James Hansen and the inexorable slide toward nuclear power.

On his Storms of My Grandchildren site, James Hansen talks about how intolerable coal-powered power stations are in any realistic future, and claims that:

in most countries, phase-out of coal emissions requires also a carbon-free source of baseload electric power that is competitive in price with coal. Until we have another way to meet 21st century energy needs while eliminating coal and carbon emissions, nuclear power appears to be the only option.

From this he infers that even nuclear power would be the lesser of these two evils, concluding that

The (“3rd generation”) nuclear technology ready to replace the aging 2nd generation reactors in the United States and other counties is inherently safer than existing nuclear power, which already has an exemplary safety record – however, it still burns less than one percent of the nuclear fuel and leaves a long-lived nuclear waste pile. Hansen recommends initiating urgent development of a fourth-generation nuclear power plant. These “fast” nuclear reactors utilize more than 99 percent of the fuel and can “burn” nuclear waste, thus solving the nuclear waste problem that concerns so many.

This doesn't seem to me to follow. Why is he so confident that these fourth-generation nuclear power plants are any less pie-in-the-sky than carbon capture? It's the first time I have heard anyone suggest that the problems of safety and spent nuclear fuel could be a thing of the past. I would very much like to hear Hansen's reasoning. Not that I would like CCS any more than him, but it doesn't make much sense to be asked to choose between two mirages.

But there's a more important assumption in Hansen's commentary. He argues that, if we are to avoid both fossil fuels and nuclear power, then we need 'a carbon-free source of baseload electric power that is competitive in price with coal'. It is certainly a most attractive option. However, my reading of the technical literature leads me to two conclusions. One, such an option will not exist for many years to come. And two, we can't afford to wait that long.

So how is it Professor Hansen can claim that the solution needs to be 'competitive in price with coal'? Given the magnitude of the potential problem - a series of disasters and creeping destruction that will dwarf any previous human experience short of, perhaps, a re-run of the global plague in the 14th century, surely this is like saying that we should have decided our strategy for the Second World War on the basis of whether it would have been as painless as peace.

Plainly this would be nonsense, and as in the case of WW2, there is little doubt what the consequences of continuing prevarication will be. Add to this the impact of ever-expanding resource depletion, ecosystems collapse and 40% more people by 2050, and waiting for another cheap energy source to come along sounds like madness. It would be nice if we were in a position to choose between cheap, friendly, familiar options, but we aren't. Meanwhile, our social, political and economic system is awash with people and interests for which an effective solution would be anathema, if not fatal.

Of course, we are not at war, and such metaphors are as likely to be misleading as helpful. But to pretend that we can reach Professor Hansen's own goals without paying a price and making preparations comparable to a war strikes me as unwarranted optimism, if not self-deception.

Tax breaks for accelerating Peak Oil

Yesterday's Financial Times includes an article by their Energy Editor, Ed Crooks entitled 'Tax breaks to lure oil and gas sector'. It reported that tax allowances of up to £160m per field will be made for developing an area west of the Shetland Islands that probably includes more than 2 billion barrels of oil.

Tax breaks on oil wells? What sense does this make? Oil companies are some of the richest on the planet, and subsidising them to drill is doubly stupid - in a world fast approaching (passing?) Peak Oil, this is foolish short-termism, and in a world that cannot afford to burn more than a small fraction of its remaining fossil fuels before it trips us into irreversible global warming, paying them extra to make sure it happens is simply bonkers.

So why are they doing it? It's a hard region to develop, so if the UK government wants oil money to continue flowing into the economy, they have to bribe oil companies to bring it here. Hence the tax breaks.

It's a characteristic environmental/resource problem that follows from a) the mass nature of many decision-marking processes (e.g., multiple nations and companies making related decisions in parallel) and b) the absence of effective overarching (e.g., global political or regulatory) systems capable of ensuring that the whole - the net impact of a mass of individually intelligible decisions - does not undermine the interests of us all.

And in this case, that is exactly what is happening: a hundred countries trying to attract investment for the sake of the employment, the tax revenues and the boost to GDP are collectively abandoning the responsibility for handing over a sustainable resource base to future generations and accelerating global warming. A thousand companies, all hungry for investment and struggling to maximise their returns, ravish the planet and resist even the most superficial controls.

But there's nothing unique about the oil industry: we subsidise a huge range of damaging and short-term practices (e.g., airline flights through tax breaks and indifference to 'externalities'). In fact governments and business have been 'managing' the economy between themselves for perhaps as long as there has been an 'economy' to manage. Monopolies, politically inspired subsidies, corruption are the normal practices of all major economies - all delivering short-term gains for state and business that destroy the long term interests of society. All that is new today is that these mechanisms are so powerful and so far of the leash that we are simultaneously creating an unprecedented threat to society's very survival and abandoning every tool we once had to manage such a problem.

Where does obsessive growth come from? Well, not consumerism, that's for sure

Contemporary society is widely described as consumerist, and when politicians and pundits are asked how we can control the endless expansion of the economy, their first hand-wringing response is that what ‘the consumer’ (a group that seems to have superseded ‘the voter’ as the arbiters of political policy) want is simply ‘more and more’. So growth is the only game in town.

The environmental implication of this frozen staring into the contemporary economy is simple: nothing can be done. Nothing can be done to prevent us driving right over the CO2/ resource/ ecosystem cliff, because ‘the consumer’ is king and ‘the consumer’ would not stand for not having more stuff, more holidays abroad, more everything.

This is mythology at its most deceitful – and, given its environmental implications, most disastrous.

Look at how the economic process that links consumers to the economy really works. Somewhere out there is someone – some billionaire, some bank – with a lot of money to invest. They build/buy a factory that makes some consumer goody – iPods, perhaps, or ‘designer’ jeans’, or the latest ‘taste sensation’. The new owner invests millions, maybe billions. They’ve invested millions in creating the product, millions more in setting up production, millions more paying managers and production line workers, millions more for natural resources and energy, millions more to create the supply chain that gets it into the shops.

The sole reason all this investment takes place is to make money – lots of money, and certainly more than the millions invested. Otherwise there is no profit. So they need people to buy their product. You and me. Hence the endless orgy of marginally differentiated goods and services, the interminable and increasingly in-your-face advertising, marketing, the lobbying, the focus groups, the viral messages.

Consumerism exists not because consumers want to buy but because companies need to sell. If they don’t invest more and more in manufacturing, services, energy, transport, and so on, there will be no returns on their capital. They go bankrupt. But if they do invest, then there must be sales. It is not consumerism that drives growth but capital’s need for a return - endlessly.

But why does this lead to growth rather than simply a ‘steady state’ economy in which we can continue to have what we have now? Or if we must expand, why can we not expand in directions that contribute to the sustainability and equity so many commentators – Nicholas Stern, Jonathan Porritt, George Monbiot, and many more - insist must be the goals of the 21st-century economy? The answer is quite simple: there are plenty of mechanisms built into the contemporary economy that enforce growth - whether or not we want it - but none of then involve doing anything for developing countries – unless, that is, they can pay as well as developed countries can.

Ironically, one of the key mechanisms for ensuring that growth will happen is the very efficiency improvements that so many pundits are relying on to reduce future growth. From society’s point of view it makes sense that, if we can produce the same goods and services by using less energy, less resources, with less damage to the atmosphere and the environment, then surely this is the way we should be going.

But from a capitalist perspective, there reverse is true. If I – just me, rather than my rivals – can use the same resources to produce more, then I will. I will not – could not – simply produce the same in a more environmentally benign way - the assumption of the pundits – because the goals of investment is to maximise profits, not minimise total costs. Given that I have already invested hugely in plant, resources, supply chains, marketing, and so on, many of my costs are already fixed, regardless of how much I actually produce. As a result, if I want to maximise my profits the only rational thing to way to exploit improved efficiency is to use the same investments still more intensively.

After all, I will still be paying fixed rent on my factory and offices, still paying the same fixed interest on my loans, and so on. The main variable costs come from the inputs (labour, materials, energy, transport, and so on) that I use to create actual goods and services. So if I want to maximise the profit I make from this enterprise, simple arithmetic dictates that I should increase the amount of stuff I make (i.e., increase my investment in resources, labour, energy, etc.), because the same fixed costs will now be spread over more units. That will minimise my unit costs, and so (other things being equal) increase my profits. Hurrah!


This logic becomes more compelling the more capitalism matures. History as a whole can be seen as humanity building and rebuilding society with more and more fixed capital – roads, education systems, hospitals, technology, and so on – so that each generation is blessed with a greater stock of means to its ends. In a rational universe this would lead to societies in which, having satisfied its ‘basic’ wants, humanity might not ever quite lose its appetite for progress, but it would at least be able to decide exactly what progress meant.

In our present position, this would surely mean the very commitment to sustainability and equity referred to above. But again, capitalism bucks the trend. As the level of fixed investment needed even to join the game grows – the size of a new car plant, the cost of R+D, and so on – the more fixed costs dominate, the more units that must be sold to cover them, and the more compelling the need to grow becomes.

There are whole countries devoted to this model. China, for example, has put overwhelming emphasis on manufacturing for export – feeding the West’s addictions before developing its own. But there is little reason to believe that even China’s authoritarian government will be able to resist the logic of capitalist investment. And no doubt the boys from Goldman Sachs – or whatever their Chinese incarnation turns out to be – will, for a handsome fee, show them how to lock the handcuffs on themselves.

So growth won’t be ending any time soon. On the contrary, there is only acceleration ahead. Our despoliation of the planet won’t be quite as rapid – those efficiency gains are real (because they are profitable) and neither public nor governments are quite helpless. But until we recognise exactly what the link between capitalism, growth and our all too unpleasant environmental fate is, there is no turning back.

Welcome to the machine.

The Coming Shortage Of All The World's Most Important Industrial Metals

To read André Diederen's deeply scary presentation, 'Metal minerals scarcity and the Elements of Hope' (presented at the ‘Peak’ Summit, Alcatraz, Italy, June 27, 2009 and republished by Business Insider), click on the title of this post.

In essence: all the major metals on which western economies rely will peak within the next few decades. And then... To quote verbatim the conclusion:

1. Less affordable mass electronic products
2. Forget large-scale conversion towards alternative energy sources
3. Forget large-scale electrification of land-based transport
4. Chemical compounds will become more expensive
5. Construction and machining will become more expensive
6. Metals scarcity will aggravate energy scarcity

I think 2, 3 and 6 are quite enough. But there will be no Copenhagen for resource depletion until it is far too late, because all the key resources are owned by corporations or national governments. The USA and EU are especially exposed, and especially exposed to China - an almost equally scary idea.

As for Diederen's proposed solution:

1. Use less or “managed austerity”
2. Longer product lifetime
3. Recycling and reuse of materials
4. Substitution of materials
5. Develop adapted new products
6. Stockpiles

Hard to see how any of this can be achieved under the current economic regime:

1. Use less or 'managed austerity' - In a production/consumption-driven capitalist economy?
2. Longer product lifetime - As above.
3. Recycling and reuse of materials - Possibly, but the maths of exponential growth means this will only put of the peak by a few years. Has no one learned from the Limits to Growth?
4. Substitution of materials - With what? How often can metallic materials be replaced with non-metallic materials? Sometimes...
5. Develop adapted new products - OK if these can be made profitable - and do not themselves involve any of the key materials. Hard to imagine.
6. Stockpiles - Given the above, what will there be left to stockpile?

Finally, the effect of materials shortages and the domination all this hands to undemocratic governments and global corporations will be to undermine the possibility this very solution ever being carried out.

Very few 'elements of hope', I think.

http://www.businessinsider.com/energy-and-mineral-production-on-a-permanent-downward-spiral-2009-12#economies-are-growing-exponentially-which-is-the-root-cause-of-resource-strain-1

The Limits to Growth

Just about the most convincing – and scary - book I ever read about the environment was The Limits to Growth. I would guess that everyone has heard of this book but my impression is that relatively few people have ever read it, or the two follow-up volumes. I read it when it first came out – almost four decades ago – and then again a few months back.

The book was written by a group of MIT researchers - Donella and Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William Behrens – and published in 1972 by the Club of Rome. The timing is interesting, as the first edition of The Limits to Growth is roughly contemporary with a number of other foundation texts in the overall environmental movement. 1971 saw the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, which gave the growing concern with population growth a kick start. Then in 1972 Barbara Ward and the well-known anthropologists René Dubos published Only One Earth – a sort of semi-official UN report that attracted a lot of attention. And then in 1974, M. King Hubbard gave what was perhaps his most important summary of the position on oil and energy production, namely his testimony to Congress on the peaking of US oil production.

The reason I found The Limits to Growth so compelling – even more than Only One Earth or Silent Spring - was the simplicity and centrality of the question it posed and the directness of the method its authors used to answer it. Instead of endless facts and figures and yet another multi-faceted discussion of our environmental predicament, they simply asked what would happen if humanity at large continued with a small number of key trends:

• World population.
• Industrialization.
• Pollution.
• Food production.
• Resource depletion.

Their method was equally straightforward – so much so that, had I felt very doubtful about its validity when I first heard about it. They started with a very generalised model of these factors - the ‘World3’ model developed by Professor Jay Forrester (also from MIT). This is described in Forrester’s World Dynamics (published the previous year), which used a ‘system dynamics’ approach. This was really a very simple model - basically a suite of functional interactions (circular, interlocking, sometimes time-delayed relationships, etc.) between what the modellers regarded as the key social and natural phenomena. World3 was based on large, long-term factors, which it defined in self-consciously simple and gross terms, without much detail. It made little attempt to explain why these interactions were as they were.

When tracking what happened when the trends they were interested in unfolded, the Limits to Growth team were not looking for trouble. They made strongly optimistic assumptions when in doubt, and took into account most of the qualifications critics usually offer about predictions of environmental doom and gloom – resource substitution, the power of innovation, and so on. On the other hand, they did assume that all these factors tend towards compound growth - which is to say, that they grow by a constant percentage, and constantly accelerate, not by a constant amount, which would lead only to regular increments of the same size. They also interact with one another, which has the effect of overshoots and disruptions in one undermining the others.

A typical outcome of the model went like this:

1. Population cannot grow without food.
2. Food production can only be increased by growth of capital.
3. Creating more capital requires extracting and processing more resources.
4. Discarded waste from resource extraction, refining and usage become pollution.
5. Pollution interferes with the growth of both population and food.
6. So the system tends towards eventual collapse of both population and food production.

It’s crucial to understand that this collapse happens not only because a specific input is damaged or reduced (which might be ameliorated by resource substitution, innovation, etc.) but because the system undermines itself. That is, the initial success of the system destroys the conditions for its continuing success. This is, I think, why it makes relatively little difference to assume that we will eventually find far more resources than are currently expected, or that we can continue to have cheap energy.

The authors made multiple runs of the model based on different assumptions. Although, like most futurologists, they avoided claiming to be making strict predictions, the consistency of the outcomes is quite frightening enough.

The book analyses quite a few scenarios (though only a fraction of those actually run, apparently). The starting point was ‘business as usual’, which led to the following outcomes:

1. Massive industrial growth depletes resources.
2. Resource prices then rise and stocks are depleted.
3. So more capital used for obtaining resources, leaving less for growth.
4. Eventually investment cannot keep up with depreciation.
5. With that, the industrial base collapses, taking with it the service and agricultural systems, the tax base for government, and so on.
6. However, population keeps rising, so the death rate is driven upward by lack of food and health services.

Radical collapse comes ‘well before the year 2100’.

As I say, the authors presented other scenarios in which:

• Nuclear power is cheap and safe.
• We manage to discover vastly increased resources.
• Innovation and technology allow much reduced pollution.
• Agricultural yields are greatly improved.

And so on. By and large, these optimistic assumptions mean that the eventual collapse is delayed by a decade or two – never more.

Here’s another typical example: the Green Revolution. This has indisputably increased food production, but at a price. The specialised seeds require a great deal of fertiliser and water. The former accelerates fossil fuel use and depletion, while the latter extracts more water than natural systems can sustain. In addition, the need for extensive capital also leads to peasant farmers being evicted from the land by their landlords, and hundreds of thousands of landless peasants end up in Mumbai, Kolkata, Sao Paulo or Mexico City, where they have no resources and no relevant skills from what they might earn a living. This increases pressure on urban systems and causes fertile land to be built over by slums.

The increase in capital requirements – tractors, petrol, fertiliser, shipping etc. – needed to operate the Green Revolution hugely depletes resources, including oil and natural gas. What is worse, the intensive treatment of the soil under a monoculture régime means that it becomes less able to support any other sort of agriculture, so the system becomes even more locked into an inherently unsustainable ‘solution’, and by this remarkable ‘advance’ we have managed to convert what one would have thought was an inherently renewable resource – fertile soil – into a non-renewable resource. Aren’t we clever? Meanwhile, the planet’s carbon footprint is made that little bit bigger, global warming is given that small extra shove upwards, and the glaciers that feed the irrigation systems that feed the crops melt that little bit faster. More jam today, but not only less jam tomorrow but also a lot less ability to manage having less jam tomorrow.

More generally, the consistent result reported by The Limits to Growth was overshoot and collapse. If the present trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue, the limits to growth will be reached by 2070. The alternative scenarios only delay collapse: all end by 2100. The most probable direct outcome will be sudden, uncontrollable falls in population and industry – in other words, the ‘hundreds of millions’ of deaths predicted by the Stern Report. Only The Limits to Growth predicted it all three and a half decades earlier.

The authors conclusions about the ‘business as usual’ scenario are stark:

The unspoken assumption behind all of the model runs we have presented in this chapter is that population and capital growth should be allowed to continue until they reach some ‘natural’ limit. This assumption also appears to be a basic part of the human value system currently operational in the real world. Given that first assumption, that population and capital growth should not be deliberately limited but should be left to ‘seek their own levels’, we have not been able to find a set of policies that avoids the collapse mode of behavior.

As so often, the reactions to the original publication illuminating not only for the welcome offered to this absolutely vital book but also by the disdain expressed by those who could see no further than the status quo. It was described as ‘the most fascinating and the most disturbing book’, and it was said that ‘if this doesn't blow everybody's mind who can read without moving his lips, then the earth is kaput’. But it was also described as ‘a piece of irresponsible nonsense’ and ‘an empty and misleading work’.

The authors reviewed their findings in updates published in 1992 and 2004. These books are worth reading in their own right, as they both go far beyond updating the original methods and finding. Their original conclusions, they find, were sound. They needed some qualifications, but by comparison with the critics who greeted the original publication with such scorn and the deniers by whom they are still surrounded, they seem to have been pretty much spot-on.

Nor is this merely their own opinion. In 2008 Graham Turner published a comprehensive re-evaluation of the data, and concluded that:

The analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compares favorably with key features of a business-as-usual scenario…, which results in the collapse of the global system midway through the 21^st century.

In other words, we have done nothing significant to deflect our fate.

So are there no scenarios that lead to a happy ending? Maybe - it depends on what makes you happy. If you want interminable consumerism, then no, there aren’t. If you ever wanted a ringside seat at the end of the world, consumerism represents the front row. But if you are willing to settle for mere sufficiency, to imagine that there might actually be an ‘enough’, then yes, a somewhat reduced standard of living – something like the 1940s or 1950s, it is said – is available for all. Not bad, given the alternative, and hardly desperate poverty by any standard. It’s not as though we are any happier than we were then, though it might take a bit of getting used to. Nor need it look quite like that slightly dismal era – we start from here, not there, and a great deal can be done with a 1950s carbon footprint, give the science and technology of the 21^st century.

But there is a lot to be done – population control, the end of ‘the American Way of Life’ (which surely represents the biggest threat to the planet since the last ice age), serious support for developing countries, and so on. But it’s hardly worth thinking about – we never have done anything about these things, we show no signs of doing anything about it, and we are led by politicians, media and business people with as much grasp of our situation and as much interest in dealing with it as a bucketful of molluscs.

But not to worry – it will soon be too late to deflect the worst effects of our own actions, so we won’t have to worry about it any more. Just die in our millions. If you have ever wondered what the fall of the Roman Empire looked like, stay tuned.

Read this book.

References

Ehrlich, P. (1971). The Population Bomb. Cutchogue, N.Y.: Buccaneer Books.

Forrester, J.W. (1971) World Dynamics. Cambridge, Mass.: Wright-Allen Press.

Hubbert, M.K. (1974). Testimony to Hearing on the National Energy Conservation Policy Act of 1974, hearings before the Subcommittee on the Environment of the committee on Interior and Insular Affairs House of Representatives. June 6, 1974. Published as The Nature Of Growth by Technocracy.org.

Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J. and Behrens III, W.W. (1972). The Limits to Growth. A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books.

Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, and J. (1992). Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future. Earthscan.

Meadows, D.H., Randers, J., and Meadows, D.L. (2004). The Limits to Growth: The 30-year Update. Earthscan.

Turner, G. (2008). A comparison of the Limits of Growth with thirty years of reality. CSIRO Working Paper Series 2008-2009.

Ward, B., and Dubos, R. (1972). Only One Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.