“One can say that the nagual accounts for creativity,” he said finally and looked at me piercingly. ”The nagual is the only part of us that can create.”
He remained quiet, looking at me. I felt he was definitely leading me into an area I had wished he would elucidate further. He had said that the tonal did not create anything, but only witnessed and assessed. I asked him to explain the fact that we create superb structures and machines.
“That’s not creativity,” he said. “That’s only molding. We can mold anything with our hands, personally or in conjunction with the hands of other tonals. A group of tonals can mold anything, superb structures as you say.”
You’ve probably been taught that the “invisible hand” of a “free market” is the most “efficient” way of generating the largest amount of wealth for the largest number of people, and that those who don’t participate in the system are “lazy welfare queens.” It would be best if you disabused yourself of these notions.
I’ll repeat here a thought experiment I’ve mentioned to a number of people over the last day or two: imagine a world in which all labor is automated (and note that you don’t have to get all the way there for the conclusions of the experiment to hold true). The requirement for less intensive human labor should, in theory, ease the burden on everyone. But under a system of dog-eat-dog capitalism, where all wealth must be considered “earned” through engagement in the labor market, and where virtually all jobs are eliminated by ever-increasing automation, the only ones who stand to gain are the oligarchs who own the machines, pulling the strings at the top. The entire economy would reorient itself to serve only the needs of those elites. Do you suppose we might be headed in this general direction? And if so, should we continue full speed ahead? Or should we at the very least pause and consider what the purpose of employment really is, whether it is an end in itself or simply a means to an actual end, that of improved general welfare at the median of society?
Consider this one: if you want economic stimulus through job creation, the most effective way to do so might be something like this:
WASHINGTON—In an effort to boost the economy and promote job growth, representatives from the newly revived Works Progress Administration announced Thursday their plan to dismantle, piece by piece, the 3.25 million cubic yards of concrete forming the Hoover Dam, and then immediately rebuild it. “This is a vital initiative,” said WPA director Ted Doogan, who was appointed last week. “Systematically tearing down such a massive edifice will create at least 25,000 jobs over the next five years. And then reassembling it, using all the same pieces in the exact same configuration, will employ another 25,000 workers. America is back.” Other public works projects currently underway include the bulldozing of libraries, the burning of national forests, and the defacing of public murals, which will be followed by a massive plan to rebuild libraries, revive national forests, and repaint public murals.
Efficiency at its finest, no?
If you happen to be among the lucky ones whose work hasn’t yet been outsourced, automated, or otherwise eliminated, if you are among those who would object to the idea of providing a guaranteed minimum livable income to all citizens, you might ask yourself a few questions: could a robot do your job? How about someone in Bangladesh? Does your work really require any “skills” outside of formatting Excel spreadsheets and keeping an Outlook inbox neat and tidy? Do you have to work with your hands? When was the last time you had to use any aspect of your “higher” education? Is there any creativity or artistry involved on a day-to-day basis? How many times per week, or even per day, do you find yourself unable to engage in the activities from which you truly derive some pleasure or passion because you must instead act in a way that serves a corporate interest that does not concern you directly? And finally, does your work create any real, lasting wealth, or are you one of the multitudes involved in transforming fossil fuels into garbage?
Now, let’s step back for just a moment. I don’t mean to suggest that all jobs are worthless, or that the idea that anyone who does one deserves no more wealth than someone who does literally nothing except sit on the couch watching reruns of Family Guy. I do mean to suggest, however, that such a person in many cases creates the same aggregate value as someone who works day in and day out, and in some cases more value (considering the number of business models predicated on the creation of negative value and the outsourcing of unpaid externalities). And considering any of the above criteria, can you really honestly say to yourself that someone not engaged in this activity does not have the right to a decent standard of living? What about those who are entirely able and willing to contribute to the creation of value for society in some way, but whose entreaties to do so are rejected by the ruthless inefficiencies of the corporate economy? Do they deserve hot meals? Is it really a better economic model to force someone to “earn” her keep serving poison to the masses at Burger King than to simply pay her to stay at home doing nothing?
Oh, whoops, this one is proprietary! Another great example of how large corporations create positive wealth for society at large, no? Ah, well, at least you can still watch it on YouTube…
Let’s return briefly to the idea of negative externalities, and how much of our economic system is oriented around encouraging people to take jobs that promote them, at the expense of the public’s general welfare. Externalities are a lot more important than most economists assume. In many cases, they are the very heart of the matter, the basic reason why one choice is better or worse than another (and remember, kids: economics is about making good choices, not just about maximizing profit for the corporation). Most economic analysis either ignores externalities entirely or at the very most treats them as some kind of side consideration, perhaps shifting around some prices but too difficult to bother including in any economic model. But consider the following claim, some variation of which we’ve seen from a number of related vested interests:
“Continuing to burn coal creates more jobs than solar or wind power because it maintains the need for coal miners.”
And why is it that the dirtiest fuel creates this particular economic “benefit”? Precisely because it requires continual depletion of a non-renewable resource! Now, you try and tell me there is any real value in maintaining these jobs for their own sake. So we don’t even need to consider how our present economic system treats any of the other externalities of coal burning, and there are many, all of which “add” value to the economy in the form of jobs (in the health care and environmental remediation sectors) and an increase in the GDP through their management, to the extent that they are managed. Just the very nature of the activity is, in itself, a negative externality to society as a whole: it permanently destroys a resource for all time, making the next round of coal that much harder to find and burn. And there are still those out there who believe the game we’re playing isn’t rigged to make bad choices?
Now how about this one: Michael Vick. The man gets paid bajillions. What value has he created? He has tortured dogs, but even setting aside that negative value, let’s consider just what it is that he does that enables him to “earn” his keep: he’s good at tossing around a dead pig. What value does that create? Well, for one thing, it inspires many television viewers to get piss-drunk and gorge themselves on nachos while living vicariously through a machismo colloseum spectacle. What a great example for the children! And another type of value he creates: by getting more people to tune in through his display of athletic prowess, he creates lots of revenue for advertisers. You know, those corporate parasites who make their living by turning the very premise of free-market capitalism on its head: convincing people to buy products that won’t benefit them through misrepresentation and manipulation in lieu of the “information” that is supposed to be the greatest asset to the perfectly rational economic human consumer.
The list goes on. Ke$ha. Charles Koch. Lloyd Blankfein. T. Boone Pickens. R.J. Reynolds. Coca-Cola. The entire prison industry. All of them, making fortunes by taking advantage of unpaid externalities that vastly outweigh any positive benefit to society. For every instance you can find of a millionaire or billionaire who has transformed civilization for the better, I can come up with ten examples of those who make their fortunes by turning fossil fuels into garbage. At some point, we have to ask ourselves: where does it all end?
Real Wealth? It’s Gone Daddy Gone…
I’ll go ahead and end this one on a positive note: you only live once, so stop worrying about it and go do something you really enjoy! I myself am going to go make some art, and create something of real value.
Welcome to Fort Chipwyan, Alberta. If you’re looking to cash in on Canada’s “oil” boom, here is where you want to be.
Whether we’re talking about building, grading, and widening highways to accommodate McMansion-sized trucks and whole factories being hauled to the site, or the tar sand itself being transported and processed by those vehicles and equpiment, shoveling asphalt is the only game in town. You don’t have to drive a tar sand truck or work in an upgrading plant, but whether you work laying down airstrips or milling steel for new pipelines, there’s many a bucktoothed buck to be made in selling your soul to Syncrude. 99% of the universe here is composed of dark energy.
It’s a pretty good deal for everyone involved, unless of course you happen to be one of the few remaining quaint folk who prefer to live off the fruits of the land rather than profiting off fuel shipped in from the underworld. Thin strips of land separate the tar sands operations and the vast pits of waste sludge they produce from the Athabasca river and its headwaters, the essence of life for countless generations of farming and fishing communities. Crops, livestock, fish, and people now die bearing mysterious markings and tumors never before seen by the First Nation elders of these communities. Government officials and university professors living off the oil dole from boomtowns named after the original people to inhabit this countryside dismiss their concerns over the water’s toxicity as just so much “folklore” and hogwash. Perhaps a healthy environment is something citizens of Earth should be prepared to give up in the name of progress, as the lands once known for their bounty are covered over in pavement and plastic.
We now travel a few hundred miles west, where something strange is afoot in a remote corner of British Columbia. The zombie invasion, we shall soon see, is no longer limited to Alberta and the Gulf of Mexico, and the infestation has begun to feed on anything it can find that hasn’t already been chewed up by mountain pine beetles:
Look a little bit closer, and some familiar patterns begin to take shape:
What we are looking at in these photos is, of course, the signature “circuit board” pattern of fracking, the process now used to unlock much of the energy used to keep spinning the wheels of the oil machines over in Alberta. North American natural gas, the primary fuel used to boil tar out of the ground and upgrade it to synthetic crude oil throughout an ever-increasing share of Canada’s middle provinces, has already peaked and has been in decline for the past decade. And the tar sands are always hungry for more gas. Look a little bit closer, and the thoroughness of the change that is happening becomes clear. Some of the last remaining wild lakes and rivers in the whole continent now sit adjacent to massive industrial operations, where a single careless spill or feckless operator has the potential to poison vast and formerly unspoiled ecosystems for generations to come. These remote waters are now being tapped.
You’re probably saying to yourself: wait a second. Isn’t natural gas supposed to be abundant in North America? It’s touted as an “alternative” fuel, even though it already makes up a quarter of the continent’s energy mix. But supposedly we’re sitting on a veritable bonanza of cheap methane, much of it in the form of shale gas, tight gas sandstone, coalbed methane, and such “unconventional” gas sources, right? And all of it is going to cost $3.50 per thousand cubic feet to develop and bring to market, so cheap we can afford to put off living sustainably for as long as anyone alive today cares…no?
The media echo chamber continues to recite the conventional wisdom that technological breakthroughs are responsible for the oversupply of gas that has depressed prices this season. Meanwhile, the gas producers themselves have begun to sing a different tune and are now liquidating their assets to those able to bail out the industry, as revenues at such low prices are unable to keep up with the costs of production. The trend over the past several months has been increasing consolidation of smaller, independent gas-drillers into large multinational corporations with diverse portfolios and a wider range of hedging options. The likes of Exxon-Mobil and the China National Offshore Oil Company are the kind of names you see coming up in the news about shale gas today, but it’s not because they think the gas is going to come for cheap. It’s because these are the companies that have the cash flows and deep pockets to hold onto undeveloped land and poor-performing wells while the price of natural gas recovers from years of continuous new drilling subsidized by swindled shareholders and high costs hidden by arcane accounting procedures. In the meantime, the executives of these companies continue to talk up their gas plays in an effort to convince the public and the market to continue to support gas development off which they have no intention of making a profit anytime soon, at least not until the gas markets witness another one of the price surges we have started to see over the past decade.
Meanwhile, as more and more fracks per well are used, the energy and water intensity of the process expands: the amount of energy consumed by trucks hauling fluid and equipment to and from drilling and disposal sites, and the energy needed to process and transport the produced fluids and gas skyrockets along with the water consumed to drill each new well. As gas from wells fracked dozens of times in British Columbia flows eastward to the Alberta tar sands, more oil is needed to produce more of this “natural” gas, which in turn is needed to produce more oil.
As the circle formed by such a tail-chasing operation continually expands and a surplus of energy production disappears, less energy, and hence less wealth, becomes available to the rest of society, until finally the profit of fossil energy completely disappears and energy production itself becomes impossible to sustain. By the time we catch on to what is happening, will there be anything left to keep us cruising down our own highways?
What we are talking about is not new technology, of course – just look at how the industry likes to bring up the “50,000 wells that have been successfully fracked without incident over the last fifty years.” What we really mean is the application of old technology, formerly used to squeeze the last bits of juice out of dying wells, as the now-mainstream means of acquiring onshore oil and gas in the United States and Canada. The process mimics what is happening in the tar sands, as the toxic byproducts of an energy- and water-intensive process claim a growing share of ecosystems and the communities that depend on them. What we have now begun to do is multiple-frack the countryside in all corners of the continent to free up the last few little pockets of energy, in a vain attempt to stave off the ever-dwindling gap between what the rest of the world can afford to export and what we can afford to consume. In other words, it is the classic story of peak oil and gas: newer, more expensive technology and methods used to access and process ever-smaller and more remote resources of continually lower quality. If it can’t go on indefinitely, it won’t.
Whatever the noise of the market says from day to day, the signal only points in one direction.
Laissez les bon temps rouller, non? While bickering continued between Obama administration officials and everyone’s favorite Ragin’ Cajun Senator Mary Landrieu over whether the Interior Department’s new(?) rules after lifting the six-month moratorium on new drilling were sufficiently agreeable to the oil and gas industry, trouble of a different sort was brewing across the pond. In a year apparently characterized by reactionary lunacy not just in this corner of the globe, French President Nicolas Sarkozy cozied up to nativist interests in a vain and ultimately embarassing attempt to distract voters from unpopular pension reform measures by violating E.U. law in singling out ethnic Roma for camps to be dismantled and their residents to be deported.
Now that the political fallout from the episode appears to be settling, it is worth mentioning some of the other toxins still floating in the air.
The French law under which the Roma were expelled requires temporary settlers to find the means to provide for themselves within three months, or else face expulsion. But it appears the French leaders themselves have been unable to fulfill the demands of this law. For to achieve economic self-sufficiency, a necessary prerequisite is the ability to effectively manage the entropic byproducts of prosperity. In this case, the Roma, long among the most downtrodden people of Europe, have taken on the thankless task of recovering valuable metals from the junked electronics produced by the French, who have embraced the obsolescence and waste cycle with a zeal that seems downright American. So if the Roma are expelled, I assume the French will be forced to turn to the same methods the rest of us use: sending waste electronics to the Chinese.
The past year or two has seen a flurry of new regulations and corporate social responsibility promises to crack down on the growing export trade in waste electronics. You would think it would be quite a bit easier than it is to keep all those cell phones and hard drives from being loaded onto container ships to China. After all, there’s not just gold, but something that may be even harder to come by in there: rare earth minerals like neodymium, an essential and irreplaceable ingredient in industrial magnet production, and lanthanum, used in the light-emitting phosphors found in flat-panel monitors and televisions. Unfortunately, in our attempts to maximize volume in our recycling programs by stacking as much paper as possible, we seem to have lost sight of what kinds of materials really might be worth holding onto, and the world (minus China, where we keep sending more and more of them all the time as part of our recycling programs) faces a critical shortage of many rare earth elements within as little as a two-year timeframe. Meanwhile, the price of rare earths has gone up by around 700% in just the past couple of months. And we never bothered putting any effort into figuring out how to recycle the stuff. It’s a shame, really.
While we’re on the topic of e-waste “recycling”: maybe, just maybe, it is actually better to bury old leaded glass cathode ray tubes in landfills, where they are unlikely to be disturbed and remain in a form that poses little in the way of health risks, unlike smashing them and separating the lead from the glass by hand (if you want more, we could get into the gory details of berylliosis). There are ways of dealing with some (though not all) of these hazards in the recycling process, although they do make the process quite a bit more expensive, more even than your usual recycling programs. The waste management method that recovers the most material is not always, automatically, the best or the most environmentally sound. And while the idea of “zero waste” might sound appealing, and waste minimization actually can bring substantial benefits, it behooves us to keep in mind that the goal of “zero” waste is unattainable not only for reasons of practicality, but because it violates physical first principles. It is impossible for any physical process to be perfectly efficient and hence produce no waste at all, and we shouldn’t set ourselves up for goals that do little but rhetorically empower opponents of what often is the best way to manage a given material, plain and simple.
All the attention given to the matter of e-scrap also begs the question of what is happening to all the other materials collected from the First World for recycling. We know from the plastic recycling industry’s own reports that #1 PET containers (think Aquafina, or as Lewis Black put it, “the end of water as we know it”) are mostly exported, with over 50% of recovered containers being shipped to China as of 2008. I haven’t found a more recent report, but I can’t say whether the reason is simply that the 2009 numbers have yet to be released or that they would prefer not to say (I assume the exported fraction can only have increased).
One difference between the issue of e-scrap, which has grabbed the public’s attention on 60 Minutes and in a number of other media reports, and the rest of the materials recycled or managed as municipal waste, is that the latter is more or less invisible. There are no well-publicized municipal-corporate partnerships here or public outcry to ban the export of plastic bottles. Maybe if people knew what conditions were like in the workshops in China and elsewhere that process the stuff, very often the same kinds of conditions you find in the e-scrap recycling industry so often reported, even sensationalized, by the media today, there might be some of those things.
Of all the forms of entropic pollution generated by humanity, our discarded goods may be the most hidden (we love to bury it), the most remote (we love to put it in someone else’s backyard) and even the part we feel the most compelled to pretend does not exist (it’s pretty trashy stuff, after all). But guess what? It’s all staying right here on this planet, it’s real enough that a good number of people make an honest living from it (not just the Roma either), and it matters enough that we need real answers for what to do about the stuff. Talking about it just isn’t enough.
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!
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?
Does anyone really, truly believe that the real price of coal is the $0.03 per kilowatt-hour claimed by utilities as the cost of production (or the $0.08 or so they charge you once they jack it up to retail rates)?
Let’s examine just a few of the costs that are paid for out of your tax dollars, or not paid for at all and just plain causing irreparable damage to our homeworld.
1. Climate change. It should almost go without saying, but according to the best studies available, coal burning is the primary culprit behind global warming, responsible for some 50% or so of the anthropogenic buildup of greenhouse gases and other pollution (including soot and coalbed methane release) responsible for observed warming of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans that has already resulted in sea level rise, more energetic atmospheric events like hurricanes, extreme heat waves, and greater absorption by warmer air of water vapor, resulting in widespread flooding and droughts. The current price of this externality is $0.00.
2. Eradication of the marine ecosystem. Better known in some circles as “ocean acidification,” I figure it would be best to just call this phenomenon what it actually is. We are on track to hit a mean ocean pH of 7.8 or so by 2050, too acid for coral reefs to form and likely acid enough to destroy extant reefs. Significant bleaching and destruction has already been observed given our current reduction of ocean pH from a historical average of 8.2 to the 8.0-8.1 we have today. Lest we forget, these reefs form the basis for virtually the entire oceanic ecosystem as we know it. Lest we further forget, we humans cannot survive without a functional oceanic ecosystem.
3. Radioactive waste. Coal mining and combustion results in the creation of more radioactive waste than nuclear power, wherein the problem of disposal still has not been resolved.
4. Massive-scale heavy metal pollution caused by fly ash. Coal is around 14% ash by volume (more for low-quality anthracite and lignite coals), of which 90% is fly ash, which has a high heavy metal content. If you like drinking arsenic, lead and mercury, then you should love coal. Most coal plants still operate retaining ponds rather than landfills, an actual disposal option, and if you want to know what kind of problems that can cause, well, maybe you should visit Kingston, Tennessee sometime. By the way, if coal ash were counted as part of the municipal solid waste stream, it would be about a third of it. Yes, it’s true: coal power plants in the United States produce about half as much waste as all of our residential and commercial trash and recyclables combined.
5. Acid rain. Yes, this is still a problem, especially in developing countries that continue to operate older coal plants. Which, as it so happens, includes the United States: the average age of coal-fired power plants here is some 40-50 years, with some plants much older, like the lovely Capitol Power Plant we have here in Washington, DC, which was built in 1908. Yes, that’s right, 1908. Can you guess whether this particular plant has seen any serious retrofits or upgrades since that time? Of course, attempts to replace this plant with something, anything, newer and better, have been blocked by the coal lobby here. Say, you don’t suppose they might be onto something in their attempt to buy politicians, do you? Is it not pathetic that politicians are willing to selling their souls for such a pittance as it takes to get them re-elected? Compared to the total profits that coal pushers can make by selling their product without adequate externality pricing, it really doesn’t take much.
6. Exemption from water quality requirements. Do you really think we could continue to operate our existing fleet of power plants and extant mining practices in this country if we applied the Clean Water Act universally?
7. Destruction of mountains.
8. Damage to roads and railroads caused by the weight of coal-hauling freight equipment (trucks and trains).
9. Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink. Over half of all fresh water withdrawals are used for power plant cooling, mostly coal.
I’m sure I forgot a few. Anyway, $0.30 per KWH from solar energy isn’t looking so bad anymore now, is it (let alone $0.10/KWH for wind power)? Imagine what you can really do with an entire thousand watts for an entire hour. Thirty cents is a pittance to pay for such a privilege as operating air conditioning, having refrigerated food, or using the Internet.
Oh yeah, and several studies recently showed that coal costs the governments of coal-producing states like West Virginia and Tennessee more than it produces in revenue, which kind of throws a wrench into that whole “coal is essential to the economy” claim, now, doesn’t it?
Forget about hurricanes pushing oil slicks onshore in Gulf Coast states. Ignore what you might have read about “Corexit rain” and other atmospheric disturbances. Have no fear of a little oil in Lake Pontchartrain. Oil has been moving onshore and slowly but steadily spreading into Gulf Coast states, even accumulating in underground reservoirs where it has the potential to leak out under pressure and cause potentially severe contamination of the surrounding soil and groundwater. Let me guess: you’ve read all the posts over on TOD about running casing, blowout preventer inclination and seafloor subsidence, skimmers, bad cement jobs, top hats of all kinds, and relief wells, and you think you’ve read the whole story now on this crudest of episodes. Well, here is a really trashy story about the Texas Orgasm that BP has been having lately all over the Gulf of Mexico and adjacent states. As it turns out, oil has been making its way onto the coast through the humblest of mechanisms: those big green trash trucks coming through to service your dumpster every week, as well as the occasional cleanup site piled high with used oil boom and bags of tar balls.
Disposal of waste from BP oil cleanup sites is a sticky issue with political, economic, and ecological ramifications for many players in the region. If you have ever attempted to legally dispose of used motor oil or other oily waste products, you know that managing these wastes is not as simple as tossing them into your trash can and sending them in a big truck to your local landfill. At these small scales, oil and its liquid products are considered “household hazardous waste,” a class of material halfway in between ordinary household trash and true hazardous waste. Small quantity generators of these wastes, such as households or small businesses disposing of small quantities of waste such as used oil from a company van, are exempted from the strict federal regulations governing handling and disposal of hazardous waste. But as a concerned citizen exercising your civic duty to comply with the laws of the land (and because you wouldn’t want to despoil your own backyard), you know that you are still required to bring these items to a household hazardous waste facility or collection event. And as soon as the material is collected, quite literally the instant you hand it over to the agency or business doing the collecting, the collector is bound by federal hazardous waste management regulations. Since the household hazardous waste exemption exists in order to avoid overly inconveniencing residential waste generators and make it more convenient for safe and environmentally sound waste management to take place, as opposed to the actual hazardous qualities of the waste itself, one would assume that stricter requirements would apply to those generating large quantities of the waste, no?
Not so when it comes to throwing out thousands of tons of oily waste from the effort to clean up after the hot liquids gushing into the Gulf and the beaches and coastal marshes next door. Apparently, tossing oil-soaked boom directly into a bin lined with nothing more than an ordinary trash bag (known for their ability to break when collected in packer trucks and rolled over by landfill compactors) is completely fine. BP is the first example I know of a “conditionally exempt large quantity generator.”
Are you surprised? If so, here is a tip for those new to studying the fossil fuel game: coal, oil and gas companies are exempt from air and water quality requirements, and the hazardous waste regulations for managing oil spill cleanup waste are no exception to the rule. After all, the 2005 federal Energy Policy Act specifically exempted gas drilling using polluting and water-intensive hydraulic fracturing methods from the Clean Water Act, and coal-fired power plants and the mines and ash disposal sites that go with them have never been required to comply with most of the provisions of the Clean Water or Clean Air Acts. Makes sense to me: remember, corporations are people too, and we wouldn’t want to inconvenience the fossil fuel industry or make it harder for these fuels to compete with renewable energy sources. Considering how much we owe BP and the others willing to get their hands dirty in such a grimy business, our first imperative should be to keep the cost of fossil fuels as artificially low as possible at all costs, even if it means sullying our coastlines, coral reefs, and plankton, and even at the cost of taking us back some fifty years in the soundness of our solid waste management practices. We need that oil, and there is no alternative! Plus they give scads of money to politicians. So it makes sense that we would treat these upstanding corporate citizens the way they want, by giving them lax regulations and loads and loads of tax breaks.
Anyway, there is a big mess going on down in southern Alabama and the surrounding area right now over how much of the oily cleanup waste to put where, with local residents and governments caught between their concerns over the environmental quality impacts of accepting oily waste for disposal versus the potential revenue streams available from making landfill sites available. A recent investigation by the Associated Press caught a number of state and local environmental officials with their pants down, in many cases completely unaware that hazardous waste was being disposed in these landfills at all. The investigation also showed evidence of environmentally unsound disposal practices at collection sites, such as heaps of oil-filled bags, collection containers with broken liners or in some cases none at all, and trucks spilling oil along the road and into local lawns as they move along their collection and hauling routes. Meanwhile, BP and its contractors are allowed to save money and cut yet more corners by disposing of hazardous waste in facilities designed only for ordinary household waste.
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Whatcha gonna do with all that gunk? (Photo: Mobile, AL Press Register)
Too Big To Succeed?
What do BP, AIG, and one more little company you might have heard of that goes by the abbreviation WM all have in common? Here is one characteristic they all share: all three companies grew so large and dispersed in their operations that quality control was bound to suffer on some level. Over the past several months, many observers have commented on what they see as a culture of negligence, indifference to safety standards, and corner-cutting to save costs at BP. I would argue that another factor is also at play: the inability of the entity that is the mega-corporation to get control over all its tentacles. It is easy to appreciate the challenge of changing corporate culture at a company as large as BP, with its hundreds of thousands of employees working in thousands of oilfields around the world as well as in alternative energy and in its gasoline distribution business. The energy sector and the financial sector have seen players rise to became too big to fail, only to ultimately become too big to succeed. Solid waste is looking more and more like it is heading in that direction every day too, as consolidation, reliance on (especially privately owned) megalandfills, and a lack of competition among major hauling and disposal operations creates a race to the bottom. With its landfill, collection, hauling, recycling, composting, and waste-to-energy operations in the United States and Canada and a presence worldwide, is it possible that Waste Management simply has too many hands in too many cookie jars to control what must ultimately be the core of any operation: a meaningful commitment to quality?
As for the mess itself, they could always just burn the nasty but energy-dense waste at one of the fifteen waste-to-energy plants already located throughout Florida and actually make some use of the stuff instead of just burying it or flaring it straight off the side of the Discoverer Enterprise. (Sidebar: do the names of some of these vessels not suggest just a bit of arrogance on the part of these oil companies?) But that would make just a bit too much sense for a company that seems to have lost the ability to do much of anything right other than making as big and as nasty a mess as possible out of our entire energy supply.
