Jim Kingsdale has a post up that includes a longish piece by the financial deity Peter Lynch on the cost of energy. Please go read the whole thing, but let me present just a few snippets to entice you to do so:

In my opinion, “Energy” is the number one problem facing the U.S and the world as we move forward into the 21st century. In fact, I think that it may be the greatest problem that mankind has ever faced. All the other “problems” we hear about on the evening news – health care, social security, housing crisis, credit crunch etc. are ALL “small change” compared to the looming worldwide energy crisis. The problem facing us is so large that I am really beginning to believe that people, as well as, governments are simply in mass denial and refuse to believe the magnitude of the approaching problem. Keep in mind that reasonably priced, available energy is what gave birth to our mighty industrial revolution and is what separates the U.S. and the rest of the developed world from becoming third world countries.

This is a problem that CANNOT be ignored and must be addressed rapidly, with a detailed long term plan that MUST be based upon a comprehensive accurate evaluation and assessment. There is still time to move forward, but time is running out and we have to stop with the politics as usual and start to focus on what we ALL need to do for the common good.

What is the price you pay to purchase a gallon of gasoline for your car? Depending on what part of the country you live in, it is probably between $4.00 and $4.50 per gallon.

But what is the “real cost” of that gasoline? Does it count ALL of the direct AND indirect costs to the consumer, society and the nation of our continued and insane dependence on fossil fuels?

I think not.

Everyone knows the posted price, but very few realize or stop to think about the true costs. There are a number of “hidden” costs that most of us do not realize. It may not be obvious but we are quietly paying these additional costs every day. These additional indirect costs actually make the “real” cost of the gasoline and all other fossil fuel related items many times higher than it seems at first glance.

Unfortunately our government does not utilize all of the necessary cost components in order to arrive at an accurate “true cost” number. As a result, they are using a faulty equation, which, of course, will result, EVERY SINGLE TIME, in an incorrect answer and subsequently a fault ridden policy that is based upon error after error.

Some of these costs and associated penalties:

• Health Related Costs
• Air Pollution
• Water and Land Pollution
• Thermal Pollution
• Macro Economic Costs
• National Security
• Global Warming

[Lynch then addresses each item in the above list.]

We can lower our healthcare costs, reduce our air, water and thermal pollution, develop a more stable economy, create an enormous number of U.S. based jobs and become a far more secure nation if we just begin this inevitable process of evolution toward renewable energy sources - solar, wind, biomass, ocean power, energy efficiency and conservation.

We need to educate the American people about the real truth of the current situation and then apply, what has always been America’s greatest “assets” - technical ingenuity, creative innovation and our “can do” attitude.

Now you can see what the “real costs” of our addiction to fossil fuels are. We need to be preemptive and undertake this NOW, before we find ourselves in the midst of a worst-case scenario.

Please go read it all.

I’ve argued perhaps a billion or so times on this site that we need a wide range of actions to deal with our looming energy and environmental issues. We can’t rely on just a grass roots movement or just government action or just leave it all to “the free market”. We need them all, which means we have to be smart about how we combine their costs and benefits; we’re quickly running out of time for stupid or half-hearted measures.

Part of our action has to be expressing our collective will through elected officials, i.e. government action. The nastiest reality of all is that while some people will do what’s right on energy and environmental issues simply because they know it’s the right thing or they get satisfaction because doing it proves their moral superiority, not nearly enough people will act that way. For every member of the Sierra Club or Greenpeace (or regular reader of this site, frankly), there are many more Americans who want nothing more than the cheapest out-of-pocket expense for energy possible, and they reject everything else as a plot by the New World Order or environuts or (gasp!) Al Gore to take over their lives.[1]

Therefore, we need voters and consumers to educate and activate themselves, and force politicians seeking their support as well as corporations seeking their money, to adopt a longer planning horizon and a more enlightened approach and do the right thing.[2]

We also need people to make the myriad of changes I’ve been screaming about on this site for years, like using compact fluorescent bulbs, driving fewer miles, hunting down and killing electricity vampires[3], improving the insulation of their homes, using as little space heating or cooling as possible, etc.

And above all, Lynch is right: We need to do those things now.

(Lest anyone miss the enormous, neon sign hanging over this discussion, let me point to it explicitly: About four years ago when I started this web site and project, I chose the name “The Cost of Energy” precisely because I wanted people to adopt a more expansive and encompassing mindset and consider all the costs of our energy use, not just the immediate and obvious ones measured in cash flow.)

[1] And for the life of me, I have never figured out why the people who say such inane things believe for a moment that other people would want control of their lives. That’s a stupefyingly weird alloy of paranoia and egomania.

[2] For those of you who just laughed at the planning horizon and enlightened approach stuff, answer me this: How much better off would Ford, GM, and Chrysler be today if they challenged Toyota and Honda in developing hybrid vehicles in the 1990’s instead of dismissing it? For that matter, how much healthier would they be, and how many fewer people would they be laying off directly and indirectly, if they had simply put more emphasis on smaller, more efficient vehicles instead of binging on trucks for years, like an unsupervised kid in a candy store? It’s easy to be smug and make fun of calls for the kind of change in corporate boardrooms that I think we need, at least until corporations are greedy and willfully ignorant and then reality bites them on the ass. Then everyone starts wailing about “could GM really declare bankruptcy???” instead of treating this as a huge and very painful object lesson in how companies should be run.

[3] These are all those little things around your home that suck a little (or a lot of) electricity all the time, even when they’re not being used. Do you really need to have your cable modem and router turned on all the time? Do you need to leave your PC on 24/7, even though Windows doesn’t boot so much as it gestates? Walk through your house and do a quick inventory of what’s plugged in, and how often you really use it, and I’m willing to bet you’ll find a good $5 of monthly electricity you can painlessly eliminate. And if that’s too much trouble, then please send me that $5/month (PayPal to lougrinzo [at sign] rochester.rr.com), as I need it to keep this project afloat.

Bill McKibben, one of Those Who Must Be Read, in my opinion, has a thoughtful, moving piece up at Orion Magazine’s site, “When Words Fail” (emphasis added):

I almost never write about writing—in my aesthetic, the writing should disappear, the thought linger. But the longer I’ve spent working on global warming—the greatest challenge humans have ever faced—the more I’ve come to see it as essentially a literary problem. A technological and scientific challenge, yes; an economic quandary, yes; a political dilemma, surely. But centrally? A crisis in metaphor, in analogy, in understanding. We haven’t come up with words big enough to communicate the magnitude of what we’re doing. How do you say: the world you know today, the world you were born into, the world that has remained essentially the same for all of human civilization, that has birthed every play and poem and novel and essay, every painting and photograph, every invention and economy, every spiritual system (and every turn of phrase) is about to be . . . something so different? Somehow “global warming” barely hints at it. The same goes for any of the other locutions, including “climate chaos.” And if we do come up with adequate words in one culture, they won’t necessarily translate into all the other languages whose speakers must collaborate to somehow solve this problem.

…

In a PowerPoint presentation [James Hansen] gave at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco last December, he named a number: 350 parts per million carbon dioxide. That, he said, was the absolute upper bound of anything like safety—above it and the planet would be unraveling. Is unraveling, because we’re already at 385 parts per million. And so it’s a daring number, a politically unwelcome one. It means, in shorthand, that this generation of people—politicians especially—can’t pass the problem down to their successors. We’re like patients who’ve been to the doctor and found out that our cholesterol is too high. We’re in the danger zone. Time to cut back now, and hope that we do it fast enough so we don’t have a stroke in the meantime. So that Greenland doesn’t melt in the meantime and raise the ocean twenty-five feet.

…

But a number works. And this is a good one. Arcane, yes—parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere. But at least it means the same thing in every tongue, and it even bridges the gap between English and metric. And so we secured the all-important URL: 350.org. (Easier said than done.) And we settled on our mission: To tattoo that number into every human brain. To make every person on Planet Earth aware of it, in the same way that most of them know the length of a soccer field (even though they call it a football pitch or a voetbal gebied). If we are able to make that happen, then the negotiations now under way, and due to conclude in Copenhagen in December of 2009, will be pulled as if by a kind of rough and opaque magic toward that goal. It will become the definition of success or of failure. It will set the climate for talking about climate.

This basic issue: How do you get the enormity of the problems we’re facing, including global warming and peak oil, across to enough people and at a sufficiently visceral level that they realize “this time it’s different”, is one that I, also, wrestle with constantly. We’ve all grown jaded over the years, those of us over about the age of 30, and most would say with good reason. We’ve all seen countless examples of Really Serious Problems hyped to death in the media and by people selling books or with some other, less obvious agenda, only to see those world-changing threats turn out to be wrong (i.e. the problem never really was a problem) or self-correcting or easily solved with a minor public policy adjustment or solved with a big, concentrated effort that didn’t hurt us (Y2k, anyone?). We’re lucky enough, most of us and most of the time, that a high percentage of the horror stories about the monsters under our beds dissolved into nothing more than harmless noise in our mental bandwidth that dissipates after a while, leaving us to go about our lives.

Another factor is the defense mechanism of proximity. You hear a news report of a bad chain reaction accident on a fog-obscured highway that you drive several times a week, and you have the typical human reaction–you’re sorry to hear about those 35 drivers, and you feel a momentary twinge of sympathy for the three people who died and the couple of dozen who were sent to various local hospitals. But just as quickly you move on to the next story or some errand you have to run, at least until you find out later that day that a good friend was in that accident and had to be cut out of the twisted shell of his totaled car and air lifted to a hospital, where he’s still in guarded condition. You’re suddenly focused on the house painting party he had planned to host this weekend, and how you and some other friends were planning to play a trick on him by bringing a can of paint in a conspicuously wrong color and telling him one of the rooms had been finished in that color. It’s no longer a two-minute local news item but a personal tragedy; you’re gripped by the nearness of the accident, the “there but for the grace of God go I” mix of genuine sorrow that such a good person was so seriously and needlessly injured, and embarrassed thankfulness that it wasn’t someone even closer to you, or you yourself struck by this random tragedy.

And right now, as you read this, you’re wondering about these specific details–is this just a fabricated example or did this really happen? You’re balanced on the razor’s edge between dismissing the story or surrendering to even momentary emotional investment; does Lou have a close friend clinging to life? Is he callous enough to use it as an example on his web site?

The answer is another question: Why does it matter? Why do you care any more or less about highway safety or how safely you drive depending on whether you know someone who was injured in an accident? Why does it have to be “personal” for us to care? Why do so many people assume that only parents care enough about humanity’s future to try to reverse our behaviors that exacerbate the effects of global warming and peak oil? Isn’t it enough to say that all the children of the world belong to all of us, whether or not they share our DNA?

Will the 350.org campaign be successful at breaking the conceptual logjam and globalizing our world view enough that many more of us “get” it? I don’t know, but it’s certainly worth the effort to find out.

Joe Romm touched on a critical point in a post at Climate Progress this morning, “Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 6: What the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner bill debate tells us”:

Equally important, conservatives now have a very potent political issue to beat back advocates of an economy-wide cap & trade system — high gasoline prices. And gasoline prices are probably going to be much higher over the next few years (see “Must read CIBC report: $7 gas by 2010, 10 million cars off the road, 1970s style GDP growth“). That is one reason I would leave transportation out of an economy-wide cap & trade, but that will be the subject of another post.

As I said on CP in response to that post, this is one of the things I feared the most, that our sense of urgency about GW and the pain of higher oil prices would arrive simultaneously and cause policy paralysis. If we’re not at that point as one might conclude from many of the examples Joe cites in his post, we’re way too close (and getting close) for comfort.

This is a big deal because of the way large groups of people, most notably Americans in this shiny, happy 21st century, deal with major crises. We have a terribly hard time dealing more than one Big Conceptual Issue at a time, and both global warming and peak oil certainly qualify as BCI’s. Even worse is how hard it can be to get us to focus on action now to avert a catastrophic, but not yet present, Issue 2 when Issue 1 is not just big and scary, but hitting us hard in our weekly finances right now.[1]

On top of this foundation of psychological weirdness is everyone’s favorite nasty detail: Perception is reality. Most notably for our purposes GW and PO have taken very different paths through the obstacle course that is public perception space, paths that I suspect virtually no one would have predicted 10 years ago.

Global warming made the leap from science geek and enviro issue to a widely recognized, and even largely accepted, mainstream concept thanks almost entire to An Inconvenient Truth. Yes, many other people have been shouting about this topic for a long time, including some people I respect greatly, like Bill McKibben and James Hansen, plus we’ve seen tireless contributions to this effort from organizations like the NRDC and Greenpeace. And all this happened before the people who were educated and/or convinced were directly affected by global warming. Sure, Uncle Al and others had some compelling imagery to work with–stranded polar bears, disappearing glaciers, US state-size chucks of Antarctica breaking off, implications of more and stronger hurricanes–but the considerable conceptual progress we’ve seen has all been at a distance, with the consequences removed, in both space and time, from those people undergoing a shift in the world view.

Peak oil is a nearly opposite situation. The effects are being felt right here, right now, and in ways that mainstream consumers and voters can’t ignore. So surely people would be clamoring for information about peak oil, and then pressuring their politicians to take appropriate action, right? Of course that hasn’t happened; we have no Al Gore, with or without his nifty presentation and movie, and we have endless debate about What’s Really Causing High Oil Prices, which only feeds the populist streak in Americans as well as our DNA-level belief in infinity. We can’t be running out of cheap oil! There’s plenty of it in the ground! It’s just OPEC or Exxon or Bush or the New World Order or Speculators screwing us again!

Public perception seems to have solidified. The mainstream public sees global warming as a real problem we’ll just have to ignore for now while we get those oil prices down. Peak oil isn’t even on their radar screen, and to the extent people have even heard of it nearly all of them are convinced it’s nothing more than just another of those Internet-fueled conspiracy theories.[2] I’ve said for a long time that peak oil needed our own equivalent of Al Gore, but I think it’s too late for anyone to fill that role.

The biggest problem here is not the disparity of perception about global warming vs. peak oil, but how those two things interact, as Joe Romm pointed out. People are so squeezed by higher energy prices that they’re demanding their elected representatives Do Something Right Now, and I pity the politician who supports a policy that his or her opponent can paint as being a new tax, no matter how well thought out and necessary the policy might be.

What a startling chain reaction. We become global warming aware, but then peak oil keeps us from taking serious action on global warming, and that budding awareness of global warming is at least partly to blame for our inability to deal with peak oil (that “only one crisis at a time” thing).

How do we break that cycle and shun our comfort zone and deal with these twin problems in realistic terms? How much can we expect mainstream consumers and voters to change and pressure their elected representatives? Or is the answer simply to hope that we elect people who know what’s going on, haven’t been bought by special interests, and are willing to do unpopular things that are in everyone’s long-term best interest? I don’t know, and that’s a mix of questions I’m thinking about more than ever not just in connection with my writing here, but also in my current book project, where I’m currently deciding how much of a “crash course in energy analysis” I should include as an explicit section.

[1] This is not to say that I think American consumers are being selfish or too wrapped up in their personal finances. If anything, more attention and careful planning on that front would have helped lessen the impact of the current mess.

[2] The fact that so many people think peak oil is a conspiracy theory and that the “real” explanation is one of their quarter-baked fantasies about a New World Order or oil companies ruling the world (i.e. keeping 100MPG cars off the road), surely deserves to be a first-ballot entry into the Irony Hall of Fame. And yes, I blame both the 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.

The Independent has an article about global warming in today’s edition that raises some very disturbing questions. Exclusive: No ice at the North Pole:

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.

Read the article Rising seas threaten west Antarctic, and it’s all but impossible to think, yet again, of all the chances to take serious, desperately needed action on CO2 emissions that we’ve thrown away over the last twenty years. What could trigger such a bout of depressing navel staring? Try this:

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.

Here we go again–another article about economists measuring uncomfortable things like the value of human life in trying to figure out what our policy priorities should be. This time around, I have more than the usual objection to what my fellow economists have cooked up.

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.

As the dual problems of global warming and peak oil become so pressing that even US politicians can no longer ignore them, they, and all Americans, will face a daunting series of public policy questions. In one way or another, all the questions raised by the need to rein in CO2 emissions and accelerate our transition away from oil as a primary energy source share one thing in common: An implicit decision about the “proper” roles of government and free markets in achieving these goals. It’s quickly becoming clear that the first of these painfully difficult decision points is already upon us, namely: What can and should the US government do about the imploding airline sector?

This is the question posed by the report “Oil Prices and the Looming U.S. Aviation
Industry Catastrophe: A Hole In The Transport Grid”[8-page, 94KB PDF], written by the Business Travel Coalition and AirlineForecasts, LLC. The report paints an stark picture, by any measure, as summarized in the press release (emphasis added):

At current oil prices, several large and small U.S. airlines will default on their obligations to creditors beginning at the end of 2008 and early 2009, according to a study issued today by AirlineForecasts, LLC and the Business Travel Coalition. The study shows that $130/barrel oil prices will increase yearly airline costs by $30 billion, while airlines will be able to generate only $4 billion in fare increases and incremental fees. The implication of this alarming trend is that several large and small airlines will ultimately end up in bankruptcy, and of those, some will be forced to liquidate.

…

“If oil prices stay anywhere near $130/barrel, all major legacy airlines will be in default on various debt covenants by the end of 2008 or early 2009,” the study conducted by AirlineForecasts for BTC states. “U.S. commercial aviation is in full blown crisis and heading toward a catastrophe.”

“Airlines are the primary source of inter-city transportation, critical to national and local economic development, the flow of human capital, movement of just-in-time parts for manufacturing, perishable food and other goods critical to our economy,” the study says. “With airlines gravely threatened, so is our economic well-being.”

Findings:

* The top 10 U.S. airlines will spend almost $25 billion in higher fuel costs this year over last year when jet fuel averaged $2.11 per gallon. Fuel hedge benefits could offset $5 to $6 billion of the increased fuel costs.

…

* Industry fares will have to increase at least 20% - across the board and on average - just to cover the dramatic gap-up in fuel costs from 2007. This is not possible given the level of uneconomic seat capacity in the system today.

* The upshot of higher fares is less traffic, and given a reasonable estimate of price elasticity, the industry will eventually be forced to shrink its seat capacity by 15% to 20%. However, there is no guarantee that a transition to a smaller, more expensive (for the consumer) airline industry would be successful and sustainable.

* Airlines have the ability to raise some cash, and moreover, suppliers such as aircraft manufacturers, leasing companies and travel management companies will have an incentive to support large airlines that provide a stream of value. Nevertheless, without a swift reduction in the price of fuel, the industry is headed toward a massive failure that will result in more bankruptcies, including liquidations.

“The U.S. airlines, and those who depend on them, are watching with growing alarm as their cash reserves fall precipitously toward zero as the price of oil, already at unsustainable levels, continuously spikes into uncharted territory,” the study says. “These airlines have never faced a darker future.”

“Brand name legacy carriers that we and American communities from coast to coast have depended upon for decades to provide us with affordable, frequent air service are running out of cash, and therefore, toward a date with bankruptcy and liquidation,” the report warns.

“Airlines can attempt to radically shrink the industry,” the study states. “But given the competitive situation they face, it’s highly unlikely that they will have the ability to reduce capacity to levels that will allow all of them to survive. Instead, absent direct policy intervention, the likelihood is several airlines will fail.”

“Stabilizing this ailing industry must become a national policy priority,” the report states. “Many Members of Congress, federal regulatory officials, state legislators and Governors have yet to fully appreciate the devastating impact an oil-crippled airline industry will wreak on our culture and our national and local economies.”

The report itself says (pages seven and eight):

To fully grasp the gravity of the current situation, it’s useful to reference some historic context. During the airline industry cyclical downturn in the early 1990s, the industry lost a cumulative $12 billion between the fourth quarter of 1990 and the first quarter of 1993. What followed were 6 years of profits
sufficient for airlines to repair damaged balance sheets. (US Airways even repurchased $2 billion of its stock.)

The most recent downturn in 2000 lasted until 2006 and reported net losses were over $44 billion. The industry only had one year of profitability, in 2007, at less than $4 billion, to begin the balance sheet repair work before it was plunged into deep losses again in 2008. Importantly, during this most recent downturn, significant costs were taken out of the industry, and for many airlines, virtually all assets were mortgaged. Most airlines have little flexibility now as they face both a slowing economy and record-setting jet fuel prices.

…

A catastrophic result for U.S. airlines can be averted if policymakers, particularly in the White House and Congress, step up purposefully to address this monumental challenge. There is still time to make a difference. This is important not only for airlines and their passengers, but also for every business that uses oil products.

In the weeks ahead, BTC will work with its allies to bring forward to Congress and the Administration some specific proposals that will help address the near and long-term implications of the aviation fuel crisis.

We urgently need a new energy policy that will give the airlines a fighting chance to survive and recover — and serve all members of the traveling public for many years to come.

Even if you want to apply a fudge factor to these claims–it’s a business sector claiming times are tough and asking for government help, not a condition that historically tends to result in understatement–it’s hard not to agree with the conclusions of this paper. We’ve already seen several airlines increasing fees, retiring less fuel efficient airplanes, laying off workers, and even flying slower. As I’ve pointed out in some detail (e.g. Airlines, Apocalypticons, and the rest of us), the essential problem is that airlines have no where to turn; they’re tied to the cost of jet fuel, with no substitutes in sight.

So, if you wake up tomorrow morning and find out you’re the US president (with far more time in office remaining than George Bush) or the Senate Majority Leader or Speaker of the House, say, what policy fixes for this quickly unfolding mess would you propose?[1] I’m not talking about blue sky, magic wand notion that we can talk about on a blog and then blithely ignore, but real world, honest-to-Orville-and-Wilbur solutions that must (1) pass through the legislative process intact, (2) actually address the problem to an acceptable degree, and (3) do so at an acceptable cost to the taxpayer at a time when the US Treasury is geysering red ink and the US has an astronomically high national debt.

The first step, clearly, is to define what “acceptable” in (2) above means. Do you try to save all airlines over a certain size? Or do you determine a minimal size for the overall airline sector and try to save just enough carriers to meet that level of service (meaning coverage and number of flights), regardless of which companies that means saving or throwing to the wolves of the marketplace? My gut feeling is that the latter is the best approach, since our goal is to save the country from the pain of an airline sector collapse, not save individual companies.

Once we have some sort of metric for “acceptable”, then what do we do? I think the only viable approaches are to subsidize tickets or subsidize fuel costs. Subsidizing tickets would quickly turn into a infinite mess, I suspect, as the sheer volume of tickets and the resulting logistics would outstrip the government’s management skills, especially in the short run. If we were to subsidize fuel, however, it would be orders of magnitude simpler to administrate and adjust the program, and we would be directly addressing the problem: Fuel costs.

So, we decide to subsidize all airlines to a set fuel cost. What’s the magic number, and how much does it cost? The above report has a table (page 5) that provides various oil prices and their effects on the airline industry. This table says oil at $130/barrel equates to jet fuel at $3.80/gallon, and $100 oil translates to jet fuel at $3.10/gallon. For the sake of example, assume we’re aiming for the $100/barrel oil, $3.10/gallon fuel price point, although I’m not sure that the airlines would agree that this is enough help.

The US uses about 1.6 million barrels of jet fuel/day, or 67.2 million gallons/day, according to the current TWIP report, and oil is just a bit over $130/barrel. So we’re talking about the government underwriting 70 cents of ever gallon of jet fuel, at a daily cost of about $47 million, which is $17.1 billion/year. Given that the US is spending about $12 billion every month in Iraq, an endeavor which should end sometime within the life of at least some people reading this, this doesn’t seem too bad.

There are some very serious issues here, obviously:

• How long do you subsidize jet fuel? Until oil prices come down on their own? Lots of luck on that front. Until airlines shrink enough that they can survive without subsidies, i.e. the conversion to a boutique industry that serves only the wealthy? That’s what we’re trying to avoid in the first place, so that’s out of the question unless your goal is merely to slow the collapse of the airlines enough to let the rest of the economy adjust and soften the shock.
• Lower fuel prices means you’ll have more people flying than if you hadn’t created the subsidies, so that means more oil diverted to jet fuel and less to gasoline, diesel fuel, and home heating oil, as well as more CO2 emissions that we have to deal with as part of that other growling monster under our bed.
• How do you pay for the subsidies? Do you generate some other revenue stream–windfall profits tax on oil companies, anyone?–or do you simply pile it on the mountain that is our yearly deficit?
• What do you do if the crazy people on the Internet, like, well, me, are right and we hit peak oil in just a few years and oil becomes much more expensive, pushing up the cost of your subsidies? Do you maintain your commitment to subsidize jet fuel at $X/gallon, or is your commitment to subsidize by Y cents per gallon? Even if you stick to the Y cents/gallon formula, how many other, equally dire demands on the government will materialize once we get into the age of truly expensive oil?

I often say that one of the things I’m thankful for on a daily basis when I wake up is that I’m not the president of the US, and this airline situation is a prime example why that observation is less amusing on some days than others. In light of the range of current and developing issues facing the US, all industrialized countries, and essentially the entire human race, I honestly have no idea what I would do about this.

See also:

• Airlines, Apocalypticons, and the rest of us
• Airline Armageddon
• Aviation articles on the TCOE discussion board

[1] I’m assuming that you agree that this is a very big problem that should be addressed if at all possible. If you think it’s either not a problem for the country to have the airline sector implode, or you think we should just let it “sort itself out” as the free marketeers like to say, then consider the rest of this post as an exercise in fantasy.

Three items that I highly recommend to all the TCOE faithful:

First is Mark Lynas’ article, Climate chaos is inevitable. We can only avert oblivion (emphasis added):

Sometimes we need to think the unthinkable, particularly when dealing with a problem as dangerous as climate change - there is no room for dogma when considering the future habitability of our planet. It was in this spirit that I and a panel of other specialists in climate, economics and policy-making met under the aegis of the Stockholm Network thinktank to map out future scenarios for how international policy might evolve - and what the eventual impact might be on the earth’s climate. We came up with three alternative visions of the future, and asked experts at the Met Office Hadley Centre to run them through its climate models to give each a projected temperature rise. The results were both surprising, and profoundly disturbing.

We gave each scenario a name. The most pessimistic was labelled “agree and ignore” - a world where governments meet to make commitments on climate change, but then backtrack or fail to comply with them. Sound familiar? It should: this scenario most closely resembles the past 10 years, and it projects emissions on an upward trend until 2045. A more optimistic scenario was termed “Kyoto plus”: here governments make a strong agreement in Copenhagen in 2009, binding industrialised countries into a new round of Kyoto-style targets, with developing countries joining successively as they achieve “first world” status. This scenario represents the best outcome that can plausibly result from the current process - but ominously, it still sees emissions rising until 2030.

The third scenario - called “step change” - is worth a closer look. Here we envisaged massive climate disasters around the world in 2010 and 2011 causing a sudden increase in the sense of urgency surrounding global warming. Energised, world leaders ditch Kyoto, abandoning efforts to regulate emissions at a national level. Instead, they focus on the companies that produce fossil fuels in the first place - from oil and gas wells and coal mines - with the UN setting a global “upstream” production cap and auctioning tradable permits to carbon producers. Instead of all the complexity of regulating squabbling nations and billions of people, the price mechanism does the work: companies simply pass on their increased costs to consumers, and demand for carbon-intensive products begins to fall. The auctioning of permits raises trillions of dollars to be spent smoothing the transition to a low-carbon economy and offsetting the impact of price rises on the poor. A clear long-term framework puts a price on carbon, giving business a strong incentive to shift investment into renewable energy and low-carbon manufacturing. Most importantly, a strong carbon cap means that global emissions peak as early as 2017.

…

But let’s look at the modelled temperature increases associated with each scenario. “Agree and ignore” sees temperatures rise by 4.85C by 2100 (with a 90% probability); for “Kyoto plus”, it’s 3.31C; and “step change” 2.89C. This is the depressing bit: no politically plausible scenario we could envisage will now keep the world below the danger threshold of two degrees, the official target of both the EU and UK. This means that all scenarios see the total disappearance of Arctic sea ice; spreading deserts and water stress in the sub-tropics; extreme weather and floods; and melting glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas. Hence the need to focus far more on adaptation: these are impacts that humanity is going to have to deal with whatever now happens at the policy level.

But the other great lesson is that sticking with current policy is actually a very risky option, rather than a safe bet. Betting on Kyoto could mean triggering the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet and crossing thresholds that involve massive methane release from melting Siberian permafrost. If current policy continues to fail - along the lines of the “agree and ignore” scenario - then 50% to 80% of all species on earth could be driven to extinction by the magnitude and rapidity of warming, and much of the planet’s surface left uninhabitable to humans. Billions, not millions, of people would be displaced.

My view is that we’re definitely deep into the “agree and ignore” scenario, as Lynas points out, and that we’ll completely skip “Kyoto plus” and go straight to “step change”. The key questions I have about this meta scenario are [1] how big will the shocking event(s) have to be to kick start our collective response?, and [2] will Earth’s climate cross a tipping point before we take meaningful action, thanks to to our delay now plus the additional time lost when we take insufficient and just plain wrong steps, whenever that happens?

I know this sounds much more pessimistic than is typical for me on this site, but the more I read about the climate mess we continue to make, the worse I think it is. I’m convinced that James Hansen and others are right, and that the magic number (parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere) for avoiding truly awful effects is closer to 350 than 450. (We’re currently at about 385, with a hell of a lot more CO2 effectively in the pipeline thanks things like all those existing and new coal plants, all those existing and new vehicles driving around, etc.)

See 350.org for Bill McKibben’s effort to get the word out about the magic number.

You can download the Climate Scenarios document Lynas mentions above here (small PDF).

Second is yet another article on methane release from the no-longer-permafrost, described in the article, Global Warming Could Release Trillions Of Pounds Of Carbon Annually From East Siberia’s Vast Frozen Soils:

East Siberia’s permafrost contains about 500 Gigatons (1100 trillion pounds) of frozen carbon deposits that are highly susceptible to disturbances as the climate warms.

Called the Yedoma, this permafrost has not undergone much alteration by soil microorganisms since its formation, which took place between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago. To investigate how easily this huge carbon stock could be degassed in future warming scenarios, Khvorostyanov et al. use a model of heat transfer and soil organic matter decomposition in frozen soils and find that specific conditions trigger the irreversible thawing of Yedoma, which is maintained by heat production by soil microbial activity.

Once started, irreversible thawing could release 4.4-6.2 trillion pounds of carbon per year into the atmosphere between the years 2300 and 2400, transforming 74 percent of the initial carbon stock into carbon dioxide and methane.

Further investigations reveal that the faster the planet’s surface warms, the sooner fast deep-soil decomposition will start, although the tipping point above which soil carbon starts irreversible mobilization due to permafrost thawing increases slightly with larger external warming rates.

The actual article is here, although only the abstract is freely available.

My most recent posting on this is Pondering a methane apocalypse.

Finally we have one of two dates I refer to as Energy Geek Christmas–the day the BP Statistical Review of World Energy is released. (The other is the day the DOE/EIA releases the Annual Energy Review, obviously.)

The 2008 release of the BP Statistical Review is available in various forms from BP’s site here.

While I haven’t had a chance yet to go through this year’s edition carefully, I did notice a few numbers in the oil section that relates to something I’ve mentioned here numerous times, namely reserves reporting for oil producers, and not just those in the Persian Gulf area.

The numbers below are all from page 6 of the report, the units being billions of barrels of oil in “proved reserves”. (The report also lists Canadian oil sands at the bottom of the table as a separate category from conventional Canadian reserves, at 152.2 billion barrels. Add your own riff on the “it’s not the size of the reserves but how quickly you can extract them” speech here.)

My initial reaction in seeing those numbers? I could lie more convincingly than that when I was a college student trying to get into the house after a few hours at the local bar without my mother figuring out I’d been drinking. And I doubt I ever fooled her even once. The most eyebrow-raising category is the Middle East, which shows in the country-level breakout in the original BP table a set of numbers that practically look like a cut-and-paste operation from the YE2006 column to the YE2007 column.

Matt Simmons is right–we desperately need much greater transparency in the energy field.

Since shortly after I wrote about the looming disaster in the airline industry (see Airline Armageddon), I’ve been engaged in an interesting discussion via e-mail with a reader that I thought worth writing about publicly.[1]

In essence, the questions raised by Airline Armageddon were: Have I joined the Apocalypticons? If so, why? If not, how can I write about the airline business in such stark terms and not be in that camp?

The first question is the easiest to answer: No, I haven’t joined the Apocalypticons.[2] I still believe, right down to my DNA, that for all the challenges humanity faces–peak oil and global warming being right at the top of the list–we will rise to the occasion. It won’t be fun, it won’t be cheap, and it will entail significant human pain. But it won’t trigger the end of modern industrialized civilization or any other Apocalypticon fantasy.

The second question is now moot, which brings us to question number three and the heart of the matter, not to mention my motivation for writing this blog entry.

Boiled down to its essence, the answer is that the unique circumstances of the airline industry make it a very special case that’s not representative of our overall peak oil dilemma; in other word, their goose is highly likely cooked[3], while that of humanity or modern industrialized civilization isn’t.

To help explain those special circumstance, let me very briefly detour into microeconomics. Two key concepts of micro theory are the price mechanism and substitute goods. The price mechanism is nothing more than a fancy term for how prices act as a signal throughout the economy, letting buyers and sellers make decisions in a way that (presumably) best serves their own interests. The critical balancing act that economies perform in terms of allocating scarce resources is built atop the foundation of the price mechanism working within the context of a reasonably open and free market.

A substitute good, as the name implies, is something you can use in place of something else. Just think of all the brands and models of consumer items, like appliances, audio/video equipment, clothes, etc. we’re used to seeing for sale, many of which offering very little or no significant difference from their competitors.

Combine the price mechanism and substitute goods in a free market and you have the basis for a very powerful system that works surprisingly well on autopilot. For example, you go to a sporting goods store to buy a tennis racquet, and find that the one you had planned on getting has increased in price, so you buy a different model or brand. This increases demand for the one you bought relative to the one you had planned to buy, and helps balance the prices, and therefore the allocation of resources to make them.

As far as airlines go, they have a problem: They were already under stress from ferocious competition, and then fuel costs rose dramatically in the last few years. In the usual abstract economics classroom discussion, Company X finds that resource Y needed to make widgets rises in price, so they stop buying Y and switch to resource W. When enough companies follow X’s lead, the price of W rises and that of Y falls until the amount they contribute to the cost of making a widget is equal, and then everyone goes home happy. The catch is that airlines don’t have a resource W to turn to–there is no short-term substitute for petroleum-based jet fuel.

But wait, you say–isn’t that that sneaky little “short-term” qualifier the loophole in the gloom and doom? There may not be a good substitute for petroleum-based jet fuel now, but once the rise in fuel prices creates a large enough incentive we’ll invent one, right? Isn’t that the classic economics view of the world. Yes, it is, and in this case the real world choose not to play by the rules of that quaint mental model.

Aside from shrinking the entire industry considerably, until it’s just big enough to serve those fliers willing to pay enough for a ticket to cover current (and likely much higher, in the coming years) fuel costs, what are airlines to do? There are efforts to make jet fuel from biological material, essentially the airplane equivalent of ethanol for cars. Similarly, there’s considerable work going on to make jet fuel from coal. Neither of these alternatives seems promising.

To begin with, consider the scale of the problem. The US alone uses 1.6 million barrels of jet fuel every day[4], that’s 67.2 million gallons/day, or 24,528 million gallons/year.

The biofuels option seems highly unlikely to scale to a useful level. A large ethanol plant produces about 100 million gallons per year. Replacing even half of US jet fuel consumption would therefore require 122 biofuel plants of that size. With the high and growing backlash against biofuels made from food, and the likely competition for arable land even if you’re using willow tress or switchgrass or who knows what, it’s ever more difficult to concoct a scenario in which this option works in the real world. Add in water issues, and it gets even nastier: Drought conditions mean we’ll have ever tougher decisions regarding the use of fresh water, and using more of it to grow biomass for airplane fuel and then even more to convert that biomass into usable fuel will be very tough to justify.

Converting coal into jet fuel looks like it’s technically workable, and the US Air Force is involved in developing this technology. The problem is that turning coal into jet fuel creates a lot of CO2, which we all know we can’t just dump into the atmosphere. So we’re stuck either trying to sequester it permanently underground or consuming it in some way, such as feeding it to greenhouse plants or algae farms and ensuring that a very high percentage of it is consumed. (The planes will make more CO2 when they burn the fuel, so this sequestration or consumption step handles only the emissions from the CTL processing.)

Even if you assume that we can cook up a zero-CO2 way to turn coal into jet fuel, something I find highly doubtful, we will still face enormous pressure to minimize air travel, which is currently responsible for over 240 million metric tons of CO2/year in the US[5] and offers virtually zero hope for CO2 capture and sequestration. Plus, there’s the delay factor–how long will it take to build out the infrastructure needed to convert coal into jet fuel (with no CO2 emissions) at a rate that will help the airline industry? And can the airlines possible hold their breath that long?

My conclusion from all this detail: If you assume that cheap oil isn’t returning, then the nature of the airlines’ business and the other pressures arising from global warming unavoidably leads you to one conclusion: The airlines will have to shrink, a lot, to stay alive, which is why I keep referring to that sector having a future as a “boutique business”. This is quite a contrast to the car makers, where electrified vehicles will be a mainstream alternative very soon and much can be done to increase the miles traveled on each gallon of oil even for plain old gasoline and non-plug-in hybrid models. Airlines have neither an escape hatch nor low hanging fruit to save them.[6]

I’m bringing all this up for a simple reason: I think it’s critical that each of us, when we’re making decisions about our own consumption or which public policies and politicians to support, avoids the error of reaching bad conclusions based on a too-broad analysis or, even worse, simply relying on a gut instinct or misapplied rule of thumb. Very often we can only find accurate answers by delving into the details. Yes, that’s a lot more work than simply assuming that “gasoline prices are high because the oil companies are screwing us”, for example. And yes, that exposes us to being lied to with numbers by people with all manner of hidden agendas, most of which don’t share our best interests. But with the peak oil and global warming situations becoming more urgent by the day, it’s never been more important that we do our homework so we can individually and collectively make the right decisions.

[1] For those who like to play blogger parlor games and will be tempted to guess who my correspondent is, don’t bother. The person isn’t even a registered member of the site or the discussion board, let alone one of the regular contributors. Even though I don’t understand the need for it, I’m keeping the person’s identity a secret by request.

[2] For those new to the site, “Apocalypticons” is a term I coined some time back to refer to the doomers who make ridiculous predictions, typically based on absurd, linear projections of current trends (or simply pulled from a particular body orifice which shall remain unnamed), with no (or virtually no) allowance for the dynamic nature of economic and political systems, not to mention humanity in general. (The opposite end of the spectrum is Cornucopians, the equally clueless fools who think we can achieve infinite growth on a finite planet.) A classic example of Apocalypticon thinking is the claim that after the peak in worldwide oil production we won’t be able to maintain wind farms because the necessary trucks and cranes run on petroleum-based fuels. I’ll leave the refutation of that gem as an exercise for the reader.

[3] Throughout this entry I will assume for that the price of oil will not make a major and long-lived retreat.

[4] It’s actually 1.624 million barrels/day in 2006, as reported in the latest Annual Energy Review, Table 5.11.

[5] It’s actually 243.8 million metric tons in 2005, as reported in the latest Annual Energy Review, Table 12.3.

[6] It should go without saying, but let me be painfully clear about this: If I’m wrong in this assessment of the airlines, please tell me. In fact, I would love to be wrong. I would be delighted to have someone point out that there’s a way for airlines to keep flying (and keep all their employees on the job) without continuing to contribute to CO2 emissions and/or making the biofuels debacle far worse. I’ve looked, and I can’t find that solution.

Probably the biggest, nastiest monster under my bed for some time has been the possibility of a massive methane release from the Arctic region kicking global warming into warp speed. To people who don’t follow this stuff as obsessively as I do, this probably sounds like I’ve suddenly enlisted in the tinfoil hat brigade. Let me explain, as it’s sadly nowhere near that nutty a concept.

First, consider that methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. It doesn’t hang around in the atmosphere nearly as long as does CO2, but the net effect, once you take that timing into account, is usually quoted as roughly 20 times more greenhouse forcing than an equivalent amount of CO2. That’s a scary-big number. (To be more precise, the effect is estimated to be 62 times higher over the first 20 years, and “only” 21 times higher over a century.)

Second, there are two main stores of methane: Methane hydrates (a.k.a. methane ice or methane clathrates) in oceans and methane trapped in permafrost in places like Siberia.

How much of this stuff are talking about? A lot:

Recent estimates constrained by direct sampling suggest the global inventory lies between 1×10**15 and 5×10**15 m³ (1 quadrillion to 5 quadrillion). This estimate, corresponding to 500-2500 gigatonnes carbon (Gt C), is smaller than the 5000 Gt C estimated for all other fossil fuel reserves but substantially larger than the ~230 Gt C estimated for other natural gas sources. The permafrost reservoir has been estimated at about 400 Gt C in the Arctic, but no estimates have been made of possible Antarctic reservoirs. These are large amounts. For comparison the total carbon in the atmosphere is around 700 gigatons.

So , for the oceans and the Arctic permafrost combined we have 900 to 2,900 billion metric tons of carbon, roughly 1.3 to 4 times as much carbon as is already in the atmosphere.

Third, is there any real threat that this stuff will wind up in the atmosphere? Actually, there is, as relatively small amounts have been measured bubbling out of Siberia thaw lakes for at least a couple of years. That same article states that Siberian methane releases are about 3.8 Tg/year, compared to IPCC’s estimates of 600 Tg/year for all methane emissions, so from just the permafrost the current methane releases seem to be pretty small compared to other sources, such as the one US government reports delicately refer to as “enteric fermentation” in livestock, a.k.a. cow farts.

But there’s more evidence than that:

Higher atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gas methane noted last year are probably related to emissions from wetlands, especially around the Arctic.

…

Indications that methane levels might be rising after almost a decade of stability came last month, when the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) released a preliminary analysis of readings taken at monitoring stations worldwide.

Noaa suggested that 2007 had seen a global rise of about 0.5%.

…

Ed Dlugokencky, the scientist at Noaa’s Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) who collates and analyses data from atmospheric monitoring stations, agrees that the 2007 rise has a biological cause.

“We’re pretty sure it’s not biomass burning; and I think 2007 is probably down to wetland emissions,” he said.

“In boreal regions it was warmer and wetter than usual, and microbes there produce methane faster at higher temperatures.”

Dr Dlugokencky also suggested that the drastic reduction in summer sea ice around the Arctic between 2006 and 2007 could have increased release of methane from seawater into the atmosphere.

A further possibility is that the gas is being released in increasing amounts from permafrost as temperatures rise.

Researchers will be keeping a close eye on this year’s data which will indicate whether 2007 was just a blip or the beginning of a sustained rise.

Methane concentrations had been more or less stable since about 1999 following years of rapid increases, with industrial reform in the former Soviet bloc, changes to rice farming methods and the capture of methane from landfill sites all contributing to the levelling off.

In the recent past, concentrations have risen during El Nino events, whereas the world is currently amid the opposite climatic pattern, La Nina.

…

A sustained release from Arctic regions or tropical wetlands could drive a feedback mechanism, whereby higher temperatures liberate more of the greenhouse gas which in turn forces temperatures still higher.

A particularly pertinent question is whether methane is being released from hydrates on the ocean floor.

These solids are formed from water and methane under high pressure, and may begin to give off methane as water temperatures rise.

See that link for a graph of methane emissions as measure by NOAA.

Finally, we have the issue of just how bad a big methane emission could be, in terms of global warming. As it turns out, we may have a truly hair-raising historical precedent:

Melting of methane ice unleashed runaway global warming some 635 million years ago, according to a study released Wednesday that has implications for today’s climate-change crisis.

Release of the potent greenhouse-gas, at first in small amounts and then in massive volumes, brought a sudden end to the planet’s longest Ice Age, its authors believe.

During the “Snowball Earth” era, Earth froze over completely, with glaciers that crept down into the tropics and possibly even reached the equator.

The chill was self-sustaining, because the ice formed a brilliant white shell that reflected the Sun’s rays, preventing the surface from warming.

After a frozen slumber lasting 155 million years, Earth warmed dramatically.

How this happened has been fiercely disputed, although all agree that the event changed the planet’s climate system and ocean chemistry forever.

Publishing in the weekly British journal Nature, scientists in the United States and Australia point the finger at methane clathrates — methane-rich ice that forms under ice sheets at specific temperatures and pressures.

The researchers believe that the ice sheets on Snowball Earth became unstable, which released pressure on the clathrates.

They began to evaporate, releasing the methane, which helped to warm the planet slightly. This thawed more clathrates and fuelled the warming and so on, creating a vicious circle or “positive feedback” in scientific parlance.

…

Billions of tonnes of methane are locked up in these reservoirs, and the big worry is that it could take a relative small rise in temperature to start unleashing the gas, which would then trigger an unstoppable warming cycle.

“One way to look at the present human influence on global warming is that we are conducting a global-scale experiment with Earth’s climate system,” said Kennedy.

“We are witnessing an unprecedented rate of warming, with little or no knowledge of what instabilities lurk in the climate system and how they can influence life on Earth.”

If the end of Snowball Earth is a guide, positive feedbacks, “once initiated, change the climate to a wholly different state,” he observed.

If the mechanism for clathrates’ feedback is now clearer, the scientists have still to explain how much forcing was needed for the vicious circle to set in motion — and whether we are approaching any similar threshold today with the CO2 from fossil fuels.

All this means… what, exactly?

Let me be as clear as possible about this: I’m not saying that we’re definitely on track for a rendezvous with a methane burp (or clathrate gun, as some call it) scenario. As the last bit of text quoted above points out, we don’t know where the tipping point is, even if we assume that these latest findings hold up to scientific scrutiny. And to be completely objective, they might not, although that’s not how I would bet my Internet connection right now.

For me, there are two factors that elevate the methane apocalypse from “dumb thing I read on the Internet and can now ignore” to “something I really hope we’re spending a lot of money researching, right now“. The first is the rate at which climate change is happening, not least of all in the Arctic ice situation, as shown on the home page of the NSIDC (National Snow and Ice Data Center). I’ve pointed out numerous times on this site that the worldwide climate is changing much quicker than we expected, which means that despite the best efforts of a lot of extremely smart and dedicated people we still don’t understand what’s going on as well as we’d prefer. Will the changes we’re seeing level off or even decline over the next few years? Or will feedback effects, from albedo flip (reflective ice being replaced by less reflective water or ground) to methane releases accelerate change, possibly to the point where no reduction in our CO2 emissions will save the day?

The other factor is the similarity of the scenario outlined in the last article I quoted from above to our current situation. The critical difference is that in 2008 we’re changing the CO2 level in the atmosphere at a lightning fast pace, by geologic standards, and with virtually no hope of reducing that buildup this century. We could very well be running, at full-speed and blindfolded, into the mother of all tipping points and triggering catastrophic effects in a few decades instead of hundreds or thousands of years.

Maybe the situation isn’t that dire. Maybe this is all a lot of worry over nothing, and there are negative feedbacks we either haven’t discovered or grossly underestimate that will buy us considerable time to reduce our CO2 emissions and then the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. But right now, it feels more like we’re playing Russian roulette with the biosphere instead of being prudent and applying the precautionary principle.

See also Joe Romm’s take on this:

The permafrost won’t be perma for long, Part 1

Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return