a monetary system which continues to grow exponentially and a physical system which is unable to do so leads to an increase with time in the ratio of money to the output of the physical system. This manifests itself as price inflation. A monetary alternative corresponding to a zero physical growth rate would be a zero interest rate. The result in either case would be large-scale financial instability."

"With such relationships in mind, a review will be made of the evolution of the world's matter-energy system culminating in the present industrial society. Questions will then be considered regarding the future:

What are the constraints and possibilities imposed by the matter-energy system? human society sustained at near optimum conditions?
Will it be possible to so reform the monetary system that it can serve as a control system to achieve these results?

If not, can an accounting and control system of a non-monetary nature be devised that would be approptirate for the management of an advanced industrial system?
"It appears that the stage is now set for a critical examination of this problem, and that out of such inquries, if a catastrophic solution can be avoided, there can hardly fail to emerge what the historian of science, Thomas S. Kuhn, has called a major scientific and intellectual revolution."

In is not in any ordinary age that Barack Obama will step into the office of the Presidency. By the way the name Barack means lightening in Hebrew. Lets how that he can electrify the world. Doing so will require every bit of his very considerable talent. He must lead the world as if we were at war, and he must do no less than lead us into a new energy age. This is a task that is fully comparable to national and global leadership during World War II Franklin D. Roosevelt played during World War II. Our energy war will not be against other people, but rather it will be against the human misery that we will see if we do not win the war. The energy war is Mr. Obama's to win or loose, and on that victory rests the fate of human society.

The Conclusions Were Overwealming: Robert Hirsh on Peak Oil

Dr. Robert Hirsh is an energy economist who was commissioned by the United States Department of Energy to examine the problem of peak oil. His 2005 report, "Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management" paints a dark picture of our energy future. You can listen David Room of Global Public Media interviewed Robert Hirsch on his report in November 2008. Here is a transcript.

An Executive Summery of the Hirsh Report can be found here.

From the Executive Summery:

Important observations and conclusions from this study are as follows:

1. When world oil peaking will occur is not known with certainty. A fundamental problem in predicting oil peaking is the poor quality of and possible political biases in world oil reserves data. Some experts believe peaking may occur soon. This study indicates that “soon” is within 20 years.

2. The problems associated with world oil production peaking will not be temporary, and past “energy crisis” experience will provide relatively little guidance. The challenge of oil peaking deserves immediate, serious attention, if risks are to be fully understood and mitigation begun on a timely basis.

3. Oil peaking will create a severe liquid fuels problem for the transportation sector, not an “energy crisis” in the usual sense that term has been used.

4. Peaking will result in dramatically higher oil prices, which will cause protracted economic hardship in the United States and the world. However, the problems are not insoluble. Timely, aggressive mitigation initiatives addressing both the supply and the demand sides of the issue will be required.

5. In the developed nations, the problems will be especially serious. In the developing nations peaking problems have the potential to be much worse.

6. Mitigation will require a minimum of a decade of intense, expensive effort, because the scale of liquid fuels mitigation is inherently extremely large.

7. While greater end-use efficiency is essential, increased efficiency alone will be neither sufficient nor timely enough to solve the problem. Production of large amounts of substitute liquid fuels will be required. A number of commercial or near-commercial substitute fuel production technologies are currently available for deployment, so the production of vast amounts of substitute liquid fuels is feasible with existing technology.

8. Intervention by governments will be required, because the economic and social implications of oil peaking would otherwise be chaotic. The experiences of the 1970s and 1980s offer important guides as to government actions that are desirable and those that are undesirable, but the process will not be easy.

Mitigating the peaking of world conventional oil production presents a classic risk management problem:

• Mitigation initiated earlier than required may turn out to be premature, if peaking is long delayed.

• If peaking is imminent, failure to initiate timely mitigation could be extremely damaging.

From the Interview with David Room.

"There is no question in my mind that peaking is going to occur within the next 10 or 15 years, so if depletion is as high as some people think it is, we are in a very very serious serious problem, much worse than the worst that we considered in the past. This problem is truly frightening; this problem is like nothing I have ever seen in my lifetime, and the more you think about it, and the more you look at the numbers, the more uneasy any observer gets, its so easy to sound alarmist - and I fear that part of what I am saying may sound alarmist - but there simply is no question that the risks here are beyond anything that any of us have ever dealt with, and the risks to our economies and our civilization are enormous and people dont want to hear that, I don't want to think about that...thats a very uncomfortable thing to think about. And I tell you that it took some time, after the realization had set in to be able to emerge and try to be positive and constructive about this problem; this is really an incredibly difficult and incredibly severe problem."- Robert Hirsh