SOLOPEC Nations Warn Sun's Output May Fall Short Of Demand

Seriously funny stuff!

Excerpt from The Onion, 22 June 2005

'RIYADH, MUHAMMAD ARABIA—The governing board of the Solar Output Power Exporting Countries announced Monday that, in spite of attempts to raise production levels, increased global-power consumption may begin to outstrip the sun's output by early next year.

"Our solar-accumulation arrays in Muhammad Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, and Mexico are operating at full capacity, and still, we're struggling to meet demands," said Muhammad Arabia's Prince Fayahd al-Saud, whose family has controlled the world's energy market for more than 100 years. "In a very short time, the sun will not be able to meet the world's energy needs."

SOLOPEC, formed in the '20s to regulate solar-energy prices, currently includes the sunlight-rich nations of Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Muhammad Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Mexico, Venezuela, Iran, and Iraq...

With an output of 4x1026 watts per second, the sun was considered an inexhaustible energy supply when SOLOPEC was formed 30 years ago. However, if growth continues along the current trajectory, that amount will be inadequate to fuel the Cuba/Newer York/Boston megapolitan corridor as soon as 2070.

"Once again, human consumption has expanded to meet available supply," said SOLOPEC economic director Hermann Villalobos of Mexico City. "With today's fully automatic homes, artificially sentient robotic cities, 32-lane automatic roadways, floating antigrav-suspended skyscrapers, air-conditioned city-domes, and 96-inch personal fusion-screen monitors, the energy demand of human civilization has never been higher. Why, last year, the wattage requirements of leisurebots alone exceeded the entire world's energy-consumption rates of 1988. It's no surprise that SOLOPEC can barely keep up."

MIT scientist Glen Schraeder said he predicted the shortage a decade ago.

"The U.S. must reduce its dependence on foreign solar power," Schraeder said. "The sun was created billions of years ago, with the formation of our galaxy. When its unused energy output is gone, it's gone. We must look for alternative energy sources throughout the universe now."'

International Energy Agency - Crude Oil Peaked in 2006

From the horse's mouth of the International Energy Agency's Chief Economist, Dr Fatih Birol - crude oil peaked in 2006.

'


The time is running out, the oil is today our lifeline, it is everywhere in the economy, if the prices go up or if there's a supply disruption this will be definitely very bad news.
..
I think it would have been better if the governments have started to work on it at least ten years ago.'

Sourced from YouTube, 28 April 2011

'In this special Catalyst investigation, we travel from Paris, to London, to the outer space like world that is deep sea drilling to find out why so many industry insiders now say we'll soon look back on 2011 as the good old days when fuel was cheap.'

A Strategy for National Security - Sustainability

Excerpt from New York Times, 3 May 2011

'Here’s a proposition: The death of Osama bin Laden brings a moment to talk about something other than threats — not because they don’t exist, but because for the country to see and speak of nothing else is mortally dangerous.

Col. Mark Mykleby, a senior advisor on strategy to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Capt. Wayne Porter of the Navy wrote a paper calling on the United States to focus on social policies, education and sustainability...“A National Strategic Narrative,” a paper written by Captain Porter and Col. Mark Mykleby of the Marines, which calls on the United States to see that it cannot continue to engage the world primarily with military force, but must do so as a nation powered by the strength of its educational system, social policies, international development and diplomacy, and its commitment to sustainable practices in energy and agriculture.

“We must recognize that security means more than defense,” they write. After ending the 20th century as the world’s most powerful country, “we failed to recognize that dominance, like fossil fuel, is not a sustainable form of energy.”

The two officers each have more than 20 years of service, and now work as special strategic assistants to Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Their paper, which is not an official policy document, was published last month by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, and is available on the center’s Web site, wilsoncenter.org...

In their paper, the officers argue that the United States has to move from “containment” — the foreign policy established after World War II to limit the expansion and influence of the Soviet Union — to what they call “sustainment” or sustainability.

The first priority, they write, should be “intellectual capital and a sustainable infrastructure of education, health and social services to provide for the continuing development and growth of America’s youth.” They go on to say that the country’s security may require “a hard look at the distribution of our treasure,” arguing that the historic focus on defense and protectionism has meant the neglect of international development and diplomacy. And with technology piercing the isolation of nations, they write that the United States has a stake in helping countries held down by illiteracy and poverty.

Finally, they write, the world population is projected to reach nine billion by midcentury and the country must face the demands for water, food, land and energy...'

If Cars and Cities Were to Evolve Together

Ecocity Builders's Richard Register plants an interesting idea in the consciousness of car companies - just as fossil fuel companies need to evolve into energy utilities, can car companies evolve into '

whole systems transportation/infrastructure companies'?

Reposted in full from Ecocity Builders, 29 October 2010

The following article by Ecocity Builders President Richard Register will be appearing in the upcoming edition of Nissan Technology Magazine

'I'm the author of books on "ecocities," head of some local ecological restoration projects and a speaker on the international circuit. By ecocities I mean simply cities that are ecologically healthy, that leave the biological world happily buzzing along while we humans do whatever we do best in our built environments of cities, towns and villages and in moving about and utilizing the countryside while protecting nature - mostly from us.

I don't have to tell many audiences these days that climate is changing rapidly now and in dangerous directions, that biodiversity is sliding from high to lower every day, that humanity is drawing down resources rapidly in many areas from finite energy stores to digging up, using and losing considerable amounts of finite minerals for our metals, and failing to recycle efficiently.

In thinking of the next twenty-five years for Nissan and its publications' readers, I have to admit, I am not optimistic. The basic ideas I've been advancing for forty years have not yet caught on, have barely started the journey. So instead of trying to predict I'll simply say what I think is the problem and what I would like to see as the solution - and car companies' role in the solution.

It starts with whole systems thinking. Car companies should become whole systems transportation/-infrastructure companies, bifurcating their moveable products into cars so much smaller they become carts - that's right - essentially carts like improved golf carts, on one hand, and train systems large and small plus elevators and conveyor belts sometimes called "people movers" like we see in airports. Transport and city development needs close coordination with architecture, plazas and parks and streets and rails. A small number of what we think of as cars today would still be needed for rural work and living and available as rentals for city and town people wanting to get to places in the country far from small towns with train stations.

The conventional car is about 30 times as heavy as a person, 10 times as fast in optimal operation and takes up about 50 times the volume. To say the least, it doesn't mix well with pedestrians and bicycles. It demands hundreds of acres per city for parking lots and whole extra buildings called parking structures stuffed into city infrastructures scattering everything farther apart making everything work worse for foot, bike and transit.

Another important point: the presently understood better car actually makes the city worse - and takes the world down with it. The car does not stand alone; it is integral to the buildings and their arrangement and to the street and energy systems. To improve the car simply continues the pattern of sprawling development and all the harms that go with it. If it's energy efficient, it is most efficient in convincing its owner he or she is "green" while perpetuating a disastrous urban form. It would be a sad day for most car companies to wake up to this notion, which I take to be a reality, without realizing that they could become companies to coordinate far better urban development with transport. They could turn out to be thriving and profitable endeavors after all serving society and nature alike, but only if remissioned, retooled and retrained to participate in building ecocities, perhaps even taking the lead. There is no one like the reformed to lead with enthusiasm and effectiveness. The story of their conversion is powerful.

The ecological city, the "ecocity," would be much more compact - think Manhattan, downtown Tokyo, or at the other end of the size scale, compact pedestrian European villages where buildings are no more than five or six stories high. Ecocities are three-dimensional, not essentially flat like most American cities excepting their central business districts. Ecocities are cities primarily for pedestrians, supported by bicycles and transit the best of which would be rail from streetcars to metro systems.

But they would go beyond models we see in the general layout of compact cities of separate buildings, the European old city model, for example, by beginning to stitch the buildings together in whole systems design featuring extreme pedestrian permeability - access three-dimensionally through the city. This means there would be bridges between buildings with rooftop "uses" like shops and restaurants, mini-parks and plazas on rooftops and rooftop gardens for native species of birds, some food gardens, though not high volume production relative to the number of people obviously, but educational for the children - and all this with fantastic views over the city and surrounding landscapes. Systems of bridges for bicycles and monorail-like connections fit too in the larger city context, connecting those rich, verdant pedestrian environments hanging in the sky.

This configuration of the physical structure - clusters of buildings linked on ground level and one or more levels above ground level arranged around streets, parks and plazas uses radically less land, as well as energy, than the car/sprawl/paving infrastructure we see so dominant today and growing rapidly in many countries. Ecocity design means natural landscape and agriculture can come back into close relationship to the city. Just take an elevator - I encourage adventurous glass elevators on the outside of some buildings for pleasure rides - walk a few short blocks and be in the country. Ecocity wholes systems design also applies at all scales.

I've been in some villages in Nepal, Turkey and Northern Italy that are only four or five blocks long and wide and yet have buildings six or seven stories high, infrastructure providing for enough people to have a very lively cultural life, plus hosting a small hotel or two for very personal connection to the outside world. Think in addition to such structures attached solar greenhouses and those bridge linkages and roof and terrace experiences.

So as part of a coordinated enterprise understood by people everywhere, we can well imagine car companies joining, even leading, a larger program of coordinated parts in which the city is stitched together in the ecocity way and a healthy future is launched.'

The Great Disruption - Paul Gilding

Paul Gilding's talk on his new book, 'The Great Disruption', to the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London (audio only)

Sourced from the RSA, 13 April 2011

www.thersa.org/__data/assets/file/0004/396994/20110413PaulGilding.mp3 (1 hour)

'Paul Gilding is an independent writer, advisor and advocate for action on climate change and sustainability.

An activist and social entrepreneur for 35 years, his personal mission and purpose is to lead, inspire and motivate action globally on the transition of society and the economy to sustainability. He pursues this purpose across all sectors, working around the world with individuals, businesses, NGOs, entrepreneurs, academia and government.

He has served as CEO of a range of innovative NGO’s and companies including Greenpeace International, Ecos Corporation and Easy Being Green. He has also helped to establish and served on the board of a number of new NGOs including Inspire Foundation, the Australian Business Community Network and Climate Coolers. His speaking and work has taken him to over 30 countries including the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, South America, Europe, South Africa, the USA and Mexico.

Paul believes we are now in a global ecological and economic crisis that will lead to a period of major global economic transformation. As he advocated in his 2005 letter Scream Crash Boom and his 2008 update The Great Disruption, he sees this crisis driven change as an enormous opportunity to build a new approach to economic and social development for humanity.'

Open Sourced Blueprints for Civilisation

Sourced from TED, April 2011

'Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing a set of blueprints for 50 farming tools that can be built cheaply from scratch. Call it a "civilization starter kit."

Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).'

The Carbon Atlas

click on link to original source for interactive map

Sourced from The Guardian, 9 December 2008

'New figures confirm that China has overtaken the US as the largest emitter of CO2. This interactive emissions map shows how the rest of the world compares. Global C02 emissions totalled 29,195m tonnes in 2006 – up 2.4% on 2005'

The Old American Dream is a Nightmare

Excerpt from Grist, 9 March 2011

'...[James Howard] Kunstler has long warned of the horrendous hangover we're going to wake up with after our "cheap oil fiesta," but he's not gloating as global instability and climate destabilization become the new not-so-normal. Unlike some dystopians, he's motivated less by the desire to say "I told you so" than by the hope that we might still manage to reinvent the American dream on a scale that better suits our current circumstances.

Q. In your 2005 book The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, you gave high-rises low marks, and declared that you're "not optimistic about our big cities." You maintain that towns and small cities are far better equipped to adapt to the post-cheap-oil future.

Now, we've got economist Edward Glaeser talking up skyscrapers in The Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier. David Owen made a similar case with Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability.

Do you find yourself swayed, even a little, by these defenders of urban density?

A. I am completely on board with compact, dense urbanism. It's a mistake, though, to think that's the same as an urbanism of mega-structures - either skyscrapers or landscrapers.

A lot of this misunderstanding derived from David Owen's 2004 New Yorker article, "Green Manhattan," which declared that stacking people up in towers was the ultimate triumph of urban ecology. Owen is a very nice fellow, but this thesis was a crock.

And I'm confident that Ed Glaeser and his acolytes will be disappointed with how it all works out, too. We are entering a capital-scarce, energy-scarce future. The skyscraper is already obsolete and the architects and academic economists remain tragically clueless about it.

Oddly, the main reason we're done with skyscrapers is not because of the electric issues or heating-cooling issues per se, but because they will never be renovated! They are one-generation buildings. We will not have the capital to renovate them - and all buildings eventually require renovation! We likely won't have the fabricated modular materials they require, either - everything from the manufactured sheet-rock to the silicon gaskets and sealers needed to keep the glass curtain walls attached.

You cannot have a city of buildings unavailable for and unsuited for adaptive re-use. This final exuberant generation of skyscrapers built the past few decades - including the mis-named "green" skyscrapers - may be considered the architectural expression of the final cheap oil blow-off.

From now on, we need desperately to tone down our grandiosity. We will discover to our dismay that all these skyscrapers - amazing feats that they might be - are liabilities, not assets. Our cities are going to contract a lot and the process will be painful in terms of lost notional wealth (and probably other ways, too). They have attained a scale that is inconsistent with the economic and energy realities of the future. The optimum building height, we will re-discover, is the number of stories most healthy people can comfortably walk up.

Q. Is "smart growth" the antidote to sprawl, or just a developer's disingenuous oxymoron?

A. "Smart growth" started as a polemical retort to the "dumb" growth of suburban sprawl. It happened that dumb growth was utterly entrenched in all our local land-use laws, and in the sectors that served them - especially the construction trades and our lending practices. The zoning laws mandated a car-dependent outcome, and the builders furnished it, exactly as specified.

By the way, it's important to understand that suburbia was not dreamed up by the devil or any of his agents among us. It just seemed like a good idea in the America of the 20th century. We had the material and capital resources to build this empire of comfort and convenience, so we did. And all this implies a powerful cultural consensus - a broad agreement that this way of living is okay.

Eventually, of course, it became embedded in our national identity as a late incarnation of the American Dream. All well and good - and over! Because our circumstances have changed drastically now. We face the awful predicament of peak oil, and the global contest over the world's remaining resources, and reality is telling us very loudly that we have to live differently - we have to get a new American Dream.

The resistance to this is ferocious, not because Americans are particularly dumb or wicked, but because of the massive investments we have already made in these suburban infrastructures for daily living. We can't accept the scary mandates of reality, or begin the process of letting go.

Smart growth was a strategy undertaken by the New Urbanist reformers to offer an alternative template for land development in America - one based on the traditional walkable neighborhood. The New Urbanists were superbly skilled at drawing up clear graphical codes that might be used to replace the suburban codes around the country. The term "smart" growth was intended to be a selling point - though, unfortunately it often offended the very people it was aimed at by making their own codes look dumb...

The housing bubble bust...represents not just a transient economic fiasco; it is the end of the suburban project per se. We are finished with suburbia. We're stuck with the residue of it. And now we'll see how this all sorts itself out in the face of $100+ per barrel oil.

We will probably come to see a long era of little-to-no-growth. Whatever happens in terms of the human habitat from now on will involve the re-use of stuff that is already there, one way or another.

Personally, I believe the action is going to shift to small towns, small cities, and places that exist in a relationship with a productive agricultural landscape. The fate of suburbia is to become slums, salvage sites, and ruins. Human beings are very good at sorting out materials, and we'll have to do a lot of that. I believe a great deal of all trade in the years ahead will be in material goods already made, re-purposed, as they say, and re-circulated.

...I maintain that any activity organized at the colossal scale will tend to fail in the face of the compound crises of energy, capital, and ecology (climate change). Giant governments, giant universities, giant retail operations - all these things will wobble and fail in the years ahead as reality compels us to downscale and re-localize...

...we are mounting a foolish campaign to sustain the unsustainable, to defend our previous investments in things like suburban living, instead of making new arrangements. That's what we do when we invest half a trillion dollars of "stimulus" capital in building new circumferential highways around our hypertrophied metroplex cities instead of repairing the railroad system.

There is, sadly, much truth in the old saying that people get what they deserve, not what they expect. We are an extremely demoralized nation, unable to construct a coherent consensus about what is happening and what we might do about it, and floundering as a result. Even at the elite environmentalist level, the conversation is ridiculous. For two years in a row, I attended the Aspen Environmental forum, which attracts the cream of the green-and-enviro community. Whenever the subjects of peak oil and our extreme car dependency came up, all they wanted to talk about was running cars by other clever means: electricity, biodiesel, etc. They showed a total lack interest in walkable communities or public transit. They were blind to the fact that their own techno-grandiosity left them in a position that only promoted further car dependency - which is suicidal, of course...

...I suspect that we have left behind the supposed normality of the past decade and have now entered uncharted territory of the long emergency. We have also seen the first stirrings of American unrest in the battles over public employee bargaining rights. I'd maintain that this is only the start of a very rough political era in the USA. The buildup of tensions is fantastic. You have a dissolving middle class watching their futures whirl around the drain, and an obscenely rich Wall Street banking class (abetted by a disgustingly bought-off political class) that has been allowed to evade the rule of law in running a set of ruinous financial rackets, swindles, and frauds, and this alone is, to me, a recipe for civil disorder. I'm amazed that the Hamptons have not yet been torched.'

The Food Bubble is About to Burst

Reposted in full from the New Scientist, 10 February 2011

'We're fast draining the fresh water resources our farms rely on, warns Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute

What is a food bubble?

That's when food production is inflated through the unsustainable use of water and land. It's the water bubble we need to worry about now. The World Bank says that 15 per cent of Indians (175 million people) are fed by grain produced through overpumping - when water is pumped out of aquifers faster than they can be replenished. In China, the figure could be 130 million.

Has this bubble already burst anywhere?

Saudi Arabia made itself self-sufficient in wheat by using water from a fossil aquifer, which doesn't refill. It has harvested close to 3 million tonnes a year, but in 2008 the Saudi authorities said the aquifer was largely depleted. Next year could be the last harvest. This is extreme, but about half the world's people live in countries with falling water tables. India and China will lose grain production capacity through aquifer depletion. We don't know when or how abruptly the bubble will burst.

With population rising, a fall in grain production would spell big trouble.

Yes. Tonight at the dinner table there will be 219,000 people who weren't there last night. But that's not all: we also have maybe 3 billion people moving up the food chain, consuming more grain-intensive livestock products. Then there is the conversion of grain into ethanol for cars, mainly in the US, where last year 119 million tonnes went to distilleries out of a harvest of just over 400 million tonnes.

What will happen if we carry on as we are now?

Civilisation as we know it can't withstand the stresses of continuing with business as usual. We've got to move, almost on a war footing, to cut carbon emissions, eradicate poverty, stabilise population. We must also restore the economy's natural support systems: forests and aquifers and soils. No civilisation ever survived that kind of destruction; nor will ours. We haven't gone over the edge, but we're much closer than most people think. If the heatwave that hit Moscow in 2010 had been centred on Chicago instead, we would be in deep trouble. The Russians lost 40 per cent of their 100-million-tonne grain crop, but we would have lost 40 per cent of our 400-million-tonne crop - a massive global setback.

How can we avert a disaster like this?

In many countries, irrigation water is free or comes at a low price, so it's treated as an abundant resource. In fact it's scarce and should be priced accordingly. We must also redefine what we mean by "security". The real threats are not some armed superpower but water or food shortages, climate change and the rising number of failed states.

Can individuals make a difference?

The question I get asked most is "What can I do?" People expect me to say change your light bulbs, recycle newspaper, but I say we must restructure the world economy, especially in energy. It's about becoming politically active. If there's a coal-fired power station near you, organise to close it down.'

Five Things Every Mayor Should Know Before Starting A Bike-Sharing Program

Reposted in full from Shareable, 15 February 2011

'Bike-sharing is a two-wheeled transit service — call it bike transit — which started in 1965 in Amsterdam and has since spread to nearly 250 communities around the world. The service allows individuals to rent a bike from one of many unattended stations, or docking points, and return it to any station. Before implementing a bike-sharing service, it’s important for public officials and staff to consider the following:

1) Be a bike-friendly community first.

Your community should be bike-friendly first with a dense network of bike facilities such as cycle tracks, bike lanes, and trails. This network of bike facilities will enable bicycle riders and your future bike-sharing customers to easily and safely travel through your community by bike. The League of American Bicyclists’ Bicycle Friendly America Yearbook offers examples of what other communities have done to become bike-friendly. Communities with bike-sharing services also have high Bicycle Friendly Community ratings and include: Arlington, VA (silver), Washington, D.C. (bronze), Minneapolis (silver), and Denver (bronze). Before implementing a bike-sharing service, a community should be at least a bronze-level Bicycle Friendly Community.

2) Bike-sharing is not cheap, so secure sufficient funding.

By implementing a bike-sharing service, you’re launching a new transit service. It may be less expensive to purchase and operate than a bus or rail service, but sufficient funding is required to make it successful. While the types of bike-sharing systems vary, costs can be up to $5,000 per bike for capital, and operating expenses can range from $100-200 per bike per year. A service with a couple hundred — or thousand — bikes is pricey. However, while implementing a service is not cheap, bike-sharing can be a cost-effective public transportation option.

3) Size and density matter.

A bus service with a solitary bus or just a couple of stops will only be accessible to a limited number of people — those living, working, or playing near the stops. The same can be said for bike-sharing, as the greater the number of bikes and the wider the network of stations translates into a more successful service. Station density should be such that a customer can find a station every couple of blocks. In fact, a bike-sharing service’s usefulness will increase exponentially with each additional station, as each station expands the reach of your service by better connecting places into this new transit system.

4) Build public-private partnerships.

Bike-sharing lends itself to public-private partnerships. Private organizations can assist the implementing agency by sponsoring the service or purchasing a station for outside their worksite. They also find bike-sharing good for providing their employees a healthy commuting option, making their location more accessible to customers, being environmentally friendly, and promoting a green service. The public benefits by having some of the costs of buying and operating a service covered by private organizations. Whether the implementing agency is a local government or non-profit, both have successfully taken advantage of sponsorship to help expand their service’s reach. Barclays Bank sponsored Barclays Cycle Hire in London to the tune of $40 million; BlueCross BlueShield of Minnesota sponsored Nice Ride Minnesota in Minneapolis with $1.75 million and has offered up to a $1.5 million match for expansion of the service. For bike-sharing implementers, private engagement can expand a service in a cost-efficient way — creating a win-win for both parties.

5) Don’t do it alone, work regionally.

Bike-sharing can produce the greatest benefits when done regionally, which is why the Paris and Washington, D.C. areas have regional services. For commuting trips, bike-sharing is ideal for the first-mile/last-mile challenge of getting folks to and from longer haul transit services. Implementing a service takes a lot of work, but sharing the workload, and expenses among multiple jurisdictions is a great deal. Additionally, it’s important that jurisdictions within a region have the same, compatible service, so riding from one jurisdiction to another is smooth and makes for a pleasant customer experience.

With the number of bike-sharing services in the U.S. and worldwide rapidly increasing each year, bike-sharing has proven effective at serving the public well for short urban trips, as well as complementing other modes of transit. However, like any other transit mode, there are pitfalls — both shared with other transit modes and unique to bike-sharing — which should be avoided to ensure a successful, well-used service. Following this advice will get your jurisdiction rolling in the right direction.'

Peak Oil Angst and the Lure of Techno-Utopia

'Latest 'Zeitgeist' Documentary Mixes Sound Critique and Goofy Futurism' — Transition Voice

I must concur – the film’s diagnosis is pretty much on the money, but the prescription? I am highly suspicious of technological master plans that deny the diversity of humanity, and don’t really address the internal dysfunction that brought us to this point.

Excerpt from Transition Voice, 30 March 2011

'...to many who are disgusted by party politics and corporate greed, the dispassionate world of science, with integrity built right into the experimental method, looks appealing by comparison...

2011′s Moving Forward is actually the third film in the series, which began with Zeitgeist in 2007, a film roundly attacked for promoting conspiracy theories on 9/11, Christianity and the international banking system. A second film, Zeitgeist: Addendum came out in 2008, focusing again on the financial system.

Clearly, these documentaries and the political movement behind them (the Zeitgeist Movement has a separate Facebook page with 95,089 friends) have tapped into a trend.

With a hard-hitting critique of market economics and corruption in politics by such visionary thinkers as Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky and Vancouver physician Gabor Maté, the film’s got a lot that a thinking person can agree with. I was glad to see that director Peter Joseph gave plenty of time to peak oil, featuring both Michael Ruppert and Colin Campbell.

But this impressively produced film is wracked by a split personality. On the one hand, it’s as cynical as can be about the difference between Democrats and Republicans (none that matters), the health of the financial system (poor to critical) and the consequences for the future of the market economy (bleak, bleak, bleak).

On the other hand, Zeitgeist’s solutions are not merely uncompelling and unconvincing. They seem to rely on the very thinking that got us into today’s problems in the first place.

Here’s what the Very Smart People behind Zeitgeist think will save civilization: The peoples of the world should rise up simultaneously in revolt and demand an end to the current world order. The film imagines a scenario where demonstrators mass peacefully in the major cities of the world and dump the life-savings they’ve just withdrawn from the nearest ATM into huge piles of cash on the street in front of the offices of their nation’s central bank.

What’s next? Somehow, an enlightened regime of brainiacs, chosen in some unspecified manner entirely free of either party politics or moneyed interests (oh, right, there’s no more money), will revamp world civilization according to a blueprint from the world of — get ready for it — systems engineering.

Resources will be sourced from where they’re produced anywhere on Earth to wherever they’re needed anywhere else on Earth. Shopping will be a thing of the past as people simply “check out” any goods that they need for temporary use from the local lending library.

And the world’s cities? Somehow they’ll all become completely rational, with concentric circles of high-tech building complexes designed to maximize land use and energy efficiency, all fed by hydroponic agriculture and with transportation provided by monorails apparently borrowed from Disney World.

Apparently gone will be narrow Renaissance alleys and Victorian brownstones, Manhattan high-rises and Stalinist low-rises, Qing Dynasty hutongs and Meiji Era courtyards. How will we get there? Again, details TBA.

I don’t fault a documentary that’s already pushing three hours for skipping over all the steps of how such a wondrous transformation could occur. I’ll trust that the super-smarties at the Venus Project, a clearly well-funded group behind Zeitgeist, have some ideas on how to pull the old stuff down, reuse the materials and rebuild everything to look like a set from Logan’s Run.

The real question is, after dozens of compelling visions of techno-dystopia, why anyone today would still find appealing a future in glass domes and Modernist towers that look like the theme restaurant at LAX.

If the only way to free ourselves from the Koch brothers, Goldman Sachs and Michelle Bachmann is to wipe away the glorious mess that is 5,000 years of civilization and replace it with a Version 2.0 that’s all metal and perfectly aerodynamic, then there doesn’t seem to be all that much point to human survival.

What the hell would we do in those damn domes all day anyway?

Fortunately, if for energy and resource depletion alone, not to mention human psychology, a future in geo-domes eating hydroponic asparagus picked from the glass balcony is about as likely as seeing George Jetson as president or Buck Rogers as Secretary of Defense.

The appeal of a cerebral version of urban renewal — tear down the slums of history and replace them with shiny new stuff that’s approved by science — is worrisome.

Clearly, too many people still think we have to destroy civilization to save it.

And if you want to point your finger at dirty politics and the greedy market as the root of all evil, can you really claim that science still has clean hands?

From eugenics to Auschwitz, from the Manhattan Project to Fukushima, from physicists flocking to Wall Street to design complex financial derivatives to Monsanto’s latest genetic engineering horror, science has shown little scruple about ethics when money and power came a-calling.

Why should next time be any different?'

The End of Growth - Richard Heinberg

Leading peak oil educator and author Richard Heinberg explains how the harnessing of fossil fuel energy gave us economic growth - and what this now means in the face of peak oil and the end of the fossil fuel era.

Sourced from the Post Carbon Institute and Transition Town Totnes, 4 March 2011

‘Net Energy’ Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society

Overview of a report about whether humanity's energy bubble is so big, that *no* mix of known energy sources could supply the forecasted demand by the end of the century...

Sourced from the Post Carbon Institute, September 2009

'This report is intended as a non-technical examination of a basic question: Can any combination of known energy sources successfully supply society’s energy needs at least up to the year 2100? In the end, we are left with the disturbing conclusion that all known energy sources are subject to strict limits of one kind or another. Conventional energy sources such as oil, gas, coal, and nuclear are either at or nearing the limits of their ability to grow in annual supply, and will dwindle as the decades proceed—but in any case they are unacceptably hazardous to the environment. And contrary to the hopes of many, there is no clear practical scenario by which we can replace the energy from today’s conventional sources with sufficient energy from alternative sources to sustain industrial society at its present scale of operations. To achieve such a transition would require (1) a vast financial investment beyond society’s practical abilities, (2) a very long time—too long in practical terms—for build-out, and (3) significant sacrifices in terms of energy quality and reliability.

Perhaps the most significant limit to future energy supplies is the “net energy” factor—the requirement that energy systems yield more energy than is invested in their construction and operation. There is a strong likelihood that future energy systems, both conventional and alternative, will have higher energy input costs than those that powered industrial societies during the last century.We will come back to this point repeatedly.

The report explores some of the presently proposed energy transition scenarios, showing why, up to this time, most are overly optimistic, as they do not address all of the relevant limiting factors to the expansion of alternative energy sources. Finally, it shows why energy conservation (using less energy, and also less resource materials) combined with humane, gradual population decline must become primary strategies for achieving sustainability.

***

The world’s current energy regime is unsustainable. This is the recent, explicit conclusion of the International Energy Agency1, and it is also the substance of a wide and growing public consensus ranging across the political spectrum. One broad segment of this consensus is concerned about the climate and the other environmental impacts of society’s reliance on fossil fuels.The other is mainly troubled by questions regarding the security of future supplies of these fuels—which, as they deplete, are increasingly concentrated in only a few countries.

To say that our current energy regime is unsustainable means that it cannot continue and must therefore be replaced with something else.However, replacing the energy infrastructure of modern industrial societies will be no trivial matter. Decades have been spent building the current oil-coal-gas infrastructure, and trillions of dollars invested. Moreover, if the transition from current energy sources to alternatives is wrongly managed, the consequences could be severe: there is an undeniable connection between per-capita levels of energy consumption and economic well-being.2 A failure to supply sufficient energy, or energy of sufficient quality, could undermine the future welfare of humanity, while a failure to quickly make the transition away from fossil fuels could imperil the Earth’s vital ecosystems.

Nonetheless, it remains a commonly held assumption that alternative energy sources capable of substituting for conventional fossil fuels are readily available—whether fossil (tar sands or oil shale), nuclear, or a long list of renewables—and ready to come on-line in a bigger way. All that is necessary, according to this view, is to invest sufficiently in them, and life will go on essentially as it is.

But is this really the case? Each energy source has highly specific characteristics. In fact, it has been the characteristics of our present energy sources (principally oil, coal, and natural gas) that have enabled the building of a modern society with high mobility, large population, and high economic growth rates. Can alternative energy sources perpetuate this kind of society? Alas, we think not.

While it is possible to point to innumerable successful alternative energy production installations within modern societies (ranging from small homescale photovoltaic systems to large “farms” of threemegawatt wind turbines), it is not possible to point to more than a very few examples of an entire modern industrial nation obtaining the bulk of its energy from sources other than oil, coal, and natural gas. One such rare example is Sweden, which gets most of its energy from nuclear and hydropower. Another is Iceland, which benefits from unusually large domestic geothermal resources, not found in most other countries. Even in these two cases, the situation is more complex than it appears.The construction of the infrastructure for these power plants mostly relied on fossil fuels for the mining of the ores and raw materials, materials processing, transportation, manufacturing of components, the mining of uranium, construction energy, and so on. Thus for most of the world, a meaningful energy transition is still more theory than reality. But if current primary energy sources are unsustainable, this implies a daunting problem. The transition to alternative sources must occur, or the world will lack sufficient energy to maintain basic services for its 6.8 billion people (and counting).

Thus it is vitally important that energy alternatives be evaluated thoroughly according to relevant criteria, and that a staged plan be formulated and funded for a systemic societal transition away from oil, coal, and natural gas and toward the alternative energy sources deemed most fully capable of supplying the kind of economic benefits we have been accustomed to from conventional fossil fuels.

By now, it is possible to assemble a bookshelf filled with reports from nonprofit environmental organizations and books from energy analysts, dating from the early 1970s to the present, all attempting to illuminate alternative energy transition pathways for the United States and the world as a whole.These plans and proposals vary in breadth and quality, and especially in their success at clearly identifying the factors that are limiting specific alternative energy sources from being able to adequately replace conventional fossil fuels.

It is a central purpose of this document to systematically review key limiting factors that are often left out of such analyses.We will begin that process in the next section. Following that, we will go further into depth on one key criterion: net energy, or energy returned on energy invested (EROEI).This measure focuses on the key question: All things considered, how much more energy does a system produce than is required to develop and operate that system? What is the ratio of energy in versus energy out? Some energy “sources” can be shown to produce little or no net energy. Others are only minimally positive.

Unfortunately, as we shall see in more detail below, research on EROEI continues to suffer from lack of standard measurement practices, and its use and implications remain widely misunderstood. Nevertheless, for the purposes of large-scale and long-range planning, net energy may be the most vital criterion for evaluating energy sources, as it so clearly reveals the tradeoffs involved in any shift to new energy sources.

This report is not intended to serve as a final authoritative, comprehensive analysis of available energy options, nor as a plan for a nation-wide or global transition from fossil fuels to alternatives. While such analyses and plans are needed, they will require institutional resources and ongoing reassessment to be of value.The goal here is simply to identify and explain the primary criteria that should be used in such analyses and plans, with special emphasis on net energy, and to offer a cursory evaluation of currently available energy sources, using those criteria.This will provide a general, preliminary sense of whether alternative sources are up to the job of replacing fossil fuels; and if they are not, we can begin to explore what might be the fall-back strategy of governments and the other responsible institutions of modern society.

As we will see, the fundamental disturbing conclusion of the report is that there is little likelihood that either conventional fossil fuels or alternative energy sources can reliably be counted on to provide the amount and quality of energy that will be needed to sustain economic growth—or even current levels of economic activity—during the remainder of the current century.

This preliminary conclusion in turn suggests that a sensible transition energy plan will have to emphasize energy conservation above all. It also raises questions about the sustainability of growth per se, both in terms of human population numbers and economic activity.'

Crematorium To Heat Water For Town's Swimmers

A friend of mine has suggested this project be dubbed 'Ashes to Splashes'!

Reposted in full from Planet Ark News, 14 February 2011

'A local authority in England has given the go ahead for a swimming pool to use energy created by the next-door crematorium to heat its water.

The plan, the first of its kind in Britain, will see waste heat from the incinerator chimney used to warm up the neighboring leisure center and its new pool.

"The cremation process is a sensitive matter and we wanted to be sure our proposals had widespread support," said Councilor Carole Gandy, the leader of Redditch Borough Council in central England.

Eighty to 90 percent of people who contacted the council had backed the scheme, she said.

"Throughout we have been careful to explain how the technology would work, that it is tried and trusted, and that the practice is quite common in parts of Europe and especially in Sweden," she said.

"We already support our residents to insulate their homes and be energy-efficient, so it seemed only right for us to explore this re-use of energy."

However, local trade union officials are less than impressed with the plan, saying it was a reflection of the massive public spending cuts being implemented by the government.

"These proposals ... are sick and an insult to local residents," said Roger McKenzie, regional secretary for Unison, Britain's biggest public sector labor union.'

WikiLeaks Cables - Have Saudi Arabia's Oil Reserves Been Overstated?

For those of you going 'what does this mean? - it means oil and all the things that depend on it (like food, travel, petrol etc) will become much less affordable much sooner than expected...what are our leaders doing about transitioning?

Reposted in full from The Guardian, 8 February 2011

'The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show.

The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom's crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300bn barrels – nearly 40%.

The revelation comes as the oil price has soared in recent weeks to more than $100 a barrel on global demand and tensions in the Middle East. Many analysts expect that the Saudis and their OPEC cartel partners would pump more oil if rising prices threatened to choke off demand.

However, Sadad al-Husseini, a geologist and former head of exploration at the Saudi oil monopoly Aramco, met the US consul general in Riyadh in November 2007 and told the US diplomat that Aramco's 12.5m barrel-a-day capacity needed to keep a lid on prices could not be reached.

According to the cables, which date between 2007-09, Husseini said Saudi Arabia might reach an output of 12m barrels a day in 10 years but before then – possibly as early as 2012 – global oil production would have hit its highest point. This crunch point is known as "peak oil".

Husseini said that at that point Aramco would not be able to stop the rise of global oil prices because the Saudi energy industry had overstated its recoverable reserves to spur foreign investment. He argued that Aramco had badly underestimated the time needed to bring new oil on tap.

One cable said: "According to al-Husseini, the crux of the issue is twofold. First, it is possible that Saudi reserves are not as bountiful as sometimes described, and the timeline for their production not as unrestrained as Aramco and energy optimists would like to portray."

It went on: "In a presentation, Abdallah al-Saif, current Aramco senior vice-president for exploration, reported that Aramco has 716bn barrels of total reserves, of which 51% are recoverable, and that in 20 years Aramco will have 900bn barrels of reserves.

"Al-Husseini disagrees with this analysis, believing Aramco's reserves are overstated by as much as 300bn barrels. In his view once 50% of original proven reserves has been reached … a steady output in decline will ensue and no amount of effort will be able to stop it. He believes that what will result is a plateau in total output that will last approximately 15 years followed by decreasing output."

The US consul then told Washington: "While al-Husseini fundamentally contradicts the Aramco company line, he is no doomsday theorist. His pedigree, experience and outlook demand that his predictions be thoughtfully considered."

Seven months later, the US embassy in Riyadh went further in two more cables. "Our mission now questions how much the Saudis can now substantively influence the crude markets over the long term. Clearly they can drive prices up, but we question whether they any longer have the power to drive prices down for a prolonged period."

A fourth cable, in October 2009, claimed that escalating electricity demand by Saudi Arabia may further constrain Saudi oil exports. "Demand [for electricity] is expected to grow 10% a year over the next decade as a result of population and economic growth. As a result it will need to double its generation capacity to 68,000MW in 2018," it said.

It also reported major project delays and accidents as "evidence that the Saudi Aramco is having to run harder to stay in place – to replace the decline in existing production." While fears of premature "peak oil" and Saudi production problems had been expressed before, no US official has come close to saying this in public.

In the last two years, other senior energy analysts have backed Husseini. Fatih Birol, chief economist to the International Energy Agency, told the Guardian last year that conventional crude output could plateau in 2020, a development that was "not good news" for a world still heavily dependent on petroleum.

Jeremy Leggett, convenor of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security, said: "We are asleep at the wheel here: choosing to ignore a threat to the global economy that is quite as bad as the credit crunch, quite possibly worse."'

Austrian Registry Freezes Stolen EU Carbon Permits

This is something Monty Python would have come up with!

Here is why a good, swift kick up the carbon tax might be better than this ridiculousness...

Reposted in full from Planet Ark News, 8 February 2011

'Austria's carbon emissions registry has tracked European permits that were stolen in a coordinated cyber attack last month to accounts in Liechtenstein and Sweden, where they have been frozen, the registry said.

Austria said last month that 488,141 permits were missing.

"In the course of the cyber attack on the Austrian emissions trading registry in the beginning of January, illegal transactions were carried out. The illegally transferred allowances have been frozen in accounts in Liechtenstein and Sweden," the registry said on its website on Monday.

"Consequently, there is no risk that these allowances are traded on the market and thus no need to publish the serial numbers of the affected allowances," it added.

Austria's public prosecution service has filed a request for the permits to be transferred back to Austria, the registry said.

Last week, the European Commission allowed five national emissions registries to reopen after freezing them for over two weeks following the theft of carbon permits worth at least 45 million euros ($60.9 million).

More national registries are expected to reopen in the coming days and weeks. Austria's registry has not reopened yet as it implements additional security measures.

The European Union's spot carbon market resumed on Friday after the suspension of trade, but it has been quiet as some exchanges remain shut and as traders fear more thefts or seek to avoid getting stuck with unidentified stolen permits still in circulation.'

An Eruption of Reality

Snowpocalypse, last year's volcano eruption, floods and cyclones will have nothing on the chaos a solar storm could cause...

Reposted in full from Monbiot, 20 April 2010

'Man proposes; nature disposes. We are seldom more vulnerable than when we feel insulated.

The miracle of modern flight protected us from gravity, atmosphere, culture, geography. It made everywhere feel local, interchangeable. Nature interjects, and we encounter - tragically for many - the reality of thousands of miles of separation. We discover that we have not escaped from the physical world after all.

Complex, connected societies are more resilient than simple ones - up to a point. During the east African droughts of the early 1990s, I saw at first hand what anthropologists and economists have long predicted: those people who had the fewest trading partners were hit hardest. Connectivity provided people with insurance: the wider the geographical area they could draw food from, the less they were hurt by a regional famine.

But beyond a certain level, connectivity becomes a hazard. The longer and more complex the lines of communication and the more dependent we become on production and business elsewhere, the greater the potential for disruption. This is one of the lessons of the banking crisis. Impoverished mortagage defaulters in the United States - the butterfly’s wing over the Atlantic - almost broke the global economy. If the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano - by no means a monster - keeps retching it could, in these fragile times, produce the same effect.

We have several such vulnerabilities. The most catastrophic would be an unexpected coronal mass ejection - a solar storm - which causes a surge of direct current down our electricity grids, taking out the transformers. It could happen in seconds; the damage and collapse would take years to reverse, if we ever recovered. We would soon become aware of our dependence on electricity: an asset which, like oxygen, we notice only when it fails.

As New Scientist magazine points out, an event like this would knacker most of the systems which keep us alive(1,2). It would take out water treatment plants and pumping stations. It would paralyse oil pumping and delivery, which would quickly bring down food supplies. It would clobber hospitals, financial systems and just about every kind of business - even the manufacturers of candles and paraffin lamps. Emergency generators would function only until the oil ran out. Burnt-out transformers cannot be repaired; they must be replaced. Over the past year I’ve sent freedom of information requests to electricity transmitters and distributors, asking them what contingency plans they have made, and whether they have stockpiled transformers to replace any destroyed by a solar storm. I haven’t got to the end of it yet, but the early results suggest that they haven’t.

There’s a similar lack of planning for the possibility that global supplies of oil might soon peak then go into decline. My FoI requests to the British government reveal that it has made no contingency plans, on the grounds that it doesn’t believe it will happen(3). The issue remains the preserve of beardy lentil-eaters such as, er, the United States Joint Forces Command. Its latest report on possible future conflicts maintains that “a severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity.”(4) It suggests that “by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day.” A shortage of refining and production capacity is not the same thing as peak oil, but the report warns that a chronic constraint looms behind the immediate crisis: even under “the most optimistic scenario … petroleum production will be hard pressed to meet the expected future demand”.

A global oil shortage would soon expose the weaknesses of our complex economic systems. As the cultural anthropologist Joseph Tainter has shown, their dependence on high energy use is one of the factors that makes complex societies vulnerable to collapse(5).

His work has helped to overturn the old assumption that social complexity is a response to surplus energy. Instead, he proposes, complexity drives higher energy production. While complexity solves many problems - such as reliance on an exclusively local and therefore vulnerable food supply - it’s subject to diminishing returns. In extreme cases the cost of maintaining such systems causes them to collapse.

Tainter gives the example of the western Roman empire. In the third and fourth centuries AD, the emperors Diocletian and Constantine sought to rebuild their diminished territories. “The strategy of the later Roman Empire was to respond to a near-fatal challenge in the third century by increasing the size, complexity, power, and costliness of … the government and its army. … The benefit/cost ratio of imperial government declined. In the end the Western Roman Empire could no longer afford the problem of its own existence.”(6) The empire was ruined by the taxes and levies on manpower Diocletian and Constantine imposed to sustain their massive system. Invasion and collapse were the inevitable result.

He contrasts this with the strategies of the Byzantine empire from the seventh century onwards. Weakened by plague and re-invasion, the government responded with a programme of systematic simplification. Instead of maintaining and paying its army, it granted soldiers land in return for hereditary military service: from then on they had to carry their own costs. It reduced the size and complexity of the administration and left people to fend for themselves. The empire survived and expanded.

A similar process is taking place in the UK today: a simplification of government in response to crisis. But while the public sector is being pared down, both government and private enterprise seek to increase the size and complexity of the rest of the economy. If the financial crisis were the only constraint we faced, this might be a sensible strategy. But the energy costs, environmental impacts and vulnerability to disruption of our super-specialised society have surely already reached the point at which they outweigh the benefits of increasing complexity.

For the third time in two years we’ve discovered that flying is one of the weakest links in our overstretched system. In 2008 the rising cost of fuel drove several airlines out of business. The recession compounded the damage; the volcano might ruin several more. Energy-hungry, weather-dependent, easily disrupted, a large aviation industry is one of the hardest sectors for any society to sustain, especially one beginning to encounter a series of crises. The greater our dependence on flying, the more vulnerable we are likely to become.

Over the past few days people living under the flight paths have seen the future, and they like it. The state of global oil supplies, the industry’s social and environmental costs and its extreme vulnerability mean that current levels of flying - let alone the growth the government anticipates - cannot be maintained indefinitely. We have a choice. We can start decommissioning this industry while there is time and find ways of living happily with less of it. Or we can sit and wait for physical reality to simplify the system by more brutal means.

References:

1. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20127001.300-space-storm-alert-90-seconds-from-catastrophe.html

2. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16400-major-solar-storm-could-cause-lasting-damage.html

3. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/04/14/cross-your-fingers-and-carry-on/

4. http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2010/JOE_2010_o.pdf

5. https://campus.fsu.edu/bbcswebdav/users/jastallins/public_htm/courses/complexity/readings/Tainter.pdf

6. ibid.'