The Great Oil Mystery

The generally accepted (read: people in Europe and America think its true) belief is that oil is old dinosaurs, algae, trilobites and ferns, squished under unimaginable pressure for unimaginable periods of time.

That, like so much of science, is a theory, and it turns out, like so much of science, there are alternate views on the subject.

Kevin Kelly is an exceptionally interesting guy and on his blog he has a very interesting post about some of those competing views -

The conventional wisdom is that oil descends from algae from eons ago. Lots and lots of algae.

[There] alternative theory that oil comes from non-biological carbon compounds deep in this planet, like the methane oceans we find on other planets.

An emerging third theory is that bacteria living within rocks produce oil.

This seems important to me for one and only one reason. If there is a globally unlimited resource of hydrocarbons, the likelihood of naturally arising economic signals strong enough to change emission and consumption patterns would be quite low. The appearance of high energy prices is actually good news. That it arose on its own because of supply constraints and the tumbling dollar is less than ideal because it doesn't target inefficient energy consumption as smartly as a carbon tax or a cap and trade system would and it doesn't lead to a national renewable energy fund. It just dumps money into the hands of ExxonMobil and Russia.

Putting money in the hands of people who gain from the widespread use of clean technologies is just smarter.

European system for cutting CO2 emissions is working well: Lessons to be learned for US, globe

Two MIT professors, one in the business school one in economics, had a look at three year-old cap and trade program in the European Union. What they found is interesting.

The four take aways from an MIT
press release -

[T]he economic effects-in a macroeconomic sense-have not been large...

Permitting facilities [to] bank (save some of this year's allowance for use next year) or borrow (use some of next year's allowances now and not have them available next year) [has not allowed a company to] postpone their obligations indefinitely

[A]llocating emissions allowances is going to be contentious-and yet cap-and-trade is still the most politically feasible approach to controlling carbon emissions.

[E]verything does not have to be perfectly in place to start up.

Of course the reason the macroeconomic effects have been low is that the cap is still so low. The question left out of this analysis is any comparison of the rate of reduction in CO2 emissions to any external goal. In other words, if you have a deadline for a story, it is excellent to establish that the new word processor you have works, that it powers on, that words get recorded as they are written etc. The missing metric is whether you will meet the deadline at the rate you're writing.

That should be the next area for study.

Arctic thaw threatens Siberian permafrost - Climate Change, Environment - The Independent

More disturbing news about the network effects of global warming, this time about Siberian permafrost. From The Independent -

The permafrost belt stretching across Siberia to Alaska and Canada could start melting three times faster than expected because of the speed at which Arctic Sea ice is disappearing.

A study found that the effects of sea-ice loss – which reached an all-time record last summer – extend almost 1,000 miles inland to areas where the ground is usually frozen all year round.

The smaller the area of sea ice, the less sunlight is reflected and the more heat is absorbed. That means scientists expect a tripling in the rate of warming over the continental land mass surrounding the Arctic.

This is not a linear problem, in other words.

"Our study suggests that, if sea ice continues to contract rapidly over the next several years, Arctic land warming and permafrost thaw are likely to accelerate," said David Lawrence of the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

At what point does this stop being a problem we created and can reverse and become instead a problem we started and are along for the ride?

Lying, Poorly, with Numbers

This is from a State Department press release titled U.S. Actions to Address: Energy Security, Clean Development, and Climate Change -

Decline in emissions growth

From 2000-2006, the population of the United States grew by 5.8 percent (16.5 million people) and GDP grew by 15 percent (about $1.5 trillion) while our GHG emissions growth was only 0.3 percent; comparable to the results of many other developed nations.

Of course what this means is emissions are still enormous and still growing. Where is the decline again?

This is an indication of the fantasy we still live in. This is a solitary but noteworthy effort to stick our head in the sand and pretend that any progress is good progress. In this case, regression is trumpeted as progress and then any progress is heralded as enough, "comparable to other nations"

This is like saying you're honest because you lie less than everyone else. What is missing is a culture of integrity about this. The score keeper here isn't us.

The Special Theory of Sustainable Civilization

I have been thinking about our new neighbor, this nature-enforced deadline that's moved in next door. It may be 20 years or 40 years. Maybe little more. Maybe a little less. That's practically in our living room, watching TV with us, really. Eating our popcorn. So I'm looking for many different sources of wisdom.

Us post-enlightenment types typically get all bent out shape when we hear Rev. Hagee or Bin Laden or President Bush talk about God-given-and-enforced moral codes. We don't get as upset when Albert Einstein says gravity works this way; time works that way.

Before you get upset to point how different they are, I want to say I agree with you. Or did. And that is why I am surprised writing this post.

The message of Judaism (at least some kinds) is that there is a moral order to the universe as much as there is a physical one. The laws we discover about some aspects get names like "gravity" or "evolution". As I study my own religion, I find that the grand claim of Judaism is that the same is true of interconnectedness, justice and charity.

There are two reasons I think we kind of snicker at that kind of thinking.

First, we use very different language for moral laws than natural ones. Einstein didn't say, "Only the almighty, who sets and keeps all creation to his wishes, can exceed the speed of light; we should be humble and not seek to exceed the speed of light for this is God's and even if we tried we will fail."

The language of science looks instead like this, from Einstein's 1905 On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies -

We will... introduce another postulate... that light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body.

Einstein postulated simply you can't go faster than 186,000 miles per second. He could be wrong (postulate means "to nominate"). It would be ridiculous to be offended by a fixed speed of light. Anyone who felt very strongly that 186,000 mps was unfair, even wrong, either too fast, too slow or evidence of an arbitrary paternalistic, Old Testament, vindictive god would, I think, be laughed at.

You see where I am going with this. We don't don't know why the universe seems to work this way, but it does. We can continually come to more refined explanations of the thing we call "gravity" but they don't mean we can escape it.

Which brings me to the second objection. The Special Theory of Relativity has been tested and confirmed many, many times. There is a claim. Evidence is presented. The test can be repeated, and confirmed or laid aside. You can't possibly do that with these moral laws.

Can you?

Here is a Jewish postulate, the Ve'ahavta:

You shall love God, the Source of Healing and Transformation, with all your mind, with all your strength and with all your being. Set these words which I command you this day, upon your heart. Teach them faithfully to your children; speak of them in your home but also in the world... inscribe them on the doorposts of your house, and on your gates... Do what is right and good in the sight of the Lord, that it may go well with you and that you may be able to possess the good land that the Lord your God promised

Revere only the Lord your God and worship Him alone, and swear only by His name. Do not follow other gods, any gods of the peoples about you... lest the anger of the Lord your God blaze forth against you and He wipe you off the face of the earth.

There's that sweet Old Testament vibe! Before I translated the Theory of Special Relativity into Deuteronomese. Can we translate this into a falsifiable statement more appealing to our skeptical ears? Sound of cracking knuckles

Here we go:

We will... introduce the The Tolstoyian Postulate: for a human society to achieve lasting prosperity, there are:

(1) naturally existing and immutable limits to individual and collective behavior (X)

(2) naturally existing and immutable demands of individual and collective behavior (Y)

There are several competing and complementary efforts (viz. Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Animism et al.) to determine the simplest X and Y, but we here propose these ten metrics as an irreducible system. Cultures that are consistent with X or Y are persistent; the set of cultures unbound by the ten metrics are infinitely variable except their unsustainability.

Falsifying the collected wisdom of persistent and successful communities hasn't been possible. Until now. Lucky us! We may not need the scary god or taboos threatening to punish us a la Deuteronomy anymore. We have a thought experiment come to life.

Is the way we live now sustainable?

Is the way we live now consistent with the ten metrics we've had kicking around for a couple thousand years?

If we align our actions with these ten metrics, is that sufficient to get us to sustainability?

Are these metrics both predictive and suggestive?

Take any behavior and see if the result leads to an increase or a decrease in environmental poisons? Then see if the behavior is consistent or inconsistent with these ten metrics.

Take for example, urban design. Is the way we design cities sustainable? Is it consistent with all 10 metrics? Is there a way to design a city that would be sustainable? Is it consistent with the 10 metrics?

Here's a very interesting interview with a high priest of secular city design, Joseph Rykwert, Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture Emeritus and Professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania on CNN.com -

CNN: What's your opinion on the rapid growth in places like Dubai? What sort of signals are they sending out?

JR: They're trying to send out the signal that they are doing something else. But, in fact, what they are showing us is that they are doing exactly the same. So I think it's a rather peculiar message. They are now trying to import cultural institutions to make the places vibrant in the way that western cities are but I don't quite see that it is going to work. I could be entirely wrong, but it seems to me that this is a very artificial growth in many ways. Like all new cities of this kind -- like Brasilia, for instance -- they depend on a separate serving space with very low paid operatives of many kinds -- cleaners, builders and so on. Brasilia is surrounded by a sea of these settlements.

Even a place like Celebration [in Florida] is dependent on a nearby low income village where all the service people live. There is always a kind of parody of the servant's space and the serving space and when the serving spaces overflow you have social problems of a major kind.

CNN: So movements like "New Urbanism" aren't the way forward in your view?

JR: I'm afraid it's part of the great move to make citizens into customers. They actually say so explicitly that they are not about citizenship they are about commerce. And when you go to Celebration it's very obvious because the town hall is rather small and relatively insignificant whereas the real estate office is a big tower. It's very striking. The metaphors are very clear.

We now know the answer. If I write that you can't ignore gravity or you will fall and get hurt, it isn't about a vengeful god punishing us for transgressing on his turf. I am just stating, to the best of our collective knowledge, what is so.

We've had a few thousand years to absorb these lessons. Lets hope we know how to cram.

Climate change in '09? - Politico.com Print View

We have an answer to my question from this post -

It will be interesting in the days ahead to see which part of these bills gets the lion's share of the debate. Will we hear more about how the market is created or the emissions reduction target, which is far less important?

The answer? Neither. From
Politico -

The Lieberman-Warner climate change bill died a short, painful death on the Senate floor after Republicans forced clerks to read the entire 492-page bill and supporters were unable to muster the 60 votes needed to thwart a filibuster.

This article is worth a look. Erika Lovley says that interested parties have turned their eyes away from the Senate and focused on the House. Foreshadowing the kind of coverage we should expect is this line -

The bills are expected to be even tougher than Lieberman-Warner on emission reductions and cap-and-trade auctions. A bill recently introduced by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) would reduce greenhouse gas emission levels to 85 percent below 1990 levels — more aggressive than the 70 percent allowed in the bill by Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Warner (R-Va.).

Remember: it isn't the goal, it's how you plan on getting there.

Making the Invisible Visible

I want to applaud ABC News for the intention behind their new series Earth 2100. From the press release -

We need you to bring this story to life — to use your imagination to create short videos about what it would be like to live through the next century if we stay on our current path. Using predictions from top experts, we will feed you detailed briefings from the years 2015, 2050, 2070 and 2100 — and you will report back about the dangers that are unfolding before your eyes.

Your videos will be combined with the projections of top scientists, historians, and economists to form a powerful web–based narrative about the perils of our future. We will also select the most compelling reports to form the backbone of our two–hour primetime ABC News broadcast: Earth 2100, airing this fall.

Silicon Valley is creating tools and gadgets to reduce the impact of our choices, but American inventors have another path available. Make those impacts more apparent, and you can change our choices. This has cultural, spiritual and technological aspects.

Normally, I am suspicious of ratings-motivated blurring of fact and fiction. Too often, the temptation is to feed fear or fantasy. But this looks like a request of that under-utilized natural resource: our imagination.

Cities Lead the Way

From the San Francisco Chronicle comes news that the Board of Supervisros (our version of a City Council) OK rebates for solar power systems -

San Francisco supervisors gave final approval Tuesday to a program that will create a $3 million fund to provide rebates for residents and businesses that install solar power systems.

... residents could receive between $3,000 and $6,000 for photovoltaic systems that produce at least 1 kilowatt of electricity. Businesses could receive $1,500 per kilowatt installed, with a cap of $10,000.

Well, its a start. How much of a start? Between 500 and 1,000 houses would eat the entire subsidy up. Only 345,527 houses left!

By the way, the $3,000 subsidy is .4% of the value of the house.

Good start, but the wrong end of the funnel.

Could Business Step in Where Government Has Failed?

A Cap & Trade plan failed in the Senate this week. Could business do what the politicians couldn't?

From the Guardian -

Up to 1,000 volunteers will be able to use their... shopping loyalty cards at any BP garage to record how much fuel they have purchased – and, as a result... how much carbon dioxide they will emit into the atmosphere.

Each volunteer will be given a monthly allowance of carbon credits which they will then be able to trade with other volunteers using an online trading system dubbed the CarbonDAQ. Volunteers who are thrifty with their credits will, using a virtual currency, be able to sell their spare credits to those needing to drive further than their allowance allows.

Could this work on a national level? Could this be the model we use to get to Monbiot's 90% reduction?

The best part of this plan is the way it makes the cost of carbon emissions real. Your choices raise or lower your emissions, and this is directly hooked to the amount of money in your pocket. Right now, your conscience is your guide, and all you have to do is pick up any Bible, newspaper or divorce proceeding to see that self-restraint has not proven to be much of a check on bad behavior.

It is also an effective riposte to claims that an individual carbon trading system would be too expensive. The UK's environment ministry published a study that found:

Initial set up costs would be between £700m and £2bn. Running costs would be between £1bn and £2bn a year.

Using bank cards hits number two in the reduce-reuse-recycle list.

That said, I see an immediate impediment. Any voluntary plan is most likely to attract the conscientious and least likely to bring in large emitters. For obvious reasons.

Which brings us back to why government involvement is required if you want anything more than token participation in Carbon emissions reductions: uniformity. Unless the whole market is forced to recognize pollution in their costs, the big polluters will go to markets where they can push the cost onto you, me, the future and the planet because their competitors will.

So, cute. Fun for some Prius owners. Not anywhere near a solution.

Coal Powered Cars

Is it better to run a car on coal or gas? It isn't usually put that way. Usually we ask if a plug-in electric car is better than a gas powered car. When its asked that way it seems a lot simpler, and in California, it is (relatively) simple. Only 1% of our total electric power is from Coal, and about 49% is from gas.

- data courtesy the Energy Information Administration

Questions about all those other states, how you deliver the energy and how efficient the cars are and how you measure it all, well, that is when it gets complicated enough that you need a few days, a lot of experts and Google.

Today and tomorrow, the Brookings Institution is sponsoring Plug-In Electric Vehicles 2008: What Role for Washington? They will be posting the sessions. I look forward to watching them.

The Future Homes of Oil

This is a great map of where we get our oil from -

- tip of the hat to Campaign for American Progress for the graphic

The darker the color, the more oil we import.

But this map is likely to change dramatically in coming years. It used to be that people who talked about peak oil were dismissed as tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorists. This is from an investor's blog, and has some interesting analysis. From John Mauldin's Outside the Box -

Over the last decade alone, China's oil consumption has almost doubled, to about 8 million barrels a day, about half of which is now imported. China... went from a net exporter in 1993 to importing 4 million barrels a day today ... with those imports projected to rise another 50% over the next 10 years.

- snip -

Mexico provides about 14% of the oil the US imports. On any given day that makes it either the #2 or #3 leading source for US oil imports after Canada and Saudi Arabia. Given that the US currently imports close to 70% of its oil needs, the Mexican oil is critical.

But here's the thing... Mexico will ship its last barrel of oil to the United States -- or anywhere else, for that matter -- about 6 years from now, in 2014.

So as demand for oil goes up in oil exporting countries, those countries stop exporting oil. Seems obvious, but think of the kinds of infrastructure in place to retrieve and transport oil, representing billions of dollars. If you include roads and gas stations and the systems in place to keep them supplied with gas, you're easily into the trillions.

What begins to emerge is the way our choices manifest in the physical world. This infrastructure will be an enormous drag on new technologies unless they work with the infrastructure in place or supercede it. These guys figure there is a lot of money to be made either way by betting on hydrocarbons.

We'll see.

What's Good For Insects...

My college roommate is now UCLA assistant professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences. Curtis Deutsch is one of the smartest guys I ever met, and one of the nicest, and definitely the first person I met who asessed climate change was.

He has just published an important paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled Impacts of climate warming on terrestrial ectotherms across latitude.

The impact of anthropogenic climate change on terrestrial organisms is often predicted to increase with latitude, in parallel with the rate of warming. Yet the biological impact of rising temperatures also depends on the physiological sensitivity of organisms to temperature change. We integrate empirical fitness curves describing the thermal tolerance of terrestrial insects from around the world with the projected geographic distribution of climate change for the next century to estimate the direct impact of warming on insect fitness across latitude. The results show that warming in the tropics, although relatively small in magnitude, is likely to have the most deleterious consequences because tropical insects are relatively sensitive to temperature change and are currently living very close to their optimal temperature.

What does this tell us? From an interview Curtis did with The Environmental Awareness Report -

The biodiversity of the planet is concentrated in tropical climates, where there is a tremendous variety of species... Insects carry out essential functions for humans and ecosystems — such as pollinating our crops and breaking down organic matter back into its nutrients so other organisms can use them. Insects are essential to the ecosystem.

Its good to hear from Curtis again -sorry, Professor Deutsch - even if the news is grim.

Greentech Media | Xerox's PARC to Spin Out Solar Startup

PARC has some new solar technology they're pretty excited about -

Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center plans in the next six months to spin out a company that hopes to reduce the thickness of grid lines on solar cells, increasing efficiency by 6 to 8 percent.

- snip-

The technology, which essentially prints the thin silver lines that transfer electricity from the photovoltaic material on solar cells, sprung out of Xerox’s printing expertise.

Reducing the concentration of CO2 requires the creation and application of new technologies of all kinds: social, cultural, economic and, as in this case, technological.

We're going to focus our attention on research conducted in the Bay Area, including Silicon Valley. Send any suggestions and tips to ben@320ppm.blogspot.com

What is Climate Change?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change defines it this way:

Climate change refers to a statistically significant variation in either the mean state of the climate or in its variability, persisting for an extended period (typically decades or longer). Climate change may be due to natural internal processes or external forcings, or to persistent anthropogenic changes in the composition of the atmosphere or in land use.

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change says it is:

A change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.

What is the difference? The IPCC says Climate Change is any change. UNFCCC says it is change caused by people. What we're talking about at 320 ppm is UNFCCC's definition.

The Death of the Climate Change Bill

The Lieberman-Warner Bill was pulled, now we wait for a new president and a new Congress.

Republicans in the Senate, led by paleoclimatologist Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) said the bill would increase energy costs at a time when the country could ill afford it. From the Washington Post -

Some Democrats were worried yesterday that the GOP might try to block withdrawal of the legislation to prolong a debate that many Democrats think no longer works to their political benefit. Republicans have pounced on the high price of gasoline and have stressed that the climate legislation, by introducing a price on carbon dioxide emissions, would further raise the price of gas along with that of all other fossil fuels.

As we've noted in previous posts, this will be the short term effect of any bill that causes a reduction in green house gas emissions in a free market system.

In selling any greenhouse gas legislation, the Democrats have to solve a public relations chicken and egg problem. To lower emissions overall, you have to make it more appealing for individual people and businesses to choose cleaner energy, but right now, we simply don't have very much online. Why? The incentives haven't been there. Chicken, meet egg.



This is a diagram from the
Energy information Administration showing where US greenhouse gas emissions come from. Lets zoom in on one part, the upper left, where we can see emissions by sector.



Even as incomplete as this image is, we can see, to reduce emissions, target coal, oil and natural gas because we have so much of it. Any Cap & Trade bill would not penalize low emissions technologies, the kind Silicon Valley is searching for and Sand Hill Road is paying for. But it would penalize what we have now. Opponents of changing market rules to reflect environmental realities will always have that point at the ready.

Senate Democrats either didn't have a response or kept their powder dry.