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One for a Rainy Day

Posted by wastedenergy on March 7, 2011

OK, so, suppose you’ve got no sunshine, the wind’s not blowing, your battery is blown out, your ultracaps are busted, you’ve got no trashy fuel left to burn, and for some reason even your geothermal flux capacitor is broken, but you still need some energy. What else are we supposed to do?

A lot of people will try and tell you the only way to balance things out is with natural gas. Well, that might not always be the worst idea in the world, but first check thyself, forst you wreck thyself. Should we really be using natural gas as the first option, as so many people seem to be suggesting? Is it really going to help us transition to renewable energy? I find the proposition dubious, as you probably know by now. Moreover, natural gas is too valuable to be wasting trying to replace coal and oil. We might actually need it for those moments when the lights all but go out.

And, it’s not exactly as clean as some folks might be trying to tell you, either.

Well, we sure fracked that one up.

So, what can we do to cut these guys down to a more appropriate size?

Let me give you my thoughts on a big part of the answer.

Hydropower. Like trashpower, it’s one of those things that gets trashed a lot by otherwise well-intentioned environmentalists. Don’t get me wrong: there’s been many an ecosystem that’s been wrecked before being checked by huge dams. But just like with waste-to-energy, with better living through technology, we can not only fix the problems that were making it dirty before, we can also make it a powerful ally in our quest to rid the world of dirty energy. But what do I mean by that exactly?

Hydropower is good for many things, first of which is providing a steady lightening of the load for when your other sources of lightning power won’t fire.  Let’s have a quick look at the Netherlands as an example. They know how to do it up proper, when it comes to both liquid and gas (sidebar: they also recycle half their trash, and burn the other half – for energy). First, they know how to save their gas for when the time is right. Compare them to Britain, which Thatcherized its gas industry and is now facing an energy crisis of epic proportions that might be fixable only with a nuclear fix, at least in the short term. I still have faith that they’ll get the offshore wind and wave power figured out, though – they have some of the best resources in the world, once they figure out how to tap into them. The Netherlands, on the other hand, owns the largest gas field in the North Sea, the largest in Europe even, instead of letting it own them via corporate control. The country has long had a penchant for demanding individual sacrifice for the greater good, though not so much that the State sucks all the flavor out of life. They’ve done a good job of conserving it and of actually tapping into the smaller, scattered fields first, so as to save the best for last. Eat your heart out, Bakken Shale and Kochheads everywhere.

Not only that, but they’re actually finding more of it all the time. The good stuff, too – no fracking required. What can I say, the Dutch know how it’s done. Keep burning that eternal flame.

But enough fire for now - let’s get to the water part.

Water, water, everywhere. We’re going to get wet. Lest you think those crazy Dutch were only about the windmills, let me be blunt with you: they know how to roll with the tides as well, and also a little thing about rolling on a river. They may be living in Flatland, but they’ve still got quite a bit of hydropower going on in their own little world too. And monster dams big enough to block out the sun aren’t the only way of doing things either: if you’ve never heard of microhydro, well, it’s time for you to get crackin’ and frackin’ on a little bit of your OWN research. Talk about untapped potential!

That’s not to say, of course, that there isn’t something to say about big hydro as well, since sometimes, as she said, you better go big or go home. Just look at what America’s Hat has to offer up, if we can only manage to get some transmission lines past those confounded nimbies. Power to the people, anyone?

Think classic was the only way I could do it? Here’s a little new wave that might be up your alley, and I’m not talking wave power, although that’s great too. Inspect this gadget, and I’m willing to bet you’ll go WOWZERS, or possibly even YAKAWOW!!! The dreaded Dr. Koch has got nothing on this one. I’m talking, of course, about the variable speed water turbine. We’ve been fangling this one for a while, but it’s ready to roll out now. You see, one of the problems that tends to arise is when the water level falls, and the pressure drops out. The solution? Add a turbine that can go at any speed and still pump out juice. Inconsistent generator speed got you down? All it takes is an extra flux capacitor to smooth out the output a little bit. So simple, you can even do it yourself.

Hey, hipster techno fans out there, I got the news: this time, we’re keeping the lights on. Wouldn’t want to miss out on that quadruple rainbow, now, would ya? As for me, I’m always on, even when I’m out cold. Five stars. Heads up. Look out below. Shoot past the moon, reach for the stars. Forget the rivers you thought you knew, try a waterfall instead. See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya.

I HAVE THE POWER OF A THOUSAND SUNS!!!!!!!!!!

Posted in Energy Production, The Ether, Water and Soil | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

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 »

Wipeout

Posted by wastedenergy on February 3, 2011

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

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

Percent of species going extinct versus millions of years ago

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

“What are you lookin’ at?”

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

Joker of Doom

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

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

Hot Potato

Posted by wastedenergy on January 10, 2011

Freedom isn’t free, at least not freedom from imported oil dependence.  Someone has to pay for the alternatives.  But whom?

The answer, if we base our decisions about which alternatives to pursue on incomplete information, without understanding their true costs and long-term impacts, is that all of us will pay the price.  And that’s exactly what the profiteers had in mind, which is why, even today, the members of America’s Natural Gas Alliance have done little to correct the media myths about what is really cheap and what is really expensive.  Quite to the contrary, producers continue to purchase ad space on the front page of the New York Times, repeating the story that “technological advances” have suddenly made ninety years of gas available, thereby allowing utilities, policymakers, and the public at large to indefinitely put off the more difficult work of finding resources that won’t run out and irreparably damage the planet’s life and ecosystems.  They know full well that energy transitions take time, and that it is impossible to respond immediately to volatility in the market by bringing new projects online – just look at the time it has taken to get the Cape Wind project off the ground.  If we choose to increase our dependence on natural gas today, we are stuck with that decision tomorrow, even if the costs rise dramatically – and we won’t have built out the capacity needed to manufacture replacements.  The conventional wisdom is that abundant gas is pricing the real alternative, renewable energy, out of the market.  “Energy in Depth,” indeed: if we get in so deep, where exactly does the “transition” part come into play?

What gets less attention than the (artificially) low price is that all that technology doesn’t come cheap.  The real winners in the horizontal drilling and fracking boom aren’t the gas producers like XTO, Chesapeake, and Range Resources, which helps to explain why these gas-leveraged companies keep selling off acres to companies with deeper pockets like Exxon, Chevron, and CNOOC.  The real winners are the oilfield services providers: companies like Halliburton and Schlumberger who hold the intellectual property rights, equipment and expertise required to coerce oil and gas from difficult-and-expensive-to-develop shales.  Counterintuitively, the larger base of reserves potentially available in shale and other low-grade resources, like bituminous sands and ultra-deepwater oil, doesn’t really help to alleviate scarcity because the higher costs of technology required to develop those resources must ultimately be passed on to the consumer at large.  As resource economist Peter Odell put it, you don’t run out of resources, you run into them.  Unfortunately, thanks to the PR blitz from the fossil fuels industry, it’s taken the mass media a while to make the connection between rising costs to producers and rising costs to consumers.  So we are stuck with the myth of cheap and abundant natural gas, the supposed “alternative to fossil fuels” that is, in fact, a fossil fuel itself.

Can you connect the dots?

If you follow the statements made by executives of major gas producing companies, you’ll notice that lately, the narrative has changed a bit.  No longer is anyone under the illusion that natural gas is a low-cost panacea; instead, they emphasize an ongoing transition to “liquids-rich plays,” like the Eagle Ford Shale in Texas and the Bakken Shale in North Dakota.  The idea here is that, even though heavily gas-leveraged companies know they cannot recover the costs of development at today’s prices, perhaps some of that cost can be offset by drilling for oil instead, given the higher price for the commodity.

So how has that transition from shale gas to shale oil been working out?  As it turns out, not so hot.  Producers are fast discovering what they should have already known: the price of oil is high for a reason, and producing it is not as simple as just poking holes in the ground.  The easy oil is gone, and you can’t offset the cost of producing expensive gas by simply shifting production to expensive oil instead.  So once the attempt to displace costs to another profit center, in the form of difficult and expensive oil, fails, to whom does the hot potato of high production costs get passed next?  The answer, as noted above, is quite clear at this point.  Sooner or later, we will all pay the price for our poor judgment.

It’s just a matter of time before all this blows up in our faces.

Posted in Energy Production, Water and Soil | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

A Bright Future

Posted by wastedenergy on December 9, 2010

Watch out for snakes!  These guys and their kin are all over the press these days, including one of Shell, Exxon, and BP’s preferred dumping grounds.
 

We could start with the statement that the U.S. has “more natural gas than Saudi Arabia has oil,” which is clearly meaningless.  They love throwing these kinds of numbers around because most Americans don’t know the first thing about what is really the same and different about the king of supergiant oilfields in the heart of the Arabian oil province and a hyper-dispersed, hyper-expensive, unconventional and intrinsically lower-quality resource here in North America.  The gas guys don’t like to talk about it much, but if you ask them directly, they’ll tell you nobody is exactly champing at the bit to go drill all those shale gas acres they keep talking up to their shareholders and anyone else who will listen.  That is, not unless they can do it with Other People’s Money.

You might not have noticed, being distracted by the return of $90 oil and all, but the price of natural gas is also creeping upward these days, toward $5 per thousand cubic feet.  Weren’t we talking about $3 gas just a few months ago?  But the current price rise looks like a tiny blip compared to the wild price swings of the past decade, when $13 and $14, roughly equal to the price of oil today on a per BTU basis, could be reached from prices at half that level or even less in a matter of just months.  Why did the price go down so suddenly?  The conventional wisdom, which as usual turns out to be not so wise, is that the shale gas drilling boom has brought a flood of low-cost gas onto the market and depressed prices.  That’s half true: there was a lot of drilling, but a lot of it was subsidized at a loss by the shareholders of the various members of America’s Natural Gas Alliance.  The gas companies were making money, but it was because they weren’t paying anywhere close to the full costs of drilling and fracking all those wells.  As long as some new suckers could always be convinced to pave the way, they went right along their business of driving their big old trucks (did I remember to mention that the natural gas industry relies heavily on oil?) up to those wells and fracking away at gas they could then sell to another batch of suckers at hedged prices.  Through a combination of creative financing, sleight of hand, and a devilishly convincing PR game, they were able to convince most of us, including those whose votes of confidence count the most, that expensive gas, gas that cost more and more to produce with each new field being developed, was actually cheap.

Well, as it turns out, the latest suckers just got swept into office and now sit in state houses from sea to shining sea.  Since the federal government still hasn’t regulated hydraulic fracturing, that leaves state governments, already in a deep financial hole, now in a regulatory black hole at the same time.  (Sidebar: what was it Tom Friedman said about what you should do when you’re in multiple holes at the same time?  That’s right: BRING SHOVELS!)  The reason New York is forced to outright ban fracturing is the same reason Pennsylvania has forsaken any meaningful attempt to regulate it or to improve its own dire financial straits by taxing a practice with the potential to cause – excuse me, which already has caused –  widespread contamination of critical water resources throughout the state, not to mention the industry’s own taxing of state infrastructure.  It will be interesting to compare the two states going forward, each sitting atop monstrous swaths of potential gas fields, and see whether the people of Pennsylvania in fact come to feel that their decision to allow unconventional gas drilling to go forward unregulated was the correct one.  Either way, the causes of both divergent policies are the same: the outsize political clout of the oil and natural gas industry and its ability to create special exemptions and loopholes for itself and even to get its CEO’s installed as vice presidents by an eager-beaver conservative Supreme Court.  This industry doesn’t just want to convince the public of its benefits; it will also shove itself down anyone’s throat who disagrees, courtesy of their tap water.

One of the most popular lines used to sell natural gas is that it will make us less dependent on oil.  Of course, gas is not a substitute for oil: the vast majority of natural gas is used for industrial, commercial and residential heating alongside electricity generation.  Very little petroleum is used for these purposes except in a handful of mostly remote locales; around 3% of total electricity generation in the U.S. comes from petroleum, compared to around a quarter from natural gas.  But the promoters continue to use the line anyway, suggesting that the alternative to natural gas development is to send more energy dollars overseas to oil producers, instead of supporting domestic production of renewable energy.  To be fair, many supporters of renewable electricity proposals such as wind and solar power also suggest that their chosen technology is in itself an alternative to oil.  And while there may be some utility for natural gas as a transportation fuel – say, for fleet vehicles that can be reliably refilled at the same location each night, such as buses or taxi cabs – it is totally impractical as a fuel for a primary family vehicle or for long-distance trucking, as even the biggest proponents of natural gas vehicles acknowledge.  At most perhaps a quarter of the U.S. vehicle fleet could be converted to run on natural gas – at great expense, and doing nothing to obviate the need for alternatives to oil that can properly serve the other 75% of Americans’ transportation needs. 

What natural gas could do, assuming there were actually enough of it to go around for any purpose for which one cared to use it, is replace a significant share of the nearly half of U.S. electricity production currently generated in coal-fired power plants.  Of course, renewable energy technologies backed by effective support infrastructure could effectively accomplish the same goal, and they could do so on a far more permanent basis and even (over the long run) at significantly lower costs than using natural gas.  But those in the oil and gas business seem to prefer the line that gas will get you off oil.  I guess that makes it easier to sell than calling attention to the polluting effects of coal, potentially undermining the industry’s position by risking broader public scrutiny of sustainability (and pollution) effects of energy choices in general.  They don’t want people to understand that sooner or later, we’ll all be freed from our addiction to fossil fuels whether we like it or not, that the only real question is what price will be paid for continually delaying the day of reckoning, and that ultimately conservation and renewable energy are the only viable options to avoid an inevitable fossil energy crash and all its attendant consequences for the resilience of the ecosystems we must continue to rely upon after the fact.  Sooner or later, Mustang Sally must slow that Mustang down, you won’t be able to get a Cadillac for no money down anymore, and there will be no more fun once Daddy takes away that T-bird.

I’m sure there are a few people out there who will read this entry and immediately accuse me of “alarmism,” as if the preferable option were to keep the alarms silent and the public in the dark, shielded from the harsh truth of our unsustainable energy trajectory and its consequences for the human species and planet Earth.  “Millions of wells have been fracked without incident,” they will say.  Fine, then: let the oil and gas drillers simply play by the same rules as everyone else.  Revoke the exemptions to the Safe Drinking Water Act and force companies to fully disclose any chemicals used in drilling fluids that may be associated with health and environmental hazards.  To use a line the conservatives who deliver political favors to these oilmen love: if they have nothing to hide, they should have nothing to fear.

That the fossil fuel interests shroud themselves in such secrecy and demand special protection from the laws everyone else must follow in itself tells us enough to know that something must be amiss.

In conclusion: “Natural gas,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar at a recent press conference, “has a bright future.”  Let’s hope he doesn’t mean it will brighten our skies with flames from a vaporized LNG cloud explosion or some similar WMD-scale disaster related to our fossil fuel extravagance.  Gas, alongside its cousin oil, will surely play a major role in the course of human events over the coming age as humanity brushes up close against its geophysical limits.  But it just might not be quite the gas America’s Natural Gas Alliance wanted you to have in mind.

Posted in Energy Consumption, Water and Soil | 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 »

Circuit Breakers

Posted by wastedenergy on October 13, 2010

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.

Will the circuit be unbroken?

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

ASPO-USA World Oil Conference: Day 1 Report

Posted by wastedenergy on October 8, 2010

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

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

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

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

Some of the more memorable sessions I attended today:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Playing With Fire Part II: After Burners

Posted by wastedenergy on September 17, 2010

It’s Energy for Tomorrow.  It’s a green machine, and it will keep the engines of the economy humming fresh and clean.  Clear blue skies, so clear it makes you want to go right up to a bus and suck down exhaust directly because it’s so much cleaner than the air around it.  And it will last forever.  Even if we do start to run short around these parts, we have so much of it here on the Gas Planet that the very idea that there ever wouldn’t be enough of it to do everything we need is…well, it’s out of this world.

And if you like that idea, you might also enjoy some of the other wonderful things we have to offer from Uranus.

The god of the sea says he might have some gas down there too.

So what’s really going on here?  And how can we make sense of the true nature of natural gas?  We can start by taking a look at some of the facts most economists and energy policymakers seem to have missed in their discussions about this highly leveraged commodity on which we seem to be quickly leveraging the future of our entire civilization.

The first thing to keep in mind about the natural gas market is that it is not anything like the oil market: there is no integrated global trading system, and it would be impossible for a single producer or cartel to dominate the global supply.  As a result, most natural gas used in North America does, in fact, come from North America.  This fact is often used as a selling point by proponents of natural gas like T. Boone Pickens, but in fact what it more reflects is the differing physical properties of the fuels and the fact that oil is by far the more convenient when it comes to transportation.  In other words, the resources are not fully substitutable for one another, and shortages of each are likely to cause their own different yet interconnected economic problems.

“Whaaat? I didn’t major in economics!”  It’s OK Boone, neither did I.

There really is no global natural gas supply; the only way to ship the stuff to other continents is in liquefied form (LNG) using enormous and expensive tankers and terminals, infrastructure projects with decade-plus lead times.  For a number of reasons, I believe that LNG will be largely irrelevant to global energy markets except in a few cases wherein the available supply for the foreseeable future is already spoken for by established importers.  The costs, risks, and public opposition to constructing new LNG terminals is substantial and may be insurmountable, particularly in relation to the quantity of overseas gas trade that would be needed to make up for regional shortages as large as those that could occur in a major gas consumer like the United States.  And of course, the process of liquefying and transporting the gas itself consumes significant quantities of energy and, together with leaks throughout the process, goes a long way toward erasing any possible benefit to using gas for the climate.  For these reasons, it is safe to almost completely ignore someone who talks about “global natural gas supply.”  To put it simply, there is no such thing.

So natural gas production is much more of a regional and continental game, and costs of production will therefore differ considerably from one location to another, even within the same continent.  For this reason, it makes little sense to talk about uniform, homogeneous pricing for gas as occurs on commodity exchanges, but there are a number of ways to do so, starting by calculating the breakeven price for production of marginal (new to come online) gas wells.  Breakeven price is really just a way of asking what the wellhead price of natural gas needs to be in order for an exploration and production (E&P) company to make back the money it spends in finding, drilling and constructing, and operating the well, and therefore to justify as marketable any new gas that becomes available.  The first method is to calculate the full amortized cost over time, the second method is to calculate only the operating costs while ignoring everything else, and the third is to ignore the share of the production cost that comes from shareholder investment. 

It should be noted that only the first method actually tells you anything about the sustainable cost of bringing gas to the wellhead and is the only measure that has any real meaning in looking at the overall resource available.  The second and third make no real sense for reasons that should be obvious if you are familiar with the basic principles of full cost accounting, in addition to the fact that every well is considerably different, even within the same gas field or “play” as the industry lingo goes.  Allowing the difference to be made up in equity while failing to report these costs in the wellhead price is the type of practice that allows a commodity bubble to form, although in this case the reported wellhead price is too low rather than too high as in most bubbles.  It remains a bubble nevertheless, with the reported wellhead price lower than the actual full cost and therefore the full costs not being reflected in pricing.  The price of natural gas today does not reflect the actual economic outlook primarily because E&P companies are so highly leveraged under private equity arrangements, especially virtually all shale gas producers.  If you want to get a real sense of the economic effects of one energy source versus another, you need all costs need to be included in the pricing to give an accurate representation of total E&P costs, which means adding in the equity provided by investors.  Once you perform this basic calculation, it becomes immediately obvious that the price of natural gas must considerably increase, at the very least by a factor of two to four, for shale and other unconventional gas sources to make up any kind of substantial share of the total gas market.

Thus, the idea on which we are supposed to be sold, that natural gas will be cheap and abundant for a long time (and therefore also the idea that it outcompetes renewable energy sources) is built on a myth that current, relatively low wellhead prices can be sustained. They cannot.  Most of the proponents of shale gas act as if it is some new resource that was just recently discovered.  It’s not; geologists and oil and gas engineers have known about the gas-bearing properties of certain shales for a long time.  In fact, it was only the gas price hikes of the early 2000′s that caused any interest in shale gas at all, and all gas companies know that the price still needs to increase considerably to make their investments in shale gas profitable.  At this point in time, they are not, and we all know what must eventually happen to a business that can’t generate profits.  What the gas companies are banking on is the idea that we will, believing the myth of cheap gas, fail to build viable alternative energy technology and infrastructure, and that we will end up being forced to pay the true, higher prices of gas once they inevitably rise. 

So it’s time we cut through the cloud here and started basing our projections on physical facts and real costs we already know for certain will come about, rather than on the babbling of people on Wall Street caught up in the day-to-day movement of markets and trained to avoid thinking about anything other than the next quarterly earnings report.

Gas bubbles are, of course, nothing new. 

Additionally, the cost of finding and producing gas is not the only cost involved; the delivered cost of gas to consumers of all types will, of course, be higher than the wellhead price, as it must include amortized pipeline construction and operation costs.  These costs are also more or less certain to increase considerably over the long term, as gas wells close to demand centers are gradually depleted and the average distance that gas must be carried through pipelines increases as more remote sources are exploited, just like with oil.  Bringing gas to hubs and then to various urban demand centers in the U.S. from distant wells in Alaska or Canada is inherently more expensive than piping it from nearby gas fields, while offshore gas pipelines are also more expensive to construct and operate and constitute an increasing share.  Transporting large quantities of gas over long distances also introduces all kinds of new safety, environmental, and national security risks.

So, natural gas might not be the future, and there are a lot of reasons to believe it shouldn’t even be the present anywhere near the extent to which it is.  Still, the idea that a long, comfortable transition to sustainable sources of energy will be made possible by ample supplies of clean, climate-friendly gas is being sold heavily by industry today, and many environmentalists seem to be taking the bait, although skepticism does seem to have increased of late.  But what will happen if the public actually does buy into this idea and agrees to bank the future on going from oil addicts to gas zombies based on “hundred year supply” claims?  What will the world look like, say, 28 years later?  Well, one thing you can count on is that a whole lot more of the Gas Planet will look something like this, times a few hundred, thousand, or million, depending on how each individual well plays out and just how much of the stuff we are capable of burning up before we simply kill ourselves off:

Careful, California: I hear the Texas Chicken Pox is contagious, and it’s spreading like wildfire these days.  Might even turn you into a zombie too.

And of course, don’t look now, but I don’t think Neptune is too thrilled anymore.

Meanwhile, from Siberia to Nigeria to down home in Lou’sana, the fires of industry and the midnight oil kept burning, never once stopping to allow for the possibility that one day soon all of it, every last bit, might come to an end…

Keep on burnin’…

Posted in Energy Production, Water and Soil | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Window of Opportunity

Posted by wastedenergy on August 17, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

About time.

A Mighty Wind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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