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Slice and Dice

Posted by wastedenergy on March 5, 2011

This is my diss track. Scrubs, you see, get no love from me. None whatsoever. Not a drop. Not even once. No energy wasted, and once I’m done with this one, the pigeons will be squirming in their borrowed shoes, and no further diss will be necessary.

How many Dicks does it take to frack to the center of the earth and make it pop? Answer: only one, and he used to be the CEO of a little company called Halliburton. These same bad boys who brought you boys back in body bags and $20 canned meals not fit for dog food not only cemented BP’s bad drill job in place to make the history books, but also invented a little process called fracking, you see. Lest you think they were coming along with a brand new ride, as so boldly pronounced by Exxon and their ilk, they invented it in 1947. That was before we even invented the hydrogen bomb. Talk about primitive!

While Republicons and Decepticrats were both dicking around trying to figure out how to make a quick buck for the private stash, the good people of America were paying the true price for their shenanigans: once again, oil in the water, in this case countless millions upon millions of gallons of the freshest stuff instead of fire on the salty seas. Well, what’s a headache and a few bloody noses here and there? A small price to pay for cheap natural gas, right? Well, not so much on that cheap part. ‘Cause it wasn’t just the good Americans who paid that price: I got news for you tea party types, there’s more than one way for a cat to catch a mouse. And by that, I mean there’s more than one way to subsidize drilling: environmental externalities aside, it was the shareholders who were paying that two or three times the price on the futures market for each thousand cubic feet. Fiscal conservatives? Hardly, these guys have a mountain of debt all the way to the Kingdom Come they’ll be sending us all to climb on our own two feet if they have their way.

Speaking of which: did you know these guys want to cut funding for the next-generation energy technologies we need to save our skin? Yes, that’s right, apparently the future is a low hanging fruit to some, and they don’t mind picking it right off the tree before it’s even gotten to its full size, let alone ripened. Apparently, anything that slices even a dollar off the profit margin of Koch Industries is considered bad for America. Well, it’s certainly bad for general motoring, that much we know without a doubt. The conspiracy to which I refer, of course, is the attempt to de-fund the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This would be roughly the equivalent of ending the Space Program at Mercury.  We may be abusing plastic like it’s our job, but remember that if it weren’t for public sector investment in science and technology, we’d never have the stuff in the first place, and I don’t just mean trashy bags, but the also what lets me tell you this over the tubes right at this very moment. Let’s hope these boys get caught Red-handed just like the CIA with their friends in the Taliban and left and right, but mostly Right, all over South America. Talk about Forbidden Fruit! (Sidebar: do I even dare mention the extraterrestrials? Nah, save that one for another day. First things first.)

And if that wasn’t enough, they dare not touch those Red State agricultural subsidies either, oh, no sir! When it comes to pretending to be pound-wise, these guys have even the old Reagan, Reagan II, and Reagan III and IV administrations beat! Oh yeah, I went there, and I’ll even go a step further: everyone’s beloved Saint Reagan was even worse than Bush II. Sure, he may have had the gift of gab, but just because a pigeon can cluck doesn’t mean he has anything to say. His vision for America included painting red stripes right over the blue background for the stars, and I don’t mean a smooth brew from Jamaica: we’re talking red and white bottles of high fructose chemical poison processed from the fruits of God’s Green Earth. If only we had the foresight to support real green agriculture, we might be eating a lot more fruits and vegetables, but corporate criminals get first dibs when it comes to government handouts, so it’s not just the price of wheat going up these days, but cabbage and tomatoes too. Shrub, grandchild of the famous friend of fascists, may have taken it to the next level in dropping a cool trillion on fruitless wars in the Mideast, but his ideological predecessor and the source of his worst Dicks and Donnies was the one who set the stage. Reagan invented neoconservatism, and you just can’t top that when it comes to Worst President Ever.

Last, but not least, I’m willing to bet some private waste management contractor has some skin in the game when it comes to the recent dicing of the Green the Capitol initiative. And de-funding the EPA, whose total budget amounts to a mere handful of billions, isn’t exactly the best way to balance the budget. Remember, not every office has its head in the sand like the one that lets the haters keep hating on waste-to-energy so much: these are the folks who make sure our rivers don’t catch on fire and air doesn’t contain enough smoky soot to choke a camel. Next time you need to pull off a balancing act, try using your head instead.

Look at that, I even managed to hit all seven categories, and then some. Eat your heart out, double rainbow, I got sixteen ways ’til Sunday to call out a Scrub and make him run crying back to the hole he came from! Speaking of which, it might be time to return to our ongoing discussion soon. But ah, as the Good Book says (and a little bird or two as well): to everything, there is a season. How I do love Spring!

Posted in Agriculture and Food, Air, Climate Change, Energy Consumption, Energy Production, Solid Waste, The Ether, Urban Planning, Water and Soil | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Mislead By Example

Posted by wastedenergy on March 2, 2011

Pro Tip for all those wannabe budget slashers out there: Kimchi is not a low-hanging fruit, even if you can’t pronounce it (pro tip #2: it’s pronounced how it’s spelled, and it’s easier to figure out than your last name, Mr. You-know-who-you-are).

“Not helping my buddies in the oil business makes me sad.”

In case you missed it, the Houseteria now looks a lot different from how it did during your last visit. Gone are the recycled paper takeout trays and biodegradable eco-plastic cups and utensils, the myriad eye-catching compostables and recyclables receptacles to grab both your attention and your waste product. In their place now stands a mountain of garbage-to-be, in the form of styrofoam cups and Teabaggers.

What more is there to say, really?

I know, it all amounts to peanuts in the end. But don’t you think our Hill of beans should hold up their end of the bargain?

 

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Posted in Agriculture and Food, Energy Consumption, Solid Waste | Tagged: , , , , | 2 Comments »

Wipeout

Posted by wastedenergy on February 3, 2011

EXTINCTION!  It’s a concept with which most of us are familiar only in passing, in the abstract or from our experience using it stack up W’s back in our high school debate days. But what about the real thing?

Well, you don’t actually have to try that hard to imagine it, because it’s already here. Consider how the mass extinction event occurring today as a result of human encroachment on habitats, pollution and climate change stacks up against past events. Last time we checked, a full 40% of all species have disappeared from the face of the planet Earth since 1970. Forty percent in just forty years! Imagine what we might be able to accomplish if we just try a little harder, by colonizing the remaining biodiversity hotspots with industrial agriculture, burning all the remaining coal we can find and flushing as much methane as we can get out of the continental shelves, and filling up the rest of our streams and oceans with choking garbage.

Percent of species going extinct versus millions of years ago

Now consider the trilobite. The fossil record is rife with trilobites; this group of animals dominated the planet’s oceans for some 250 million years, almost half the time multicellular animals have existed at all. Have you seen any of these guys around lately? How is it possible that something so common, so entrenched, so basic and ubiquitous in the Earth’s ecosystems is entirely gone? It would be as if all mollusks or all insects were wiped out. In our efforts to exploit the Earth’s resources to suit solely our own needs, we are tinkering with forces we do not understand and cannot hope to control. Now ask yourself, do large brains and opposable thumbs really make us so special? Unfortunately, most of us seem to be under the illusion that we are better than other creatures, as opposed to both exactly the same as them and wholly dependent upon them.

“What are you lookin’ at?”

Now, there are some who would tell you none of the above matters. What really matters is relaxing restrictions on oil drilling, so we can frack away bits of the environment slowly but surely until all that remains is skies of acid filled with clouds of soot and rivers that run purple with poison. They don’t believe in the value of other species, or even the human species; the only thing that concerns them is the bottom line. These mammon worshippers believe all our problems would be solved if we simply reverted our monetary system to the gold standard. They might have some of their own skin in the game, if they happen to be invested in gold as a commodity, but if we want to save our own skin, then it behooves us to pay attention to the bare facts instead of the issues that seem to occupy the teabaggers on Fox News and the Ragnarok promoters over at the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute.

Joker of Doom

If we were really so self-interested, we might be more inclined to protect our own home. Julian Simon’s followers might like to believe human ingenuity is the ultimate resource, but I’ve got news for them: we’re not going to be landing on another planet with trees anytime soon. So maybe it’s finally time for the dinosaurs to go extinct, before they take the rest of us down with them.

Posted in Agriculture and Food, Air, Climate Change, Solid Waste, Water and Soil | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

ASPO-USA World Oil Conference: Day 1 Report

Posted by wastedenergy on October 8, 2010

Day 1 of ASPO-USA’s conference was an enlightening perspective from a good number of viewpoints on a variety of environmental and energy matters concerning us today and tomorrow.  It was a great privilege to attend a meeting of so many minds today, but I do have to say, I was a little disappointed in the turnout.  Very few public officials seemed to feel the matter of peak oil and energy and resource security matters deserved their attention on this first day of the conference, and only a handful of media were on hand to record today’s proceedings.

I felt a real diversity in the audience and speakers was lacking as well.  As I scanned over the audience and listened to today’s questions (didn’t manage to get myself called on today, but we’ll see if I can get the moderator’s attention at Arthur Berman’s session tomorrow) there was certainly a diversity of intellectual viewpoints expressed, but it was disappointing to look out onto a sea of mostly white, middle-aged faces.  It is our younger generation that holds the greatest stake in the critical resource and environmental challenges of tomorrow, and we must begin to speak out for ourselves and our own interests in these issues that will define our future and the fate of the world in the century and more to come.  Just as importantly, it is imperative that the voices of communities of color be heard, who have very often been and are still today disproportionately affected by many of the environmental and public health hazards created by our modern, industrial-energy-based society.  To consider a path forward on energy without paying heed to environmental justice matters is to ignore the very most pressing problems of environmental health, the toxic byproduct from communities handed the privilege of outsourcing their ecological footprint to someone else’s backyard.

While the conference provided a great deal of analysis on the availability of oil and other fossil fuels, another matter needing attention that was scarcely discussed was the impending and critical shortage of many other mineral resources, perhaps most importantly including rare earth minerals, and the urgent need to develop practical and environmentally sound ways of developing supply chains for not just energy, but all the minerals we take for granted that have become so important to such modern luxuries as radar systems, hard drives, cellular phones, hybrid car batteries, gearless wind turbines, and of course, oil refining catalysts.  A presentation providing an update on rare earth and other critical material issues would certainly be more than appropriate considering the subject matter dealt with at this event (Hint: ASPO, I’d be more than happy to fill this role for you or moderate such a session if needed at next year’s conference, and may or may not know one or two other people who could talk about it too, unless the shortage hits before October 2011 and spells The End Of The World As We Know It).

HIGHLIGHT: Catching a Cheseapeake Energy employee making an offhand remark to the woman sitting next to her about the climate change sessions being “balderdash.”  Very professional, and bonus points for using a word seldom heard since the 18th century.  Her comment went a long way toward showing just how much the natural gas companies really care about building climate-friendly bridges to the future, or whether they are really just interested in making a quick buck off those who might otherwise make an actual difference and in the process burn down some of those same bridges.

Some of the more memorable sessions I attended today:

Jeffrey Brown, independent petroleum geologist, spoke about the effect of net oil exports on the availability of the petroleum fuels we so take for granted in virtually everything in society that moves.  The supply of total world oil production and the amount that is actually exported from the countries producing it, from the standpoint of a country that imports the vast majority of its oil like, say, the United States of America, is actually a lot more important than the effects of the ”global peak” (which, incidentally, already occurred, back in late 2004).  The take-home point was that we all need to start thinking about the peak oil issue @ way sooner than right now, and going back to just yesterday won’t even help in the slightest.

Jonathan Callahan informed us that Gas Balancing Alerts were forced three times in the United Kingdom last year, and while he believes overall world production of natural gas will continue to increase, natural gas is of course a regional game, and it is in the very near future (actually, the present) that natural gas and other shortages will begin to rear their ugly heads in the UK and elsewhere.  Don’t hold your breath for an explosion in U.S. shale gas availability either, although given the amount of fracking going on over here, you might want to just hold your breath in general.

Oh, and of course, lest you forgot about China’s coal-truck-induced 20-day traffic jams, China is burning a lot of coal.  A lot lot lot.  India too.  Also, the United States and the rest of the world still burn a lot of coal – even more than before, in fact.  All told, pretty much more coal all around than anyone in their right mind can possibly imagine, and definitely way more than anyone would ever want to.  In fact, we burn so much coal that we may darn well be pretty tootin’ close to doing something a lot of people thought we could never ever do: run out of it.

Quick question I never got to ask Dave Summers, (Heading Out over on TheOilDrum), just to play devil’s advocate: According to Dave, the claim by some recently published research that we have already reached global peak coal production is false because unlike oil, we can directly measure how much coal remains by going underground and looking at the “thickness,” and we know a lot still remains.  While some coal reserves have been downgraded to mere resources, he asserts that as the global coal price rises, they will surely be upgraded to reserves again.  My question: if the price of coal rises, why the hell are we still mining coal?  I thought the only reason we mined it was because it was so cheap, at least until you start actually putting a price on its pollution?  And isn’t it a bit of an oversimplification to outright dismiss alternative energy technologies while reducing modern coal mining to “a pick and a shovel”?  One could just as easily say solar energy is as simple as planting trees, or that wind energy is as simple as putting up a sail (actually, come to think of it, they are).  Unlike a few professed photovoltaic “skeptics” (you can show someone something a billion times and they’ll still be convinced it doesn’t work), we know there are actual alternatives to burning coal to generate what people are actually looking for.  Sure, we’ll still have plenty of coal for the future – coal to hopefully make into graphene and activated carbon.  We just won’t have enough to burn for energy.

Finally, in what certainly seems to me to be an abuse of the ”net energy” concept and a little graphplay that hopefully wasn’t lost upon an audience that professes not to be innumerate, I’m sure the Dutch will be interested to know that you can’t actually get any energy from the wind (and I guess unlike oil and gas, better technogy doesn’t improve the outlook either).  What a shame.

Looking forward to Day 2, and I’ll do my best to be a real thorn in everyone’s side!

Posted in Agriculture and Food, Air, Climate Change, Energy Consumption, Energy Production, Solid Waste, Urban Planning, Water and Soil | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Window of Opportunity

Posted by wastedenergy on August 17, 2010

If you listen carefully, you can hear something rising above the noise of the traffic.  Beyond the day-to-day ups and downs of the stock market, the oil market, and the job market, something bigger is happening.  I like to call this phenomenon “the winds of change.”

I’ll give you an example of what I mean: a few days ago, the New York Times published an article that, taken to its logical conclusion, ought to make the promoters of the endless growth myth tremble in their boots.  It told the story of a woman who took a daring leap of faith to escape from what she called “the work-spend treadmill,” challenging the widely held, or at least widely followed, belief that a strong relationship exists between the money we earn and spend and the fulfillment we ultimately find in life.  In addition to the anecdotal evidence, the article cited a number of recent scientific studies confirming that, in fact, not only can you not take it with you, a lot of it isn’t even all that helpful here in the first place.  Among the conclusions:

“While the current round of stinginess may simply be a response to the economic downturn, some analysts say consumers may also be permanently adjusting their spending based on what they’ve discovered about what truly makes them happy or fulfilled.”

If that doesn’t cut directly to the heart of the Western sell-the-world mentality that seeks to prop up its primacy through backwards thinking on questions of consumption and resources, I don’t know what would.  And that wasn’t the only gem from the Times’ recent portfolio of work.  It turns out scientists have begun to study not just the problem of “can money buy happiness?” (hint: no) but also the question of “is it good to get outside and clear your head a little bit sometimes instead of spending all your time in a little box worrying about the next stage in the tiny hyper-specialized corner of the universe known as ‘your career?’”  As it turns out, yes, it is in fact good for your mental (not to mention physical) state to take in a little natural splendor from time to time and get away from the daily grind.

Not only that, but the paper is finally getting around to talking about the changes we have seen in our climate on the front page. 

About time.

A Mighty Wind

Here is another item that graced the headlines recently, not to be lost in a cascade of sour news about the economy and the damage we have done to the Earth’s climate system.  In case you missed it, we just broke ground on the largest wind farm – ever, by nearly a factor of three and perhaps even more once additional phases of the project are completed.

Who cares if wind power growth stalled from its five-year epic entrance into the big time just a little bit in the first half of 2010?  In case you forgot, just about everything else slowed down too.  The long term outlook for wind power is that it is going to keep growing for a long time to come, and we still have a long way to go.  Of course, the longer we delay and adopt backwards policies that ignore the externalized costs of fossil fuels as well as both the environmental and economic benefits of renewable energy, the more difficult and painful the transition will be.  Is it any wonder that Portugal, Germany and Spain, which is even leading the way in snatching up the market for renewable energy customers over on this side of the pond, are light-years ahead of the United States already in adoption of clean energy technology, from solar to wind to household trash combustion?  They have had the correct policies in place for decades, policies that tax pollution and waste and reward conservation and investment in technologies that deliver over the long run.  Europe even has its own internal cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions.  How are we doing over on this continent?

We seem to have so many skeptics here who think we’ll never be able to get away from fossil fuels (or can only get there by reopening the can of nuclear squirms).  Do these people really think we couldn’t do a whole heck of a lot more to take advantage of the world’s best wind resource, both on- and offshore?  Boy, do they have a lot to learn!

These are not final solutions, unlike what proponents of “clean coal” believe it is and what it still might become if we fail to use this potentially transformational moment wisely.  But the small changes we are seeing today could be the beginning of a systemic shift in our ways of thinking about consumption of energy and resources, ways of thinking about living.  And you’d better believe we need to change our ways and start consuming a lot less, and fast; if you thought living in a $147-a-barrel world was tough cookies, just wait until we arrive in $500-a-barrel country (and don’t think it won’t happen, or something much, much worse).

There may be no hope for business-as-usual, and perhaps there shouldn’t be.  But there is hope for humanity.  From culture to technology, from sea to shining sea, the seeds of change have been planted, and if you look closely, you can even see the first few sprouts coming up.

Amidst the chaotic storm, a glimmer of hope in the sunlight?

Posted in Agriculture and Food, Air, Climate Change, Energy Consumption, Energy Production, Solid Waste, The Ether, Urban Planning, Water and Soil | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Smoke Signals

Posted by wastedenergy on August 9, 2010

A pattern is emerging from the oceans of data.  And it’s not pretty.  Those who have been following the news this week have seen some of the surest signs yet that we have truly entered a brave new world, and nobody can say for certain what comes next.

Wildfires in Russia are nothing new.  In fact, by this time last year, more acreage had actually been consumed by fire.  But this time, something is different.  The fires are smaller, but greater in number, and they are taking place closer to highly populated areas, which is why Moscow has suddenly filled with a choking smoke, and concentrations of airborne toxins have risen to unprecedented and potentially lethal levels.  What changed that these fires became so much more serious this time around?

In short, what changed was the worst heat waves and droughts in over a hundred years.  And, as is always the case with these matters, “nobody can prove this happened because of global warming.  But then again, nobody can prove it didn’t either.”  Sounds like good enough reason for inaction to me. 

In any case, the forests are drying up and the fields are parched, and what that means is that populated areas in particular become more at risk of raging wildfires, caused by the casual flicking of a cigarette butt out a car window or tossing grill cinders off the porch.  And one of the largest and most economically significant victims of the heat, blazes and droughts has been Russia’s wheat harvest, usually the largest in the world.  In response, Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin declared a ban on any further exports, putting millions of people in the Third World dependent on imports of Russian grain at risk of food insecurity.  And unless rains come soon, forget about a second grain harvest this season.  The government of Egypt, which gets fifty percent of its wheat from Russia, claims it has several months of stockpiles and plans to buy grain from other sources.  But what about everyone else who wants to buy the rest of the world’s grain to feed people, let alone commodity futures traders?  Is it possible the poor will be outbid by Goldman Sachs yet again?  We won’t know for certain what the consequences will be of the failed Russian harvest this year until many months down the road, once the growing season in the vast majority of the Earth’s landmass lying in the northern hemisphere is long past and shortages have the potential to become critical.

It’s not just wheat that has been put at risk by the fires.  Russia, as we all know, was at one time part of the largest nuclear superpower the world had ever seen, and is still speckled with nuclear weapons silos, research facilities, and power stations.  And as we all know again, the country has always taken great care of them, to make sure nothing ever goes wrong.  So when the wildfires started getting close to Russia’s nuclear facilities, its leaders were quick to act to contain the flames encroaching on two nuclear facilities.  Nobody was terribly thrilled about the prospect of another Chernobyl or the catastrophic failure of critical infrastructure.  But risks still remain.  These facilities, particularly commercial power plants, require vast quantities of water for cooling in order to prevent meltdowns, the same water needed to fight the fires, the same water that hasn’t been falling from the sky for months…

This is supposed to be the answer to global warming?

Fires in Russia are not the only signals telling us it may already be too late to turn back.  Throughout Asia, catastrophic flooding has been the rule all summer.  Most of the news has been about China, but particularly of note is what is happening in Pakistan, which is facing its worst floods ever.  Millions have lost their homes and many face critical food shortages, which will surely be exacerbated by Russia’s failed harvest and the strain that will be placed on international food aid already.  Meanwhile, here in the United States, record high temperatures are the norm.  We languish in our air-conditioned homes and offices, going about our business and trying our best to filter out the news telling us that the world we once knew no longer exists.  We seem fine with it.  The U.S. Senate just decided climate change was of no consequence, and our only real option is to go about our business as usual.  Will we feel the same way once the heat gets so bad that we are cooking the grandkids?

These are the sort of events that makes you wonder just how far we have to go down the path of irreversible, catastrophic climate change before we finally get around to deciding it’s worth our time to actually do something about it.

Posted in Agriculture and Food, Air, Climate Change | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Straw to Straw

Posted by wastedenergy on July 13, 2010

One of the biggest concerns related to energy depletion and scarcity is how to continue to feed the world’s population without access to the vast and cheap reserves of stored energy found in fossil fuels, particularly if population increases to 9 billion by mid-century as forecast by most projections today.  Modern industrial agriculture is highly dependent upon fossil fuels, particularly the oil that provides the energy used in farm tractors, combines, and trucks for transportation to demand centers, and the gas that provides the hydrogen needed for fixation of atmospheric nitrogen into synthetic fertilizer via the Haber-Bosch process.  The energy use and ecological impacts of our agricultural systems are indeed vast, and a quick glance at the Checkerboard America sprawling across the midwestern states is all that is needed to reveal the unsustainability of present methods of food production.

A good place to look for opportunities to curtail waste is in our food system.  But rather than beginning with the more difficult question of what might be more sustainable ways of drawing upon the land for sustenance, I believe it is helpful to first examine the patterns of consumption that drive agriculture in the first place.  Let’s start with one of the most egregious examples of wasted energy, a product which contains many calories but no nutrition, which promotes obesity and diabetes at the cost of ever-rising medical bills and insurance costs for all Americans (yet another hidden subsidy), and which could not exist absent ferociously large energy inputs.  Can you guess what I’m talking about?  Here’s a hint: it starts with straws in the ground and ends with straws in your mouth, and in between lie a whole lot of tankers criss-crossing the heartland.

Keep on chugging…

Corn syrup is a curiosity the likes of which could only be found in a place like the United States of America, where cheap junk food and cheap junk energy are a way of life.  Of course, the same analysis upon which we are about to embark could just as easily be applied to Cheetos and hot dogs, or to our super-sized levels of meat consumption.  But the footprint of corn syrup consumption alone is so vast, its benefits so nonexistent, and the tolls it reaps upon the health of our people, our farmland, and our energy supply so heavy that it deserves to be counted first.

Let’s back up for a moment to the stuff that makes it all possible: the original superstraw, without which so much of what we take for granted would never even exist in the first place.

Well that sucks.

What could better embody our postmodern perversion of the American Dream than the twenty-ounce individual serving of cola packaged in plastic?  Everything about it embodies a culture of waste, from the unnecessarily large portions to the utter emptiness of the corn-sweetener calories, to the disposable container made from finite fossil fuels, to the truck that brought it to you.  And everything in it is made from fossil fuels, from the gas used to make fertilizer used to grow the corn to the coal burned to provide electricity to refine it to the oil used to transport it.  While there might be nothing wrong with slurping soda as an occasional treat (personally I find the stuff rather gross-tasting in the first place), the sheer quantities we consume today, the scale and impacts of its production, and the fact that it is far cheaper than its more nutritious alternatives demonstrate drastically misplaced priorities.  Before we beg those giant corn flakes, Monsanto, ADM, and the other members of the American Corn Growers Association, for “solutions” to the problem of how to feed a world of nine billion, we might start by addressing some of the problems with the way we grow and consume food for a mere seven billion.  It would be one thing to talk about the need for genetically modified organisms if we were concerned about producing enough calories and micronutrients to sustain the people of the world.  It is entirely another matter to argue that we must rely on the plant equivalent of superviruses when so much of that crop is devoted only to making a sick world even sicker.

In a world of abundant fossil fuels, corn syrup is a malnutritious curiosity.  In a world of depleting fossil fuels and ever-rising costs of energy and food, both in monetary and ecological terms, it is no less than a crime against humanity.  So for those looking for ways to make our food systems more sustainable and healthier, and before anyone objects to the “land use footprint” of wind and solar energy, let’s start by cutting back on the largest waste of land, energy, and resources the world has ever seen, shall we?

Not the real thing.

Posted in Agriculture and Food, Energy Consumption | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Alien Versus Predator

Posted by wastedenergy on May 23, 2010

Take cover, we’re under attack!  Killer plants from Pluto!  Radioactive hamsters from Mars!  Is it time to bring out the big guns yet?  Or perhaps the answer is to breed some kind of genetic supermutant killer that can tear through them as fast as they come up…

Let me introduce you to a few of the core cast of this terrible thriller with its roots in the 1970′s – specifically, the 1970′s expansion of globalization driven by the World Bank and its cheerleaders in Congress, who insisted that there could be no wrong to come from a more interconnected world.  Whether they arrive in shipping crates from China or originate in Pike’s Nursery as intentional imports…we’ve got quite an invasion on our hands these days.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Been Plundering

Posted by wastedenergy on May 14, 2010

There’s been some question of late as to what exactly it is that BP stands for.  Over the past decade or so, the company has made a big deal of claiming it stands for progress, for environmental protection, for a sustainable energy future.  They have done a lot to advertise their investments in solar energy, for example, so much that it makes one wonder whether their budget for advertising their alternative energy investments actually exceeds their budget for alternative energy investments.  The company even went as far as to change its name, officially, from “British Petroleum,” which describes what they actually do, to “Beyond Petroleum,” although once they started taking heat for pollution from their tar sand production facilities, among other activities, they decided it would be best to just go with “BP.”

Well, today the reputation for environmental stewardship that BP has carefully and calculatedly cultivated over the years appears to be up in flames just like a blown out drilling rig, and the stock value of the company itself is plummeting about as fast as the Titanic sunk cost known as “deepwater drilling.”  And a few other things besides just icky tar balls have risen to the surface of late.  Namely, the not-so-light-sweet record of these epic plunderers.  Let’s have a look at the facts:

Blowout (not) Prevented

The peak oil deniers have been telling us for a while that deepwater drilling would be the answer to our troubles, but recently it seems like a very different type of “oil boom” has become prominent.  The BP shenanigans with which you are probably most familiar today are, of course, those pertaining to the Earth Day explosion of the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling platform and ensuing 70,000 (not 5,000, as previously reported) barrel-per-day “voilcano” gushing out into the Gulf of Mexico.  What caused the explosion?  Nobody is quite sure, except that it had something to do with a bad blowout preventer, possibly caused by a faulty cementing job by partner Halliburton, or possibly by a dead battery, or possibly by faulty wiring.  Will we ever know for certain?  If this company and its cohorts continue buying off officials, not to mention witholding information from investigators (like the video taken by robot submarine repair units that led to the conclusion that far more oil was spilling than they initially admitted, which was hoarded for weeks), probably not.  Even if they start complying with investigations, like a likely-to-come Congressional subpoena, we may never find out – BP is pretty good at cover-ups, as it turns out.  Anyway, all the Bad Press that BP has been getting lately caused CEO Tony “Soprano” Hayward to ask, “what the hell did we do to deserve this?”  I don’t know, Tony, maybe it has something to do with this:

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Global Warning

Posted by wastedenergy on May 3, 2010

So, over ninety degrees in Washington on May 2, huh?  Phew, it’s getting hot out here!  You don’t suppose these intense heat waves early in the warm season might have something to do with all the carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere for the last several hundred years, do you?

I have only touched briefly on the particular issue of climate change on this site so far, mostly because I feel the issue does get a good deal of attention already and because I do not wish to distract from other equally pressing concerns such as air and water quality issues, peak oil, and fossil fuel depletion.  But I feel it is now time to seriously consider the question of what effects human activity is having on the Earth’s climate systems.  Climate science has long demonstrated that high atmospheric concentrations of the compounds mentioned earlier have, at various points in paleo-history as shown by such methods as ice core sampling and dendrochronology, resulted in higher average temperatures.  Carbon dioxide and methane, along with others of the class of chemicals known as “greenhouse gases” or “global warming pollutants” trap the low-grade energy emanated by the Earth after sunlight is absorbed by its surface, keeping that heat energy in the Earth’s climate system rather than allowing it to be shed into the upper layers of the atmosphere and then into space.  These compounds are what keep the Earth at temperatures that make it inhabitable to humans; we have our thick atmosphere to thank for a climate more hospitable than that of, say, Mars.  But the problem is now that we have entirely too much, and concentrations of the compounds are rising far faster than the Earth’s natural mechanisms are able to sequester them out of the air.  The concern is not that we will become like Mars, in other words, but rather that we will become more like Venus, where atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases are so high that temperatures average around 900 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt all the space probes we have sent to the planet within minutes.

That is not to say we are in any imminent danger of reaching 900 degree temperatures, even if we were to burn all the planet’s fossil fuels and release all available carbon into the atmosphere.  But changes of even just a few degrees, as we have already observed, are able to cause dramatic changes in Earth’s energetic and living systems, especially when concentrations rise signficantly over a comparatively short period of just centuries, decades, or even years.  Even the atmosphere itself can only absorb so much carbon dioxide from so many coal power plants in such a short period of time; a lot of that carbon has already dissolved into the ocean to form carbonic acid, decreasing its pH from 8.2 to 8.1 in just a matter of a few decades, and ocean pH is projected to drop to 7.8 by mid-century.  The effects of such a change are as dramatic as they are irreversible: 7.8 would be too acid for coral reefs to form, and essentially all corals on the planet and all the forms of life that depend on them and in turn form the basis for the entire oceanic ecosystem are likely to disappear very soon under a business-as-usual scenario.  It is doubtful that many humans could even survive, let alone thrive, in such a world.  And such a world is shockingly close at hand.

But even beyond the documented effects of ocean acidification on Earth’s biodiversity, buildup of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere itself has a number of effects that are likely to increase the vulnerability of both people and the living systems on which we depend.  No credible scientist disputes the fact that higher concentrations of these compounds cause warmer temperatures, and we have already observed warming on the scale of 1-2 degrees Fahrenheit over just the past few decades.  This warming is expected to accelerate.  The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas, was very close to 275 parts per milion (ppm) for virtually all of human history prior to the 20th century.  But beginning with the industrial revolution in the middle of the last millenium and the extraction and burning of the fossil fuels coal, oil and gas that powered this revolution, that concentration steadily rose, to the point that today’s concentration is roughly 390 parts per million and continuing to increase.  At these concentrations, it is fair to assert that any additional “greenhouse gases” can also be classified as pollutants.  According to climate scientists, this concentration is already too high to avoid the most catastrophic effects of warming; the highest “safe” level to avoid cascading effects and uncontrollable and unmanageable climate change is widely understood to be 350 ppm, and even this number is shaded by a great deal of uncertainty.  Nevertheless, what is clear is that even decreasing emissions of global warming pollutants is insufficient to restore a stable climate; what we need is a retreat from all fossil fuel-based growth and consumption patterns, as fast as we can possibly manage it.  And the proper time to begin such a transition would have been decades ago; any efforts undertaken today may already be too little, too late.

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