I find it astonishing how few people realize what predictions like this one (Gulf Times: Oil reserves ‘sufficient for 42 years’) really mean:

The proven global oil reserves of 1,258bn barrels, excluding Canadian oil sands, are enough for 42 years at the 2008 production rates, a BP review said.

On the same basis, global gas reserves are sufficient for 60 years and coal 122 years, the 2009 BP Statistical Review of World Energy said.

OK, you ask, what does it “really mean”? It’s an explicit prediction that at current consumption rates we will be out of oil. As in not one drop coming out of the ground. And we’ll have no coal after 122 years and no natural gas after 60.

There are multiple issues here. Let me try to tease them apart.

The kind of “analysis” (to use too generous a term) in this article is the classic “R/P” nonsense. Divide reserves by yearly production, and you get the lifespan of the reserves. Of course, once you take the enormous step from saying, “this is just a very crude measurement of the reserve size”, to saying, “this is how long those reserves will last”, you’re taking on some pretty big assumptions and problems:

• We know what the ultimately recoverable reserves are, which is highly suspect, never more than when talking about oil and natural gas. We’re dealing with state secrecy, as in the mysterious, never-depleting oil reserves of Saudi Arabia and various members of OPEC suddenly boosting their reserves because they had and incentive to lie (each country’s quota was based on its reserves, turning the whole exercise into one giant game of liar’s poker). Additionally, the level of “reserves” in any given field or country keeps changing. Technological advances make it possible to economically extract some reserves that would have been prohibitively expensive only a few years or decades earlier, plus there are still some discoveries being made, like the offshore, ultra deep water Brazilian fields. And don’t forget the further complications of market price and political sentiment–as the market tightens due to peaking and eventually declining world production, the price will rise considerably, making more expensive reserves suddenly economically viable. And price pressure will change the minds of a lot of voters regarding things like drilling in those fields currently off limits, as in many US offshore areas.
• Making a prediction about production (and therefore consumption) of any fossil fuel decades from now is even riskier. Higher prices impact economies and put downward pressure on demand, as well as spur the adoption of lower-fuel consumption patterns and the development of functional replacements for petroleum-based fuels. To use one of my favorite examples: Imagine that someone comes up with a fantastic way to grow algae and turn it into biodiesel. It scales beautifully, it’s robust enough to work in a variety of climates, etc., but it’s expensive (producing marketable fuel at around $4/gallon), at least by July 2009 standards. What happens if the price of oil is quite volatile, as seems highly likely post-peak, and averages about $150 to $200/barrel (roughly $4 to $5/gallon for finished fuel)? How quickly do you think we’d be building algae biodiesel facilities here in the US so that we could use that fuel in 18 wheelers and then use petroleum for our gasoline vehicles?
• And don’t forget the role of climate chaos, and therefore public policy in this. Every push from that quarter away from petroleum-based fuels alters the overall balance of the market and all that implies.
• We won’t be able to produce oil (or natural gas or coal or …) at the current rate right up the moment we get the last bit of it out of the ground. Long before the day the last well runs dry many others will have stopped producing, restricting production and tightening the market, which will only push up prices and induce more volatility into the market. No one believes that we’ll be able to extract these reserves at the current rate right up the very last day.[1] I would contend that the R/P scenario is even worse than what most peak oil adherents (Apocalypticons excepted) assume.

In short, if you want to use R/P as a crude measuring stick, then by all means do so, but don’t say that we have “42 years of oil left at current consumption rates”, because it’s trivially obvious how false that is. Instead say that reserves are 42 times what we currently produce in a year. That’s not only more accurate, but it avoids the obvious and pathetic attempt at spin.[2]

[1] This is, sadly, probably not true. I’m sure that among Americans who believe a truly mind blowing list of Stupid Things, including [insert your own politically incorrect list here], you can find some who think this is possible. Assuming they don’t think peak oil, climate chaos, AIDS, swine flu, avian flu, UFOs, and who knows what else are all part of a vast global conspiracy to control their lives, of course.

[2] Let me be blunt here: The Cornucopian crowd, including oil companies and exporting countries, love to talk in terms of having X decades left of resource Y, simply because they know what kind of psychological effect it has. Mainstream voters and consumers hear how big X is and instantly think, “Oh? We have that much? Great! Nothing to worry about here because someone will come up with a solution in time.” And then they go shopping a “great deal” on a shiny new SUV.

Laurel Graefe, a senior economic researcher working for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta has written an excellent overview of peak oil, “The Peak Oil Debate” [16page, 1.6MB PDF].

I consider this a must-read piece, as much for armchair oil experts as beginners, and as much for who published this as what it contains. This should be very high on your list of “brother-in-law” documents, the ones you can safely recommend to co-workers, neighbors, or, well, your brother in law.

While Graefe has taken a decidedly middle of the road approach, which will be enough all by itself to infuriate the Apocalypticons, she also touches on several points that I would have expected a publication from any part of the Fed to ignore.

I should also mention that if you’re one of those economist-haters who have seizures when I or one of my fellow dismal scientists does the “on the other hand…” thing, then you should probably read this only under the influence of a suitably calming libation. I thought Graefe used this technique properly, in that she highlighted some of the rampant uncertainties involving oil, but at no point did I think she was hiding behind a false question to escape taking a position.

The notable details, in no particular order:

• The paper talks about peak oil, by that name, without condescending to prefacing it with “so called” or anything similar. I know this sounds like a triviality, but I think it’s critical to de-demonize the term so that politicians and voters can talk about it without all the baggage that the term has grown over the years.
• Graefe tells us on page 1 that “The term ‘peak oil’ is not about running out of oil; oil; we will likely have oil to pump for generations to come. Peak oil refers instead to the inevitable point at which the world’s energy output can no longer increase, and production begins to level off or decline.”
• She gives the reader an excellent overview of the kinds of oil we use–conventional vs. unconventional, proved vs. probable vs. possible reserves, deep sea reserves, etc.–and never strays far from two critical details, the cost and the role of technological advancement in extracting various kinds of oil.
• She mentions on page 7 what I consider the key detail in our run-up to peak oil: “Still, despite their drawbacks, nonconventional resources will likely play an increasingly important marginal supply role in the future as reserves that are easier and cheaper to produce become depleted.” This is the mechanism that (1) will impact human beings and (2) give us the needed incentives to transition away from oil, both via increased prices. The view, sometimes implied quite subtly in online conversations, is that we’re going to hit a wall at full speed when we reach the peak. That characterization is as wrong as it is cartoonish.
• Graefe also talks candidly about Matt Simmons’ number one issue (and references his work in a footnote), the lack of transparency in oil reserve numbers.
• In talking about oil prices in 2008, she says:
  

  However, the price spike also had an upside: Consumers began to drive less and conserve more, while businesses and producers set out ambitious plans to invest in energy-saving technology and upgrade outdated equipment. Alternative (both nonconventional and renewable) sources of energy, which historically had been price prohibitive, emerged as attractive substitutes to $145 per barrel oil and gasoline above $4 a gallon. World oil demand plummeted as record prices and a worldwide economic slowdown forced consumers to cut back on their energy use. But just as talk of a new green era was entering the mainstream, crude prices retreated as quickly as they had come.

  I found this notable simply because of the explicit comment that driving less and conserving more were positive developments. This is a mindset that can only help us in the coming years.

• The last three grafs of the paper deserves quotation in full (emphasis added):
  

  The supply of energy as we have known it is in the process of transition. Today’s “easy” conventional oil that the world relies upon as a primary energy source is being depleted, and, regardless of the exact timing of peak oil production—be it this year or fifty years down the road— the world faces the challenge of adapting to a new model of energy supply. Although the peak oil literature tends to concentrate heavily on the scenarios of peaking world oil production, the true underlying issue is a fear that the transition from conventional oil to substitutes will be expensive and chaotic, leaving insufficient time for supply substitution and adaptation.

  This adaptation process—which involves using more renewable resources and conservation and developing new technology and processes to better access hydrocarbon deposits and more efficiently extract and refine nonconventional sources—has already begun. But the road to the future energy balance—one with dwindling amounts of conventional oil—is far from mapped out.

  It is possible that the world’s vast endowments of hydrocarbon resources will be heavily relied upon to answer this growing call for substitutes for the conventional oil supply. However, there is also potential for an energy future largely diversified away from hydrocarbon use. Most likely, future energy sources will be a combination of the two. Perhaps the peak oil literature would better serve society by being more solution-oriented, focusing on discovering the best way to transition to a world with less conventional oil rather than locking horns about discrepancies in terminology.

  Do I have to say how delighted I am to see this emphasis on the timing of the transition and her rebuke of the more obsessed members of the peak oil community? I didn’t think so.

To be sure, I think there are some problems, or at a minimum, things I would have preferred to see done differently in this paper.

No mention of Chris Skrebowski’s bottom-up analysis of world oil supply? Given his methodology and background, not to mention his 2011 prediction, I think this stands out as a conspicuous omission.

It’s “Fatih Birol”, not “Faith Birol” (page 12). Death to spellcheckers!

My biggest concern is that the overall paper is so controlled in tone that a newcomer to the field who hasn’t read Simmons, Skrebowski, Aleklett, or any of the other rational people writing about peak oil could jump to the conclusion that, “Nobody knows what’s going to happen, so I’m not going to change anything or worry about it. Things will work themselves out.” That’s precisely the mindset that will be most damaging, since there is still quite a lot people can do individually and through their influence over concentrations of power (via their vote and spending patterns) before they’re forced to take action by much higher oil prices in just a few years.

You can quote numbers all day about how much oil the US uses and for which purposes, but few things drive the point home like the graph below. This shows US oil consumption for just transportation (broken out by mode), with a line plot of domestic production, revealing a humongous gap and explaining why so many peak oil adherents are so freaked out.

The description from the graph’s page:

In 1989 the transportation sector petroleum consumption surpassed U.S. petroleum production for the first time, creating a gap that must be met with imports of petroleum. By the year 2030, transportation petroleum consumption is expected to grow to nearly 17 million barrels per day; at that time, the gap between U.S. production and transportation consumption will be 3.7 million barrels per day.

The graph’s caption:

Note: The U.S. Production has two lines after 2005. The solid line is conventional sources of petroleum. The dashed line adds in other inputs — ethanol, liquids from coal, and liquids from biomass. The sharp increase in values between 2006 and 2007 are caused by the data change from historical to projected values.

The graph’s page has a table of the data, but it doesn’t break out those “other inputs”, which seem to be particularly loaded with assumptions. (”Liquids from coal”???) The sources cited for the data are “Transportation Energy Data Book: Edition 27, and EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2009, December 2008″.

There’s been a bit of a buzz in the peak oil crowd (not to mention my in-box) about CERA, famously dismissive of peak oil, supposedly becoming peak oil adherents. This all started, as best I can tell, with a presentation by CERA Global Oil Group Managing Director Jim Burkhard spoke at a CSIS session on “Transforming the Transportation Sector: Energy Security, Climate Change and Transportation”. (This is how it was reported by ASPO (see link below); I don’t know what the setting was for this session or presentation.)

Check ASPO’s web page about the talk, where you can download a 6.5MB MP3 of the event. ASPO’s description of the talk, from that same page:

During his presentation, Mr. Burkhard explained that in acknowledging that peak oil is here, CERA’s interpretation is that US gasoline demand peaked in 2008 and is expected to decline in future years. He also stated that CERA maintains its position that the reasons for US liquid fuel demand having peaked are economic and geopolitical in their nature, rather than in any way driven by geologic factors. He repeatedly came back to the notion that “peak oil is here”.

It commonly claimed, often used in a somewhat derogatory way, peak oil is only about geology. We rather state that peak oil is the result of a complex series of forces which include economics and the physics of oil wells. Bardi has earlier discussed the four stages of an idea and how it diffuses into public knowledge. At the ASPO 6 Conference former US secretary of Energy Dr James Schlesinger declared the following: “The peakists have won … to the peakists I say, you can declare victory. You are no longer the beleaguered small minority of voices crying in the wilderness. You are now mainstream. You must learn to take yes for an answer and be gracious in victory”. We at ASPO can only be glad to see that CERA now is acknowledging our concerns are begins to shift their position.

As for what Burkhard said, here’s my summary, with quotes transcribed directly from the recording:

Early in the presentation, Burkhard says, “The peak oil I’m talking about is peak oil in transport fuel demand for light duty vehicles. Light duty peak oil fuel demand in the United States and Europe. We’ve reached it.”

He then mentions that CERA issued a report talking about peak fuel demand in the US in 2007, and how the Great Recession (his term, not mine) has only “intensified” the forces they saw at work. Those forces:

1. Biofuel mandates
2. Lower economic growth in VMT (vehicle miles traveled), which he says have been flat since 2005 and declined in 2008 and so far in 2009.
3. Fuel economy legislation
4. The Great Recession

Later on in the presentation he talks about the possibility of this decline in transportation fuel causing large-scale capacity surpluses in both crude oil production and refining. He mentions that currently there’s about 6.5 million barrels/day of excess crude oil production capacity, much greater than normal in recent years, and that it could “hang around for a while.”

The upshot is the possibility of what he called “the long aftershock”, his (CERA’s?) term for excess capacity suppressing investment which ultimately leads to a tightening of supply and prices “spike up quite a bit in three to five years”.

So, that’s what was said, and what was said about what was said. Here’s my take on it:

CERA is clearly not leaping to embrace the online-dominant view of peak oil, namely that geologic limitations are about to crush us like a bug striking the Universe’s windshield. They’re talking about a peak in demand for oil used to fuel transportation in the US and Europe, and how that could have larger ramifications worldwide in the coming years. So all the borderline doomers e-mailing me about CERA’s capitulation or whatever can stop it. It never happened.

Is this the right way to view the issue of peak oil, in general, namely that a drop in the quantity supplied (as opposed to production capacity) caused by a drop in demand still “counts” as being “the” peak? I’ve long argued that it does, and I still believe that. But I also think we need to add another layer to our taxonomy of oil terms, and distinguish between the overall peak in world oil production via whatever mechanism and two sub-cases: A demand peak and a supply peak.

A demand(-triggered) peak, unless caused by a total collapse of the world economy or something even more horrible, like a nuclear war, is the much preferred route, at least preferred by anyone who’s primarily concerned with human welfare. If we’re shifting our petroleum demand to direct oil substitutes (biofuels) or electricity, and using conservation and greater efficiency to reduce our overall liquid fuel consumption, and doing so in advance of supply declines, then we’re in a very good position. In that scenario consumers are in control of the market and there’s considerable downward price pressure on oil.[1]

A supply(-triggered) peak creates a dramatically different dynamic and is very bad news, as it results in much higher market prices, greater stresses on virtually all levels in importing countries, and more than sufficient incentive for those countries with a high ratio of guns to oil to act stupidly.

Many of the online peak oil adherents think a supply peak is much more likely, while CERA seems to saying quite clearly that a demand peak is our immediate concern, with a supply crunch coming in three to five years largely because of a lack of investment now, not because of geological limitations. This sounds to me like there’s been very little effective change in CERA’s outlook.

Or is that a too simplistic view? CERA would certainly claim that not much has changed–they were talking about these factors being in play two years ago, and now they’re saying that the current recession has “intensified” them. (One can argue about whether the recession had anything to do with factors other than the reduction in VMT, but the overall impact is the same: Downward pressure on oil demand for transportation fuels in the US and Europe.) But I think it might not be too cynical to claim that CERA is still “splitting the difference”, a tactic I’ve repeatedly said we’d see employed by those unwilling to embrace a supply peak. As time passes and events unfold, it seems quite reasonable that reality is getting ever closer to the basic scenario the supply peak adherents predict: Demand might decline slightly due to voluntary (conservation, efficiency) and non-supply related involuntary (economic cycle) reasons, but by far the major force at work will be constrained supply driving prices up and demand down.

So, right now the comfortable (and, in the short run, conscious easing) thing to do is predict a crunch in a few years, and if and when it happens, talk about how it was triggered by that investment drought back in 2009. But the problem is that unless we make some pretty dramatic changes to reduce our use of oil, none of which I see on the horizon, reality will diverge wildly from the rosy scenario of CERA and others, and we will hit a supply peak. At first it will be a crunch, as moderately higher prices are persistent enough (while still volatile) to cause us finally to wring some of the waste out of our oil use. This will cut demand and create some restraining downward pressure on oil prices, but only for a while.[2] Once those relatively easy steps are taken, and the supply of oil continues to decline and the price rises, we’ll be faced with making ever tougher and more expensive choices, likely over a period of decades.

I remain confident that even though we’ll be much slower to act in our own best interest than I would prefer, we will find the individual and collective will and ingenuity to avoid realizing the catastrophic visions that launched a trillion keystrokes online. But that doesn’t mean it will be easy, cheap, or enjoyable, by any measure.

[1] Because oil is not traded on what anyone would rationally call a free market, I would expect to see quite an effort by the major oil exporting nations (not just those in OPEC) to prop up the price. This would quickly evolve into a very interesting situation, to say the least. They would be giving importing nations even more incentive to use even less oil, plus it would quickly put considerable political pressure on the oil exporters to lower prices.

[2] This dynamic is half of the reason I think we’re headed for an undulating plateau, and might already be on it. The other half is how the supply side of the equation responds to higher prices: The production of more and higher volume of alternative fuels, as well as the revenue needed to fund extraction from ever more expensive oil fields and entice cartel members to break their production quotas, where excess capacity still exists.

I watched the ABC News production Earth 2100 last night, and I have some very mixed feelings about it.

In no particular order:

• My overwhelming sense is that this production will be lambasted by the usual denier crowd as being “The Century After Tomorrow” and ridiculously overblown. While that group would have screamed like wounded animals at any serious look at the issues addressed in Earth 2100, I think it’s undeniably true that ABC made several decisions that only hurt their (and humanity’s) cause.
• Cartoon representations of Lucy’s storyline? Really? Isn’t that just begging for the deniers to call the entire production “cartoonish”? They could have ditched the entire Lucy story, stuck to a more traditional documentary format, and shaved 30 minutes off the show, easily. If doing things as they did was ABC’s way of trying to appeal to a broader audience, then I think all they managed to do was make themselves look like clueless panderers.
• They said several times that this was a “worst case scenario”, which was patently false. Try this just to get the ball rolling: The methane time bomb goes off not in 2070 as (I recall) they depicted, but in 2010, leading to a far quicker and worse drinking water situation in Asia and a nuclear exchange between at least two countries.
• I was impressed by the number and range of talking head experts they included, nearly all of whom I thought were excellent choices.[1] I was a little bothered by the impact their sheer number had on the production, though. It felt as if several of them could have been edited out completely, with comments on the same topics provided by other experts, and a reduction in the whirlwind effect. My guess is that they included so many as a defensive move–they didn’t want the show to come across to people new to the topics as nothing more than the ravings of four or five lunatics.
• They were far too colorful in their depiction of peak oil, and they bordered on falling into the “peak oil means no oil” trap. The comment from Thomas Homer Dixon (a.k.a. the thinking person’s James Howard Kunstler) about oil doubling or tripling in price is wildly speculative. In a vast and horribly complicated market like the world wide market for crude oil and products made from it, price is the hardest thing to predict, simply because it’s a function of the interaction between supply, demand, and market psychology, all of which are perversely difficult to predict.
• They placed too much emphasis on a single nexus point, the upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen. Those talks and the ensuing agreement will indeed be important, but they’re part of a decades-long process, not a single, independent event that will determine our future.
• They didn’t put enough emphasis on the energy-water nexus[2], and depicted it hitting us too late (around 2050?).
• It was absurdly US-centric. Did they ever mention Australia? Did they say anything about Canada and Russia except that they would be “warmer and wetter”? Did they so much as mention Europe or South America or Africa or India in passing (if at all)? Except for reaching and impasse with the West in 2015 and getting into a war much later, what was China up to during this 91-year span?
• They depict humanity as being almost entirely reactive to events, with a spectacularly bad decision to turn to coal after things start to hit the fan. (I forget the year this happened their fictional storyline. 2030?) This struck me as being very unrealistic, to say the least.
• The ending, where they show how things could work out if we get our collective act together, was such a radical shift in tone from the first roughly 105 minutes that I wonder if it was an overt attempt to manipulate the audience. Beat them down for nearly the entire show, then give them a hopeful vision right at the end to motivate them to avoid the beat-down in the real world. Whatever their thinking, I would have preferred to see this portion of the show expanded (at the expense of said beat down) with a lot more detail added. As it stands, it sounded like little more than, “…or we could stop being idiots and live in an environmental Utopia!”.

Let me stress, particularly for all the newcomers to this site who haven’t figured out where I stand on the Big Issues yet, that I am convinced that climate chaos and peak oil are extremely serious and imminent problems; in the case of climate chaos we’re already seeing significant effects and possibly the beginnings of a serious methane release from the Arctic region. My criticisms of Earth 2100 come not from a disagreement with the basic analysis and message, but with how they squandered much of their opportunity to perform a social benefit by reaching out to mainstream voters and consumers. By setting themselves up for such easy criticism, even from someone like me who needs no convincing on the facts and their consequences, they’re guaranteeing that they’ll be ridiculed by the deniers for producing third-rate science fiction, which will only lead to the people we want and need paying attention to this material dismissing it.

[1] But I have to ask: No James Hansen? No Bill McKibben? No Mark Serreze? No Gavin Schmidt? No David Attenborough?

[2] Long time readers knew that was coming. I apologize for being so predictable, but I think it’s a fair criticism of the production.

I’ve mentioned several times the looming oil crunch, exacerbated by the current plummet in oil field investment. The article linked below is a better than average example of the myopia that can run rampant in oil discussions.

The entire focus is on the “lack of investment now means a crunch later” meme, with not one word about peak oil or the possibility that oil prices now could look absurdly cheap in 12 months or so. This newspaper is not alone in seeing the world this way, of course. Listen to any of the talking heads on financial TV shows and you’d be forgiven for thinking that there’s an infinite supply of oil, climate chaos doesn’t exist, and the only impediment to consuming all the oil we can dream of is the cost of extracting and using it.

So, we have yet another Convenient Fiction. Oil prices are high? No, it’s not any sort of nasty, unavoidable geological limitation, you silly, silly information consumer! It’s just bad management by the oil companies! Really!

For all the complaining some people (including me) do about the lousy job the media does with their faux balance nonsense when covering climate chaos (”But here’s some guy we found sleeping on a park bench who thinks James Hansen is a doody head!”), the oil situation is even worse. There, no one is even talking about the problem or uttering That Which Must Not Be Said, “peak oil”. Frankly, we’re so close to the peak in world oil production that I think fighting the public relations war and trying to educate the mainstreamers about it is now a lost cause. The best we can do is support policies, like the development and roll-out of petroleum-free alternatives (under the guise of reducing CO2 emissions), and not bother telling anyone that we critically need to reduce our petroleum dependency, as well.

Calgary Herald: Energy supply crunch brewing:

Forget low oil prices. The worry of the moment is a spike in oil prices and how long it will take before a supply crunch sends prices soaring.

And if one subscribes to the views of former CIBC World Markets economist Jeff Rubin and University of California, San Diego economics professor James Hamilton, a spike in prices could send the world tumbling back into recessionary territory, just as it is about to climb out of it.

Both Rubin and Hamilton hold the view that the current recession is the result of a spike in oil prices and not the collapse in the U. S. housing market.

So what’s the deal with the about-face in sentiment on oil prices?

It doesn’t get much simpler than the basic economic principles of supply and demand.

Ever since the bottom dropped out of the economy — and the oil market — last fall, there has been a single-minded focus on the weekly demand numbers released by the various energy agencies around the world. The conclusion drawn was that oil prices were going to remain weak for the foreseeable future because of the huge drop in consumption.

This, despite other compelling information that has long determined the decline rates of existing fields, even with steady demand, is going to push the world toward an oil shortage.

Now, all of a sudden, the tide has turned and the focus is on the supply side.

What’s interesting is the mix of organizations on the supply-shortage bandwagon.

[mentions IEA, OPEC, and consulting firms]

…

Consulting firm McKinsey &Co. also weighed in with its analysis this week, which showed supplies could begin to tighten as early as next year, even if economic growth is on the weak side.

All this should make Albertans happy. A higher oil price is good for the economy–though not as good as higher natural gas prices –and there is the distinct possibility that if prices stabilize in the $60 range, the oilsands projects that were put on hold might be put back on the active roster.

…

Of course, no one really knows where oil prices are headed long term, but it’s getting harder to ignore the growing body of analysis pointing to a supply crunch as a result of the 15 per cent drop in investment and continued declines in the big fields around the world.

The smart money looks like it’s on prices going up, not down.

Reuters: Brazil may need $60 oil to tap subsalt finds-CERA:

Petrobras (PETR4.SA) (PBR.N) may need benchmark oil prices near $60 a barrel to profitably tap Brazil’s massive subsalt offshore finds, Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) said.

“We’ve evaluated the economics and believe that (Brazil’s subsalt oil) can be developed with WTI or Brent at $60,” said Enrique Sira, CERA’s director for Latin America and co-author of an upcoming report on Brazil’s subsalt oil.

“If all goes well, Petrobras and partners could reach a significant production level after 2019.”

Petrobras and partners have found up to 14 billion recoverable barrels of subsalt oil since 2007. Brazilian officials believe the reservoirs contain 30 billion to 100 billion barrels, rivaling Europe’s huge North Sea finds of the 1970s.

But estimates vary on oil price levels needed to economically exploit Brazil’s new oil, which is located beneath 3 to 5 miles (5 to 8 km) of water, sand, stone and a Jurassic-era salt layer.

Chief Executive Officer Jose Sergio Gabrielli said last week that state-controlled Petrobras could tap Brazil’s subsalt oil even with oil at $45 a barrel. Petrobras plans to spend $29 billion on the subsalt areas by 2013.

Cera said its $60-a-barrel estimate is preliminary, and added Petrobras may be able to tap subsalt blocks with oil in the $45 to $60 range, but $40 oil would likely make them unattractive. U.S. benchmark oil traded above $63 a barrel CLc1 on Wednesday.

…

Higher world oil prices and lower drilling costs could help Petrobras secure the funding it needs. Since 1980, benchmark oil prices, adjusted for inflation, have averaged around $44 a barrel. Crude dipped as low as $32.40 last December.

Am I the only one who sees this as yet another argument about angels dancing on the head of a pin?

14 billion barrels? At 85 million barrels/day for world consumption, or 31 billion barrels/year, that’s 164 days of world consumption. Even the 30 to 100 billion barrels is at most a little over three years, and that production (assuming it ever reaches anywhere near that level) will be spread over decades.

Does anyone reading this site think that in the coming years $60/barrel won’t sound ridiculously quaint? And I honestly don’t understand the point of adding historical pricing data ($44/barrel averaged over 29 years?) to this article; the only value of such information lies in its predictive value for future prices, which in the case of oil at this point in time, is precisely zero.

The mainstream perception of the world oil situation will be transformed in the next couple of years just as radically as our perception of climate change has been in the last ten.

We need to use a lot less oil and emit a lot less CO2. I doubt anyone who regularly reads this site would seriously debate those assertions. As we see so often, the truly interesting issues arise only in the follow-up questions: What do we cut? Who has to make which lifestyle changes (and, in some cases, sacrifices)? Who bears which monetary costs? And, most important of all, who gets to answer those first three questions?

All of this came to mind when I read a couple of items that flowed through my news feeds in the last couple of days…

Courant.com: Some Still Swear By Gas Guzzlers, But For How Long?:

Whether I’m launching onto I-84 or passing a truck on Route 44, I want to hear a sound — not a buzz or a whine, but a throaty snarl that speaks of power and survival.

Like many Americans, I need a car with spirit and heft, and if it has some elegance or attitude in the fender lines, so much the better.

Events, however, are conspiring to end this long affair.

Rising fuel prices, the recession, federally mandated fuel economy hikes and smart growth are combining to scrap the vigorous, often chunky vehicles that take our cheeseburger-loving behinds down the road. It won’t be long until we’re all skittering along in identical pods, spurting puffs of mist from our hydrogen-fueled mini motors; or worse, moving under our own puny power.

So I say, let’s enjoy these final years of gas-guzzling joy. Get under the oil tap this Memorial Day weekend and swill.

Speaking as an ex-motor head, a guy who owned sports cars and a 100+ HP motorcycle, someone who lived and breathed 0-to-60 times, 60-to-0 braking distances, lateral G-force ratings, etc., and thought it was my moral duty to exercise all of a speedometer’s range while wallowing in the adrenaline rush of eyeball-flattening acceleration, I have to admit that I went through a list of reactions upon reading this.

My knee jerk reaction: Get over it. The age of mindless, thoughtless consumption is over. Even here in the historically myopic and selfish US we’re (finally!) exiting adolescence and becoming acutely aware of how much our actions affect each other, and therefore ourselves. Poor baby–you have to give up your bloody hobby as part of our joint effort to avoid the twin horrors of peak oil and climate chaos!

After a few moments of contemplation, I realized I was making the same idiotic and infuriating mistake that so many others make: I’m imposing my own values (as they exist today) on others, dismissing the viewpoint of the people I’m passing judgment on, and confusing strategy and tactics.

I’ll come back to these points below, but let me flesh out the pattern a bit with the other article I read, Cultural Trends Examiner: Indy 500 continues to waste fuel: Another car race with no awareness of recession or peak oil:

The Indy 500 happens at this time ever year regardless of the price or scarcity of gasoline. It’s pushing $3 per gallon, and it was near $5 per gallon last year. Still, these folks continue to blow off valuable energy as if there is an endless supply. They no longer use gasoline but have replaced it with ethanol, the plant-based fuel that is now causing us to grow corn and sugar for fuel rather than feeding the 25,000 who will die of starvation today. Experts say that the energy required to fill one SUV tank could feed a single person for an entire year.

And we still haven’t even included the waste from the fuel used by people who spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to attend and watch cars drive fast around and around and around. I thought that we were deep into a recession, and that people were having trouble with the basics of life. We’ve been asked to limit our use of oil and combine out trips to save fuel, but these racers just keep driving nowhere. And people come out to watch and cheer as long as they make lots of noise and crash every so often. How about a real technology race of electric, sustainable energy vehicles?

That does not seem to be the interest of such big sports events. People are still attending and making a big deal about this type of “competition,” which is really nothing more than lots of fat cat corporate types getting “we the people” to get excited about overpaid “athletes” creating a spectacle. It’s just big money using more big money to attract money from unconscious people (mostly guys).

The majority of people who have the great seats are corporate executives whose tickets are bought by the company, many of which are being supported by U.S. government funds. That big corporation may be receiving bail out money from us (”we the people” American taxpayers), but they still “invest” in taking themselves and their clients to these big sporting events.

Since I try very hard to stick to the numbers in such discussions, let me point out that the amount of fuel used every year in the US during these races plus everything burned to get the drivers, their huge support teams, the cars and other equipment, and all those spectators to a race is certainly an impressive number, in absolute terms, but a truly insignificant one in terms of the overall US liquids fuels consumption. I won’t bother doing the research needed to ballpark the number; consider it an exercise left for the reader. Nor will I address the issue of who is buying those expensive tickets, which borders on class warfare and is therefore irrelevant.

The problem with this view of Indy and car racing in general is that it views the whole operation via a specific set of values and imposes a moral judgment on those who see the world differently.[1]

But wait, I can hear people typing into their angry e-mail already, isn’t it absolutely true that if we gave up a lot of completely unnecessary activities, like holding and attending many professional sporting events, that we would forgo a lot of CO2 emissions and effectively leave a lot of oil in the ground? Wouldn’t that benefit us all? Of course it would, and I’ll sign up for that view just as soon as someone gives me a list we can all agree on of which things are truly “unnecessary”. You might think the first writer’s obsession with all things automotive, or my obsession with lacrosse, are inexcusable luxuries. But taking those “unnecessary” things away from people like us (and your favorite things away from you, I dare say) would have a huge impact on our lives, even if they don’t provide food, clothing, shelter, or medical care.

So, we’re at a stalemate, and we should do nothing, and race right off the edge of that quickly approaching cliff, right? Of course not. What we should do is take the approach that I keep preaching governments should adopt: Set the strategy (reduce CO2 emissions, reduce petroleum dependency), but don’t pick winners and losers. In the case of government subsidies, that usually means not selecting one technology over another for support. In the case of our individual lives and how we view the actions of others, that means leaving moral judgments for more appropriate circumstances, like how we view issues of prisoner torture or war in general, aside and focusing on the big goals.

That’s a nice sentiment (I hear you typing), but in the real world the government has to favor some solutions over others, even before our quaint panorama is warped almost beyond recognition by the absurdities of politics. Witness the recent changes in funding for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, Yucca Mountain, the ongoing PTC (production tax credit) for renewables, the endless support for corn-based ethanol, and the subsidies for nuclear power, including insurance, which would be all but impossible to acquire without government help. Until we have a reasonable price on CO2 emissions, then I think we have little choice but to employ technology-specific government support, especially where it’s critical to providing the stable, investment-friendly environment that’s critical in building a large enough industry for building and maintaining wind turbines and solar power in its various forms, for example.

I’m more convinced than ever that the solution on the climate portion of our shared nightmare is a well run (note the emphasis) cap and trade system for CO2 emissions and most other forms of environmental impact. Set the overall limit and let the market and individuals decide how they want to divide it up, with no subsidies for anyone aside from R&D funding. If some entity wants to horde its CO2 emissions allotment, in effect, and then blow it all on attending a couple of races or lacrosse games or NFL games or science fiction conventions or yacht races or whatever “unnecessary”, legal pursuit you can name, then that’s fine, and it matters not the least whether the entity is an individual, a university, a government office, an NGO, or a corporation. The grand goal–get CO2 emissions down to X tons/year–is still met, and that’s all that matters. Moral judgments should be as irrelevant to us as they are to the atmosphere, which draws no distinction between CO2 emitted for a “good reason” vs. that emitted for something “unnecessary”.

Peak oil is a far more problematic issue, as trying to get people focused on a hard and fast limit–the US has to reduce its oil consumption to Y million barrels/day next year–simply because the education process is so much further behind that for climate chaos. I know and have spoken with quite a few mainstream consumers and voters who have more or less accepted the conclusion that climate chaos is very real problem, one we have to address as soon as possible and much more vigorously than we have to date. And yet a large portion of these people (80%?) don’t realize we’re facing a second ticking time bomb in our world oil supply. Almost any attempt to talk to them about it futile, regardless of the approach (and I’ve tried everything short of puppet shows). Part of this is, I think, crisis exhaustion. Between all the aspects of the economic mess we’re living through plus all the enviros hammering at them over CO2 emissions, they simply don’t have the mental and emotional bandwidth to deal with yet another Big, Scary Thing. As a result, they think that “there’s plenty of oil” to be had, and there is no deadline approaching. Of course there is a deadline–the amount of oil in the ground and the amount of CO2 we can pump into the atmosphere without triggering a climate catastrophe are both reality-imposed limits, whether or not we choose to see them as such.

Put another way, this is a plea for us to stop and take the time to evaluate which issues do and don’t matter as the twin terrors of peak oil and climate chaos rush ever closer. We should focus all our resources on addressing the truly important ones as quickly and efficiently as possible, and then simply ignore the rest.

And as soon as I have a good definition of what’s “truly important”, I’ll let you know…

[1] I would say something here about the anti-suburbs fetish that’s so rampant in some corners of the blogosphere, but that would side track the entire discussion, so I’ll leave it for another day.

If there’s one thing people take away from this blog, I would hope it’s an appreciation for the perverse level of interaction between natural and man-made events, and therefore how easy it is to let simplistic assumptions lead us to horribly incorrect conclusions. I was in this frame of mind last night when I saw the report that NBC did on their nightly news broadcast about the new CAFE standards.

They talked about what the new requirements are, and then said that this will add $1,300 to the cost of every car by 2016 (without revealing the source of that estimate, as best I can remember). They said that the Administration says that the average driver will save about $2,800 on reduced fuel cost over the life of the vehicle, based on a price of $3.50/gallon.

I have no idea exactly what other assumptions went into that calculation, and I won’t waste my time and yours dissecting it. But $3.50/gallon for gasoline? In 2016? Seriously?

We have the IEA howling, yet again, about the coming oil crunch (”Downturn Sets Up Surge in Oil Prices“), and all those nasty predictions about peak oil being here or imminent, from the rank and file of the math and logic enabled (that’s us, dear readers) to Raymond James to Jeff Rubin. Assume for the moment that we haven’t yet peaked, and that Chris Skrebowski’s prediction of a 2011 peak will still prove to be accurate, investment-triggered crunch notwithstanding, then what do you think the price of oil, and therefore the price of gasoline, will do five years post-peak? It’s possible that we’ll be using oil at a low enough level that we’ll still be trundling along on the undulating plateau of world oil production, meaning we won’t yet have encountered true supply constraints because we’ll still be eating into excess capacity.

Right now, it doesn’t look like that will happen; even a moderate worldwide economic recovery in 2010 is likely to re-start the growth in oil demand in China and India, which should swamp out any conservation in other countries. Add to that dynamic the fallout from the current plummeting investment in oil field development, and the scene is set for supply constraints, significantly higher prices, and any talk of $3.50/gallon gasoline in the US in 2016 sounding terribly quaint.

Which begs the question: Are the new CAFE rules a major advancement in the greening of America, or will they prove to be much ado about nothing? I’ve been pondering this since the news broke, and I think I’ve finally come down on the side of much ado about nothing. I think they represent a very hollow victory; yes, sanity has prevailed, and the US government is finally acting like the adults are in charge, which is always a good thing. But what real effect will they have? Right now, it seems none at all, as the price of gasoline will provide more than enough incentive to move consumers to more efficient vehicles well before 2016.

One can make the argument that before consumers can buy those cars the car companies have to design and build them. Higher CAFE standards for 2016 put into place now will indeed provide the regulatory certainty that people are talking about (a non-trivial detail), but I’m not at all convinced that they will accelerate the development and availability of more fuel efficient cars. With the steady drumbeat of announcements from various car companies about PHEVs, EVs, diesels, etc., it seems that even the most reluctant companies have finally Received The Message.

I think the bottom line is that events are largely locked into place for the next few years on the oil front, barring any unforeseen above ground event, like an inconveniently placed/timed hurricane or war, and we’re headed for gratuitously interesting times.

At least that’s how I assume things will work out…

Some days you have to wonder if everyone who’s been sounding the alarm about oil issues for years have been right all along, and the rest of the world, including the US power structure, is just now playing catch-up. At least that’s the thought I had when I read BusinessWeek’s U.S. Reliance on Oil an ‘Urgent Threat’:

A group of retired senior U.S. military officers has concluded that the country’s reliance on fossil fuels undermines its capacity to defend itself. Citing a “serious and urgent threat to national security,” the group has urged the Pentagon to take the lead in shifting to a new age in energy.

The dependence on oil-based fuels left the U.S. military seriously over-extended in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the officers’ report, issued on May 18 by CNA, a military think tank based in Alexandria, Va. The 62-page report asserts that the true cost of fuel, including logistics and the military protection of sea lanes, can run to hundreds of dollars a gallon.

“Our energy posture is not sustainable. It can be exploited by those who want to do us harm,” retired Air Force Lieutenant General Larry Farrell, a co-author of the report, said in an interview. Finding a suitable alternative fuel and scaling it up to the size of the U.S. economy “is a 30-year project,” Farrell said. “We’ve got to get started now.”

The report, called “Powering America’s Defense: Energy and the Risks to National Security,” was written by CNA’s military advisory board, comprised of 12 retired generals and admirals. It’s a follow-up to a 2007 report by the advisory board called “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.”

From the report’s executive summary:

This report identifies a series of current risks created by America’s energy policies and practices that constitute a serious and urgent threat to national security—militarily, diplomatically, and economically:

• U.S. dependence on oil weakens international leverage, undermines foreign policy objectives, and entangles America with unstable or hostile regimes.

• Inefficient use and overreliance on oil burdens the military, undermines combat effectiveness, and exacts a huge price tag—in dollars and lives.

• U.S. dependence on fossil fuels undermines economic stability, which is critical to national security.

• A fragile domestic electricity grid makes our domestic military installations, and their critical infrastructure, unnecessarily vulnerable to incident, whether deliberate or accidental.

Looking forward, the report warns that continuing business as usual is perilous because of the converging national security risks of energy demand and climate change:

• The market for fossil fuels will be shaped by finite supplies and increasing demand. Continuing our heavy reliance on these fuels is a security risk.

• Regulatory frameworks driven by climate change concerns will increase the costs—both economic and geopolitical—of using carbon based fuels.

• Destabilization driven by ongoing climate change has the potential to add significantly to the mission burden of the U.S. military in fragile regions of the world.

The home page for the report is here.

You can directly down the report here [74 page, 750KB PDF].

BusinessWeek: Car-Scrapping Plans: Germany’s Lessons:

The global auto industry may be facing its worst crisis ever, but you’d never know it at Ford Motor’s factory in Cologne. There, workers are putting in extra shifts on weekends to cope with demand for the compact Fiesta. In fact, Ford (F) sales have been booming in Germany. Customers have placed orders for 68,500 Fiestas, Ka subcompacts, and midsize Fusions in the four months to April, more than triple the year-earlier figure.

Thanks for this gravity-defying performance go—at least in part—to the German government’s so-called environment bonus, which Germans prefer to call the Abwrackprämie, or “wreck rebate.”

The program, launched in January and renewed in March, is Chancellor Angela Merkel’s most visible economic stimulus measure. It pays $3,320 to people who scrap a car that’s at least nine years old and buy a new car instead. The scheme has more than offset the effects of the global downturn on domestic auto sales, preserved factory jobs, and encouraged people to replace gas-guzzling, exhaust-spewing clunkers with the latest engine technology.

…

But the rebate also has some major downsides. Retailers, for example, have complained bitterly that the program sucks spending from other categories. German retail sales fell 1.5% in March—the third monthly decline in a row—a decline that retail industry groups blame partly on incentives to buy cars rather than other goods.

The rebate also is expensive. Nominally it will cost $6.6 billion if Germans take full advantage of the program. The real cost is harder to figure. Increased sales will boost sales tax revenues, and the state will avoid the cost of unemployment benefits for workers who might have lost their jobs. On the negative side of the balance sheet, the program will kill jobs in other parts of the economy, for example auto repair shops or used-car dealers. A study by the Halle Economic Institute, a major think tank, estimates that the net burden on the German government budget will be $3.5 billion.

And you thought public policy involving the economy and energy would be simple… why, exactly?

Monbiot.com: How Much Should We Leave in the Ground?:

The two papers on carbon emissions published in Nature last week were ground-breaking: they show us how much carbon dioxide we can produce if we’re to have a reasonable chance of preventing two degrees of global warming. It’s a completely different approach from the UN’s and national governments’. They set targets for reductions by a certain date but have nothing to say about the total amount of carbon we can release.

One of the papers, by Myles Allen and others(1), suggests that we can burn, at most, another 400-500 billion tonnes of carbon at any time between now and the extinction of humanity if we want to avoid two degrees of warming. The other, by Malte Meinshausen and others(2), suggests that producing 1000 billion tonnes of CO2 between 2000-2050 would give us a 25% chance of exceeding two degrees. That’s a lot less than Allen’s estimate, as one tonne of carbon produces 3.667 tonnes of CO2 when it’s burnt: 1000 billion tonnes of CO2 arises from 273 billion tonnes of carbon.

…

Even ignoring all unconventional sources and all other greenhouse gases and taking the most optimistic of the figures in the two Nature papers, we can afford to burn only 61% of known fossil fuel reserves between now and eternity.

Or, using Meinshausen’s figure, we can burn only 33% between now and 2050. Sorry - 33% minus however much we have burnt between 2000 and today.

So the question which arises is this: which fossil fuel reserves will we decide not to extract and burn? There is, as I have argued before(9), no point in seeking to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels unless we also seek to reduce their production. Yet, apart from the members of OPEC (who do it only to shore up the price), no government is attempting to limit the amount of fuel extracted. Far from it; they all pursue the same strategy as the United Kingdom: to “maximise economic recovery”(10).

The test of all governments’ commitment to stopping climate breakdown is this: whether they are prepared to impose a limit on the use of the reserves already discovered, and a permanent moratorium on prospecting for new reserves. Otherwise it’s all hot air.

George Monbiot gets his geek on breaks out his calculator. Worth reading.

One thing to keep in mind is how hard it is to pin down world oil reserves, a point Monbiot acknowledges. He uses a figure of 162 billion tons (not, not barrels), which is almost exactly what BP last published in their yearly energy stats compendium. The problem is that as we approach and pass peak oil and see some dramatic and sustained price rises, the incentives to find ways to improve the recovery rate for existing wells (typically about 33% today) or go after very expensive fields (like those in ultra deep water locations) will rise considerably. Oil is probably the most susceptible of the fossil fuels to this effect of resources being a function of market price.

I don’t quite get his point about distinguishing between leaving the evil stuff in the ground instead of not using it. If consumers greatly slow their use of fossil fuels, I guarantee that producers will stop mining or pumping them. (For example, there’s been a lot of talk lately about how there’s 100 million barrels of oil sitting in tankers at sea, waiting for a customer, as if that’s a tremendous amount. It’s about 1.2 days of world consumption, so I’m not impressed.)

FT.com: US carbon cap-and-trade - more data on its effects:

The Pew Center on Global Climate Change has become the latest organisation to wade into the murky waters of the Waxman-Markey bill, the proposed legislation that would introduce a cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide in the US.

The Pew Center’s analysis suggests that the impact of a cap-and-trade programme on energy-intensive manufacturers would be small. The analysts based their study on an examination of historical trends among energy-intensive manufacturing industries, using 20 years of data on 400 energy-intensive subsectors.

They found that energy-intensive manufacturing industries would on average lose only 1 per cent of their annual production to imports, if a carbon price of $15 per tonne was assumed, and if there was no carbon price in other countries.

(That $15 figure comes from projections of the carbon price under Waxman-Markey produced by the U.S. Energy Information Administration and Environmental Protection Agency.)

Such a small impact could easily be addressed through policies targeted to energy-intensive sectors, the authors of the report said, including straightforward compensation or more complex border adjustment measures (tariffs) for imported energy-intensive goods.

In all candor, I’m not sure where I stand on the issue of the impact of a price of carbon on various parts of the US economy. I’m reasonably sure that $15/ton won’t be nearly enough to trigger the cuts we’ll need by 2050, but it’s probably a good start. The key point, as I’ve argued before, is that no one knows in advance how a given amount of reduction in CO2 emissions maps to a market price, which is one reason why we should control the level of emissions (via a cap) and let the evolving market decide on the price (via trade).

Green Car Congress: Study Finds That Plankton Blooms Do Not Send Atmospheric Carbon to the Deep Ocean; Weakens Iron Fertilization as Geo-Engineering Approach:

Oceanographers Jim Bishop and Todd Wood of the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have measured the fate of carbon particles originating in plankton blooms in the Southern Ocean, using data that deep-diving Carbon Explorer floats collected around the clock for well over a year. Their study reveals that most of the carbon from lush plankton blooms never reaches the deep ocean.

The results weaken the applicability of the simplest version of the Iron Hypothesis as a geo-engineering approach to climate change. Iron Hypothesis adherents suggest global warming can be slowed or even reversed by fertilizing plankton with iron in regions that are iron-poor but rich in other nutrients like nitrogen, silicon, and phosphorus. The Southern Ocean is one of the most important such regions.

Oops.

Translation: This lesson in the hubris of geoengineering was brought to you by reality. Remember–if it’s not Reality, it just ain’t real!

People just now seem to be waking up to the fact that, golly gee, the Intertubes run on electrons, and it uses a lot of them.

Two related articles:

guardian.co.uk: Web providers must limit internet’s carbon footprint, say experts

New Scientist: Unknown web: Is the net hurting the environment?

The one thing to keep in mind is that what matters is not merely the cost of the Internet but what we get for it. For example, how many errands do I have to avoid by doing online banking or shopping before I completely offset the carbon footprint of all the Internet resources I use in the process? I’m guessing it’s a very favorable ratio; even several errands bundled together in a single 20 mile trip in my Scion xA would seem to emit far more CO2 than hours of online activity.

Another issue is that a large portion of the Internet infrastructure was built with little attention to electricity consumption. The benefit of adding Internet capacity is (or is perceived to be) high, while the price of electricity is relatively low, so we’ll only feel pressure to make it more efficient as we run up against limits of electricity supply or funding.

Finally, the big issue with data center electricity consumption is cooling. I’ve seen figures that estimate that for ever watt of power spent on running hardware another 1.5 watts is used in cooling it. This means that lower-temp chips and drives could do a lot to reduce data center energy consumption, far more than just the their own power consumption figures might suggest.

Some recent news items have me pondering questions with not so obvious, at least to me, answers.

Green Car Congress tells us that GM’s 2010 Chevrolet Equinox will be rated at 22 MPG city, 32 MPG highway. Note that this is not a hybrid, but just a plain old gasoline engine (POGE) vehicle. It just happens to have been the beneficiary of a lot of attention in the efficiency department, which GCC details.

How do we interpret this news, assuming GM’s fuel efficiency tests stand up? Is it too little, too late–we’re perilously close to peak oil and we desperately need to make dramatic reductions in our CO2 emissions, so what the heck good is an SUV, even if it gets, for that class of vehicle, very good mileage? Transportation accounts for large portions of both the US’s oil consumption (69%) and our CO2 emissions from energy use (34%), so we have to make big cuts there. We can’t afford to keep driving in a business as usual fashion and make deeper changes in other areas; the numbers just won’t allow it.

I’m not even sure ow to interpret this even focusing on just GM. Is it proof that “they could have done this years ago”? Is it a sign that GM still doesn’t realize what needs to be done to save itself and help the US and the world? Or is it merely a nasty reality that GM has to give the public at least some of the kind of vehicles they want (spurred on by years of very expensive advertising, of course) if they want to push enough sheet metal to stay alive?

ASPO Netherlands has issued a report on the interplay between climate change and peak oil. You can read a summary and discussion, plus get a link to the 56-page report here. The report’s summary (emphasis added):

Climate change and scarcity of conventional oil interact in a number of important ways. Rising oil prices make it increasingly interesting to develop unconventional petroleum resources, with a clear impact on CO2 emissions. Conversely, accelerating climate change will impact both positively and negatively on oil production. After studying the available data, we draw the following conclusions.
Conventional oil production will peak some time during the coming decade, probably between 2012 and 2017, at a level of 90-95 million barrels per day. After a short, three to six year production plateau production will start to decline, thanks to a combination of geological (underground) and economic (above-ground) factors.

Growth in unconventional oil production will be too slow to postpone the peak in world oil supply beyond the 2020s. This holds even if current efforts in developing unconventional oil are doubled, in order to achieve an output of 22 million barrels per day in 2030. This makes a very large gap between worldwide oil demand and oil production inevitable. In this context, ‘unconventional’ oil resources means tar sands, oil shales, extra-heavy crude oil and synthetic oil from coal and natural gas.

The substantially higher CO2 emissions associated with unconventional oil compared with conventional oil are such that even if total oil production decreases from 96 million barrels per day in 2016 to 73 million in 2030, growth of unconventional production to 22 million barrels per day will mean scarcely any decrease in total CO2 emissions from oil. In such a scenario the share of unconventional sources in total production will rise from 4% in 2008 to 30% in 2030.

A failure to anticipate the peak in worldwide oil production will inevitably lead to a major dilemma. Either policies on the CO2 emissions associated with oil production are relaxed in order to make more oil available, to limit economic and social problems; or a strong commitment is made to limiting unconventional oil as part of a climate policy that will lead to less oil becoming available . To escape this dilemma requires robust policies promoting alternative energy sources that can help compensate for the decline in conventional oil output.

In the IPCC’s most recent oil production scenarios, prepared in 2000, the dynamics of this dilemma do not emerge very clearly at all, as no distinction is made between easily produced conventional oil and difficult to produce unconventional oil. In IPCC production modelling it is assumed that the declining quality of the fossil fuels recovered will have no influence on production levels of those fuels. Technical limits on production as well as constraints on external inputs like water and energy are left out of the equation, even though these are limiting factors in the scaling up of unconventional sources. This means that actual CO2 emissions of oil will differ significantly from the picture to emerge from the IPCC scenarios.

Climate change will also lead to a higher frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, leading in turn to higher insurance costs and other forms of cost inflation on oil production. Because of rising seawater temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, hurricanes are expected to grow in intensity. The impact of this on oil production will depend very much on hurricane tracks, which are notoriously erratic, but will probably be very high. The production cost of oil in this region, which is of major importance for the United States, rose from $50 per barrel in 2003-2005 to $70 per barrel in 2004-2006.

The Arctic icecap is melting ever faster and by the summer of 2017 there will probably no longer be any sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. The often quoted claim that 25% of the world’s remaining oil reserves are to be found in the Arctic is false. A report by Wood Mackenzie and Fugro Robertson, the most in-depth study to date, cites a figure of 50 billion barrels of oil, permitting production of only 2-3 million barrels per day around 2030. Most fossil fuel resources in the Arctic are natural gas. Mackenzie and Robertson anticipate reserves of 180 billion barrels oil-equivalent, of which 70% in Russian territorial waters.

Even with the sea ice melting in the Arctic summer, oil production in these waters will present an extreme challenge. Melting ice will not only remove obstacles but also create them, in the form of icebergs and thawing of the permafrost. The latter not only threatens existing infrastructure, but also makes new infrastructure all the more expensive. The number of days that ice roads can be used to reach faraway production units is already decreasing fast, as roads, buildings and pipelines suffer damage due to melting foundations. The future effects of thawing permafrost are hard to quantify, however, due to a historical lack of pertinent data.

This is a battle I’ve fought many times with environmentalists who think that “peak oil is a good thing because it will force us to reduce our CO2 emissions”. That’s a dangerously simplistic view of how economies and politics work, which leads me to my questions: Why is this concept so hard to grasp? Is it simply that the hard core environmentalists don’t know much about energy issues beyond “coal sucks” (and it does) and “we need to drive a lot less” (and we do, at least when doing so means we’re adding to our net CO2 emissions)?[1] Or do they, like many of the peak oil aware crowd, only have the emotional and mental capacity to deal with one gigantic problem at a time? And what does that say about our chances to deal with these growing crises and all their attendant knock-on horrors?

And finally, there’s this issue of shifting heat in the atmosphere. I’ve asked this question before on other sites, and I never seem to get a good answer, possibly because I’m not explaining it properly.

As I understand the situation, we have two unchallenged phenomena going on at once:

First, the polar regions, particularly in the north, are warming much faster than the planet overall. This is causing no end of consternation about melting permafrost regions, like most of Siberia, releasing massive amounts of CO2 and/or methane and kicking off a gigantic feedback effect. We’re also seeing things like a terrifyingly high portion of the Arctic sea ice being single year, thin ice, as well as the continued breakup and melt of glaciers. We keep hearing about some small-US-state-size chunk of Antarctica breaking up, complete with satellite photos.

Second, we’ve seen a slowdown in the ever-upward march of global temperatures. This is no doubt due, at least in part, to the unusually quiet sunspot cycle we’re in. But is it connected to what’s happening at the poles?

Assuming that the measurements of the planet’s temperature are reasonably averaged, then a shift in heat from non-polar to polar regions would be a wash, regardless of the mechanism in volved (likely changing ocean currents or weather patterns).[2] But when one of these state-size glaciers breaks up and floats off into the ocean, that creates millions or billions of tons of ice that will melt far quicker than it would have as a monolithic block; it’s exposed to warmer conditions as it floats even slightly toward the equator, and it has a vastly higher ratio of surface area to volume. So, what effect does accelerating the melting of that much ice have on the temperature of the polar regions’ air and water? Remember, it takes a lot more heat to force ice to melt than it does to raise the temperature of ice just a little.[3] Even if you assume that these fragmenting glaciers have an average temperature of just below freezing (which I suspect isn’t true), and that post melting they are water just above freezing (ditto), then it still takes a tremendous amount of heat energy–pulled from the immediate environment–to fuel the phase change of that much ice into water.

But the poles aren’t getting colder because of this effect, they’re actually getting noticeably warmer.

So what the heck is going on? Is this phase change effect having a measurable impact? And if so, how much additional warming are we being spared because of it?

[1] Don’t think for a nanosecond that I’m letting the peak oil camp off the hook. Many of them are just as convinced that climate chaos isn’t a big deal, we can deal with it later, and peak oil is the only issue with true urgency.

[2] Yes, the exact distribution of the heat in the atmosphere has non-trivial consequences; I’m talking strictly about measurement of that heat on a planet-wide basis.

[3] It’s been eons since my high school chemistry, so I had to look it up. According to the first diagram on this page, it takes about 80 calories to turn 1 gram of ice at 0 degrees C into 1 gram of water at 0 degrees C, about 80 times more energy than is needed to raise one gram of ice one degree C.

No, really, it has been. And I can prove it without all those charts and lists and other mind-numbing hard data that people like me just love to trot out for an audience and then wallow in as we prove our point.

What Earth-shaking turn of events has convinced me? Simple, the smart, mainstream money people are now saying it, as in Peak Oil: Global Oil Production’s Peaked, Analyst Says:

Dust off those survivalist manuals and brush up on your dystopias: Peak oil is back.

Global production of petroleum peaked in the first quarter of last year, says analysts Raymond James, which “represents a paradigm shift of historic proportions. Unfortunately, mankind better get ready to live in a peak oil world because we believe the ‘peak’ is now behind us.”

Raymond James’s notes that non-OPEC oil production apparently peaked in the first quarter of 2007, and given precipitous falls in oil output from Russia to Mexico, there’s not much hope for a recovery. OPEC production—and thus global output—peaked a little later, in the first quarter of 2008, Raymond James says.

The contention rests on a simple argument: OPEC oil production actually fell even as oil prices were above $100 a barrel, a sign of the “tyranny of geology” that limits the easy production of ever-more crude.

“Those declines had to have come for involuntary reasons such as the inherent geological limits of oil fields … We believe that the oil market has already crossed over to the downward sloping side of Hubbert’s Peak,” the analysts write.

If true—and the analysts note that true historical peaks are only visible in the distant rear-view mirror—then expect oil prices to jump back toward triple digits. All the more so if demand recovers—oil has clung to the $50 a mark even as demand cratered everywhere.

This item–carried on the blog Environmental capital (a.k.a. The Wall Street Journal)–not only quotes Raymond James as giving the latest stamp of legitimacy to what so many of us have believed (that peak oil was real and imminent and a humongous problem), but they even hang some dates on it, as seen above.

So, what’s the point? Simple: This is the only way we’ll get the Serious Money People to pay attention to peak oil–by having the message spread by Other Serious Money People they respect.

Any sort of grass roots effort, particularly one based on the (ugh!) Internet, is doomed to being ignored, and thus to failure, as I pointed out in my comment on Kurt Cobb’s essay,The Oil Drum: Peak Oil and Mass Communication (please go read the whole thing; I’m quoting just my response here):

I agree wholeheartedly that “what we have here, is a failure to communicate” to borrow a phrase.

I’ve run into the same problems of describing the issues involved with peak oil and climate chaos to a wide range of audiences, in size, age, and general science background. It ain’t easy, especially when they’ve heard just a little about the topic–mostly from ads financed by the fossil fuel lobby–and they think they know things that just ain’t so, a condition far worse than simple ignorance.

But I think the proposed solution has some non-trivial problems, as well. Even if you limit participation in the declaration to just those you mentioned (conviction about the situation’s urgency and the lack of a silver bullet), you’ve still set the stage for some huge battles within the group. I’m as convinced as anyone here that peak oil is “real, imminent, and an enormous problem”, as I’ve said over on my site (The Cost of Energy) countless times, but that would still leave me at odds with many other people who share those beliefs. There’s a heck of a lot of real estate between “yes, it’s a real and very serious problem and we can’t squander any more time” and “we’re cooked and should forget about fixing anything and learn how to make needles from rat ribs”. How do you get everyone under that enormous umbrella to play along?

Based on my roughly five years of writing and speaking about this topic, such an effort can only succeed via a push–as in advertising. Relying on a pulled message, meaning things people have to take action to find online, just won’t cut it. First of all, very few people (relative to the overall adult population) will bother looking, no matter what the message is and how well it’s portrayed. Second, those that do find it online are all too happy to dismiss it as just another example of Internet idiocy. They know what a bust Y2k was (see below), and they know that the Internet is loaded with ridiculous stories of alien abduction, Dick Cheney still running the world from hidden bunker, Illuminati, 300 MPG fuel injectors, Area 51 technology, etc. Why the heck should they believe this wild story about “the world running out of oil”, when it’s never happened before?

Still, I think it’s an idea worth pursuing. Right now, the peak oil message sounds to an outsider like a room full of zealots all trying to out-scream each other. I have to believe we can find a way to do better than that.

(On Y2k: I know for a fact thanks to many industry contacts with first-hand information that it was a very real and very serious problem. The only reason it didn’t turn into a disaster is that a huge number of very smart people fixed it. All the scare mongers on the ‘net didn’t know squat about what was really going on, and their displayed lack of understanding of how humanity responds to at least some crises is nothing less than pathetic.)

Just to be clear: Things like this Raymond James proclamation are very welcome (if overdue) and key to getting the Serious Money People (and therefore many elected representatives) to pay attention to and “get” the basic peak oil message, but even that’s not enough. We need to reach mainstream consumers and get them to do two key things:

• Take action in their own consumption decisions to minimize their oil use and therefore help insulate themselves and society as a whole, at least a bit, from future oil price shocks.
• Pressure their elected representatives to make more rational public policy decisions. Having the Serious Money People influence politicians is good, but far better would be the addition of pressure from the rank and file voters. Between political contributions and actual votes from their constituents, no shift would change politicians’ minds quicker.

(As an aside, I would love to know what kind of conversations the US government’s auto task force has had behind closed doors with GM and Chrysler (and possibly other companies) about their product mixes and the impact of oil prices and public policy shifts just a few years from now.)

It would be easy to get our smug on and roll our eyes at the Raymond James report, but I think it’s far more useful to accept it and then use it–e-mail the above story to your Senators, House Members, mayor, etc. It might not seem like this one report provides us with much of a fulcrum, but remember what Archimedes once said, “Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I will move the world.”

San Diego Unveils Algae Coalition To Advance “Green Gold” Research:

They call it “green gold,” and its proponents are betting that the light, sweet crude oil that can be extracted from farm-cultivated algae will help the world to cut its dependence upon dirty and increasingly expensive gasoline and diesel fuels that are extracted from fossil fuels.

And, on Tuesday, San Diego — which envisions itself as the green equivalent of the traditional oil industry’s Houston — unveiled a “broad-scale research effort” to turn that dream into a reality.

Though no dollar figures for financial support were discussed during Tuesday’s press event on the UC San Diego campus, the research effort will build upon the creation earlier this year of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology. The center was created to facilitate green fuels research being conducted by 272 scientists at UC San Diego, The Scripps Research Institute and other San Diego universities, research organizations and for-profit companies.

…

“By sharing and facilitating the interactions of these multiple researchers through this center, we hope to make sustainable algae-based fuel production and carbon-dioxide abatement a reality within the next five to 10 years,” Fox said. “This consortium will strengthen our ability to obtain grants and attract resources to the area. Algal biofuels will allow us to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and other economies, and will provide opportunities for a new economy and workforce.”

…

Algal researchers believe that cultivated algae will become an economically viable alternative to large-scale production of such resource-intensive plants as corn and cellulosic crops (including trees, non-edible parts of plants and grasses). Both corn and cellulosic crops require substantial amounts of fertile land, fresh water and petroleum-based fertilizer.

What’s more, the end product from corn and cellulosic crops — ethanol — is a lower-energy fuel than the algal hydrocarbons that can be converted directly into gasoline or diesel fuel that, proponents maintain, can be delivered to service stations through the existing refinery infrastructure.

Algae can also be used to produce hydrogen or biomass, which can then be turned into methane. Proponents also note that production of 140 billion gallons of algae-derived fuels would yield about one trillion pounds of protein that could be used to feed livestock, chickens or fish. The production process, they add, can “eat up” such environmental contaminants as wastewater.

I suspect this will be far from the last such effort to be launched in the next year or so. Obviously there’s a huge interest in developing a viable[1] biofuels technology, but there’s more to it than that. I think there’s a growing realization of how difficult (or impossible) it will be to solve the problems of other biofuels, problems that severely curtail their ability to be a broad-based petroleum replacement.

Corn ethanol simply can’t scale up to anywhere near the needed volume without devastating impacts on food production. Switching to cellulosic ethanol made from non-food crops (genetically modified poplars, switchgrass, etc.) still incurs costs associated with planting, harvesting, and transporting the biomass. And any ethanol product has distribution and usage challenges for a US-wide rollout.

Similarly, biodiesel from soybeans is still limited by being a harvested plant.

Right now, algae biodiesel seems to be the best biofuel option, and that will likely translate into a lot more startup activity–investment and government grant money, consortia, and private/public partnerships.

The next few years could be very interesting on this front, to say the least.

See also:

• It’s algae time, baby
• Late night thoughts on I-90, somewhere east of Rochester

[1] In this case, “viable” means scalable, price competitive, and without unacceptable environmental and food competition side effects.

The other night, my wife and I went to see the Rochester Greywolves play their first game of the season on the Onondaga Reservation, near Syracuse. Being the team photographer (as I was last year), I had to be there, even though it was an 8:30PM start time out of town.

Driving home on a very dark I-90 after the game, with spectacular lightning ahead of us and to our right nearly the entire way, I had some time and the right environment to ponder some things. Few experiences are more conducive to navel staring than the unshakable feeling that you’re not just driving on a dark highway but falling through the night and being pulled ever faster by the gravity of some immense and distant object just beyond the reach of your headlights. One can only wonder how many people have received speeding tickets because of that phenomenon.

What to make of the “BYD battery”? The Chinese company is claiming a 400 km (250 mile) range using this battery in a small sedan, and a quick charge capability that can bring it up to 50% (200 km/120 mile range) in only 10 minutes. As impressive as this sounds, it is also supposedly based on “ferrous ion, which is cheap, plentiful and green. If it turns out to be as functional as the Chinese company claims, it could be the breakthrough needed to finally bring electric cars into the mainstream.” The company will soon be selling a PHEV, ala the Volt, using this battery technology with a 100 km (62 mile) electron range for $22,000.

Breakthrough, indeed. Even assuming a fair amount of marketing fudge factor in BYD’s claims, if the actual performance is reasonably close to those specs, it’s almost impossible to overestimate the impact this could have. Imagine a Scion xD-sized EV with these batteries that provided a battery range of “only” 200 miles (slightly reduced from the above figures), the option to slow charge overnight from a standard wall socket or quick charge in 10 minutes from a beefier connection, and a price of around $25,000 to $27,000. Think American drivers would line up around the block to buy something like that, knowing they would never have to deal with the price of gasoline or any of the other maintenance joys of a vehicle with an internal combustion engine? I’d bet my keyboard that a major manufacturer selling such a car would be hard pressed to keep up with demand. (And don’t underestimate the value of this dual charging option, as I pointed out in March of last year in The revolution is in the second plug.)

And what about biodiesel? I wrote about this the other day (It’s algae time, baby), but consider what it would do to the conventional wisdom, especially as it’s manifested in online discussions, where so much of conventional wisdom is formed these days. Nothing makes the economist haters lose their minds quicker than one of my fellow dismal scientists making some ridiculously broad and naive statement about how “the market will find a solution”, “something always comes along, given a large enough financial incentive”, etc. Straddling the fence, as I do, between the economics camp and the reality-endowed camp, I can see both sides of this fight. In fact, “something” in one form or another has come along quite often, and even taking into account the immense challenges involved in finding a technical solution to peak oil (and one which also addresses climate chaos), is it out of the question to say that our ingenuity, spurred by an enormous, looming threat, would once again find a solution and send the doomers sulking back to their Y2k bunkers? No, it isn’t.

But the doomers have just as solid an argument. The hurdles to “solving” this problem are breathtaking, and the potential impact of not pulling a techno-rabbit out of our hat this time are gruesome.[1] Sitting back and saying “relax, it will be OK” is just as ridiculous and useless a response to peak oil as is jumping up and down and screaming about how it will be The End Of The World As We Know It. If anything, it’s worse, because it’s counterproductive to convince people the situation is hopeless.

Which brings me back to biodiesel, especially the varieties made from naturally occurring or gengineered microbes. Imagine that three to five years from now we have several technologies for making microbe diesel that work in the lab and in small field tests, but they’re still a bit finicky and expensive to scale up and roll out. The companies pushing them are all wrestling for market share and government backing, and online factions have lined up behind different contenders. Then an article hits the world’s RSS feeds that some university or corporation has figured how to make microbe diesel at an insanely low price, perhaps $1/retail gallon, via a process and formula that scales beautifully. Investors pile in, money supporting some or nearly all of the contenders evaporates, a pilot facility is built, and it works. Sure, there are some minor glitches, but those are ironed out in short order and suddenly the questions become: How quickly can we build out this technology and start pouring the resulting fuel into the tanks of long distance trucks? How quickly can we start building diesel cars in places like the US where they’re still scarce?

What would happen then to the consensus view of our situation? I suspect it would play out like this:

The Cornucopians would smugly predict that they always knew “something” would come along, and point to this Uber Microbe Diesel as “proof that the market works”, “oil really is a renewable resource”, etc. This would be an absurd piece of spin; the market does not always provide, and there was no guarantee whatsoever that such a solution would emerge. Anyone claiming that they “knew” it would happen would be lying. The truth is that they had faith in the market and they guessed right. (We see this syndrome all the time. One any given day you can find very reasoned, detailed arguments for the economy or the stock market doing practically anything you can imagine. And a few years from now the few who scored a win in this Prognosticator’s Lottery will reap a sizable and unwarranted public relations reward. Right now, I’m sick to death of hearing from the hucksters talking about how they predicted “exactly” our current economic mess years ago.)

The Apocalypticons (Peak Oil Chapter) would be just as insufferable, as they would argue endlessly that the Uber Microbe Diesel was not, in fact, as good as it seemed, even as new plants were being built at breakneck speed and OPEC ministers were screaming in agony at the thought of no one wanting their oil. Consider this doomer persistence a replay of the Y2k fanatics refusing to give up even after 1/1/2000 and continuing to argue that the big collapse of the banking system or electricity grid or who knows what could still happen–right up to the time when even they saw the absurdity of their claims and they had no choice but to give up, take down their tent, and move their traveling act to the next most promising and appealing carnival site, peak oil[2] or bird flue or an immense meteor strike or the attempts by the New World Order to take over the planet or an obsession with day trading or who knows what.

If this microbe diesel scenario plays out as I’ve speculated[3], I think the most accurate thing we could say is: We got lucky. We were lucky in that we weren’t fatally distracted by CNG or hydrogen or corn-based ethanol or any of the other absurdities currently sucking up too much of our time and resources. We were lucky that the right team of scientists not only managed to find the magic solution, but did so just in time.

Taking the broader view of the BYD battery and microbe diesel, I’m worried that even wildly positive results would send too many people the wrong signal. The conspiracy theorists, the people who decades ago were convinced that “the government and the oil companies” had a “300 MPG carburetor” that they were keeping from the public, would consider the timing far too convenient to be coincidental; they would point to it endlessly as evidence that the technology had existed all along, likely with the assistance of little green men in Area 51. The Apocalypticons would move on, but with ever more determination to “prove to the world” that the next thing they latch onto would be the real threat to humanity, and this time they’d be right, damn it. The Cornucopians would be the most damaging, as they would manage to convince an ever greater portion of policymakers that there never was a threat or that it was real but, as always, the all seeing, all knowing, infinitely kind and loving market provided a solution.

In other words, extreme events often act as an amplifier for pre-existing tendencies, which in this case would be a very bad thing, simply because these are far from the last challenges we’ll face. If there’s one thing I can barely discern off in the distance during lightning flashes late at night on I-90, it’s the uncertainties and unforeseen events that still lurk in the shadows, just waiting for their time to become the next big threat we have to deal with as we lead our measured life on a managed planet.

[1] I’m talking here about the period not just post peak, but also after the initial round of relatively easy oil consumption reductions–a.k.a. the low hanging fruit so many people, most notably here in the US, are so reluctant to pick. We will experience peak oil in stages, the first post-peak one being an oil squeeze when we can still make relatively comfortable changes to reduce our consumption. After that comes the time when things get more than a little “interesting”, the oil crush.

[2] For those of you who are new to this site, let me make sure we’re all on the same page in terms of both Y2k and peak oil. Y2k was a very real and very serious threat. It was defused thanks to the work of many first rate project managers and programmers. The hoopla about it was nothing more or less than a severe misreading of our response to the situation, not the situation itself. Peak oil, as I’ve said countless times here, is a real, imminent, and immense problem. Because of the different nature of peak oil it will be much harder to deal with than was Y2k; we can’t simply throw a lot of money and resources at it to get us past a magic date and then largely forget about it.

[3] And I’m increasingly convinced that it’s the most likely scenario over the next five to ten years, assuming you allow me about the same latitude afforded a Chinese car company’s marketing department.

One of the memes that’s received a lot of attention lately in online discussions is the notion that science doesn’t provide definite answers, it deals in probabilities. This is a tough concept for many lay people to accept and remember as they read about peak oil and climate chaos, not to mention all the other science-related news that they encounter during any given week. It’s not to see why this is so, given all the number and kind of decisions most mainstream consumers have to make. We live in the present, but one that’s separated from the future by an ever more blurred line; we’re constantly assessing whether to take out this loan, buy that car or house, pick a university or career path, get that tattoo, etc., all framed in the context of our expectations for the future. In other words, we build this mental structure of “how the world will work, and how the future will play out” largely out of assumptions, and then use it to help make our educated guesses. While scientists are often far more rigorous in their procedures than my neighbor who’s deciding on which pickup truck to buy, the basic model is the same.

A key difference concerns when someone making a decision or conducting research assumes that a probability is high enough to safely assume that the related event will happen, and other possible outcomes or explanations can be dismissed. You bought some new article of clothing yesterday, “knowing” that you would get to wear it in a day or two and completely discounting the possibility that you would be struck by lightning or suffer a similarly abrupt ending before then. Scientists likewise consider some things as settled, such as the greenhouse property of carbon dioxide or water vapor in the atmosphere. There’s nothing stopping a scientist from conducting experiments to determine if those facts are indeed accurate, although I suspect very few would bother. (Trying to determine the exact level of forcing triggered by those or other gases under different conditions is another matter, obviously. I’m talking here about the simple binary question of whether each one does or doesn’t trap heat.) Lay people are much more comfortable making sweeping assumptions that “get right to the bottom line”; depending on what’s at stake and other circumstances, they often upgrade their assessment that something will “likely” happen to a belief that it “will” happen at a much lower probability than a scientist would.[1] Scientists are far more cautious about crossing that conceptual line.[2]

This is why I’ve often said that more than anything I would love to be at a party where some of the world’s top experts on climate, ecology, oil, natural gas, water, etc. were present and drinking just enough to melt their inhibitions. I know what they say publicly, but what I want to know is what they really believe to be true, even if they can’t prove it with the kind of rigor one normally expects from them. Throwing legislators and heads of state into the mix would be entertaining, although I doubt any level of drinking short of alcohol poisoning would get them to speak the unvarnished truth.

All of the above is why I found the article World will not meet 2C warming target, climate change experts agree so fascinating:

Almost nine out of 10 climate scientists do not believe political efforts to restrict global warming to 2C will succeed, a Guardian poll reveals today. An average rise of 4-5C by the end of this century is more likely, they say, given soaring carbon emissions and political constraints.

Such a change would disrupt food and water supplies, exterminate thousands of species of plants and animals and trigger massive sea level rises that would swamp the homes of hundreds of millions of people.

The poll of those who follow global warming most closely exposes a widening gulf between political rhetoric and scientific opinions on climate change. While policymakers and campaigners focus on the 2C target, 86% of the experts told the survey they did not think it would be achieved. A continued focus on an unrealistic 2C rise, which the EU defines as dangerous, could even undermine essential efforts to adapt to inevitable higher temperature rises in the coming decades, they warned.

…

The poll asked the experts whether the 2C target could still be achieved, and whether they thought that it would be met: 60% of respondents argued that, in theory, it was still technically and economically possible to meet the target, which represents an average global warming of 2C since the industrial revolution. The world has already warmed by about 0.8C since then, and another 0.5C or so is inevitable over coming decades given past greenhouse gas emissions. But 39% said the 2C target was impossible.

…

Asked what temperature rise was most likely, 84 of the 182 specialists (46%) who answered the question said it would reach 3-4C by the end of the century; 47 (26%) suggested a rise of 2-3C, while a handful said 6C or more. While 24 experts predicted a catastrophic rise of 4-5C, just 18 thought it would stay at 2C or under.

Some of those surveyed who said the 2C target would be met confessed they did so more out of hope rather than belief. “As a mother of young children I choose to believe this, and work hard toward it,” one said.

“This optimism is not primarily due to scientific facts, but to hope,” said another. Some said they thought geoengineering measures, such as seeding the ocean with iron to encourage plankton growth, would help meet the target.

Many of the experts stressed that an inability to hit the 2C target did not mean that efforts to tackle global warming should be abandoned, but that the emphasis is now on damage limitation.

Obviously, we shouldn’t leap to conclusions based on this one survey. I suspect that experienced climate scientists (and the people polled above were registered attendees at the recent conference on Copenhagen) have long personal histories in dealing with elected politicians, and therefore have a justifiably skeptical view of the ability of policymakers to get it right. Even so, this is not good news by any rational meaning of the phrase.

One question this raises is just how much do those policymakers promising action to keep the temperature rise under 2C really know. Are they simply behind the information curve, and have yet to ask the right people the right questions? Or do they know and are simply choosing to put a happy face on the situation as a way to muster support from the masses? I’ve predicted for some time that here in the US we would see virtually no top elected officials speak openly about peak oil. Instead, they would attack that problem indirectly, by clamping down on CO2 emissions and relentlessly pushing the far more palatable (and All American) goal of “achieving energy independence”.

But we can’t blame politicians for all of this growing conceptual gulf between the experts and lay people, regardless of how comforting that may be, or how much it might feed our desire to find vast, evil conspiracies in every shadow. A good part of this gulf is likely nothing more than an artifact of timing. In particular, scientists are discovering much more about how the world’s climate works (all too often lately in the form of something “happening quicker than we thought”), and it takes some time for that information to filter through the infosphere to the overwhelming majority of lay people who don’t constantly seek out this kind of news. That gulf would largely close by itself if science stopped making discoveries.

Largely, but not entirely. Even in the absence of the constant stream of new (and ever more alarming) information from climate scientists, we would still have the seemingly tireless and clearly relentless deniers who show up in one comment thread after another online, trotting out the same ridiculous, debunked talking points. This group, motivated by finances and/or ideology, has an effect, most notably here in the US. They’ve created a tug-of-war with the scientists, with the beliefs of the mainstream consumers and voters being the prize.

So, what to do? Censoring the deniers is absolutely out of the question, even if it were somehow possible. As many other free speech advocates have pointed out, the answer to bad speech isn’t censorship, but more speech. And in our situation, that speech has to begin with the scientists and the energy and environmental geeks, and spread through the web of information consumption to the lay people. That’s not a quick process, and it’s riddled with delays and frustration and chances for mistakes, but it seems to be all we’ve got as a first step in addressing the problems we’ve created for ourselves.

At least, that’s my best guess.

[1] This is probably a good thing, on the whole. Imagine a world in which we tried to make all those decisions, large and small, with the same care scientists applied to the research. We’d drive ourselves and our loved ones nuts and slow things down so much that entire economies would grind to a halt.

[2] Which reminds me of one of my favorite ways to explain this caution. Three scientists were walking near a farm, when one of them pointed to an animal and said, “Gee, I didn’t know there were black sheep around here.” The second scientist added, “Not so fast–all you’ve seen is one black sheep. It could be the only one.” The third scientist raised an eyebrow and said, “Don’t leap to conclusions–all you’ve seen is one black side of one sheep. How do you know the other side is black?”

The process of reading tea leaves, um, making projections, regarding the major energy and environmental issues is, to put it mildly, not something we should do casually. But we have little choice, given the terrifying proximity of peak oil and the growing impacts of climate chaos. The reason why is as simple as it is inescapable: Through a mix of ignorance and complacency and plain old denial we’ve used up the lead time we had to deal with these issues.

Projections, and looking for signs of where we’re headed, seem to be a stronger than normal theme in recent news items.

Some examples:

Absolute must read: Australia today offers horrific glimpse of U.S. Southwest, much of planet, post-2040, if we don’t slash emissions soon:

Drought, fires, killer heat waves, wildlife extinction and mosquito-borne illness — the things that climate change models are predicting have already arrived there, [scientists] say.

That’s the subhead on a stunning L.A. Times piece, “What will global warming look like? Scientists point to Australia” which opens starkly:

Reporting from The Murray-Darling Basin, Australia — Frank Eddy pulled off his dusty boots and slid into a chair, taking his place at the dining room table where most of the critical family issues are hashed out. Spreading hands as dry and cracked as the orchards he tends, the stout man his mates call Tank explained what damage a decade of drought has done .

“Suicide is high. Depression is huge. Families are breaking up. It’s devastation,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve got a neighbor in terrible trouble. Found him in the paddock, sitting in his [truck], crying his eyes out. Grown men — big, strong grown men. We’re holding on by the skin of our teeth. It’s desperate times.”

A result of climate change?

“You’d have to have your head in the bloody sand to think otherwise,” Eddy said.

…

And a major new study led by NOAA found that if we don’t act to reverse emissions soon, these global Dust Bowls will be irreversible for a long, long time (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe). The regions that NOAA identifies as facing permanent Dust Bowls:

• U.S. Southwest
• Southeast Asia
• Eastern South America
• Southern Europe
• Southern Africa
• Northern Africa
• Western Australia

Again, since Australia is the most sensitive and driest of the habitable continents, it’s no surprise that it is the first to see such climate change driven decadal drought,

See the related op-ed, also in the LA Times, Climate change hits Australia first, and hard - Los Angeles Times, which includes the chilling text:

If Australia serves as a harbinger of things to come for the rest of the world, its political response shows how difficult it will be to solve the problem. Progress is being made, but it’s achingly slow. A country that gets 80% of its electricity from coal (compared with 50% in the U.S.) is deeply reluctant to pay the price of switching to renewable energy sources; so far, the government has agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions just 5% by 2020. That won’t do much to reduce the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere and slow the pace of global warming.

Can the United States, where the impacts of climate change aren’t yet nearly as apparent, be expected to do better? For Australia’s sake, and our own, we must. Soon, you may not have to travel to the outback to see a desolate wasteland; it may be coming to your neighborhood.

Given the climate mechanisms at work (e.g. all the warming that’s still in the pipeline, the likely results of the sun coming out of its near-total lack of sunspot activity, etc.), it seems certain that the US and some other parts of the world are already locked into a future that includes a lot of drought-related pain. I truly wish I could argue otherwise.

Retreat of Andean Glaciers Foretells Global Water Woes:

Earlier this year, the World Bank released yet another in a seemingly endless stream of reports by global institutions and universities chronicling the melting of the world’s cryosphere, or ice zone. This latest report concerned the glaciers in the Andes and revealed the following: Bolivia’s famed Chacaltaya glacier has lost 80 percent of its surface area since 1982, and Peruvian glaciers have lost more than one-fifth of their mass in the past 35 years, reducing by 12 percent the water flow to the country’s coastal region, home to 60 percent of Peru’s population.

And if warming trends continue, the study concluded, many of the Andes’ tropical glaciers will disappear within 20 years, not only threatening the water supplies of 77 million people in the region, but also reducing hydropower production, which accounts for roughly half of the electricity generated in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador.

…

Similarly, on the opposite side of the world, two billion people rely on meltwater from the Himalayas, which have lost 21 percent of their glacial mass since 1962. Himalayan glaciers are the main source of water for five major river systems whose flow irrigates much of China, India, and Pakistan’s rice and wheat and which also supplies much of the region’s drinking water. These river basins are the Ganges, with 407 million people; the Indus, with 178 million people; the Brahmaputra, with 118 million people; the Yangtze, with 368 million people; and the Yellow, with 147 million. Scientists predict that the Himalaya’s smaller glaciers will be gone by 2035 and that many large ones will disappear by century’s end, possibly leading to famine in a region whose population continues to soar.

“The world has never faced such a predictably massive threat to food production as that posed by the melting mountain glaciers of Asia,” Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, wrote last year.

Studies show glaciers melting at alarming rates throughout the world, yet unlike mountains in higher latitudes, ice melts year-round off tropical glaciers, which are found on peaks close to the equator and receive the sun’s strongest rays.

The article mentions the loss of hydropower which will accompany the drop in drinking water supplies as the glaciers melt.

This is an issue I’ve been writing about for some time, and I think it’s just now starting to get the attention it deserves. Once again: The real problem with the movie The Day After Tomorrow is not the was it sensationalized climate chaos, but the fact that it focused people on the wrong threat. The danger is not a precipitous shutdown the North Atlantic conveyor that instantly coats a wide swath of Europe and the northeast US with glaciers, but a rewriting of the rules about where the fresh drinking water is. Wet places will get wetter, dryer places will get dryer, and all those millions of people who depend on glaciers to supply them with water for drinking, crop irrigation, sanitation, and electricity generation will suddenly have none. It’s not as dramatic as an ice-encrusted Statue of Liberty, but it’s infinitely worse because it’s real and it’s already starting to happen.

‘Zero Petroleum Growth’:

“Peak oil is an illusion,” Joe Petrowski, CEO of Gulf Oil/Cumberland Farms, told attendees Wednesday at the 2009 NACS State of the Industry Summit in partnership with CSP in Chicago. But the “political peak” for oil is very real, he cautioned. The end result: “Get ready for a future of zero petroleum growth,” he said. Petrowski examined world demand for petroleum products, alternative solutions and domestic implications in his closing presentation, “Meeting the Challenges of an Industry in Transition.”

The current political climate could have a profound impact on retailers who sell fuel, he said, pointing out that “96% of our transportation is fueled by petroleum-based products.” Yet, the political climate seems to encourage what he called “an all-out war” on petroleum.

…

An increase in federal taxes for gasoline is only one of many areas of concern, he noted. Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards could ultimately cost retailers $1.9 billion in retail margin, not including a loss of transactional sales.

Carbon taxes also area bad idea. “Cap and trade is asinine,” said Petrowski. “It gives speculators another toy to play with.”

…

Petrowski also stressed that ethanol “is not a green fuel, but it is important,” calling the food-versus-fuel debate “a sham.” He said that the United States has more acreage dedicated to golf courses than it does farms related to ethanol production.

Which other fuels might hold promise for retailers? Compressed natural gas is one intriguing possibility. It currently is selling for about $4, and that breaks down to the equivalent of gasoline selling for 44 cents per gallons. “It’s domestic, it’s cleaner and it delivers less range, which means more trips (to refuel). As a retailer, I’d like to see that happen,” he said.

This sounds like it was intended to be a “red meat” speech to a friendly audience, which likely explains the “war on petroleum” nonsense and the golf course non sequitur, among other incendiary details.

And of course, we have the obligatory “peak oil is an illusion” and “CNG is a cleaner fuel” canards. Ignoring the first and leaping right to the second — CNG is cleaner than gasoline? Yes. Anywhere as clean as we need a new fuel, and notably one that requires a massive and expensive infrastructure shift to use? Not even close.

Such silliness aside, the larger issue here is something I’ve seen mentioned many times online: Have we already seen the peak in world oil production? Or perhaps the peak in US oil or gasoline consumption? It’s not hard to see why some people would like to leap to that conclusion, and why. The most extreme peak oilers, which largely overlap with the doomers, can’t wait to get the show started. They have their popcorn popped, their sacks of rice and cans of tuna in the basement (assuming they didn’t expire since the Y2k days), and they’re tired of waiting so long before the whole world sees that They Were Right All Along. Many of the climate chaos people are eager for these peaks to materialize, if only to give them hope that we can reduce our carbon emissions at least somewhat faster than the dismal rate many people predict will materialize.[1]

Personally, I think it’s still a bit too premature to say that we’ve seen the peak of US oil or gasoline consumption. The ongoing recession, which likely won’t ease for at least another 8 months, will certainly keep consumption of everything at a lower level, and we’ll highly likely see a shift toward much more fuel efficient vehicles for those who have the wherewithal and the inclination to make such a purchase. But that change in the overall fuel efficiency of the rolling stock of vehicles on US roads will be very minor; we might even see a reversal if a GM bankruptcy results in that company, along with Ford, Chrysler, and Toyota continuing to dump pickup trucks at fire sale prices to people who could get along quite well with a sedan.

And lest I leave you with an insufficiently gloomy outlook, let me recommend Poor prognosis for our planet.

[1] Save your hate mail. I understand right down to my DNA the seriousness of both peak oil and climate chaos. Taking a verbal poke at the extremists doesn’t mean I dismiss their underlying concerns.

The US Dept. of Energy has issued a set of spreadsheets on the use of alternative fuel vehicles, available from two web pages:

EIA Alternative Transportation Fuels-Supplier Data

EIA Alternative Transportation Fuels-User and Fuel Data

A few observations:

• This data is just for government and other organization fleets and does not include individual owners. This is not obvious from a quick reading of the web sites or even some of the data. See the questionnaire that was used to collect the data [PDF] and the instructions for the form [PDF], as well as table V7 (afvtrans_v7.xls) on the second page linked above that breaks out vehicle owners by category (with none for private individuals).
• Similarly, keep in mind that this data does not seem to take into account passenger light rail, although it does include buses and heavy duty trucks.
• The total amount of gasoline displaced by the use of all alternative fuels was about 4.8 billion gallons of gasoline equivalent in 2006 (table C1), compared to roughly 218 billion gallons of oil used for transportation in the US in 2007 (Annual Energy Review, Diagram 2). So alternative fuels are still a pretty small percentage of US transportation use, not that anyone should find that surprising.
• The distribution of vehicles by fuel:
  • E85 vehicles (only those actually being used with E85 and not regular gasoline): 364,384, 52.4%
  • Natural gas variants (CNG, LNG, LPG): 275,426, 39.6%
  • Electricity: 55,730, 8.0%
  • Hydrogen: 223, 0.03%
  • Other: 3

  Again, not a huge surprise, all things considered.

As always, for more US transportation stats than you could want, see the Transportation Energy Data Book, published by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The NY Times has published a fascinating profile of Jane Lubchenco, the recently approved head of the NOAA:

The marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco has long urged scientists to abandon the habitual reticence of the research community and spend more time engaging the public and public officials about scientific and technical issues.

Now Dr. Lubchenco, a professor at Oregon State University, is following her own advice all the way to Washington to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the government’s premier science agencies.

This is only the latest step in a long career of practicing what she preached. In 1997, as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr. Lubchenco called for “a new social contract” for science, aimed at helping policy makers take steps to sustain the biosphere.

The next year, she founded the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, which trains environmental researchers in communication, policy-making and related skills.

She was an organizer of the Communication Partnership for Science and the Sea, which since 1999 has offered information on marine conservation science to policy makers and the public. And she was a founding director of Climate Central, a Web site that went online last year with what she calls “credible and nonadvocacy” information on global warming.

Although some global warming dissidents expressed dismay over President Obama’s choice of an outspoken climate activist to head a leading government agency that deals with climate issues, a wide range of scientists acclaimed the appointment — and Dr. Lubchenco was approved by the Senate without objection on Thursday.

“If you look at her record, it’s pretty stunning,” said Jeremy B. C. Jackson, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He cited a range of her work, including what he called “path-breaking” studies on the ecology of algae and seaweed, her deciphering of biological interactions along rocky shorelines and her wider assessments of environmental sustainability.

It’s a longish piece that touches on several interesting points and is definitely worth your time to read in full. Personally, I was delighted to find someone with that level of commitment to public service in such an important “science role” in the US government.

For the purpose of this post, I want to focus on the part quoted above, and how it relates to our current energy and environmental situation, as well as how we view our individual roles in the coming years and decades.

I want to make it excruciatingly, redundantly, annoyingly clear at the outset that I’m not one of those people who expects or wants the whole world to leap to the ramparts to fight for my personal hot button issues. We certainly have more than enough of those online at the various E&E sites, and one more would be a step in the wrong direction.

I also have a very traditional, perhaps idealistic, view of science and scientists. I would strongly prefer to see a metaphorical wall between science and policy, with scientists doing their thing and policymakers doing theirs. This is unrealistic, of course, given how much of what policymakers do, from passing laws to directly funding research, that impacts what scientists can do. But my inclination is still to have the scientists stay out of public policy, and the politicians to consider what the scientists say to be reality and not merely another political weapon for their next ideological crusade or election campaign.

When I look at our two big challenges of peak oil and climate chaos[1], my idealism withers before the overwhelming urgency of our current situation. We simply don’t have the luxury of time to keep everyone on their own side of my metaphorical wall and let things work themselves out “in due course”. When we’re this close to a point of no return on climate and this close to the worldwide peak in oil production, then we have to take a lot of risks or suffer far more pain from inaction. These risks most notably include much more drastic public policy measures, which will certainly result in some expensive mistakes (corn ethanol simply leaps to mind as one example), and trying some truly science-fictional things, like one or more geoengineering schemes. In essence, we’ll have to make a lot of educated guesses that will have enormous ramifications, and many of those guesses will be colored by brute force politics.

I don’t like that situation in the least, and I hope no one reading this site likes it, either.[2] But I thin it would be incredibly disingenuous to try to wish it away. Peak oil is real and imminent, and climate chaos is real and already present. Both situations will only get worse over the next decade or two, potentially far worse if we’re stupid enough not to act in our own self interest.

In a slightly broader sense, this discussion of unpleasantries touches on something I’ve been talking about since I launched this site (albeit originally with respect to just peak oil): Everyone from every corner of the ideological landscape will have things to love and things to hate. Government haters will get more government and nuclear power haters will get more nukes (although it remains to be seen just how large the “nuclear renaissance” will be, given the role economics will play); solar and wind power lovers will get more of both, and those distrustful of corporations will get both more money funneled in their direction as well as more regulations placed on them. You can no doubt add many examples of your own to the lovers and haters lists.

This is the world we’ve created for ourselves and our descendants, and it requires us, assuming enough of us have the intelligence to recognize what’s going on, to have the courage to break the old rules of business as usual and find better ways to do almost everything that human beings do. This means change at all levels of society, from the largest governments, corporations, and other concentrations of economic and other power, down to individuals. It’s a hell of a mess, but the only people who are more wrong about it than the ones who can’t or refuse to see the problems are those who think it’s beyond our ability to fix.

[1] Of course, those are my picks for the two big challenges, for reasons regular readers know quite well. I’m sure other people would pick other issues as “the” big ones most deserving of our attention, and even argue about the number of critical issues.

[2] The Apocalypticons who see it as a sign of our impending, well, doom, and the Cornucopians who see it as a temporary glitch on our way to whatever econoerotic vision of free market nirvana they secretly foster are both cordially invited to take a flying leap.

Pop quiz, two questions, no Googling or even thinking too long about it:

1. What’s the most immediate and negative human impact of peak oil?

2. What’s the most immediate and negative human impact of climate chaos?

If you answered “no oil” to the first one, give yourself one demerit. If your answer was “higher prices for oil and everything made with or from it”, give yourself half credit. If you said, “a high probability of increased prices for oil and oil-based products”, you get full credit, the gold star, and the job of hall monitor next week.

On the second question, if you said anything about higher temperatures, flooded coastal cities, tropical storms, or any of the other dramatic things that leap to mind, well, don’t get too attached to that Hall Monitor title. If you said something about shortages of fresh water and pointed out that it’s already happening, then break out that box of gold stars again.

My point in this seeming silliness is that we’re all guilty at one time or another of making knee-jerk assessments of large and complex problems, and we all too often latch onto the Big, Scary things that make intuitive sense to the parts of our brains that evolved skills for getting through the night without being turned into Purina Cheetah Chow. But that was then, this is now, and if we work hard enough at sticking to the facts, we’ll be more than adequately “rewarded” with enough things that scare us spitless.

Like water shortages caused by climate chaos….

Adapting to water woes:

The southwestern United States is moving headlong toward an environmental catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions.

The already drought-prone region is almost entirely dependent on a shrinking snowpack and sparse rain in the Colorado River Basin. As the planet’s climate changes, an already overtaxed and volatile water supply is expected to get even more unstable.

“A lot of people say that in global warming there will be winners and losers. In the Southwest, we’ll be in the losers’ category,” University of Arizona climatologist Jonathan Overpeck said at a symposium on global warming’s effect on the Southwest.

Overpeck discussed the latest scientific consensus on climate change at the Feb. 19 symposium, hosted by the Urban Land Institute at the Palms.

He was joined by Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager Pat Mulroy, who discussed what can be done on a local, national and international scale to head off disaster.

The problem of climate change in the Southwest is fairly complex, but can be summed up in one word: water.

The Southwest is the most persistent hot spot on the globe and has a history of severe drought.

As a region, we depend almost entirely on the Colorado River Basin for our water, and all climate change projections estimate that the basin will be among the most heavily hit by drought as the world warms. Most projections say the region will warm by about 7 degrees by 2050 and 10 degrees by the end of the century.

…

The most up-to-date climate models available show that if humans reduce carbon emissions significantly starting now, water flow in the Colorado River Basin will be reduced by 5 percent to 40 percent over the next few decades.

If we do nothing, it will be worse, Overpeck said.

…

“The United States is a voracious consumer of natural resources,” Mulroy said. “Those days are over. We can’t afford to use natural resources at the rate we’re currently using them.”

Much also must be done to halt growing production of polluting fossil fuel-fired power plants in China and India and to fund retrofits or replacement of polluting power plants in poorer nations around the world.

That change has to start at home, Mulroy stressed.

“We need to be part of the solution,” she said. “We can’t be in the eye of the storm and not look at our carbon footprint and energy sources.”

To start, she suggests massive regionwide management and conservation of water resources. This includes regulation of the agriculture industry, indicating what crops can be grown in drought-prone areas, decreases in water consumption by residents and industry, widespread wastewater recycling and more efficient management of snowmelt and rainfall through underground catchment basins.

She also said it’s essential to tap into alternative water sources for urban areas such as Las Vegas.

“The most daunting thing is adaptation, and adaptation has to happen at all levels from large institutional changes to individual behavioral levels,” Mulroy said.

By all means, go read the whole thing.

I honestly believe that over the next three or four decades, “solving” the water problem in the Colorado River system will be tougher than getting the US through the (likely) plateau and then (surely) decline in world oil production. We have far more options for greatly reducing the oil intensity of of the US economy than we do for further reducing the water intensity of Las Vegas and surroundings. What is the water equivalent of a PHEV or EV? (Think carefully about all the relevant factors, including all the ways we use water, what steps have already been taken to conserve it, and the lack of substitutes for fresh water, before blurting out an answer; this is by far the toughest question in the pop quiz.)