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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 »

Freedom Is Free

Posted by wastedenergy on January 20, 2011

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.

Posted in Energy Consumption, Energy Production, Solid Waste, Urban Planning | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Auto-Matic Earth

Posted by wastedenergy on January 18, 2011

I must admit, I’m a bit confused.  How do automobile enthusiasts square their love of four-wheeled travel, possible only thanks to the largest public works project in history, and arising from a desire to maintain rapid cross-continental military dominance, with the professed libertarian ethic supposedly underlying their arguments, that the government ought not to interfere on behalf of matters of the public good?  Certainly, the social isolation of the solo commute makes sense given the harrowed place of the individual in their ideal society.  But let’s face it: it takes a lot of work to make it all happen.  There are no accidents here, other than the thousands that litter the freeways every day; the default option, given a withdrawal of government support, is not cars and roads, but rather nothing at all. Yet somehow, many true believers still seem drawn to the purported neutrality of the automobile option, as if believing that the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System arose naturally based upon its merits in a free market.

Sometimes I have to wonder if those who advocate taking humanity along such a regression curve have ever really bothered to expose their own arguments to any scrutiny.  Here I am talking both about conservatives who espouse status quo apologism as if current living patterns and disparities in wealth arose from some presumptive natural system of ethics rather than massive government intervention, and also leftist do-nothing “doomers” who put the cart before the horse in arguing that the best way to protect the living planet is a massive die-off or worldwide degeneration of living standards to abject poverty for living humans. Strangely, these two groups, of such divergent political philosophies, seem to have found some common ground of late: they both seem to think it would be best if we stopped trying to make life better for people and instead let everything just come crashing down.  This validation of the “horseshoe theory” of politics helps us make sense of the current popularity of deflationary, minimal-interventionist, “Austrian”-style economics.  After all, it is a system that offers no way out, and both sides are essentially arguing that we ought to get used to wading through smog and feces instead of trying to build a future life that is livable by getting interested in technologies like solar panels and high-speed rail.  High speed in general is the antithesis of an ethic that believes most in grinding progress to an absolute halt.

High Speed Nothings

While the selection of transportation systems is far less than automatic, and their deterioration absent continual reinvestment and replacement far more so, perhaps most automatic of all seems to be our acceptance of the idea that “Americans have a love affair with the automobile.”  Providing transportation for the public, rather than merely publicly funded systems that serve the private motorist, strikes us as morally wrong; why, the idea itself is downright socialist!  Or as Chris Christie and his ideological kin might say, “You can have my Lexus, when you pry my cold, dead body out of the pool of twisted metal it will become should it be struck by a semi truck!”  Are we really that sworn over to asphalt and rubber instead of sidewalks and cold steel rails for any practical reason, or is it just something we find important in order to feed a fantasy?  After all, in the nation enamored of a Tea Party aesthetic (as in, get your grubby government paws out of my pocket, except for the highways, the military-industrial complex, and my Medicare-subsidized scooter), communal mobility strikes us as an insult; it offends the sensibilities that favor some macho notion of the lone cowboy or the lone gunman, the individual stalwart against some kind of creeping communitarianism.

Or, to put it more bluntly, without big cars, big suburban roadways, and lots of big open spaces in between, it’s a lot harder to get away from minorities who live in cities and therefore to insulate and protect ourselves from the idea that we might actually owe some debt to society at large for our affluence.

Were things always so black and white?

So, what exactly is the point of refusing solutions to problems upon which most all (reasonable) people can agree, such as the ever-increasing scarcity and cost of petroleum-based fuels, the social and environmental pollution of automobile culture, or the isolation and ghettoization of urban spaces?  The simplest explanation is often that those who stand for the status quo have their own dogs in the fight.  I’m not much for conspiracies myself, but they certainly aren’t unprecedented.  Take, for instance, the great highway robberies of the 1940′s and 50′s: it’s been well established that the transformation of American cities from transit- to car-based spaces, from mixed-use developments to suburbia unsurvivable sans automobile, was no accident, but bore the particular mark of interests invested in particular forms of mobility.  Unless, of course, you work for the Cato Institute, but therein lies another dog: it exists only thanks to funding from, and in order to replicate and justify the ideology of, the oil billionaire Koch brothers.  And given the continuing prominence of the auto and oil lobbies in public policymaking and electioneering, it should be no surprise that their beneficiaries in the halls of government choose the long and difficult road of collapsitarianism, rather than the easier path of choosing to adequately build out technologies of tomorrow to serve broader public interests and more sustainable, less isolated styles of development.

It would, of course, be too easy to just sit back and complain.  Is it really enough, after all, to just identify the source of the problem?  To do so would simply replicate the behavior described above.  The problem isn’t really the immense staying power of lobbies, as every major industry has them.  The problem is really that we give their arguments so much credence, and that as a result, the level of discussion of policies as a means to solve problems remains superficial.  Mull this one, for instance: the “debate” over use of Canada’s tar sands is not really one at all, but merely ships passing in the night.  Are ”Oil creates jobs!” (all industries do, though, so it’s really a non-point) or “Hundreds of millions of Americans depend on cars!” (a bit of a scarecrow, that, as it’s not the only way to get you there) really responses to “Mining tar sands devastates the local environment and First Nation communities, and exacerbates anthropogenic climate change”?  Neither side really does much to deny the validity of the other’s point.  But from a bird’s-eye view, it is possible to see that there really are some answers out there, and that there is no ideologically neutral choice in the menu of options supposedly handed to us by The Powers That Be.  Rather than accept ideologically loaded points at their face value, then, and in turn act as if economic development and protection of basic environmental and health standards were inherently at odds with each other, we might instead ask ourselves not merely “what is the best way to continue doing what we do today?” but instead, ”what are the systems that might serve both of these perceived needs?” In such a manner we might go about finding real answers.

But first, we must find the actual will to do so.

Posted in Climate Change, Energy Consumption, Urban Planning | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Highway to Hell

Posted by wastedenergy on October 31, 2010

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.

Creepy…Happy Halloween

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

Medium Rare

Posted by wastedenergy on October 20, 2010

Those who thought critical material shortages were a non-issue are about to get a little shock therapy.  The sleeping giant is awakening.

To be sure, a small but doggedly persistent group of ecologically-minded intellectuals has spent the past few years following and working to educate the public on the problems with promoting endless economic growth in a finite world with constrained supplies of essential materials.  But these discussions have largely focused on supplies of energy, while paying little attention to the creeping problems with supplies of matter.  So the debate over peak oil, for example, has become more or less played out, with familiar debates between doomers who insist that the majority of cheap oil has already been extracted and that society faces inevitable declines, even collapse, as a result of dwindling supplies, versus cornucopians who hold that the magic of free markets will always produce better technology and acceptable substitutes anytime a material such as oil is in scarce supply.  The opposing sides in this debate have become so locked in place and tunnel-visioned that almost everyone missed the impending supply crisis in rare earths, an obscure class of elements poorly understood but very much taken for granted by the vast majority of the populace.

All the technologies we take for granted as part of a twenty-first century economy are built on a foundation of stable supplies of rare earth elements, as well as other materials that could easily become unavailable in the quantities needed for manufacturing such as the platinum group metals.  The computer you are using to read this article wouldn’t exist without them: the light-emitting diodes in your flat-panel display require rare earth elements, and the magnet in your hard drive uses neodymium.  You could go and buy a replacement that doesn’t need these materials, I suppose, but first you’d have to get in your car to drive to the store – and your car uses platinum group metals for its catalytic converter and fuel refined using rare earth catalysts.  You could save fuel by driving a hybrid or electric vehicle, or take mass transit, but then you’d need more neodymium for the electric motors and quite possibly lanthanum for the batteries.  The military could secure you a supply of fuel by invading the Middle East, but they’d have a hard time doing so successfully without night vision goggles, drone aircraft, smart bombs, or radar systems – all of which use rare earth elements.  The prospect of critical shortages might even make you so anxious you want to call for help (or call your Congressional representative to take action), but your cell phone won’t do you much good: rare earths in there too.

The power of neodymium compels you!

The cornucopian theory of infinite substitutability now faces a key stress test.  Is the free market really capable of anticipating and heading off supply problems as its proponents claim, or were rare earth supplies a blind spot for business leaders as much as anyone else?  If this is the first you’ve ever heard of rare earth elements, you’re certainly far from alone.  So why are the media and political leaders paying so much attention now?  Rare earths, unlike what the name might suggest, are not even all that uncommon, so why have supply issues suddenly become so urgent?

As is often the case in critical materials, the real concern is not with the amount lying in the ground – rare earths are used only in relatively small quantities, and trace amounts can be found throughout the Earth’s crust.  The problem lies in the physical reality of the developed supply chain: China, which controls much of the world’s easily minable deposits, has taken the lead in producing these elements and today enjoys a virtual monopoly on production, which it has begun to leverage in trade conflicts with Japan and now the United States through export quotas and embargoes.  Even as Western nations developed a dependence on rare earths for technologies that have come to be essential for manufacturing, consumer goods, and defense applications, China was able to produce these elements at such low cost (in no small part thanks to its seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap labor and willingness to look the other way as environmental standards are violated) that domestic producers were simply priced out of the market.  Virtually all non-Chinese rare earth mines have now been closed for some years, and even reopening mothballed production facilities will take several years, with new mines facing lead times of a decade or more.

Meanwhile, as with other supply-constrained materials, political leaders ignored the warning signs of import dependence and associated security concerns and proposed half-baked solutions, if any at all.  In 1995, in fact, conservative Republicans who had just taken over the U.S. Congress even went so far in their zeal for shrinking government and outsourcing industries as to abolish the U.S. Bureau of Mines, the agency that had overseen research and development on rare earths and which could have proven instrumental in developing a secure supply chain.  As if the political right wing in the U.S. needed any more fractures, the need for provision of stable domestic supplies of rare earths for military uses would seem to put the defense hawks at odds with the free-market devotees, no?   I’ll continue to follow the rare earth saga as further developments unfold, but for now, it may suffice to say the way the whole issue is going these days, it’s looking more and more like we’ll be marking a point squarely in the doomers’ column, and a lot sooner than anyone might have guessed.

Well done, indeed.

Posted in Energy Production, Urban Planning | 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 »

Training Wheels

Posted by wastedenergy on September 8, 2010

What has four wheels and flies?  If you guessed “an automobile culture that’s rotten to its core,” you may be onto something.  But what can be done to make it right?

We can start by looking at what makes it wrong, a big part of which is reliance on polluting liquid fuels that just don’t come as easy as they once did.  We already know that a dependence on fossil fuels harms the environment and will make life increasingly difficult for more and more people as we progress into the twenty-first century.  The fuels that remain in the ground are expensive, hard to reach, and often of very low quality, and even those fuels that will be made available will require massive diversions of capital and resources to enormous new production facilities and transportation infrastructure, reprepresenting ever-growing  network of Deepwater Horizons waiting to happen and an escalating assault on the stable climate systems upon which human civilization has been precariously built.  But imagine life with no vehicles, no motorized transport at all, and the consequences are also far more dire than a cancelled vacation here and there.  The inability to maintain efficient networks of transportation and delivery easily means the end of economic growth, and even beyond that, the total collapse of markets, prospects of not just wars but world wars for remaining supplies, and perhaps even the utter end of technological humankind as we know it.  Some people believe it is already too late to do anything about it and that our current economic troubles represent merely the beginning of a much longer, inexorable descent into chaos and societal collapse.  They may be right, and it is a sobering thought indeed.  They are even more likely to be right if we do little to nothing to change our energy consumption patterns in advance of what lies over the horizon.

Clearly, the consequences of an imminent and possibly quite steep decline in supplies of motor fuels are vastly more far-reaching than a few more cents, or even dollars, per gallon.  And yet most of us think nothing of burning a few gallons of the stuff every day taking the kids to soccer practice, or more than a few lifting a giant chunk of metal into the sky to carry us across paltry distances, albeit only after spending an hour or two checking in.  Meanwhile, the political aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon has focused less on viable alternatives and long-term planning and more on meaningless bickering over a moratorium on deepwater drilling, as if that even addressed the issue at hand.  Imagine what it takes to keep pumping a few billion gallons every single day year in and year out, and you get a sense of just how irrelevant any new drilling and any new discoveries will be in prolonging the fantasy of happy motoring.  And it’s not just cars, either: without oil, we can’t run all manner of planes, trains and automobiles, from the tractors working the fields to the trucks that deliver food to the grocery, to all the aircraft packed with fresh off-season produce flown in daily from the other half of the world, never mind all those plastics and industrial materials from fungicide to hand soap.  So regardless of how one might feel about new drilling and pipelines filled with synthetic tar sand crude, it would seem to be a no-brainer to support infrastructure needed to actually get OFF oil in a few areas, and at the very least save what remains for where it is really needed.  Right?

Wrong.  Here you can find yet another case proving that you don’t have to know the first thing about how the world actually works to get a business degree, or even to teach business.  For one thing, it demonstrates the kind of paralytic thinking on investments for the future and myopic focus on immediate short-term matters that has for so long held back economists from adequately performing their charge of helping society make good decisions in allocation of resources, the same sort of thinking that got us to the point of crisis in the first place and now threatens any hope of a real and lasting economic recovery.  Forget the proven track record of high-speed rail in Europe and the fact that China is now making laps around the United States in becoming the technological leader of the new century.  Conveniently ignore that austerity measures help nobody, that no infrastructure project has ever succeeded without the support of government institutions, and that it was the abandonment of government support for critical infrastructure, under the misleading banner of reducing debt, that caused the Great Depression to sink to its lowest depths in the late 1930′s.  Continually call for delay and cancellation of the transition to sustainable transportation infrastructure by reiterating the self-fulfilling prophecy that jobs in manufacturing will be added elsewhere rather than at home.  And never mind the casual sidestepping of the job creation benefits and economic revitalization along new rail corridors in a state like California suffering under staggering unemployment.  It is the following sentence that is especially telling, and troubling, in indicating where we stand on addressing matters of energy and our collective future:

“California doesn’t need high-speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles: With 10 airports and six competing airlines, we don’t have to worry about one strike or terrorist shutting down the whole system.”

Does anything about the above statement seem a bit odd in light of the physical reality of fossil fuels and the crushing effects of oil dependence upon the economy?  Do the authors truly believe that a terrorist attack is the only thing that could cause a systemic failure in such a transportation network?

It is the total ignorance on matters of natural resources and ecology of today’s business and political leaders, the voices speaking loudest on matters of how to best address, or rather ignore, our economic crisis, that should truly raise alarms.  If leading “thinkers” like these have their way, you can forget about any kind of smooth transition away from the fossil fuel economy.  Theirs is a  prescription to crash and burn, and yet they cannot even see the stakes at hand because the very ideology embedded in their academic and professional training does not allow them to understand or even acknowledge the physical limitations of business-as-usual, as set by immutable geological and ecological principles.  With this level of thinking on economic matters, you can be sure we’ve crossed the bridge to nowhere and are now headed full bore off the cliff and into the sea.  We’d better start laying down some track turning us back around in the opposite direction, and fast.

At long last, it’s time to leave the past behind…

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What’s in Store?

Posted by wastedenergy on September 3, 2010

Ask most energy experts what they see as the greatest obstacle to using renewable energy as the backbone of the electric grid, and you will usually get the same answer: “intermittency.”  The most readily scaleable renewable energy resources, wind, solar, and wave power, vary in their intensity and availability for commercial energy production according to daily and seasonal patterns in addition to random variation.  So while these technologies offer promise for reducing fossil fuel consumption today, they remain “unreliable” and even at high levels of market penetration must rely on fossil fuels for backup power.

Or so goes the popular conceit.

In fact, the reliability of electricity has little to do with how it was produced, and a whole lot more to do with what happens next.  What causes power to go out is usually a failure somewhere in the vast network that instantaneously carries that electricity to its destination; the circuits in your house don’t very well care if they are powered by wind or by exploding oil rigs, but they certainly care whether the power can get there in the first place.  And right now, the only way to get it there in most places is to constantly match the output of power plants running at any given time precisely against the amount of power consumed by all of the customers of an electrical grid.  This practice incurs not only enormous costs to keep the lights on through during spikes in demand, but also the risk of catastrophes like the August 2003 blackout of much of the eastern United States.  A major malfunction at a massive coal-fired, nuclear or hydroelectric power plant is far more likely to result in cascading power failures than a problem anywhere in a network powered by many small hydro installations, solar panels, wind turbines or combustors.  The smarter two-way grid required by such a network would be intrinsically far more reliable than today’s ancient one-way AC transmission systems, but there is still the problem of intermittency: electricity must be consumed instantaneously as it is produced; it cannot be stored for long periods of time before use, unlike most other commodities.  Right?

Of course that is not the case: as we all know, we already use stored electrical energy from batteries in all manner of applications large and small, including relatively large-scale energy storage systems used by hospitals and other critical sectors in need of uninterruptible power supplies.  And of course, many utilities already make use of pumped-storage capabilities of hydroelectric dams.  But proposals to store enough electricity in batteries to feed the grid in times of need run up against all manner of obstacles: they may take up too much space, requiring large purchases of additional land, or material supply constraints and costs may be too burdensome considering the scale of deployment necessary, as with lithium or nickel-metal hydride battery models using lanthanum, a rare-earth metal in limited supply.  But grid energy storage is probably necessary for integration of variable-supply renewable energy sources at scales large enough to replace traditional power plants.  And it has an added benefit as well:  in combination with two-way transmission capabilities and excess production capacity, energy storage results in a sort of “cloud grid” wherein no single energy production unit is ever essential to the functioning of the system, and the network would become resilient to even large numbers of intermittent sources failing to provide or numerous failures along the transmission and distribution system.  In essence, the ”smart grid” needs to function more or less like the Internet: less like a series of tubes, which can get clogged easily, and more like a big truck, wherein excess energy can be easily dumped into storage at low cost and then retrieved as needed, whether for cheaper power during peak loads near where it was produced, or to provide support when other nodes in the network fail elsewhere.

For battery storage or any other energy storage system, the most important numbers are the amount of power that can be discharged at a given moment, measured in megawatts for utility-scale systems, and its total storage capacity, measured in MWh or simply hours if the voltage remains more or less uniform over the course of the discharge phase.  One advantage of battery systems in many applications is the simplicity offered by their relatively uniform discharge profile; the power density of compressed air, for instance, declines sharply as the storage container gradually depressurizes over the course of a discharge phase.  The advantages of NaS in particular for grid storage are many.  Their energy density is high, offering a small footprint compared to many other storage options and the possibility of siting large numbers of storage facilities at many points along the grid.  They are efficient, relatively durable, and can survive many cycles of large fluxes of energy, making them well-suited to the rigors of utility-scale energy production.  And perhaps most importantly, they scale up easily, as larger cells are more economical to construct, and the materials required are far cheaper and more abundant than those used in any other battery design.  The most common NaS batteries available today are of the 1 MW, 8-hour class, while larger cells and more cost-effective, efficient, and reliable designs are in the development and testing stages and offer promise in addressing the remaining obstacles to widespread implementation.

So why have NaS batteries just begun to arrive on the scene?  For one thing, the technology is fairly new.  First developed in the 1960′s, the first batteries of utility size were created by a consortium of the Tokyo Electric Power Corporation (TEPCO) and NGK Insulators, which produces the insulating material needed to keep the battery within its operating temperature range, during the 1980′s.  This consortium remains the sole commercial manufacturer of NaS batteries for grid energy storage.  A prototype battery for mobile applications was released in 1991 for the EcoStar electric vehicle, but ultimately proved less appropriate for vehicles than the lithium-ion and nickel-metal hydride batteries in use today, and the concept was abandoned.  The first U.S. field trials of the technology took place in Ohio from 2001 to 2002.  In 2006, the New York Power Authority installed a battery to store off-peak electricity for powering compressors used by the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Long Island compressed natural gas (CNG) bus fleet. In 2008, the world’s largest array of the batteries was installed at a wind farm in Japan, consisting of seventeen 2-MW units used to provide storage of off-peak wind generation and smoothing of plant output.  That same year, Xcel Energy, the leading U.S. utility in wind power market penetration, began testing a 1-MW unit at a wind farm in Minnesota, and the first results of the tests were released earlier this year.  In 2010, the town of Presidio, Texas, connected to the U.S. power grid only by a single transmission line built in 1948, began trials of a 4-MW, 8-hour module for use in case of supply disruptions and to bring down the cost of power, the largest single battery of this type built to date. 

While the tests conducted so far show great promise, the NaS battery remains a relatively young technology, with most battery chemistries in use today dating back to the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, and large-scale grid energy storage is still a fairly new idea.  And other technologies could compete to fill the niche of modular, low-cost energy storage systems as well; compressed air looks to be another dark horse candidate as higher efficiencies are achieved and costs decline.  But with NaS batteries now reaching the necessary levels of reliability and commercial production, is large-scale battery storage ready for prime time as well?  Could these devices be the answer the conundrum of large-scale grid energy storage?  It certainly makes a short list of serious contenders, and considering the urgent and widespread need to upgrade the aging U.S. electric grid and build synergy with the ever-growing renewable power sector, what better way could there be to put Americans back to work?

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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 »

A Series of Tubes

Posted by wastedenergy on August 12, 2010

In honor of the late Ted Stevens, I’d like to take a brief moment to discuss something the man truly loved.  No, not the Internet, but actual tubes: the ones that carry Alaska’s contribution to our modern world, and also the kind that can keep society moving once those become obsolete. 

While St. Peter may have dropped his charges against Stevens after prosecutorial misconduct, another type of charges, the explosive kind, might have been dropped by Environmentalists in order to invent a problem with another series of tubes in Michigan, at least if you believe Rush Limbaugh’s likely take on events.  In any case, thanks to production declines from its fields and yet another aging pipeline, it looks like Alaska is getting a run for its money as a prime oil supplier from another place you can see from your house if you live there: Canada.  The conventional wisdom tells us that Canada, as a friendly neighbor to the north that doesn’t want us to, as Jim Kunstler so eloquently put it, “eat shit and die” like most of the other places that sell us oil, will be more than happy to hand over all the tar we could possibly want, that is once they get done toasting the remainder of their natural gas supply and more than a few gallons of water in order to separate it from all that sand and get it into a less amorphous-solid-like form that can actually be pumped through tubes.

Look at all the beautiful land still left to wreck.

That is, of course, all assuming that everything goes swimmingly, unlike in Lake Pontchartrain.  It’s looking more and more like the Keystone XL pipeline, an expansion of an existing pipeline system from the tar sands that would extend all the way to Texas and Louisiana and a segment of tube with the potential to monumentally increase America’s use of the dirtiest and most inefficient mode of transportation in existence, won’t ever swim at all.  Even if it does get built, this time around there actually are a whole lot of environmentalists already angry enough about the project that they just might sabotage the pipeline for real this time.  After the Michigan pipeline tear last month dumped a million gallons of crude into the Kalamazoo River watershed in what is believed to be the Midwest’s largest-ever oil spill (it’s been a good year for biggest-ever spills, hasn’t it?), the public’s opinion turned just a little sour on the risks of adding yet more pipelines to the vast network that spans the nation already.  And for those who missed it, crude was already not exactly the sweetest thing on the public’s mind these days.

Even assuming the pipeline is completed, that doesn’t mean our tubular troubles are over.  Before the synthetic crude from tar sands, or any other crude, can be burned up taking the kids to soccer practice, it must first be refined, then pumped through another series of smaller tubes to get it to your local Circle K.  OK, our pipelines may be crumbling, but our refineries are still doing OK, right?  No strange things afoot there?

Turns out there was yet another headline that graced Page 22 of your newspaper this week showing that the Deepwater Horizon and the Trans-Alaska pipeline aren’t the only leaky liabilities and ticking time bombs in BP’s portfolio: on April 7, a compressor at BP’s Texas City refinery (yes, that one again) caught fire, resulting of the illegal release of 17,000 pounds of benzene and over 500,000 pounds of undisclosed “other pollutants” into the neighborhood over the next two months.  An investigation by the Texas Attorney General’s office revealed a lack of maintenance as the likely cause of the fire.  You’d think after such an event, BP would have the wisdom to shut down the refining units running off the faulty equipment, right?  Well, it turns out they actually knew about the problem and chose to keep those units running so as to avoid any loss in productivity. I know, truly shocking for a company with such an outstanding reputation for safety and excellent performance.  Call it yet another notch in the company’s belt and add it to the fifteen from the 2005 explosion at the refinery and the shift supervisor who died in another accident at the plant three years later, along with the eleven from the Deepwater Horizon.  Hey, if we can reduce Afghan and Iraqi casualties to mere numbers, why not oil workers as well?  It’s not like they amount to a hill of beans to the company for which they once worked and which treated their lives as just another cost of doing business.

By the way, if you’re not such a big fan of wind turbines or trash-to-energy plants, I’m curious: how might you feel about having one of these monstrosities in your backyard?

Trouble in Texas City: The Intertubular Processing and Storage Node

But suppose the oil makes it through all the tubes without a hitch, all the way to the pumps and ultimately into your vehicle.  Happy motoring, right?

Bill McKibben and a few others have continually pointed out that the disasters that make headlines and business-as-usual habits are, in the end, more or less equally disastrous for the health of our environment and our economy.  A headline from today’s issue of The Onion, in the tradition of the media outlet known for its role as one of the few able to comment seriously on matters of importance, told it like it is: “Millions of Barrels of Oil Safely Reach Port in Major Environmental Catastrophe.”  It is telling that the only psychological method we have to seriously confront our oil crisis is humor: such is the mark of truly intractable problems, like the jokes that emerged from the Jewish ghettos of Europe through centuries of segregation and persecution.  So what are we going to do once, or hopefully before, this party ends, as it surely will (and more likely sooner rather than later)?

The terminal: in the end, the Internet and everything else will all go down the tubes if we don’t figure out something, and fast. 

By jove, I think I might just have the answer!  Unfortunately, it takes a bit of foresight, some dollars, and, if you want it to be sustainable, a simultaneous commitment to renewable energy, all resources that seem to be in short supply right now at all levels of government here in these United States.

Maybe soon we can start talking about trillion-dollar-scale electrified rail projects instead of just a few billion dollars in occasional stimulus money even as ten times as much goes to keep the auto industry on life support. It takes more than just a little seed money to build an industry capable of making a dent in levels of oil consumption that remain mammoth even during periods of chilled demand, like today.  It also takes comprehensive, top-level planning for the long term from visionaries at the highest levels of government.  And that, in turn, requires our political leaders to square their positions with scientific principles and the goal of moving the country forward rather than merely the principle of profitable petroleum for what proportionally is just pennies of campaign funds.  Can anyone doubt that Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R – CLIMATE ENEMY NUMBER ONE) will do as much as she can to continue Alaska’s legacy as the fossil state holding back the rest of the country from finally making serious attempts to get beyond oil, and how sad is it that she is willing to sell herself for so little?

We urgently need mass transit and other forms of low-impact transportation not to supplement our driving habits, but to actually replace them at levels that matter.  We should be generating as much as possible of the funds needed to build a transportation network we won’t be embarassed to call our own in the future through taxation of gasoline and other fossil motor fuels, including fair and non-zero valuation of their externalities such as congestion, smog, and climate pollution.  Public transportation infrastructure in this country is crumbling at the same time that we face other key turning points in the history of human energy use: the first stages of a permanent worldwide decline in crude oil supplies and changes in the planetary climate system too obvious for even the most vigorously stubborn Conservapedia readers to deny any longer.  If we don’t do something about fixing our fixation on oil-centric transport, we face serious problems not even just over the horizon but already, as America’s families and its ecosystems come under ever more strain from the rising costs of energy and transportation.

If we do manage to somehow break through the inertia of politics and get it right, our tubes will serve us in the coming world for a long time.  There may even be something already happening in Washington, DC that can give us hope…

.

Tubes done right: if we fix our transportation system, there may be a place in the world for the Internet after all, and all the other wonderful things we call “civilization.”

Posted in Energy Consumption, Urban Planning, Water and Soil | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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