Interesting Times - Part II

By BJ

Getting to know Hubbert

Hubbert of "Hubbert's Peak", or "Peak Oil", that is. In simplified terms, Hubbert postulated that for any given geographical area, up to and including the entire Earth, oil discovery and extraction would follow a bell-shaped curve where the easily exploited reserves would be found and consumed first, driving production to a peak, and then plateau and start declining when roughly half of the available resources had been exploited and the remaining reserves were more expensive and harder to extract.

Largely scoffed at when he came out with his theory in 1956, he's since been vindicated, in large part because he predicted the peak of US production in the '70's. Depending on who you talk to, peak oil for the planet is forecast as far out as a couple of decades from now to we're already there. It will be a while before we can determine whether or not production has really peaked, but it's clear from the pricing that demand has caught up, and may be surpassing, the supply.

People looking for places like ANWR or the Alberta tarsands to make up for the lost production are living in a pipe dream. ANWR doesn't hold enough to make much of a difference, and the tarsands, while possessing massive amounts of convertible bitumen, can't increase production fast enough to keep pace even with the inevitable decline in Alberta's traditional oil fields like those around Leduc, let alone deal with the declining production of a place like Russia, or the even more worrisome prospect of Saudi oil production dropping off. The Saudis by the way, unlike certain people in North America, understand that the oil still in the ground is only growing in value the longer they leave it there.

While we haven't yet run out of the black gold, the fact that it's now beginning to be priced at about the same level as the gold gold has finally gotten most people to consider the previously abhorrent thought of not burning so much of the stuff. As David Brin noted a while back, the truly awe-inspiring part of much of the Climate Change debate is that the opponents are generally arguing against measures that would make sense anyway, like efficiency.

As fester noted last week, people are starting to use public transit more and buy smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, even if they don't plan to drive them quite as often. The tragedy of all this is that many people are only now waking up to these facts, and the transition for them is going to be quite painful.

I don�t feel particularly smug when I stand next to my Honda Fit watching some SUV owner near tears as she puts more than $100 of gas into a car she doesn�t need. It just feels sad to think about how long it�s been since it became obvious to anyone who cared to look that we won�t be able to scare off problems like fuel scarcity and climate change by closing our eyes and wishing.

That lead time was an opportunity to make changes. Some would have been painful and some merely sensible, but it would prevent huge numbers of honest Americans get caught with their pants down. Instead we blew it out the tailpipe of cars that average 15 MPG. Now, instead of a planned transition, we get to see what happens when stubborn denial meets inescapable change. It�s simply unsustainable to live in suburban car country with a negative equity on the house, $6-7 gas (wait until you see what that does to property values in outlying suburbs) and expensive SUVs that nobody wants. The saddest thing for me was that most who will get fucked the worst had no idea this was coming. There was that one guy who warned us, but he had a snooty laugh.

Krugman has a vision of American cities turning into more efficient, densely-packed, transit-serviced, European models, but he also notes the another issue pointed out by fester; buildings and infrastructure don't change on anywhere near a short time scale. Buildings are generational investments at the least, and most infrastructure has even longer time horizons, (though I wonder if the fact that it's all falling apart anyway will make it easier to rebuild in a more efficient manner).

In the meantime, people are looking for alternatives for fueling their rides. The most hyped has been hydrogen fuel cells, but they're a long way off from being helpful. Hydrogen also has the issue of requiring energy to produce the hydrogen, which at present means shifting the burning of fossil fuels to power the vehicles to burning them to produce the power needed to produce hydrogen. The same problem goes for plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles. Part of the infrastructure that needs to be refurbished to produce a more efficient and climate-friendly North America is the electrical grid and power generation, particularly if more of the power is to be generated by renewables.

Grain-based ethanol was, and in some cases still is, put forward as a possibility for a fuel alternative. It didn't take too long for people to realize that this wasn't the smartest idea, (though this variation does intrigue me), given that it takes land away from food production to turn it into not terribly efficient fuel production. And food production is another thing we all need to be watching. Oil, after all, isn't the only thing that appears to be in short supply.

There have been a rash of stories recently regarding possible rice shortages, and how the near permanent drought in Australia caused wheat prices to spike. Hell, even the price of fertilizer is soaring due to shortages. While for developed nations like the US the main risk is the inflationary pressure of higher food prices, (well, that and crappier beer), crop failures and diversion of food crops to fuel use is causing far greater hardships in countries where life is a lot closer to the edge.

Rising prices for cooking oil are forcing residents of Asia�s largest slum, in Mumbai, India, to ration every drop. Bakeries in the United States are fretting over higher shortening costs. And here in Malaysia, brand-new factories built to convert vegetable oil into diesel sit idle, their owners unable to afford the raw material.

. . .

In some poor countries, desperation is taking hold. Just in the last week, protests have erupted in Pakistan over wheat shortages, and in Indonesia over soybean shortages. Egypt has banned rice exports to keep food at home, and China has put price controls on cooking oil, grain, meat, milk and eggs.

According to the F.A.O., food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

And the situation in Somalia makes those countries look good. War plays a large part of the Horn's troubles, but climate does as well, as a drought has led to crop failures and dying livestock. People point to the situation in Darfur as the world's first conflict caused by Climate Change, as the collapse of the Sahel to drought brought the peoples there into conflict over increasingly scarce water resources. It is unlikely to be the last, as the desperate move to try and escape their fate.

Drought seems to be a more common word these days, and the US is beginning to feel its effects as well, as the situation last summer over the dwindling Lake Lanier show. While Climate Change may be raising the level of the seas, humans are draining the levels of even the greatest freshwater lakes.

Canada is, by most estimates, blessed with an incredibly abundant supply of freshwater, but as with everything else, abundant doesn't mean limitless. Remember I mentioned that tarsands production would never make up for decline in oil production elsewhere? Well a big part of that reasoning is based on the fact that the water use is massive. Even with recycling, it takes between two and three barrels of water to produce one barrel of oil, and most of the water can't be sent back into the ecosystem because of the toxins it picks up.

Indeed, the lack of environmental safeguards in the area means that we are quite probably poisoning the water supply of the relatively sparsely populated north. Of course, we've never paid too much attention to aboriginal rights in the past, why should we worry about those living downstream from the tarsands now?

The energy intensive extraction is currently run mostly with natural gas, but there is talk of putting in nuclear reactors for that purpose. Doing so would suck up even more water from the rivers in the area, which are unlikely to take the strain. And the climate can be blamed again in part. The warmer weather is leaving smaller snowpacks to feed the rivers.

Shortages of resources can be painful. Shortages in food and water are deadly. This is ultimately what makes Climate Change the frightening prospect it is. Being so close to the edge of what human life the planet can support, even a minor disruption can push us over the edge, particularly given the ease with which large numbers of people can move when conditions in their area go bad. As I noted in the first part of this, our cities, our agriculture, our very lives are dependent on the climate remaining relatively stable. Knock that balance too far out of the norm and disaster follows.

It is likely too late to stop or totally reverse the change that's coming, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be a good idea to move beyond symbolic protests and work to at least mitigate the effects. At the very least, we would be smart to at least try and slow down the rate we're pumping carbon into the atmosphere to try and delay the changes long enough to give us a chance to adapt to them, rather than barreling full-speed ahead into an uncertain but likely disastrous future. It is still debatable whether or not we'll choose to do so.

And so, interesting times.