Thanks to all the (deserved) attention we’ve been paying to the floods in Pakistan, the landslides in China, the heat wave and fires in Russia, the roughly 300 hundred forest fires in British Columbia, etc., it’s no surprise that peak oil isn’t right at the top of everyone’s mind. Of course, reality doesn’t care what is or isn’t on our radar screen, and the world’s oil reserves are depleted by another 85 million barrels every day.

But it appears that some people are paying attention, says the Guardian in Peak oil alarm revealed by secret official talks (emphasis added):

Speculation that [UK] government ministers are far more concerned about a future supply crunch than they have admitted has been fuelled by the revelation that they are canvassing views from industry and the scientific community about “peak oil”.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is also refusing to hand over policy documents about “peak oil” – the point at which oil production reaches its maximum and then declines – under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act, despite releasing others in which it admits “secrecy around the topic is probably not good”.

Experts say they have received a letter from David Mackay, chief scientific adviser to the DECC, asking for information and advice on peak oil amid a growing campaign from industrialists such as Sir Richard Branson for the government to put contingency plans in place to deal with any future crisis.

…

Yet the note of the workshop distributed last year talks about secrecy around the topic being “probably not good”, although it also suggests officials stick to the line that the “International Energy Agency is an authoritative source in this field” and stresses how the IEA believes there is sufficient reserves to meet demand till 2030 as long as investment in new reserves is maintained.

But the Paris-based organisation has come under increasing scrutiny from a growing group of critics who believe the IEA’s optimism is misplaced. Last year the Guardian revealed that the IEA was also riven with dissent over the issue with senior staff members privately telling newspaper they thought the official numbers on future global oil supply were over-optimistic.

The IEA predicted in the 2009 World Energy Outlook published last November that oil demand would grow from 85m barrels a day today to 88m in 2015 and reach 105m in 2030. The organisation presumes the challenge of meeting that demand can equally be met by a mixture of higher Opec production and considerably more output from unconventional sources.

But an internal IEA source said: “Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible, but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources.”

First of all, the fact that such a workshop was held doesn’t prove that peak oil is real or imminent, although I would argue that both points are true. But it does show that some government officials are at least aware of the problem and consider it a serious situation. That’s a pretty small victory compared to the scale of our current sustainability challenges, but it’s better than nothing.

I suspect that post peak, by perhaps 5 or 10 years, we’ll hear a lot about the behind-the-scenes discussions at the IEA and other groups and even governments, and the overall picture will be infuriating. We’ll hear about repeated attempts by people to raise the issue with their organizational superiors, only to be shunned and silenced. We may even hear from one or two individuals who has the courage to say along the lines of, “We didn’t see peak oil because we didn’t want to see it.”

The problem here, of course, is that old bugaboo, timing. As many have pointed out before, if we’re “lucky” and the peak in world oil production really is 20 years away, that still leaves us very little time to transition away from it, given the extent of the developed world’s dependence on it and the time needed to convert country-level infrastructures. But if those who think we’re much closer to a production peak turn out to be right, then we have a problem of staggering proportions.

The one glimmer of good news is that there’s a fundamental difference between peak oil and climate change: When we de-oil some segment of an economy, it’s done and its history doesn’t matter. I.e. trade in your gasoline powered car for a Nissan Leaf and the world gets 100% of the benefit of that conversion, regardless of how much gasoline your old car burned in the years you drove it. In climate change we’re dealing with not just the CO2 we’re emitting right now, but the legacy emissions of the last 200+ years which will continue to cause warming and its attendant knock-on effects for a long time.

The US Dept. of Energy issued their monthly Short-Term Energy Outlook on AUgust 10th, which includes this text:

Forecast economic growth combined with increased use of coal and natural gas is expected to contribute to increases in fossil-fuel CO2 emissions of 3.4 percent in 2010 (U.S. Carbon Dioxide Emissions Growth Chart). Projected coal-related CO2 emissions increase by 6.0 percent in 2010 primarily a result of increased electricity sector coal usage. Higher natural gas consumption in the industrial and electric power sectors is expected to lead to a 3.9-percent increase in CO2 emissions from natural gas. Demand for petroleum in the transportation sector (motor gasoline, diesel fuel and jet fuel) combined with continued industrial sector fossil fuel demand growth contribute to the projected 0.8-percent increase in fossil-fuel CO2 emissions in 2011. However, even with these increases, projected CO2 emissions in 2010 and 2011 remain below their level in any year from 1999 through 2008.

and links to this graphic:

Add your own commentary. I got nothin’…

I really hate stories like the one linked below, because I have to choose between not saying anything about them or expressing myself and then having to explain (especially for newcomers to this site) that I’m Really A Greenie, Honest.

This time around, the story is not about anything that’s actually being done, but is simply an idea a few people are pondering.

What If Gas Receipts Had Warning Labels?:

Cigarette packs have the Surgeon General’s warning. Heavy machinery has a word of caution about operating while intoxicated. Doritos tell us their saturated fat content. What would happen if our gasoline receipts had disclaimers too?

…

The idea comes from a conference speaker Lisa Margonelli, the director of the New America Foundation’s energy initiative and the author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank. In a New York Times op-ed awhile back, in the aftermath of the Gulf spill, she noted that every gallon of gas is indeed a gallon of risks, and that the spill is a unique opportunity to harness our political will to get “behind a sweeping commitment to use less gas — build cars that use less oil (or none at all) and figure out better ways to transport Americans.”

Now, I don’t think even she really believes her gas receipt warning label will actually come to pass. But it’s an interesting thought experiment. Most of the time, Americans live in a state of willful ignorance about the risks of oil. Before the Deepwater Horizon disaster, there was an oil spill practically every day in places like Nigeria. And as the coverage of the oil spill fades, and as this summer of weather chaos fades into the background, the urgency of those dangers will diminish — as it always does (just look at what happened after Hurricane Katrina.)

…

Just as calorie counts inform us what we are putting into our bodies, a gas receipt warning label wouldn’t let us forget what we were really doing to our planet.

There’s no nice way to say this, so I won’t even try: This idea exemplifies precisely what’s wrong with the “environmental movement”, most notably in the US. We keep trying to come up with ever more creative and gentle ways to appeal to the better angels of consumers’ natures to coax them into making long-lived behavior changes. And, of course, it doesn’t work, for one blindingly simple and obvious reason: If you want all or nearly all people in a large and diverse group to do something they don’t want to do, you have to force them. That can be via law or by buying them off with a sufficiently large economic incentive, but be prepared to wield a carrot and/or a stick, because trying to reason with them just won’t cut it.

If we tried this gentle reminder thing on motor fuel receipts, I’m sure the overwhelming majority of Americans would not notice them at all or would see them and get pissed off that “someone was trying to tell them what they do with their own money”. In the latter case, it would likely make people dig even further into their entrenched position.

One slightly more interesting angle would be to really get in the consumer’s face. Instead of printing a static message or one chosen randomly from a static list, why not print something like, “The X gallons of gasoline you just purchased will add Y pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and add Z dollars to America’s trade deficit.” You could get even more creative and calculate the costs of adaptation to rising sea levels and other impacts, or who knows what.

Oh, there I go again — thinking that even an in-your-face version of a gentle nudge will convince a significant number of people to downsize their vehicle and/or drive less and/or hypermile when they do drive.

Silly me.

I hasten to add (he said, typing as quickly as possible) that I don’t like reaching these conclusions, so please don’t fall into the standard, hyper-polarized blogosphere trap of assuming that when someone says “X is true” he or she is pleased that X is true or stands to benefit from it in some way. In many cases all you should conclude is that your friendly neighborhood blogger thinks that X is true. I realize what a stunning notion that is, given the kinds of knock down, drag out knife fights over truly obscure minutia we see on almost any site about energy or environmental issues, but it’s true, dear reader.

On a related note, I highly recommend Dave Roberts’ Grist post, ‘Environmentalism’ can never address climate change.

I can’t speak for anyone else here, but I think few things are as enraging as the instant apathy that sets in among so many mainstream consumers as soon as some Big Event That Will Surely Change Everything is over. Take your pick: Katrina, 9/11, Europe’s 2003 heat wave, or, now, the BP Blowout. Think I’m exaggerating by adding the Gulf Gusher to that list so soon? Take a minute to read CNN/Fortune’s piece, The BP spill is already gone and forgotten:

BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster may have drawn more public attention than any other oil spill, but there’s a good chance that sordid history of spill cleanup efforts will repeat itself. That history is to bomb the crude with chemicals so it’s out sight, then place the incident out of mind once the slick appears to be gone.

The National Incident Command led by Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen put together a team of independent scientists and experts from government agencies. The group issued a report on the amount of oil left in the Gulf of Mexico, making the point that most of the oil has been cleaned up or biodegraded.

Apparently, only 26% is left to deal with from the original spill of 205 million gallons. The remaining oil that hasn’t washed ashore is below the surface of the water as a light sheen and balls, or buried in the sand, or even evaporated into the atmosphere. In other words: out of sight.

Traditionally, once oil is out of sight, the public push for follow-up studies disappears with it.

Unless you’re asking people who were directly affected by this environmental disaster, I’d guess that in no more than three years less than half of adult Americans will even be able to tell you what year the Blowout happened. (Quiz some stranger when you’re in line at the grocery store or Home Depot about what year 9/11 happened. I live in NY — you know, the state where it happened — and I’ve done this, and the results are as depressing as they are revealing.)

This is why I’m so pessimistic about the chances of a “Climate 9/11″ forcing us to “wake up” and take action on climate change. It would have to be such a gigantic, dramatic, and sudden event that there’s virtually no chance of it happening. About the only longer-lived thing that could do the trick would be an extremely fast melting of ice from Greenland and/or Antarctica that raised sea level enough in just a few years that it forced us to take emergency action to save/relocate major cities. And short of a big honkin’ meteorite hitting Antarctica, there’s just no way that will happen.

To answer the question at the end of the clip: Yes, in fact I have considered how much my world depends on petroleum based products.

In a recent blog posting, Michael Levi tackles the many-headed monster that is the job of estimating one critical aspect of China’s future in How Much Oil Will China Consume? While I recommend you read it all, as Levi shows how you can get wildly differing answers from competing, reasonable sounding assumptions, the post raises a much more serious issue: What will the intersection of China’s growth and peak oil look like?

Levi hints at this issue when he says (the comment in square brackets is mine):

There is actually one scary looking data point: the United States. Kopits observes that U.S. per capita oil consumption is 2.5 gallons per day, and notes that, geographically, China is much more like the United States. U.S. oil consumption is actually is dominated by transportation. The EIA projects that per capita Chinese GDP in 2020 will be about $17,500 (in 2008 USD). The United States was at that level around 1985. At that time, daily U.S. oil consumption for transportation was about 1.75 U.S. gallons per person. That does indeed scale close to Kopits’s projection for China [about 55 million barrels/day(!)]. This suggests that it will be economically unrealistic for China to follow the U.S. path – high oil prices would force them toward a model more like Korea’s or Japan’s before they could get very far.

You can read Stephen Kopits’ post and the ensuing discussion here.

A few observations on all this, especially the peak oil aspect…

While you can use various techniques to estimated China’s future oil consumption, I think the one Levi mentions above — using the US at a similar level of personal income as a gauge for transportation oil consumption — is reasonably solid. Clearly this makes a boatload of assumptions, though, from the exact nature of China’s infrastructure in 10 years to the personal preferences of Chinese consumers to (as Levi points out) the price of oil.

Guessing the price of oil in 2020 is a fool’s game; guessing how an economy as large and changing as quickly as China’s is will respond to that price is a damn fool’s game. We’ve seen a raft of predictions that the world oil market will tighten considerably in two to five years, which means higher prices and likely much more market volatility. (When there’s very little spare capacity in the world production of oil, then every glitch, like a hurricane shutting down production in the Gulf of Mexico or who knows what human stupidity interrupting exports from the Middle East, will send prices on yet another roller coaster ride.) Whether you’re convinced that this market tightness will be caused by peak oil or or you follow the “official” view from the IEA, among others, that’s it’s merely the result of our current underinvestment doesn’t much matter.[1]

I think it’s safe to say that as China’s oil consumption grows from its 2009 level of about 8.6 million barrels/day (nearly doubling since 2000; numbers are from the latest BP Statistical Review), it will run into a lot of resistance from oil prices that would be rising even if China’s oil consumption remained flat. Add in their rising consumption, and you get even higher prices and set off a long cascade of changes throughout their economy that will alter how their transportation infrastructure (much of it not yet built) evolves. Most obviously this means more electrification and more mass transit, which results on a higher share of their transportation being fueled with coal than we see in developed countries. Burning coal is definitely not a good thing, no matter where it’s done or for what reason, but economics will push China in that direction unless something very dramatic changes in the next few years.

In other words, I see no way China’s oil consumption will rise to anywhere near 55 million barrels a day in just 10 years. I would be surprised to see them hit the US’ current consumption of 18.6 million barrels/day, despite having more than four times the US’ population.

[1] My personal guesstimate is that it’s a combination of the two. Various companies probably have underinvested in oil field development, but that’s likely partially a function of the proximity of peak oil. Why spend billions on new facilities if peak oil is going to push up prices anyway and created a highly uncertain environment? And if your hesitation in spending pushes up prices, and therefore your revenues and profits, even more, why would you be in a rush to change that situation? (When supply isn’t constrained individual sellers have an incentive to sell more; post peak their incentives change.)

If you’ve spent any appreciable time delving into the minutiae of US energy statistics (and honestly, who hasn’t when perched in front of the computer, sleepless at 2AM?), you’ve no doubt encountered the US Department of Energy’s PECSS diagram (primary energy consumption by source and sector):

(Click here to see the home page for this diagram.)

This is easily one of the best single-page summaries that the DOE produces, simply because it includes so much information and shows so many relationships between sources and uses of energy.

In the spirit of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I’ve taken the data from another terrific DOE one-pager, Table 12.3 from the Annual Energy Review, and created a diagram that shows CO2 emissions instead of energy consumption:

A few notes on this diagram:

• The data is essentially a year old. The next edition of the AER will be released in July, according to the DOE. I will update and repost the chart when the new numbers are available.
• Note that this diagram shows only CO2 (and not other greenhouse gases), and it includes only emissions from the consumption of energy.
• The minuscule “other” category is municipal solid waste and coal coke net imports.
• I followed the basic approach of the PECSS diagram, in that I did not allocate the emissions from generating the electricity each sector consumes, but left it as its own sector. For example, in my diagram the residential sector’s 345.9 million tons of CO2 does not include the emissions from generating the electricity that the residential sector consumes. Doing so would add another 903.7 million tons of CO2 (yes, it more than triples the total for that sector — surprise!). That 903.7 figure comes from Table 12.3; it can’t be derived from the numbers in the diagram, so don’t bother trying. I will likely create a second version of this diagram that eliminates electricity generation as an explicit sector and allocates its emissions to those for the various fuels and each of the other sectors. I might not do this until the new AER comes out.
• I broke out residential and commercial into separate sectors because that’s the way the numbers are given in Table 12.3, and I think it makes more sense than lumping them together as the PECSS does.
• For those who always want to know such things: I made this diagram in PowerPoint.

Comments, criticisms, suggestions, etc. are welcome, of course.

Please take a minute to go see Oil Leak. Two Months Later….

Please go read this very long post by dougr on The Oil Drum about the BP Blowout and what’s really going on. I have no idea who dougr is, but s/he certainly sounds knowledgeable about undersea oil drilling. The post is extremely disturbing because of how well it seems to fit what we’ve already seen as well as the conclusions the poster reaches, e.g.:

What is likely to happen now?

Well…none of what is likely to happen is good, in fact…it’s about as bad as it gets. I am convinced the erosion and compromising of the entire system is accelerating and attacking more key structural areas of the well, the blow out preventer and surrounding strata holding it all up and together. This is evidenced by the tilt of the blow out preventer and the erosion which has exposed the well head connection. What eventually will happen is that the blow out preventer will literally tip over if they do not run supports to it as the currents push on it. I suspect they will run those supports as cables tied to anchors very soon, if they don’t, they are inviting disaster that much sooner.

Eventually even that will be futile as the well casings cannot support the weight of the massive system above with out the cement bond to the earth and that bond is being eroded away. When enough is eroded away the casings will buckle and the BOP will collapse the well. If and when you begin to see oil and gas coming up around the well area from under the BOP? or the area around the well head connection and casing sinking more and more rapidly? …it won’t be too long after that the entire system fails. BP must be aware of this, they are mapping the sea floor sonically and that is not a mere exercise. Our Gov’t must be well aware too, they just are not telling us.

All of these things lead to only one place, a fully wide open well bore directly to the oil deposit…after that, it goes into the realm of “the worst things you can think of” The well may come completely apart as the inner liners fail. There is still a very long drill string in the well, that could literally come flying out…as I said…all the worst things you can think of are a possibility, but the very least damaging outcome as bad as it is, is that we are stuck with a wide open gusher blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more. There isn’t any “cap dome” or any other suck fixer device on earth that exists or could be built that will stop it from gushing out and doing more and more damage to the gulf. While at the same time also doing more damage to the well, making the chance of halting it with a kill from the bottom up less and less likely to work, which as it stands now?….is the only real chance we have left to stop it all.

It’s a race now…a race to drill the relief wells and take our last chance at killing this monster before the whole weakened, wore out, blown out, leaking and failing system gives up it’s last gasp in a horrific crescendo.

We are not even 2 months into it, barely half way by even optimistic estimates. The damage done by the leaked oil now is virtually immeasurable already and it will not get better, it can only get worse. No matter how much they can collect, there will still be thousands and thousands of gallons leaking out every minute, every hour of every day. We have 2 months left before the relief wells are even near in position and set up to take a kill shot and that is being optimistic as I said.

Over the next 2 months the mechanical situation also cannot improve, it can only get worse, getting better is an impossibility. While they may make some gains on collecting the leaked oil, the structural situation cannot heal itself. It will continue to erode and flow out more oil and eventually the inevitable collapse which cannot be stopped will happen. It is only a simple matter of who can “get there first”…us or the well.

We can only hope the race against that eventuality is one we can win, but my assessment I am sad to say is that we will not.

The system will collapse or fail substantially before we reach the finish line ahead of the well and the worst is yet to come.

Again, please go read it all. This is a very long and detailed post, and the author goes into quite some detail about what to watch for in the coming days and exactly how this situation can deteriorate.

I know almost nothing about deep water oil drilling, so I have no way to judge the accuracy of this post except through looking for factual errors and inconsistencies. At that simple level the post seems to hold up. If anyone posted something like this on The Oil Drum and got the details substantially wrong s/he would be ripped apart, which hasn’t happened in this case.

If we assume the poster is 100% right, and we really are facing the possibility of a months or even years long gusher in the Gulf, it’s almost impossible to overstate the environmental impact on the Gulf Coast and everyone connected to it. In fact, it could be such an immense event that it just might be the catalyst for major change in US energy (and, by extension, climate) policy.

The International Energy Agency has released a new report about CCS (carbon capture and sequestration), a.k.a. coal’s Hail Mary Pass Attempt.[1]

From the press release:

Two years after the G8 leaders’ commitment to the broad deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) by 2020, significant progress has been made towards commercialisation of CCS technologies. Yet the 2008 Hokkaido G8 recommendation to launch 20 large-scale CCS demonstration projects by 2010 remains a challenge and will require that governments and industry accelerate the pace toward achieving this critical goal. This is one of the main findings of a new report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF), and the Global CCS Institute, to be presented to G8 leaders at their June Summit in Muskoka, Canada.

Analysis has shown that CCS is an essential component of a portfolio of technologies and measures to reduce global emissions and help avoid the most serious impacts of climate change. Together with renewable energy technologies, nuclear energy and greater energy efficiency, CCS contributes significantly to the least-cost route of reducing and stabilising the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Over the past two years, governments have made substantial financial commitments, totalling over USD 26 billion in funding for large-scale, integrated demonstration CCS projects and, by 2020, plan to facilitate the launch of between 19 and 43 of those projects. “This level of commitment is very promising, as government support is vital to helping projects under development overcome the final hurdles,” said IEA Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka. Victor Der, chairman of the CSLF Policy Group, said: “By any measure, governments and stakeholders have made impressive strides toward promoting CCS technologies and encouraging the collaboration and sharing of information necessary to foster the broad, global advancement of CCS. As this report indicates, we are moving steadily from R&D to commercialisation of effective, deployable CCS technologies.”

The report integrates a recent study commissioned by the Global CCS Institute, which identified 80 large-scale integrated CCS projects at various stages of development around the world. Five of these are in operation at present, and one new project has been launched and is proceeding to construction and a significant number could well proceed to launching and construction in the coming years. Notable efforts can be found in the United States, Canada, Australia and the European Union, particularly the United Kingdom. Projects are also under development for example in China and the Middle East. “The growing number of projects under development around the world demonstrates that increased action is being taken,” said Nick Otter, chief executive officer of the Global CCS Institute. “Rapid progress towards operation of those projects is now required if CCS is to be on-track for broad deployment by 2020.”

The report itself is freely available here [44 page, 1.7MB PDF].

I have yet to read the report cover to cover, but let me offer a few observations, some directly related to this document, some more oriented toward CCS in general:

• I referred to CCS as coal’s attempt at a Hail Mary pass, and it is. Without broadly applicable and economically competitive CCS, there is no future for coal as an energy source, period.
• The IEA report is a curious piece of work, in that it focuses very narrowly on the technical aspects and the kind of new-technology issues one would expect, like how soon a critical mass of large-scale demonstration plants can be put into service and the need for a strong public policy push (e.g. direct funding, enacting a mechanism to price carbon emissions) . But it apparently ignores some of the gigantic hurdles between our current situation and the widespread use of CCS on new and existing coal plants, most notably cost. Again, this is from a quick skim of the document plus numerous searches of the PDF; if you think I mischaracterized anything in the document, please feel free to say so.
• The cost of CCS is really two separate issues. The first is what it costs to use it on a brand new plant that hasn’t been built yet. A key component here is location, since you can’t just C the carbon, you have to have a good place to S it, as well. For a new plant, you can take that additional factor into account and avoid the really bad locations, possibly by accepting the cost of new transmission lines to put a plant in a sequestration-friendly location, but you’re still left with something like a 30% reduction in electricity generation over a comparably sized plant of the same technology without CCS.
  

  The second issue, which I’ve talked about before, is the cost of retrofitting plants that were not designed, located, or built with CCS in mind. Those legacy plants, the “installed base”, in computer terms, present a gigantic problem. It’s clear that not all of those plants will be retrofitted, since the cost would be astronomical in at least some instances. Those plants that can’t be retrofitted with CCS at a “reasonable” cost will likely be decommissioned before they reach their intended service lifetime and will have to be replaced with some other form of generation, thereby increasing the per-unit cost of electricity. No matter how you slice and dice the numbers, CCS will be anything but cheap, even if you make some very generous assumptions about how well we can solve its technical issues.

• China is barely mentioned (although the report does point out that 4 of the 80 demonstration projects in some stage of development are in China), and India isn’t mentioned at all. I will leave as an exercise for the reader an evaluation of what our chances are of avoiding catastrophic climate change impacts without both of those countries deploying massive retrofit operations on their still very quickly growing fleets of coal plants. As a brief reminder of what’s going on in those countries and the US:
  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  
  

  Notice that as of 2007 India’s coal-fired generation is nearly a third of the US’s, and China’s is actually greater. I would guess that based on the shape of the purple wedges on those three graphs that the situation in 2010 is considerably worse.

• All of the material I’ve seen on CCS talks about capturing and sequestering roughly 90% of the CO2 emissions from coal plants. This isn’t the windfall that it seems. If you look at the history of US CO2 emissions from energy consumption, you’ll see that we had roughly 5 billion metric tons in 1990 (the universally adopted baseline for calculating needed reductions) and 6 billion in 2007. With a goal of an 80% reduction by 2050, that leaves the US needing to shed 5 billion tons/year.
  

  If you make a magic wand assumption and instantly convert 100% of coal fired electricity generation to 90% effective CCS with zero-leakage transport and storage, then based on our current mix of CO2 sources, that buys us roughly 1.8 billion tons of emissions reductions (90% of the 1.979 emitted from coal-fired electricity generation), dropping the US to 4.2 billion tons/year and needing to find another 3.2 billion tons.

  If you assume that we can apply CCS to all fossil fuel fired electricity generation (which would make our magic wand even more magical) at the same level of effectiveness, then we realize savings of roughly 2.2 billion tons/year, with our total emissions falling to 3.8 billion tons/year, 2.8 billion tons/year short of our goal.

  Those additional reductions would have to come from some mix of cuts in emissions from stationary sources (residential: 1.25 billion tons/year; commercial: 1.09; and industrial: 1.63), and transportation: 2.01. I’ll leave it up the reader as another exercise to figure out the most economical and politically viable cuts that can be made to achieve the needed goal. And remember that 2050 is not the finish line, but a critical milestone on the way to zero CO2 emissions.

  Despite what one might reasonably conclude, my point here is not to depress readers into a near-suicidal funk. My dragging you through all these numbers is an attempt to stress two things: First, even with wildly successful CCS technology in hand and a rollout at a blistering pace, it will be expensive and it will require the US to do a lot more heavy lifting in other areas. The situation in China and India is even more problematic, given their continued breakneck expansion of their coal fired generation. Second, how can we possibly consider using coal for anything other than samples in museum exhibits if we can’t achieve stunning technical and economic success with CCS, and very soon? Take away any significant portion of those magic wand savings above and it only increases the burden on other sectors and sources and creates almost unimaginable pressure to abandon existing coal plants and close the gap with cleaner generating options and efficiency savings. The math of climate change is every bit as unforgiving and suffocating as is that of peak oil.

• Where does this leave us? I’m not at all optimistic about the future of CCS, at least as much for economic as technical reasons. But if I’m sitting in the Kirk Chair at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. (and the very thought of it scares me even more than it does you), I would enthusiastically and publicly support major funding for research into CCS and the development of pilot projects. Sometimes, as when you’re reduced to throwing a Hail Mary pass, your optimal path isn’t necessarily one you would consider good, and sometimes the pass actually works.

[1] For those who are not fans of American football, a “Hail Mary Pass” is a term coined in the 1970’s by American football star Roger Staubach to refer to a last-second, low-probability desperation play that has to succeed to avoid a defeat.

Disaster in the Amazon:

BP’s calamitous behavior in the Gulf of Mexico is the big oil story of the moment. But for many years, indigenous people from a formerly pristine region of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador have been trying to get relief from an American company, Texaco (which later merged with Chevron), for what has been described as the largest oil-related environmental catastrophe ever.

“As horrible as the gulf spill has been, what happened in the Amazon was worse,” said Jonathan Abady, a New York lawyer who is part of the legal team that is suing Chevron on behalf of the rainforest inhabitants.

It has been a long and ugly legal fight and the outcome is uncertain. But what has happened in the rainforest is heartbreaking, although it has not gotten nearly the coverage that the BP spill has.

What’s not in dispute is that Texaco operated more than 300 oil wells for the better part of three decades in a vast swath of Ecuador’s northern Amazon region, just south of the border with Colombia. Much of that area has been horribly polluted. The lives and culture of the local inhabitants, who fished in the intricate waterways and cultivated the land as their ancestors had done for generations, have been upended in ways that have led to widespread misery.

…

A brief filed by the plaintiffs said: “It deliberately dumped many billions of gallons of waste byproduct from oil drilling directly into the rivers and streams of the rainforest covering an area the size of Rhode Island. It gouged more than 900 unlined waste pits out of the jungle floor — pits which to this day leach toxic waste into soils and groundwater. It burned hundreds of millions of cubic feet of gas and waste oil into the atmosphere, poisoning the air and creating ‘black rain’ which inundated the area during tropical thunderstorms.”

The quest for oil is, by its nature, colossally destructive. And the giant oil companies, when left to their own devices, will treat even the most magnificent of nature’s wonders like a sewer. But the riches to be made are so vastly corrupting that governments refuse to impose the kinds of rigid oversight and safeguards that would mitigate the damage to the environment and its human and animal inhabitants.

Go read it all for more on the hidden cost of oil. “Hidden”, that is, from those who choose to look away and cling to business as usual.

This onging delusion that converting from gasoline (or diesel) powered motor vehicles to ones running on natural gas as a way to dramatically reduce CO2 emissions just won’t die. And Edison knows I’ve done my best to squash it.

Looks like my work here is anything but done…

GM Places Bet on Natural Gas-Powered Vehicles:

Automakers have had a mixed history with natural gas in the United States, but General Motors Co. is betting that a new line of fleet vans can bring the technology back.

The automaker is rolling out compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) alternatives to the Chevrolet Express and GMC Savana. The two full-sized vans are designed for those who must haul large amounts of equipment but don’t need to drive long distances.

The new vans will be available for the 2011 model year. Pricing hasn’t yet been released.

“We’re listening to our fleet customers and dealers about offering options that help them achieve their business objectives,” said Brian Small, general manager of GM’s fleet and commercial operations, in a release. “The industry commitment to expand the CNG and LPG infrastructure in key fleet markets was an enabler to allowing us to introduce these options now.”

…

The vans can also have a significant environmental impact.

The center did a study for AT&T, which plans to convert 15,000 fleet vehicles to green technology. Researchers found that once the company replaced those vehicles with either hybrid or CNG vans, there would be savings of 31,533 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year, roughly the equivalent of taking 5,776 cars off the road. If half the country’s corporate fleets adopt the same strategy, it would be the same as cutting 1.2 million vehicles from the road.

Give me a few seconds to bang my head on the nearest wall.

Here’s a few tips on how to read an article like this:

• When it quotes just absolute values, like the amount of CO2 emissions avoided, the first thing you should ask yourself is: How big is the percentage? The second thing you should ask is: Is that percentage savings enough to justify all the costs involved in doing whatever it is that’s under discussion.
• You should also question why the people and organizations involved are behaving as reported. In this case, it very likely has nothing to do with reducing emissions. It’s a move based on two things: Brute force economics (NG is cheaper and will be much more stable in price than gasoline or diesel fuel), and greenwashing (the public has largely bought off on the idea that NG vehicles emit dramatically less CO2 than conventional vehicles, so when a company has its people drive around in trucks with “This vehicle is powered by clean natural gas!” plastered on all sides, it makes them look good).
• Never forget the inescapable basic details. In this case, it’s the fact that NG vehicles emit 20 to 25% less CO2 per mile driven compared to equivalent gasoline or diesel vehicles.

This kind of conversion might very well make good economic sense for an individual company, but for the economy as a whole it’s a non-starter. The cost and time lag involved in converting even a small portion of the US vehicle fleet to NG would be non-trivial, to say the least, and we would have to abandon NG as a fuel as soon as we got even partway through the adoption process, simply because the CO2 savings it would deliver aren’t nearly enough given the level of reduction needed.

In Perspective: Visualizing the BP Oil Disaster

Enter your zip code on the above page and see what the BP Blowout looks like centered on your neighborhood. If all you’ve seen is the photos of it in the Gulf, you might be surprised when you see how big it looks in a different context…

Government review to examine threat of world resources shortage:

Ministers have ordered a review of looming global shortages of resources, from fish and timber to water and precious metals, amid mounting concern that the problem could hit every sector of the economy.

The study has been commissioned following sharp rises in many commodity prices on the world markets and recent riots in some countries over food shortages.

There is also evidence that some nations are stockpiling important materials, buying up key producers and land and restricting exports in an attempt to protect their own businesses from increasingly fierce global competition.

Several research projects have also warned of a pending crisis in natural resources, such as water and wildlife, which have suffered dramatic losses due to over-use, pollution, habitat loss, and, increasingly, changes caused by global warming.

…

Resources under scrutiny by the UK government do not include the already heavily studied oil industry, nor ecosystem services such as flood defences, but the range was still “vast”, Dolley, said.

“It’s a hot topic because other countries are also thinking of this [and] doing a lot of work,” he added.

For years, experts have warned of the threat of peak oil to both the world economy and international political stability if countries go to war to secure access to fossil fuels.

However, there is now also increasing concern about a range of other resources, including a report by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development in December that the European commission has commissioned a review of 49 strategically important resources it believes are at risk.

Among the countries known to be stockpiling resources, Japan has said it is storing supplies of seven rare metals it believes are “essential to modern life and industry”.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, James Bacchus, the chairman of the WTO’s appelate body, said China was also “hoarding rare elements and other raw materials”, but so were many other countries and there had also been a “sharp increase” in actions to protect national resources worldwide.

…

In a written statement to the Guardian, the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, which is also on the report’s steering group, said: “The Department for Business looks forward to reading the report from the AEA on the future of material resources.

“It is important to assess the long-term viability of resources to help protect businesses in the future.”

They’re worried about “businesses in the future”? And they’re looking at just some of the critical resources (and specifically not oil)? It’s still probably better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, I suppose.

As for the international aspect of this situation, I think there’s almost no way that this doesn’t add up to a death knell for globalization as we’ve come to know it. When resources get tight and waste sinks become full, and some countries perceive that some other countries aren’t doing their fair share, expect to see much more hoarding, the imposition of carbon tariffs, and general diplomatic mayhem as we suddenly find governments at odds not just with other governments, but with corporations based or operating within their borders. And that’s before various countries or factions decide to go it alone with one or more geohacking schemes. Imagine the hilarity that will ensue when we get to that point, which I’ll take a SWAG and peg at roughly the year 2020.

Oh, and not to let anyone think I’ve overlooked the most obvious form of resource clash — there will surely be localized fighting over water.

Oceans’ fish could disappear in 40 years: UN:

The world faces the nightmare possibility of fishless oceans by 2050 unless fishing fleets are slashed and stocks allowed to recover, UN experts warned Monday.

“If the various estimates we have received… come true, then we are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish,” Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN Environment Program’s green economy initiative, told journalists in New York.

A Green Economy report due later this year by UNEP and outside experts argues this disaster can be avoided if subsidies to fishing fleets are slashed and fish are given protected zones — ultimately resulting in a thriving industry.

The report, which was opened to preview Monday, also assesses how surging global demand in other key areas including energy and fresh water can be met while preventing ecological destruction around the planet.

UNEP director Achim Steiner said the world was “drawing down to the very capital” on which it relies.

However, “our institutions, our governments are perfectly capable of changing course, as we have seen with the extraordinary uptake of interest. Around, I think it is almost 30 countries now have engaged with us directly, and there are many others revising the policies on the green economy,” he said.

Climate change played major role in mass extinction of mammals 50,000 years ago, study finds:

An international team of scientists has discovered that climate change played a major role in causing mass extinction of mammals in the late quaternary era, 50,000 years ago. Their study, published in Evolution, takes a new approach to this hotly debated topic by using global data modelling to build continental ‘climate footprints.’

“Between 50,000 and 3,000 years before present (BP) 65% of mammal species weighing over 44kg went extinct, together with a lower proportion of small mammals,” said lead author Dr David Nogues-Bravo from the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate in University of Copenhagen. “Why these species became extinct in such large numbers has been hotly debated for over a century.”

…

The study shows that climate change had a global influence over extinctions throughout the late quaternary, but the level of extinction seems to be related to each continent’s footprint of climate change. When comparing continents it can then be seen that in Africa, where the climate changed to a relatively lesser extent there were fewer extinctions. However, in North America, more species suffered extinction, as reflected by a greater degree of climate change.

…

This research has important implications for the current study of climate change, not only in revealing the role of the climate in causing extinction in mammals, but also by demonstrating how the effect will be different across regions and continents.

“Our results show that continents with the highest ‘climate footprints’ witnessed more extinctions then continents with lower ‘climate footprints’. These results are consistent across species with different body masses, reinforcing the view that past climate changes contributed to global extinctions.”

Loop current is now drawing the BP oil disaster to Florida Keys:

On May 6 I wrote, “the dispersant-laced oil spill may soon be entrained in the Loop Current, which is part of the Gulf Stream, sweeping it toward the Florida Keys, home to America’s biggest coral reef” (see “Out of Sight: BP’s dispersants are toxic — but not as toxic as dispersed oil“).

Now that worst-case scenario has played out. And as meteorologist Jeff Masters explains:

The latest surface current forecasts from NOAA’s HYCOM model show that oil could continue pouring into the Loop Current for most of the rest of the week. It is highly uncertain how diluted the oil might get on its voyage to northwestern Cuba and the Florida Keys this week, but the possibility for a major ecological disaster in the fragile Keys ecosystem cannot be ruled out.

For my earlier post, I spoke to toxicologist Carys Mitchelmore, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, an expert on the impact of dispersants and dispersed oil on marine life.

She is particularly concerned about corals because they are “under siege from multiple sources, including human sewage, metal pollution, and of course they are dealing with issues from global climate change including warming and ocean acidification.” See for instance, “Nature Geoscience study: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred.”

Autoblog Green has an eyebrow raising story about a projection of EV sales success in the US,

New study expects electric vehicles to only be 2-5% of market by 2020:

A new study from Deloitte Consulting predicts that market acceptance of electric vehicles (EVs) will be much more limited than projections from companies like Nissan and Tesla Motors. Nissan and alliance partner Renault are betting big that electric cars will be huge and for Tesla that is the only option.

Deloitte blames the continued high cost of batteries and limited driving range for what it projects will be about 2-5 percent market penetration by the end of the decade. The consulting firm is projecting that batteries will drop to about $600 per kilowatt-hour which would still put the 24 kWh pack in the Nissan Leaf at $14,400. Some reports put the battery pack’s price at just $9,000 today.

The link in the end of the quote above points to another ABG article that says the current price of the Nissan battery pack is about $375/kWh.

But even beyond that detail, the number one question I have (and I can’t find the study so I can answer it myself) is: What did the consulting company assume the price of gasoline would be in 10 years? If they followed the more or less standard practice of assuming the price (inflation adjusted) would be $3/gallon in the US, then this study is very likely not worth the cost of the electricity needed to display the PDF on your screen.

As we get further into this merged energy and environmental mess we’ve created, I’m convinced that the practice of making a single projection based on one set of assumptions is nearly useless. The only approach that even remotely seems rational is to look at combinations of the most critical inputs; in this case, that might be a 3×3 grid of low, medium, and high prices for both batteries and gasoline. (Any carbon mitigation policies would likely have the effect of increasing the price of gasoline, so they could be folded in to those scenarios very easily.)

There’s also the “if X happens, we’re screwed, so we won’t let X happen” factor. If EV acceptance is that low, and there’s no other offsetting breakthrough, like a massive roll out of algae-derived, essentially carbon neutral motor vehicle fuels, then we’ll have utterly failed to contain CO2 emissions from the transportation sector and we will indeed be screwed beyond all recognition. Therefore, we won’t let that happen and we’ll intervene with public policy in the form of a higher price on carbon and/or incentives to buy EVs, that unscrew us.

Bill McKibben’s latest book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, has been on a lot of radar screens (including mine) for a while. At this point in time, a book with that title and written by someone of McKibben’s stature in the field pegs the needle on the “must read” gauge, as much as any book would with the possible exception of a new edition of Limits to Growth.[1] In fact, when my copy arrived I put all other reading aside and jumped right into Eaarth.

The result is an excellent book, but one with a haunting lacuna that arguably reveals as much about our situation as does anything McKibben wrote or has said about the book in interviews.

Eaarth continues the narrative thread that stretches all the way back to McKibben’s first book, The End of Nature, published in 1989, just one year after James Hansen’s famous testimony before Congress about global warming. (For a little context, see this brief review of The End of Nature, as well as McKibben’s Wikipedia entry.) The book also continues the train of thought from Paul Crutzen’s and Eugene F. Stoermer’s coining of the term “Anthropocene” in 2000, to refer to the period since the late 1700’s when human activities began influencing the climate through the emission of greenhouse gases.[2] Roll all this growing awareness of our situation together, and the result is inescapable: Not only are we not in Kansas any more, but we got to wherever we are via our own doing, however inadvertent. Furthermore, we’re just now figuring out all the ways in which our new neighborhood isn’t nearly as nice as the Kansas of our childhood.

Readers familiar with his previous work won’t be surprised to learn that McKibben doesn’t resort to hackneyed narrative tricks. There’s nothing revolutionary or conspicuously novel about how McKibben approaches this huge and critical topic. He generally follows the general format for any book that addresses our sustainability situation and targets a mainstream audience:

• First, describe the problem and enough of its ramifications to provide a meaningful context. Clearly there must be a problem; no author and publishing house would expend the time and money needed to produce a book that says everything is just peachy, nothing to see here, move along, or simply invents a problem. That would be far less interesting than even a “dog bites man” story; it would be the equivalent of a “dog urinates on hydrant” story.
• Second, address the path forward by making the case for one or more solutions and how to implement them. This is the eternal flame of hope to which virtually all authors and readers of such material are drawn. Authors think they have a solution to a huge and important problem, and many readers, some already familiar with the situation to some extent, are looking for answers.

McKibben does an outstanding job in the first part of this formula. He explains in painful detail how we’re just starting to see the signs that we’re on Eaarth, and not Earth, and presents evidence linking those changes to our own historical actions over the last couple of centuries. He keeps the pedantry and preachiness under control, something I can say from personal experience is much harder than it seems at times, and he avoids burying the reader in stats. I think it’s accurate to say that McKibben is more of a “word guy” than a “numbers guy”, but he clearly doesn’t shy away from hard data in this book.

No small contributor to the success of the book overall is McKibben’s writing skill. I would argue that there are many spots in McKibben’s book where his narrative style and command of metaphors are so good that only another writer who’s struggled with the same material will truly appreciate the performance aspect of this book.[3] He even uses my favorite metaphor for our situation, on page 16:

We’re not, in other words, going to get back to the planet we used to have, the one on which our civilization developed. We’re like the guy who ate steak for dinner every night and let his cholesterol top 300 and had the heart attack. Now he dines on Lipitor and walks on a treadmill, but half his heart is dead tissue.

One of the challenges of writing about climate change is that it’s such a broad subject that it forces you to include water, food, and energy issues, at a minimum. In trying to boil down all that material and make the case for the urgency of our situation, it’s very easy to succumb to passion for the topic and oversell the facts; see any number of doomer web sites for copious examples of this phenomenon, one that I’m convinced does far more harm than good in educating and activating mainstream consumers and voters. McKibben avoids this pitfall, and it’s one of the few books I’ve read where I can’t think of a single example of his saying something that I would have shunned outright or failing to mention some connection or detail that I think was “required”.

One nano-quibble comes on page 33 where McKibben talks about the interaction between peak oil and climate change.

In fact, one all-too-likely result of peak oil will be even more use of our most abundant fossil fuel, good old coal. And the certain result of using more coal will be… more global warming, since it’s the dirtiest of all the fossil fuels, producing twice the carbon dioxide of oil.

The problem here is a very subtle one: Many people in the US, including many in the ever-disappointing media, think the US still generates a sizable portion of our electricity with oil, when in fact it’s down to only 1 to 2%, thanks largely to the oil shocks of the 1970’s. (See Table 8.2a Electricity Net Generation: Total (All Sectors), 1949-2008) Therefore, quite a few readers will leap to the conclusion that McKibben is talking about replacing oil-fired generation with coal-fired plants. He’s right in saying we’ll face an enormous temptation to use more coal, but it won’t be for pushing electrons, but running motor vehicles. We’ve known for a long time how to convert coal to motor fuel, via CTL (coal to liquids) technology. (See Wikipedia: Fischer–Tropsch process) Once post-peak price increases permanently raise the price of gasoline to much higher levels than anything we’ve seen to date, the pressure to convert some of that insanely cheap US coal into something we can put into a fuel tank will be overwhelming, even at the price of even higher CO2 emissions per mile driven. It would have been helpful if this dynamic had been a little more explicit in the book.

On the second part of that formula — the solution and pathway stuff — McKibben is faced with a dilemma simply because he’s a major voice in this fight (arguably “the” major voice) and he’s writing for an audience likely in the hundreds of thousands to millions, not a blog entry that will be read by 12 friends and relatives. That means he can’t write a book that simply wallows in the problems; he has to address the solution part of the situation, even if there isn’t a “good” solution, i.e. one that’s cheap and politically easy enough to be readily implemented.

For something this complex, a solution is really multiple parts: The first is a vision of the new state we seek, which includes things as varied as infrastructure, consumption patterns, societal views, laws, regulations, and tax changes. That’s a tall order in this instance, but we also need a road map that details how we get from our current state to the more desirable one. I’m not asking for the exact pieces of legislation needed to reshape public policy and guide us in the desired direction, but at least a rough guide to how we make this happen. McKibben lays out a vision of the goal for this massive change that virtually everyone agrees we need to undertake in one form or another, described below, but doesn’t attempt to describe how we make the transition from our current Point A to his choice of Point B.

I can imagine people jumping in here and protesting that I’m demanding too much from one guy and one book. After all, if this were a simple problem with attractive solutions we would have dealt with it years ago. So while it’s inarguable that I’m asking a lot, I think it’s an entirely reasonable request, given the author, his long history of writing so effectively on this topic, and the urgency we face in 2010.

McKibben’s solution is to transform our economies and our mindset so that we can live “lightly, carefully, gracefully” on this new planet we’ve created. Specifically, he would push us toward much more localized economies. More local electricity generation, more local food production, more interaction with those strange, mythical creatures known as “neighbors”, even (gasp!) localized financial institutions so none (or fewer) are “too big to fail”. No one should assume from that description that McKibben’s inner Luddite has erupted and taken control of his keyboard; he’s clearly not a Luddite, and he even talks at some length about the role the Internet can play in a localized transformed world. If anything, I would say this is one place where his idealism nearly gets the better of him, and I don’t see the ‘net as being quite as positive a force as he does.

The problem, of course, is finding a way from our current model, which relies very heavily on economies of (often gigantic) scale coupled with cheap transportation[4], to one which is much less transportation intensive and anywhere from slightly to significantly more labor intensive, depending on the specific industry in question. Economies don’t undergo such deep and broad restructurings quickly or easily; it requires sustained pressure from the free market (i.e. price mechanism) and/or public policy over years or decades. That pressure has to be great enough to overcome the resistance to change, which in the case of the entities involved in our centralized energy and material goods sectors is almost impossible to overestimate. The portion of that pressure supplied by public policy can’t be perceived as a short-term side-effect of the latest election cycle that can be “undone at the ballot box”; the overwhelming majority of people, corporations, and institutions will have to accept that we really are no longer living on Earth before they’ll willingly make such dramatic changes to their business models and consumption patterns. In particular, the moneyed interests that are currently funding the denier war against climate change action will continue to do so, which will only slow the needed change in perception by mainstream voters and consumers.

McKibben surely sees these barriers to the kind and scope of change we so desperately need. So, one might ask, why doesn’t he talk about them? Where is the frank discussion of the social, political, and economic hurdles to be overcome, the rallying cry for us to organize simultaneous gridlock-inducing sit-ins on Washington DC and all 50 US state capitals? I don’t want to speak for McKibben or imply that I have any particular insight into his thoughts and motivations, but I suspect that if you could pry an honest answer out of him with some combination of truth serum, tequila, and blackmail threats involving photos of him being cordial toward James Inhofe, he would confess that he’s thought deeply about those barriers to change and become deeply pessimistic about our path forward. He would say that writing this book presented him with a terrible three-way choice: He could put on a cheery face and blatantly lie to the reader, justifying it to himself and his closest confidants as being in the best interest of the world to help keep everyone happily fighting the good fight; he could simply say, “We’re screwed beyond all hope”, knowing it would actually make some people stop fighting, a horrible price for a morsel of brutal honesty; or he could talk about Point A and Point B honestly and directly, simply not address how we find our way from here to there, hope the book does some good in terms of generally educating people, and deflect any such questions on the grounds that he wrote an explanation of where we stand, not a public policy book.

Again, this is speculation about McKibben’s innermost thoughts, but this gap in this book at this time leads me to believe that he’s arrived at essentially the same depressing conclusions that many others I’ve spoken with have expressed in private communications. For those of us both able and willing to see the ramifications of our past and ongoing actions, it’s all too obvious: We really have kicked our planet’s environment hard enough to move it off its cozy and familiar equilibrium and send it wandering through a succession of ever less convenient worlds. How we deal with that sobering fact will be the greatest challenge in human history.

[1] Just to be clear, there is no new edition of LtG in the works. I got this information directly from one of the authors of the prior editions. I think that’s a terrible loss, considering how important that book is to the general concept of sustainability and the rising urgency of our energy, climate change, water, food, and other issues.

[2] I remain convinced that even this view of our world is out of date already, or at a minimum, is underspecified. We’ve passed through a period of minor and benign influence on the environment into one in which we realize that we’re compelled by the ramifications of our past actions and self-interest to attempt to actively control the environment, to “lead measured lives on a managed planet”. This is the period I’ve called the Metricene, and I would trace its beginning to no later than James Hansen’s 1988 Congressional testimony [PDF], specifically the second paragraph, which begins “I would like to draw three main conclusions.”

[3] In prior comments on this site I’ve said that I really disliked the term “Eaarth”, even though I fully understood the rationale for renaming the whole planet and agreed with the point McKibben was trying to make. After reading the book, I don’t like the term any better, but it’s lost much of its fingernails on a chalkboard quality. And please don’t get nuts over my referring to McKibben’s work as “a performance”; all writing is a performance.

[4] That cheap transportation exists thanks to the insanely low price of the oil itself plus our failure to put a price on the CO2 emissions from burning it.

Julia Harte has an interesting, and slightly infuriating, piece up at SolveClimate.com, DOE Still Disavows Peak Oil Forecast, Despite New Studies:

The U.S. Department of Energy has long disavowed peak oil theory: the notion that annual world oil production will peak, plateau, and then enter a decline. But the agency’s stance appears increasingly at odds with the future predicted by many world energy analysts, including the US military.

In February, the United Kingdom Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security—a group comprised in part by renewable energy companies—published a report warning that global peak oil would probably occur within the next decade.

…

A few weeks after the joint force report came out, there was speculation that the DOE had endorsed peak oil theory after Glen Sweetnam, former director of the International, Economic and Greenhouse Gas division of the DOE’s Energy Information Administration (EIA), told French paper Le Monde that, “if the investment is not there,” world oil production could enter a “decline” by 2011.

Sweetnam has since left the EIA on a yearlong reassignment: a development unrelated to the interview he gave Le Monde, according to Lauren Mayne, a liquid fuels analyst at the agency.

Mayne clarifies that the EIA does not expect oil production to peak in 2011. When asked if the EIA expects to see oil production ever peak and diminish, Mayne replied that the agency does not anticipate a peak oil scenario resulting from supply shortages: “We do not see a peak, if a peak means a sharp retraction in oil production.”

In fact, Mayne argued, the world’s total projected oil consumption in 2030 “could be met, given current resource estimates.”

That claim is backed up, according to Mayne, by the EIA’s country-by-country estimate of future oil production. “Actual production, of course, will likely differ somewhat, but we do feel from an analytical basis that these production estimates are likely to progress in a way that’s shown” by EIA models, she said.

Those models predict significant production increases in several countries over the next two decades. In a presentation from a round-table of oil economists that Sweetnam presided over in April 2009, several graphs showed estimates of the world’s liquid fuels supply through 2030, and how production would change in the current top 15 oil-producing countries.

But all the estimates of project production were based on a “proprietary database,” according to Linda Doman, another forecaster at the EIA, and the exact numbers behind the charts cannot be released.

So it’s difficult to figure out how the agency derived, for example, the predictions that the United States will produce approximately 1,750,000 more barrels of oil per day in 2015 than it did in 2007, and approximately 2,700,000 more barrels per day in 2030 than in 2015.

You can directly download the PDF of the Sweetnam presentation mentioned above here.

My take on this general issue of “official” recognition of the reality and imminence of peak oil hasn’t changed much over the last few years. Some entities will keep up the “Peak oil? Pshaw! Don’t be silly! There’s nothing to worry your little head about” routine right up to the moment they can no longer sell it. In the first phase of this gambit, which we’ve pretty clearly passed, you simply ignore the possibility of peak oil. Anyone who talks about it is considered a loon, some fruit loop who lives in his mother’s basement and spends all night reading those wacky conspiracy theory web sites while dressed in his Doritos-encrusted Star Trek PJs.

But then we’re thrust into phase two thanks to things like the price of oil rise dramatically over a few years (even ignoring the infamous $147/barrel spike), and the steady thrum of stories about ultra deepwater oil exploration and other unconventional production (exactly what those blasted peak oil guys keep saying will happen as the easy oil can’t keep up with demand), and we have to adjust our stance a bit. Peak oil is still decades away and nothing to worry about, you see, but that nasty short-term market tightness that almost everyone is talking about in the 2012 to 2015 time frame has to be explained, so we’ll just blame it on a lack of investment — that’s it! It’s not a peak, it’s merely an “oil crunch.” We can start selling that spin now, and in particular blame it on the NOCs (national oil companies) that are owned by other countries.

Whatever we do, we can never talk about geological fossil fuel limitations presenting a hard limit to growth. It’s like Fight Club, only instead of taking place in the basement of Lou’s Bar and Grill, it will play out on Lou’s Blog (and a few hundred other online sites), plus, you know, real life.

I’m not sure exactly what phase three will look like. Presumably, once the oil crunch hits we’ll hear a lot from entities like the US Dept. of Energy about how they’ve been warning us for years that a lack of investment would cause problems. But what next? If people are paying $4 to $5/gallon for gasoline in the US, I can guarantee you that they won’t want to hear a lot of talk about investment rates five years ago. True to form, the US electorate will show all the patience of a fruit fly wacked out on Red Bull and demand the Someone Do Something About It Right Now. Aside from the utterly predictable pandering, like the US and various State governments green lighting drilling anywhere and everywhere the oil companies claim there’s an extra barrel to be had, I don’t know what form an official response or attempt to Do Something will take. (Prediction: The political right in the US will no doubt invent a way to try to blame it on the left and environmentalists, and at least 40% of population will actually believe that absurdist fairy tale.)

The real test will come once it becomes clear that there’s nothing we can do about it except manage our transition away from oil use as quickly and as close to painlessly as possible. It should make for some decidedly “interesting times” once people figure out that only is the age of cheap, easy oil over, but the age of affordable oil (for many) has evaporated with it.