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.

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?

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.

To recap the highlights:

• GM’s June sales dropped 8.3 percent vs. June 2007, and that was so much better than the expected drop (-19%) as well as the results from Ford (-19%) and Toyota (-12%), that the company’s stock spiked by 15%. Of course, it would be impolite to compare their results with Honda’s (+14%).[1]
• Oil is up again, thanks to yet another gloomy outlook report–this one from the wacky funsters at the IEA (the Medium-Term Oil Market Report), plus growing fears that Israel will attack Iran, which would cause Iran to attempt to close shipping through the most critical oil shipping lane in the world, the Strait of Hormuz.
• The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers issued a 77-page report saying that the new US CAFE standards are too costly to implement, as they would require a corporate fleet average of 35MPG in 2020. Um, not to put too fine a point on it, but do these people think that by 2020 they’ll be able to give away any vehicle that gets less than 35MPG?
• The Wall Street Journal is saying that the IEA’s Medium-Term Oil Market Report shows they’re joining the peak oil crowd. I haven’t read the report yet, but the summaries I’ve seen strongly suggest this is a reasonable interpretation, at least until the 2013 time frame.[2]

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.

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

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.

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 Cornucopians and the Apocalypticons for much of this mess. One camp is telling us there’s no underlying problem, which leaves people to conclude it’s someone just screwing us again, while the other is so overblown with their rhetoric that they’re too easily characterized as being another clueless, harmless, and ignorable Internet cult.

It seems unthinkable, but for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year.

The disappearance of the Arctic sea ice, making it possible to reach the Pole sailing in a boat through open water, would be one of the most dramatic – and worrying – examples of the impact of global warming on the planet. Scientists say the ice at 90 degrees north may well have melted away by the summer.

“From the viewpoint of science, the North Pole is just another point on the globe, but symbolically it is hugely important. There is supposed to be ice at the North Pole, not open water,” said Mark Serreze of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado.

…

Seasoned polar scientists believe the chances of a totally ice free North Pole this summer are greater than 50:50 because the normally thick ice formed over many years at the Pole has been blown away and replaced by huge swathes of thinner ice formed over a single year.

This one-year ice is highly vulnerable to melting during the summer months and satellite data coming in over recent weeks shows that the rate of melting is faster than last year, when there was an all-time record loss of summer sea ice at the Arctic.

…

The polar regions are experiencing the most dramatic increase in average temperatures due to global warming and scientists fear that as more sea ice is lost, the darker, open ocean will absorb more heat and raise local temperatures even further. Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University, who was one of the first civilian scientists to sail underneath the Arctic sea ice in a Royal Navy submarine, said that the conditions are ripe for an unprecedented melting of the ice at the North Pole.

…

There are other indications that the Arctic sea ice is showing signs of breaking up. Scientists at the Nasa Goddard Space Flight Centre said that the North Water ‘polynya’ – an expanse of open water surrounded on all sides by ice – that normally forms near Alaska and Banks Island off the Canadian coast, is much larger than normal. Polynyas absorb heat from the sun and eat away at the edge of the sea ice.

Assuming a blue Arctic happens this summer or within the next few years (which seems inevitable), those disturbing questions are:

First, what does this imply about the current and future state of global warming? As the article above mentions, one of the critical feedbacks is the “albedo flip”, in which highly reflective ice and snow is replaced by much darker open water (or on land, by soil and vegetation). If we’re entering a time when the Arctic Ocean is converted into a vast solar collector for even a small portion of every year, all the additional heat absorbed would add significantly to the warming that’s already happening.

Second, what does this say about our ability to assess the world’s climate in a time of rapid change? It wasn’t long ago that scientists thought the Arctic wouldn’t see an ice-free summer within decades, but the estimates of when that will happen have been repeatedly reeled in as more data about actual melting and the condition of the ice, etc., have accumulated. This is not to criticize climate scientists in any way. Even without the sharp kick that a higher atmospheric CO2 concentration has delivered to the global climate system, they had a more than sufficiently challenging job. The simple fact is that for decades humanity hasn’t spent enough resources on understanding and modeling the world’s climate–at least not enough to assess the current situation and make useful predictions. Perhaps the biggest single error we’ve made in this area is the meta-mistake of misjudging the importance of climate science itself.

Third, how will we respond to a blue Arctic? I would like to give in to my optimistic streak and think that this would be The Event, the mental tipping point that once and for all made the urgency of the situation clear to a large majority of people in the developed and rapidly developing nations, including policymakers.[1] How could such a shocking and immense sign fail to get and hold our attention, and then spur us to take meaningful action? The answer is all around us. We’re surrounded by far too many deniers, fueled by ideological and/or financial incentives, and people who are so overwhelmed with the details of their lives or are simply so apathetic that they just don’t care about anything that isn’t impacting them this very minute.

My prediction is that when we see a blue Arctic, we’ll have a flurry of reports in all the major broadcast and print media. People will blog about it until their fingers bleed and their vision grows blurry. For every person claiming that we’ve reached a critical point in the effects we’re having on the planet, we’ll have at least one more telling us how wonderful this is because, for example, we can now ship goods across the top of the world cheaper, at least during the summer. In particular, I expect some media outlets to reach new heights of absurdity in their practice of the faux balance technique–you can’t have Al Gore or someone from Greenpeace or the NRDC or whomever from the left/enviro camp without “balancing” that person with James Inhofe or someone from one of the right-wing think tanks. Expect to see and hear heavy use of “But some experts think otherwise…”.

In short, I’m not at all optimistic about the answer to this third question, and I think we’ll simply turn a blue Arctic into yet another debating exercise and de facto “victory” for the delayers and deniers. Given the long lead time involved in making major changes to reduce CO2 emissions and the even longer time needed to bring down atmospheric CO2 levels, that may be a delay we can’t afford.

[1] Just to be clear, for a long time I wondered what the mental tipping point would be, and assumed it would be a blue Arctic or something much sooner, as I assumed the projections I’d read were right and a blue Arctic was decades away. I now think it will have to be something far worse, like rapidly rising sea levels starting to swamp major coastal cities, or a hurricane hitting New York City and some widely respected climate scientist or organization saying that such events will be more common as the atmosphere continues to warm.

• Enough with “perfect storm” imagery. For years it’s been a cliche worn thinner than a politician’s soul, yet people keep using it. My fellow writers, trust me on this one: It would be more entertaining and no less obvious if you wore a flashing neon sign around your neck that said “HACK”.
• Enough with the “peak” one-liners. Every time people want to get the attention of the peak oil crowd and/or prove how far around the next curve they can see they claim something else is at or nearing a peak. Peak food, peak travel, peak popsicle sticks, peak orgasms (oh, wait…). Quit being so freaking lazy, leave the “look at me!” attitude switched off, and talk about the issue, OK?
• Enough with the maddeningly bad oil puns, e.g. “high oil prices have US over a barrel”, “crude realities of the new energy world”, etc. If you can’t work harder than that to say something interesting, do us all a favor and go find another way to turn time and gray cells into currency. (The same goes for transportation puns about airlines experiencing turbulence, car makers stalling, motorcycle sales revving up, etc.)
• To all the morons who try about 100 times every day to register on this blog and/or the discussion board as a way to spread their spam: You must be dumber than the product managers at GM, Ford, and Chrysler. Who the hell is going to believe a registration with a Russian e-mail address that says the person, with a name made up of seemingly random letters and numbers, who lives in Greenland and is interested in tennis, is real? Here’s a hint: Not me, ya buncha maroons.
• “The stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stone.” No kidding, and we’re using more stone now for various construction purposes than people thought existed during the stone age (assuming they even thought of those things while trying to survive day to day). Yes, I understand the point, that we found better and different ways to do those things we now do with stone, so we’ll do likewise with oil, and everything will be just peachy keen. But who believes that the supply of oil will last for thousands of years at ever-increasing rates of consumption, as stone has? Anyone?
• To the denier bots who flood the comment sections of sites like the NY Times’ Dot Earth: Grow up. You’re not convincing anyone and you’re just making yourself and your side of the “argument” look stupid. Do you live in some fantasy world where you’ll be noticed for your tireless efforts and get a call from Karl Rove or the oil or coal industry with an offer of a high-paying job to astroturf blogs? Oh, that’s right–they don’t need to pay you, because you’ll continue to do their dirty work at no charge.
• Enough with the arguments that shun real numbers and analysis in favor of “common sense”, which so often leads to absurd conclusions, e.g. “We use a lot of oil to do X, therefore after the peak in oil production we won’t be able to do X any more.” I’ve seen this one so many times and in so many minor variations that I swear it must be the first thing they teach new recruits at The Apocalypticon Institute. I find it astonishing that the people who write such things virtually never give any consideration to finding much less oil intensive ways of doing X, or that doing X might be valuable enough to the economy (e.g. transporting food) that we’ll make sacrifices in other parts of the economy (e.g. vacation travel) to preserve our ability to do X at an acceptable level.
• Enough with the idiots who can’t get their brains around the simple concept that oil is a finite resource that we’re using at the rate of 86 million barrels per day, so it therefore will eventually peak and decline. Seriously, do you Cornucopian Clowns think there’s some kind of fossil fuel fairy out there who will let us pull all the oil we want out of the ground for decades to come without hitting a peak?
• Speaking of fairy tales, let us not forget abiotic oil. Enough already with this laughable theory that oil comes from non-biological sources, and that there’s enough of it to make a difference. Show me the oil, and in quantities, locations, qualities, etc. that will change the date of peak oil and/or the rate of decline in production post peak, then we’ll talk. Until then, trade in your keyboard for something less annoying to other people when you use it, like a set of bagpipes.
• Journalists: Can we please give the “interview with the guy gassing up his 9,000-pound SUV and bitching about the price” shtick a rest? For maybe 2 or 3 decades? Why don’t you ever interview the guy who says, “I work out of a home office, and I hypermile in a really efficient car, so I spend about $10/week on gas”?
• Enough with “energy independence”. Politicians feed it to us, “journalists” regurgitate it, and most of the US public thinks it’s actually possible to “achieve energy independence” in just a few years. It ain’t gonna happen, people. Not now, not in 50 years, and probably not in 100 years.
• Stocks vs. flows. Can we all, please, take a few minutes to learn that there’s a world of difference between X barrels of oil in a resource (field, oil sands, whatever) and Y barrels/day of that oil being extracted, transported to refineries, turned into useful products, and then transported again to consumers? We keep seeing these breathless articles about how Colorado has enough oil to fill a barrel the size of Jupiter, or some such blithering nonsense. It’s not just the size of the barrel that matters, but the size of the pipe we can drain it with, what quality oil we get out of that pipe, and where the pipe is.
• Enough with the confusion about oil being a major fuel for electricity generation in the US. This one boggles my mind. The US gets about 1% of its electricity from burning oil, yet we see media reports from major networks and print publications constantly that either explicitly or implicitly link the price of oil and the price of gasoline. (Yes, I know that there is a very weak linkage here; oil goes up, natural gas drafts along behind it, so there’s some upward pressure on electricity prices because the US gets about 20% of its electrons from natural gas. But there’s no freaking way I’m willing to believe that the stringers and the anchordolls reporting this nonsense see that deeply into the issue.)
• Stop looking for silver bullets, people. There isn’t one, and trying to find one only wastes time and other resources that are already scarce. Sure, there will be technologies and combinations of technologies–the plug-in hybrid with cheaper batteries leaps to mind–that will have a huge impact on our energy future, but even those aren’t silver bullets, just really useful mid-term solutions that get us to the next stage. This is an infinite game, one with no clear ending and no definitive winner (regardless of what Dick Cheney believes in that fist-size chunk of granite he calls a heart); every “solution” is merely a transition to the next problem and ensuing “solution”.
• Enough with the economist bashing by the peak oil crowd. Seriously, you guys look around the current landscape, including all the international and national oil companies, governments playing politics and going to freaking war over oil, the Cornucopian Clowns who keep telling us not to worry, everything will be fine, and deranged politicians, and you think economists are worth picking on???

The paper is Getting Off the Road: Adjusting to $7 per Gallon Gas in America [5 page PDF], and it describes massive change (emphasis added, although hardly needed):

We stand at a turning point for US transport. Real gasoline prices have already surpassed the peak levels that followed the second OPEC oil shocks, and even when adjusted for potential fuel efficiency improvements, have increased to the point where they will dramatically change driving behaviour in America.

The some 57 million Americans who own a car and have direct access to public transportation will start to act more and more like Europeans, who have long paid much higher gasoline prices. By 2012, average miles driven will have shrunk by more than 15%. SUV and other light truck sales, which until 2006 accounted for almost 60% of total motor vehicles, will plummet to less than half that level, reversing the last fifteen years growth in market share.

More fundamentally, the freeways are about to get less congested. Not only will the number of vehicle registrations in the United States not grow over the next four years, but by 2012 there should be roughly 10 million fewer vehicles on the road in America than there are today.

For the past half century, America has spent the bulk of its infrastructure money on building highways—only to see that soon, $7 per gallon gasoline prices will lead to fewer and fewer people using them.

Gasoline prices in America have risen from around $1.80 in 2004 to the current $4 per gallon mark. The most recent surge in pump prices has, in inflation-adjusted dollars, already taken pump prices to a buck a gallon above the record prices seen in 1981 (Chart 1). And in percentage terms, the latest increase is almost twice the increase in oil prices that followed on the heels of supply disruptions after the Iranian Revolution.

Yet as daunting as these price increases have been, there is much more to come. Our updated oil price forecast of $200 per barrel oil by 2010 points to Americans paying as much as $7 per gallon for gasoline within the next two years.

Even the temporary 1979-1981 oil shock led to huge changes in driving behaviour. The prospect of a permanent price regime of $200 per barrel oil should trigger changes that will dwarf the adjustment we saw nearly thirty years ago.

See the paper for all the details of fewer cars, escalating transportation costs, people seeking public transportation, etc.

I won’t offer an opinion on the $200 oil/$7 gasoline projection, as talking about such pinpoint numbers (or even ranges) is the equivalent of trying to hit the bull’s eye on a dartboard while on a boat in very rough seas. But the ensuing analysis of what such prices, if they were to happen, would mean seem to be on the mark, with one glaring exception: There’s no discussion of the electrification of personal transportation.

Given that this paper is only talking about the years 2010 to 2012, for the most part, this seems reasonable–EV’s and PHEV’s will account for an infinitesimal share of the vehicles on the road in that time frame. But we’re very likely to see an “adjustment to the adjustment” once several mainstream companies have such cars in their showrooms (around 2009/2010) and production ramps up (likely by 2012). The per-mile cost of fueling an EV or PHEV is so much less than putting gasoline into even a Prius that they will be an economic game-changer all by themselves. Add in the virtually certain government support for residential solar PV panels, and suddenly you have many people in single-family homes (i.e. those with control over their own roof) using solar power from government subsidized hardware to partially offset the cost of recharging their plug-in Prius or Volt or iMiEV or whatever.

If there is an accelerated rate of retirement of gas guzzlers (like my Scion xA, as perceived in 2012 or 2015), combined with the people who have the longest drives flocking to EV’s and PHEV’s, we could see a higher than expected portion of vehicle miles fueled with electrons instead of hydrocarbons. And that, in turn, will reduce the incentive to make sweeping societal level changes.

In other words, we’re headed for not one major wrenching change, but a long, interrelated cascade of them, all triggered by much higher oil prices, that will pull different consumers, businesses, and institutions in different directions at various times.

And for the record, I wouldn’t bet against $7/gallon US gasoline in two years.

Energy Information Administration
EIA Reports
U.S. Department of Energy
Washington, DC 20585

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 25, 2008

World Energy Use Projected to Grow 50 Percent Between 2005 and 2030

World marketed energy consumption is projected to grow by 50 percent between 2005 and 2030, driven by robust economic growth and expanding populations in the world’s developing countries, according to the reference case projection from the “International Energy Outlook 2008″ (IEO2008) released today by the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Average world oil prices in every year since 2003 have been higher than the average for the previous year and prices in 2007 were nearly double the 2003 prices in real terms. The IEO2008 uses oil price cases originally developed in the summer of 2007 for use in the “Annual Energy Outlook 2008″, which focuses on the U.S. energy outlook. These prices do not reflect the substantial runup in prices that has occurred since that time. Nonetheless, although liquid fuels are expected to remain the largest single source of energy through 2030, the liquids share of marketed world energy consumption declines from 37 percent in 2005 to 33 percent in 2030 in the IEO2008 reference case (Figure 1).

In addition, the share of conventional oil in the overall liquids supply is declines with expanded use of unconventional oil, biofuels, and other unconventional liquids. High oil prices lead many consumers to switch to other fuels when feasible; fuel-switching and efficiency gains, for instance, slow the growth of oil use in the industrial sector. Those trends are even stronger in the IEO2008 high price case, which reflects oil prices that are closer to those being paid in mid-2008, as this report is being issued.

Other report highlights include:

* Coal’s share of world energy use has increased sharply over the past few years, and without significant changes in existing laws and policies, particularly those related to greenhouse gas emissions, robust growth is likely to continue. Coal accounted for 24 percent of total world energy use in 2002 and 27 percent in 2005, largely as a result of rapid increases in coal use in China. China’s coal consumption has nearly doubled since 2000, and given the country’s rapidly expanding economy and large domestic coal deposits, its demand for coal is projected to remain strong. In the IEO2008 reference case, coal use expands by 2 percent per year between 2005 and 2030, and coal’s share of total world energy consumption reaches 29 percent in 2030.

* Concerns about rising fossil fuel prices, energy security, and greenhouse gas emissions support the development of new nuclear generating capacity. World nuclear capacity is projected to rise from 374 gigawatts in 2005 to 498 gigawatts in 2030. Declines in nuclear capacity are projected only in OECD Europe, where several countries (including Germany and Belgium) have either plans or mandates to phase out nuclear power, and where some old reactors are expected to be retired and not replaced. China is projected to add 45 gigawatts of net nuclear capacity over the projection period, India 17 gigawatts, Russia 18 gigawatts, and the United States 15 gigawatts.

* Sustained high prices for oil and natural gas encourage expanded use of renewable fuels. Renewable energy sources are attractive for environmental reasons, especially in countries where reducing greenhouse gas emissions is of particular concern. Government policies and incentives to increase renewable energy sources for electricity generation are expected to encourage the development of renewable energy even when it cannot compete economically with fossil fuels. Worldwide, the consumption of hydroelectricity and other renewable energy sources increases by 2.1 percent per year in the IEO2008 reference case between 2005 and 2030. In contrast, world coal consumption increases by 2.0 percent per year; natural gas by 1.7 percent per year; nuclear by 1.5 percent per year; and liquids by 1.2 percent per year.

* In the IEO2008 reference case, which does not include specific policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions are projected to rise from 28.1 billion metric tons in 2005 to 42.3 billion metric tons in 2030-an increase of 51 percent. With strong economic growth and continued heavy reliance on fossil fuels expected, much of the increase in carbon dioxide emissions is projected to occur among the developing nations of the world, especially in Asia (Figure 2).

The full report can be found on EIA’s web site at:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/index.html

See also Reuters’ take on it: EIA cuts world 2010 oil output, non-OPEC loss big:

Crude oil production from non-OPEC countries will not be able to keep up with growing global demand in the next few years, forcing oil consuming nations to rely more on the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries for supplies, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said Wednesday.

In its long-term energy forecast, the EIA lowered its estimate of non-OPEC oil production in 2010 by 1.1 million barrels per day from last year’s forecast to 51.8 million bpd. For the same period, OPEC oil output was cut by just 400,000 bpd to 37.4 million bpd.

…

Saudi Arabia will remain the world’s biggest oil producer in 2030, but just barely with expected output of 13.7 million bpd. That’s way down from the 16.4 million in Saudi production, the EIA had forecast in last year’s report.

Russia’s output is forecast to be 13.5 million bpd in 2030, up sharply from last year’s EIA forecast of 11.5 million bpd.

I’ll have much more to say about this once I have a chance to download and read the document.

There’s a ‘big gorilla hiding the closet’ whose collapse could have a dramatic effect on sea levels, according to Australian researchers.

Dr Bradley Opdyke, a paleoceanographer from the Australia National University (ANU) believes the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) could partially collapse within 20 years, resulting in a dramatic jump in sea levels.

His talk on glacial cycles and the WAIS was presented earlier this month at the Imagining the real: life on a greenhouse earth conference held in Canberra.

“The 900-pound gorilla hiding in the closet is Antarctica. We have evidence that it is not a stable beast,” Opdyke says.

He says the WAIS is inherently unstable, and the current rate of sea level rise is placing it at risk.

“It is pinned on the spines of a few mountains, with ice sheets draped off them,” Opdyke says. “If sea level rise unpins these sheets, it is plausible that there will be dramatic ice collapse in the West Antarctic.”

See the article for the facts behind that conclusion that the WAIS “is not a stable beast.”

And why 20 years? As many of you probably know, Monday was the 20th anniversary of the now-famous testimony by James Hansen before a US Senate committee which happened to include a Senator from Tennessee named Al Gore.[1]

Hansen gave a talk on Monday, Global Warming Twenty Years Later: Tipping Points Near [4 page PDF] to the National Press Club, which began:

My presentation today is exactly 20 years after my 23 June 1988 testimony to Congress, which alerted the public that global warming was underway. There are striking similarities between then and now, but one big difference.

Again a wide gap has developed between what is understood about global warming by the relevant scientific community and what is known by policymakers and the public. Now, as then, frank assessment of scientific data yields conclusions that are shocking to the body politic. Now, as then, I can assert that these conclusions have a certainty exceeding 99 percent.

The difference is that now we have used up all slack in the schedule for actions needed to defuse the global warming time bomb. The next President and Congress must define a course next year in which the United States exerts leadership commensurate with our responsibility for the present dangerous situation.

Otherwise it will become impractical to constrain atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas produced in burning fossil fuels, to a level that prevents the climate system from passing tipping points that lead to disastrous climate changes that spiral dynamically out of humanity’s control.

Changes needed to preserve creation, the planet on which civilization developed, are clear. But the changes have been blocked by special interests, focused on short-term profits, who hold sway in Washington and other capitals.

I argue that a path yielding energy independence and a healthier environment is, barely, still possible. It requires a transformative change of direction in Washington in the next year.

A bit later on:

Climate can reach points such that amplifying feedbacks spur large rapid changes. Arctic sea ice is a current example. Global warming initiated sea ice melt, exposing darker ocean that absorbs more sunlight, melting more ice. As a result, without any additional greenhouse gases, the Arctic soon will be ice-free in the summer.

More ominous tipping points loom. West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are vulnerable to even small additional warming. These two-mile-thick behemoths respond slowly at first, but if disintegration gets well underway it will become unstoppable. Debate among scientists is only about how much sea level would rise by a given date. In my opinion, if emissions follow a business-as-usual scenario, sea level rise of at least two meters is likely this century. Hundreds of millions of people would become refugees. No stable shoreline would be reestablished in any time frame that humanity can conceive.

…

The disturbing conclusion, documented in a paper I have written with several of the world’s leading climate experts, is that the safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is no more than 350 ppm (parts per million) and it may be less. Carbon dioxide amount is already 385 ppm and rising about 2 ppm per year. Stunning corollary: the oft-stated goal to keep global warming less than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is a recipe for global disaster, not salvation.

These conclusions are based on paleoclimate data showing how the Earth responded to past levels of greenhouse gases and on observations showing how the world is responding to today’s carbon dioxide amount. The consequences of continued increase of greenhouse gases extend far beyond extermination of species and future sea level rise.

Arid subtropical climate zones are expanding poleward. Already an average expansion of about 250 miles has occurred, affecting the southern United States, the Mediterranean region, Australia and southern Africa. Forest fires and drying-up of lakes will increase further unless carbon dioxide growth is halted and reversed.

Mountain glaciers are the source of fresh water for hundreds of millions of people. These glaciers are receding world-wide, in the Himalayas, Andes and Rocky Mountains. They will disappear, leaving their rivers as trickles in late summer and fall, unless the growth of carbon dioxide is reversed.

Coral reefs, the rainforest of the ocean, are home for one-third of the species in the sea. Coral reefs are under stress for several reasons, including warming of the ocean, but especially because of ocean acidification, a direct effect of added carbon dioxide. Ocean life dependent on carbonate shells and skeletons is threatened by dissolution as the ocean becomes more acid.

Such phenomena, including the instability of Arctic sea ice and the great ice sheets at today’s carbon dioxide amount, show that we have already gone too far. We must draw down atmospheric carbon dioxide to preserve the planet we know. A level of no more than 350 ppm is still feasible, with the help of reforestation and improved agricultural practices, but just barely – time is running out.

Hansen then talks about public policy, and taxing carbon, but with the stipulation that 100% of the money is refunded to taxpayers, thereby giving everyone a strong financial incentive to use less fossil fuel. (I’m still pondering this one, and don’t have a strong opinion yet.) He also mentions the need for a vastly better electricity grid to better support decentralized renewable energy sources, something I couldn’t agree with more.

You can also see some “related” presentation slides [44 page, 2.9MB PDF] and his web site. I strongly recommend the presentation, as it provides some technical background on CO2 levels, what’s happening to Greenland, etc.

So, what is the point here? Sadly, it’s not merely a matter of having lost time, so that when we do finally get off our collective asses and start working to reduce CO2 emissions it will cost a bit more. Like that other monster under our bed that’s growling ever louder, peak oil, we’ve delayed to the point where the remedies will be exceedingly, and needlessly painful. Ask the coal plant operators how they will deal with CO2 emissions restrictions/taxes, or the airlines and car companies and mainstream consumers how they’re dealing with $136/barrel oil. All indications are that over the next 5 to 10 years those situations will get far worse as the price of oil continues to rise and our awareness of the urgency of global warming grows.

The saddest part of this quickly compounding mess is that the people who will have to do nearly all of the heavy lifting are today’s children and those yet to be born. Those of us who are today adults, and those who came before us over the last two hundred years, have built a world that includes many genuine wonders, but at a horrific price; the accumulated cost of our energy use has been far higher than all but a tiny sliver of the general population realize. By ignoring the warnings of people like James Hansen, Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Ross Gelbspan, and many others over the last 20 years, we’ve thrown away the opportunity of that generation and forced the next few generations to live with a nearly suffocating burden.

None of us should consider giving up, though. There’s still plenty of time for us to help ourselves and our children[2], to begin the process of stepping back from the brink. We can educate ourselves and each other, make more enlightened decisions about the myriad of goods and services we consume, and become more active in politics at all levels to force our elected representatives to do the right things. It’s time for us to turn our backs on the easy myopia and willful ignorance of deniers, recognize the breadth and depth and urgency of these problems, and act like responsible, compassionate adults.

[1] This is not to imply that this hearing is what turned Al Gore green; he saw the light long before 1988.

[2] And yes, they’re all our children, whether or not they share our DNA.

You can find the entire text (with an annoying lack of paragraph breaks) here.

Quoting the most often quoted portion from that source, Cheney said:

From the standpoint of the oil industry obviously and I’ll talk a little later on about gas, but obviously for over a hundred years we as an industry have had to deal with the pesky problem that once you find oil and pump it out of the ground you’ve got to turn around and find more or go out of business. Producing oil is obviously a self-depleting activity. Every year you’ve got to find and develop reserves equal to your output just to stand still, just to stay even. This is true for companies as well in the broader economic sense as it is for the world. A new merged company like Exxon-Mobil will have to secure over a billion and a half barrels of new oil equivalent reserves every year just to replace existing production. It’s like making one hundred per cent interest discovery in another major field of some five hundred million barrels equivalent every four months or finding two Hibernias a year. For the world as a whole, oil companies are expected to keep finding and developing enough oil to offset our seventy one million plus barrel a day of oil depletion, but also to meet new demand. By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and the national oil companies are obviously controlling about ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies, even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow.

One of “the” people in the peak oil community is Kjell Aleklett of Uppsala University and President of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil. His highly recommended discussion of this Cheney speech is Dick Cheney, Peak Oil and the Final Count Down [7 page PDF].

Even though I remain convinced that in one form or another both the 1991 Gulf War and the current war in Iraq (which seems to not yet have earned an official name, strangely enough) were “about oil”, this Cheney speech proves nothing. OK, it proves he knew enough about the importance of oil and the realities of the oil business, not to mention the brutal facts that apply to a non-renewable resource (such as it not lasting forever, production inevitably peaking, etc.), to be an executive in a big oil company like Halliburton, but is this really news? In 2008, who among us over the age of about 10 needs further evidence about Dick Cheney’s, shall we say, aggressive pursuit of his goals?

For those who missed it, my most recent take on this whole war for oil question is Thinking the unthinkable.

The article is Fixing the world — by the numbers:

Cutting our carbon emissions to reduce global warming? Not a top priority.

Combating terrorism? Not even on the list of priorities.

Zinc distribution, making school cheaper, and preventing heart attacks? Much more important on a global scale.

If the world decided to fund such efforts, the benefits we’d see would be far greater than what we put into climate change and terrorism, which are central to the anxieties of the First World, and dominate its media coverage.

At least, that’s according to some of the world’s greatest economic minds.

The scholars, including Nobel laureates, are part of an exercise in practicality called the Copenhagen Consensus. They’ve ranked 30 solutions to world policy challenges according to the strict criteria that economics provides: costs versus benefits.

While that might seem like a cold instrument to wield, bereft of human emotion, economists say it’s extremely rational and provides an unencumbered view of just what will give us the biggest bang for the buck.

…

After all, the reality is that not everything can be funded. Choices must be made. The Consensus hypothesizes the spending of $75 billion over four years on solutions for those choices.

What would these experts do first with the money? After listening to Horton’s passionate arguments at the Consensus conference, which wrapped up at the end of May, the panel agreed that providing zinc, along with vitamin A, to children who lack them in the developing world, should be the highest priority.

…

Spending just $60 million per year on this program would yield more than $1 billion in economic benefits, Horton argues, in the form of better health, fewer deaths and increased future earnings. Put another way, for each dollar spent on this solution, we’d get $17 back.

…

Benefit-cost analyses, free from emotion, can also lead to some controversial results.

For instance, the Nobel panel didn’t place solutions to terrorism on their list at all. Economists say the costs incurred in trying to stop terrorists are simply far higher than the benefits.

Another issue that is top of mind for many is global warming. But not for economists. Here again, the costs to mitigate climate change outweigh the benefits. Besides, those benefits won’t be accrued until well into the future, a strike against any solution.

“Think about it rationally,” Horton says. “Because our impacts on the environment are so slow to occur, many of us aren’t as avid about undertaking them as we ought to be.”

The panel ranked it at the bottom of the list.

Chris Green, who teaches a course on the economics of climate change at McGill University, has warned in his work that tackling climate change will be much more costly than most of us think.

Green, who participated in the Consensus, says that while climate change is an extremely serious long-term problem, “My view is that we don’t have the means to deal with it, in any meaningful way, without major technology breakthroughs.” He wants to see an “energy technology race” started.

The panel agreed, and placed the development of low-carbon technologies, whatever they may be, at number 14 on the list.

Economists know that their work can appear as nothing more than cold calculations. Even Green concedes, “I’m not sure you want to frame policy directly on” benefit-cost ratios. And Jha warns of listening to expert panels. “They’re only right half the time,” he cautions.

If anything, the Copenhagen Consensus exercise helps us think differently about the problems of the world: That is, what we may think is important may not have the biggest impact on its most vulnerable people.

The article, which I suggest you read in its entirety, also points out other health- and education-related efforts they recommended.

OK, let me deconstruct this just a bit, taking things in (generally) increasing order of friction-causing potential:

• The basic idea of cost-benefit analysis is sound, and is the only rational way to approach these issues. We have limited resources and we need to figure out how best to use them–that’s the textbook definition of economics.
• When you’re talking about human life, things get very uncomfortable very quickly. People go nuts about assigning a monetary figure to a human life, but there is no other choice. We have to measure the cost of the broad palette of steps we must choose from as well as the benefits. That means we have to use a common unit. So whether we measure things in terms of money or some fabricated unit (which then requires us to convert the money costs of things like public policies into quatloos or whatever we arbitrarily decide to use), we’re still measuring human life. It’s extremely distasteful, and economists don’t like it any more than anyone else; we’re just used to thinking in such terms.
• Even more problematic is measuring human life in the future. How much are you willing to pay today to make a better life for people who won’t even be born in the next 25 or 50 or 100 years?
• The basic conclusion of the economists in this article, that global warming isn’t a high priority, is riddled with assumptions that I think are wildly incorrect and serve as a perfect example of how easily such exercises can turn in unintentional GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) demonstrations.

A quick aside: I can almost bet my keyboard that Joe Romm will jump all over the assertion that we need major technological breakthroughs to deal with global warming. Joe has pointed out many times over on Climate Progress that the number one hurdle in the short to mid term is policy, not technology. I agree, even if I don’t match his intensity in hammering the point home.

Back to those assumptions. Clearly they are assuming that either [1] global warming “won’t be that bad”, or [2] if it is, we can delay action now and fix it later. Anyone who thinks inaction on global warming won’t be a catastrophe just isn’t paying attention and should be ignored. I strongly suspect that the economists involved believe global warming will be bad, but that we can deal with it later and spend resources on more immediate problems now. This is a horrible misreading of the situation, in my opinion, since it completely ignores the mounting evidence that not only is global warming progressing much quicker than any science-based assessment predicted, but we could well be at or beyond the atmospheric CO2 concentration needed to trigger reinforcing feedbacks–the tipping point that leads to a runaway effect that we can’t stop.

Even if you don’t think we’re flirting with a runaway disaster, something that I believe no one knows with absolute certainty, despite the growing evidence, it’s even more likely that if we delay action now and it’s still possible to fix this mess later it will likely be far more expensive than if we start now (or started when Al Gore and others started screaming about this, roughly 20 years ago). We will have to take more drastic measures, some with a higher risk of going horribly wrong (i.e. almost any of the geoengineering proposals), and we will have to spend far more to mitigate the growing effects of global warming.

Finally, let me make a public request: Those of you, including many in the peak oil community, who like to treat all economists like your personal punching bags, please stop it and grow up. Lumping everyone into one narrow, negative stereotype like that is something we all should have been taught not to do in childhood. (Do I really have to trot out some cringe-inducing examples of racial, ethnic, religious, and gender stereotyping to make my point?) If nothing else, remember that there are economists out here–including your host on this site–who understand at the DNA level what global warming and peak oil mean, and we’re doing our best to fight the good fight.

And for those who don’t know the background of “dismal science”…

The dismal science is a derogatory alternative name for economics devised by the Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle in the 19th century. The term is an inversion of the phrase “gay science,” meaning “life-enhancing knowledge.” This was a familiar expression at the time, and was later adopted as the title of a book by Nietzsche (see The Gay Science).

It is often stated that Carlyle gave economics the nickname “dismal science” as a response to the late 18th century writings of The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, who grimly predicted that starvation would result as projected population growth exceeded the rate of increase in the food supply. Carlyle did indeed use the word ‘dismal’ in relation to Malthus’ theory in his essay Chartism (1839):

“The controversies on Malthus and the ‘Population Principle’, ‘Preventative Check’ and so forth, with which the public ear has been deafened for a long while, are indeed sufficiently mournful. Dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world or the next, is all that of the preventative check and the denial of the preventative check.”

However the full phrase “dismal science” first occurs in Carlyle’s 1849 tract entitled Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question, in which he was arguing for the reintroduction of slavery as a means to regulate the labor market in the West Indies:

“Not a ‘gay science,’ I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science”

Developing a deliberately paradoxical position, Carlyle argued that slavery was actually morally superior to the market forces of supply and demand promoted by economists, since, in his view, the freeing up of the labor market by the liberation of slaves had actually led to a moral and economic decline in the lives of the former slaves themselves.

Carlyle’s view was attacked by John Stuart Mill and other liberal economists.

So the next time you want to deride economists, please remember that it was an historian who coined the term while arguing in favor of slavery.

Klare is the author of several books on the international ramifications of resource competition, most recently Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy. In this interview he talks with the host, Jim Puplava, about a lot of resource issues, most related to the growing consumer class in China and India, with a particular emphasis on oil.

The interview is the second hour from the June 21, 2008 edition, and you can download or stream the interview in various ways, or just get it here [12MB mp3].

Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.

The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production.

There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq’s Oil Ministry.

Anyone care to guess whether the US will wind up building and staffing the oft-discussed world’s largest embassy in Iraq, along with those “permanent” military bases, regardless of who wins the upcoming presidential election?

Surely this is all just some sort of wacky, leftist fantasy, right? I mean, there’s no chance that the US, with an executive branch headed by oil men and members of the Project for a New American Century (i.e. the neocons), could have looked at the world oil situation and said, “It will cost a lot in blood, money and international prestige, but we have no choice but to keep someone else from monopolizing that oil (and natural gas).” If that were the case, then surely some reputable news outlet would have had the courage to say something like this, even months before the war began (emphasis added):

The American campaign to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, even as al-Qaida’s terrorism thrives around the world and the national economy falters, has many people in America and abroad asking: What’s really motivating Washington to take on Saddam? His record of perfidy and willingness to inflict damage beyond his borders is a matter of record. For many, particularly in post-9/11 America, that is argument enough. But others believe that Saddam and his lust for ever more powerful weaponry is only part of the story. Largely missing from the debate is a simple fact: Iraq sits atop the world’s second-largest reserves of oil — a resource that translates into hundreds of billions of dollars and enormous economic power.

Within America, street protests accusing the administration of yearning to launch an “oil war” occur occasionally, but they pale in comparison to the vehemence of that charge in foreign capitals and newspapers. In European and Asian capitals, and in the restive Muslim world in particular, an “imperialistic quest for oil,” as Saddam himself frames it, is taken by many to be the ultimate goal of American policy toward Iraq. Even friendly Arab nations see it so. Al Ahram, the government-controlled newspaper of record in Egypt, led its editorial page recently with a piece by Palestinian-American Professor Edward Said, who wrote:

“Second to Saudi Arabia, Iraq has the largest oil reserves on earth, and the roughly 1.1 trillion dollars worth of oil — much of it already committed by Saddam to Russia, France and a few other countries … is a crucial aim of U.S. strategy.”

…

No reputable analyst denies the windfall that might result for Western energy firms and the economies they power from an extended American occupation of Iraq. While Iraq’s political landscape is complex and potentially explosive, many see a post-Saddam Iraq as an opportunity to ensure that Iraq’s vast potential as an oil supplier, long retarded by Saddam’s aggression and U.N. sanctions, can be used to stabilize or even lower world oil prices for decades to come.

“It is not necessarily easy, but the scenario exists whereby Britain and the United States, by handling Iraq’s oil resources a certain way, could carve out the ultimate ‘strategic petroleum reserve,’ ” says Dr. F.J. Chalabi, a former Iraqi deputy oil minister who left in 1976 and now runs an energy consulting firm in London. “It is certainly feasible.”

Such speculation about long-term American motives is bolstered by the deep ties between senior Bush administration officials, including the president and vice president, and the energy industry.

Among the facts that raise eyebrows:

The president, vice president and national security adviser all claim a stunning pedigree. Bush is a former director of Harken Energy Corp.; Cheney served as chief executive officer of Halliburton Energy Services Corp.; and National Security Council Director Condoleezza Rice served on the board of directors of Chevron, which later named a super-tanker after her.

Financial disclosure forms reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity, a non-partisan watchdog group, report that the top 100 officials in the Bush administration have the majority of their personal investments, almost $150 million, in the traditional energy and natural resource sectors. For instance, Rice holds $225,000 worth of Chevron stock in a blind trust.

Cheney’s commission on energy policy, which submitted a report last year recommending that the United States “conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq” that includes “military … assessments.”

Added to all this is a key geo-political fact of the post 9/11 world: America’s deep displeasure with Saudi Arabia, currently America’s largest oil supplier in the Middle East and the nation that, by and large, controls the world’s oil markets through its own enormous reserves and its lock on the internal politics of the oil cartel, OPEC — the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Oh wait–someone did. That long quote is from the MSNBC article Oil after Saddam: All bets are in, published November 7, 2002, just over 4 months before the war started. Follow the link for even more detail, and see this page for links to all 5 articles in the series.

So, which is it? Did the US go to war to enrich the oil companies? Or did we do it because Bush and Cheney saw peak oil and the growing oil appetites of China and India looming far too soon for a comfortable transition away from oil, and took the only steps they could see to ensure a supply of oil to the US? (And let me remind everyone yet again of Matt Simmons’ exchange with Bush, in which Simmons asked him what he thought of his (Simmons’) writings and speeches about peak oil, and Bush told him to keep doing it.) Who said there has to be only one reason? Why isn’t it possible that Bush and Cheney saw a “need” to do the unthinkable to Save The Country, and if it meant vast profits for their friends in the oil business, well, that was just a bonus?

And couldn’t this be what Bush is referring to when he talks about being judged kindly by history? Could he really be saying, “Once peak oil has the world by the short hairs, Americans will be thankful I started this war and kept the Chinese from monopolizing Iraq’s oil”?

It’s all too plausible, even for someone like me who deeply believed that the country he loves and has lived his entire life in could never do such a thing. Where are those WMD’s, anyway?[1] Where are the infamous unmanned drones that US Senators were told could reach the US to deliver WMD’s? Why should we think that a country that had no role in the War on Terrorism in 2003 had to be invaded and all but destroyed? As the official reasons for this invasion dissolve, one by one, we’re left with the following inescapable facts:

• The US went to war over oil in this region in 1991. Surely you don’t think the First Gulf War was over fig exports, right?
• The US started a war in 2003 with Iraq, a country that was no threat to us.
• The costs of the war will be many, many thousands of lives lost or irreparably harmed, plus trillions of dollars in the long run, once the US rebuilds its worn-down military and takes care of its wounded for the rest of their lives.
• The US shows no signs of leaving Iraq, regardless of how the November elections turn out. (Who here thinks that we’ll completely withdraw our military forces and leave civilian oil workers in the middle of that mess we’ve created?)
• Western oil companies are about to strike a no-bid, and likely extremely profitable, contract to extract Iraqi oil.
• If peak oil is coming very soon, it could make a huge difference in the US’ outlook to have access, even at very high market prices, to Iraq’s oil and natural gas.[2]

At some point, no matter how frightening or abhorrent or shameful or unthinkable reality is, whether it’s the imminent dangers of peak oil, global warming, and ocean acidification, or our own dawning awareness of the awful reasons for military action, we have to recognize that reality is utterly indifferent to our desires and preconceived notions.

[1] And lest anyone try to tell me the blame for the mysteriously missing WMD’s belongs to the US intelligence agencies, I respectfully suggest you do your homework first. As a start, try Googling “seymour hersh stovepiping” and see how the US intelligence apparatus was misused.

[2] Do not think, even for a second, that I’m in any way suggesting that this was the only course of action open to the US or that it was anywhere near being the best option.

Joe Romm pointed out over on Climate Progress that even drilling the heck out of the outer continental shelf won’t make any significant difference. In EIA bombshell: Offshore drilling “would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030″ he says:

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently did a detailed study of the likely outcome of offshore drilling for their Annual Energy Outlook 2007, “Impacts of Increased Access to Oil and Natural Gas Resources in the Lower 48 Federal Outer Continental Shelf (OCS).” The sobering conclusion:

The projections in the OCS access case indicate that access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030.

And the impact of the projected 7% (!) increase in lower-48 oil production that might result in 2030 thanks to opening the OCS is… wait for it…

…any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant.

The picture for natural gas is no brighter, as the EIA page linked above says: “Similarly, lower 48 natural gas production is not projected to increase substantially by 2030 as a result of increased access to the OCS.”

If you want foolproof carbon capture and sequestration that doesn’t require any technological breakthroughs or the construction of miles-long pipelines, etc., try this: Leave as much of the fossil fuels in the ground as possible.

What am I talking about? Simple: There’s this obsession, bordering on a fetish, in some circles with the concept of EROEI (energy return on energy investment). Basically, the idea is that you have to expend energy to extract, process, and deliver it in a useful form. E.g. you have to pull oil out of the ground somewhere, transport it to a refinery, refine it, and then typically transport it at least once more before a customer can actually purchase and consume the final product. That all takes energy, obviously, so you can calculate a return on the investment–you spend X kWh of energy in turning oil in the ground to a usable product at your local gas station, and every gallon of gasoline provides you with Y kWh of energy, so your absolute net energy gain is (Y - X) kWh, and the percentage gain is (Y - X)/X. Simple stuff.

The problem isn’t the math, it’s the way people fall into orbit around the concept. A good example is the post currently up at EcoGeek, Water Powered Car Will Never Work, which focuses exclusively on the physics of the situation. While I agree with the assessment of the energy flows, and I find it hard to see how anyone couldn’t, it misses the point:

We decide which things to do based on economic considerations, not energy flows.

Economics, I will remind you all for perhaps the 48 gazillionth time, is the study of the allocation of scarce resources. But everything is measured in money, and those valuations are intimately tied to how much individual consumers value the things they purchase–in econo-geek speak, their utility functions. Using energy flows as a proxy for valuations only works in those situations when they just happen to agree on the relative cost of various alternatives.

Need a specific example? OK, imagine this: Oil is getting pretty scarce, and therefore very expensive. The cost of gasoline is pushed up by the cost of oil to much higher levels than we’re seeing today. We can cook oil out of the sands and shales in the US and Canadian Rockies, but only by using a lot of some other form of energy. In our scenario the economy is shifting away from oil use, but not nearly fast enough (we have all those old cars still on the road, for example), so the market, reflecting the demand of all those individual consumers, values a kWh of energy in oil much higher than it does a kWh of energy in natural gas (or nuclear power or wind power or…). Therefore, we’ll use one of those non-oil energy sources to cook oil out of the ground because the oil is worth more than the cost to produce it, including all that natural gas or whatever. The net energy gain could well be negative, but until the price of the other energy source rises enough we’ll keep doing it.

Need a more immediate example? Batteries. Not the fancy lithium ion cells in your laptop or the NiMh cells in your Prius, but the penlight cells in your camera or the 17 remote controls on your coffee table. How much energy do you think it takes to make one of those penlight cells, even with the enormous economies of scale from making the immense number we manufacture every year? And do you think the whisper of electrons an AA battery produces is anywhere near that up-front energy input? Of course not. Yet we make and use batteries by the barge load simply because we value what they can do for us more than we have to pay to acquire them. Energy flows don’t come into the picture at all.[1]

You can make an argument that this is yet another reason why public policy is so important. Via public policy we change the relative cost of alternatives and modify behavior in a way that’s in the best interest of society at large. We could (and hopefully will, some day) institute a feebate system to encourage the purchase of more fuel efficient vehicle and discourage the sale of gas guzzlers, for example. Ditto for using some mechanism to put a price on CO2 emissions, and end to the biggest, most destructive single negative externality in the e+e arena. That’s the basic process we use to make the connection between what we collectively think we “should” do and what we “will” do–public policy using the price mechanism to tilt the competitive landscape to everyone’s benefit.

My point is not to beat up EcoGeek, a site I have in my RSS feed reader app and read every day (as should you), or anyone else for that matter. Consider this a plea to remember when you’re reading and thinking about energy, environmental, and economics issues that large groups of people do things based on economic calculations, which means money. Assuming anything else, whether based on optimism that we’ll do the right thing purely because it’s the right thing, or for any other reason, can quickly lead to wrong conclusions.

[1] If you’re going to comment here or e-mail and scold me about not using rechargeable batteries, save your keystrokes. I’m a big fan of them, and I’ve been using them for a long time. I don’t know how much money and environmental impact I’ve saved by not using disposable batteries, but I’m sure it’s a lot. And yes, you should use them, too.

There’s a lot of noise on this issue, and almost all of it ignores the peak oil factor. But first, let me dispense with some of said noise.

The right wingers claim that we should exploit our resources to push down oil prices. If we threw open the offshore areas to oil exploration and exploitation, it would take years, probably 6 or 7 at a bare minimum and likely longer, for any of that oil to reach the market. Not for it to reach the maximum flow, but for the first trickle of black gold to be turned into a usable commercial product. And even then the amount of oil reaching the market will likely result in a minor reduction of oil prices. That’s compared to what they would be years from now without this additional drilling, not compared to current p