How Likely Is Collapse?
by Michael Marien



Are these fears reasonable?

Much attention has been given recently to the prospect of collapse, catastrophe,
and decline. Are these fears reasonable? What is likely and not-so-likely? Which
concerns should take top priority? And what should we do?

One may justly ask why all this gloom and doom is appearing in YES! The answer
is paradoxical: the first step toward a positive future at the individual,
community, society, or global level is to address seriously the problems at hand
and to take meaningful action. A full basket of big, messy problems is now in
front of us. If not addressed in a constructive way, they could result in local
or regional catastrophes, or collapse of societies, civilization, and perhaps
even the human species.

Prospective catastrophe then and now

After the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, fear of more
nuclear explosions became the major concern of many people. As the arms race
between the U.S. and the Soviet Union continued to escalate, visions of "nuclear
holocaust" were frequently evoked as a way to stop the madness and reduce or
eliminate these fearsome weapons. This justified fear perhaps reached a high
point in December 1983, when environmental scientists posed the "nuclear winter"
scenario in Science magazine, arguing that nuclear war would not only devastate
people and cities, but could also darken the skies and chill the atmosphere,
leading to extinction of many plants and animals.

With the end of the Cold War, fear of all-out nuclear war virtually disappeared.
But new fears are growing which, collectively, could be as bad or worse:

Global Warming, due to human-induced release of greenhouse gases, leading to
rising sea levels and more extreme weather events such as hurricanes and
droughts;

Severe Ecosystem Damage, due to growing human numbers placing demands on
nature, leading to loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services;

Terrorist Attacks, which could involve nuclear weapons, "dirty nukes"
(conventional bombs laced with radioactive materials), bioterrorism, tampered
food supplies, or attacks on chemical plants, the Internet, or the electrical
grid;

New and Revived Diseases, most notably at the moment the prospect of an
avian flu pandemic if the H5N1 virus mutates so it spreads easily to humans;

Prolonged Energy Crisis, brought on by a major reduction in global oil
supply, which could be due to a sudden terrorist attack or a long-term waning of
available oil in the face of rising demand and insufficient alternatives;

A Great Economic Depression, brought on by rising deficits and defaults, or
collapse of the U.S. dollar.

Thus, the landscape of justifiable fear has changed radically in the past two
decades, from a single overwhelming threat of nuclear war between superpowers to
a multitude of highly uncertain threats from every direction, which could unfold
in any of numerous combinations of political, economic, and especially health
and environmental concerns. And if today’s stew of possible calamities is
quite different from that of 20 years ago, it is likely that 20 years from now
the prospect will again be different—for better or worse.

Rough guesses for uncertain times

Is all or most of the gloom portrayed in the books referenced on pages 20–21
warranted? Probably. Those who take the "pooh-pooh position" of flat denial have
probably not read any of these well-documented works. That said, can any
distinctions be made about what is likely and what is not? There are many
uncertainties, but some rough estimates can be attempted.

All-Out Extinction, of all humans, is a remote possibility at present, but in 20
years, with major climate changes and several other catastrophes, it could be
taken much more seriously. Remarkably, there are no programs to study the
possible futures of humanity at any major university.

Total Collapse, as suggested by Jared Diamond, begs further questions. Is this
likely for some societies, most societies, or all societies? Will it be
permanent, or only temporary? Collapse does seem likely in decades ahead for
small and weak societies (it is only in the past decade that we have begun to
use the phrase "failed states"), and we can see ghost towns and decaying
communities even in the U.S. Collapse seems unlikely, at present, for big, rich,
and diverse societies.

Catastrophes, both natural and man-made, will happen. Most will be local or
regional, but some (i.e. pandemics) can be global. Most people, communities, and
societies will recover, to some degree (e.g. San Francisco after the 1906
earthquake and New Orleans after Katrina, although the latter may or may not
fully regain its past glory).

Overall Decline, for most people in the U.S. and elsewhere, for decades or more,
seems likely. Think of it as "punctuated evolution" or "jagged evolution,"
rather than the linear, ever-upward evolution that is widely assumed. Arguably,
decline is already underway, but it is masked by obsolete industrial-era views
of economic growth—the GNP measure—rather than a more sophisticated progress
measure such as the Genuine Progress Indicator or the Index of Sustainable
Economic Welfare.

What we should do

Many households, businesses, local governments, and communities around the world
are pursuing sustainable practices, as are many European national governments.
But much more can be done on many fronts, especially in turning the U.S.
government around from laggard to responsible world leader. Local action is all
well and good, but sensible policies at the national and global level are
necessary. There is no dearth of advice, although it is scattered around:
hundreds of books advocate wise and humane policies to enhance our chances for
survival and well-being. One of the best is Lester Brown’s Plan B 2.0 (see
above), a lucid introduction to what is needed.

Jared Diamond does not prescribe any policies, but he nicely synthesizes lessons
learned as to why past societies destroyed themselves. Such societies fail to
anticipate problems before they arise, to perceive problems that have arrived,
and to solve problems once perceived. Despite America’s surfeit of information
and knowledge, we fail in all three dimensions because we are not effectively
organized to succeed in these multi-disciplinary and multi-agency tasks.
Seriously facing our era of multiple transitions and multiple catastrophes in an
already crowded and angry world of 6.5 billion people, projected to be 9 billion
people by 2050, will require extensive attention to the organization of our
knowledge resources—and to promoting civic education.

At the "elite" level of knowledge production, our present understanding of the
world and its problems is highly fragmented among academic disciplines and
professions, increasingly partisan think tanks, and a plethora of profit-driven
media outlets. Imagine if medicine were practiced in the same way: a world of
specialists in brains, eyes, ears, lungs, skin, feet, etc., with no general
practitioners to assess the whole body. What academia lacks are generalist
"knowledge integrators" who can assess the big picture of various sectors and
humanity in general. At the popular level, more attention has to be given to
developing informed citizens who can see through political flim-flam, appreciate
what science has to offer, sort out what is most important and what actions are
needed, and know how to evaluate success. Suffice to say that, despite—or
perhaps because of—the evergrowing abundance of information and the miracles
of the Internet, we are "amusing ourselves to death," to cite the prescient 1985
book of the same name by the late Neil Postman. Or check out Attention Deficit
Democracy by James Bovard, for a current variant. It’s not pretty

We are unlikely to rethink our organization of knowledge and ways of informing
ourselves any time soon. So we will continue to elect reality-challenged leaders
with learning problems, suffer from various catastrophes, and react inadequately
when they do occur. But perhaps one of these catastrophes will serve as a
wake-up call, and perhaps enough of us will finally realize that we cannot
continue as we have. Then we will begin to organize knowledge for survival and
human benefit, elect responsible leaders who promote the public interest and the
interest of humanity, make wise investments with our public funds, and educate
all citizens for the promises and perils of life in the 21st century.

posted by Paul at 9:02 AM

Peak Oil: It's not just about Oil.
(from a post on Yahoo's Energy Resources Group)

There is something that is very important for people to get their
heads around. Peak oil is not about the oil, not about gasoline and
diesel and heating oil and jet fuel. It's not about cars, SUVs,
vans, trucks, busses, trains, planes or ships.

Peak oil is about food and our progressive inability, after we pass
the oil peak, to produce enough of it to feed our 6.5 billion global
population. Even now, every day over 40,000 people worldwide die of
starvation, malnutrition and nutrition related diseases. Each 1%
gap between global demand and global supply will increase those
deaths by 10-25%.

Food production in today's world is critically dependent on oil (for
pesticides, herbicides, agrichemicals, and agricultural, irrigation
and distribution fuels) and natural gas (for artificial fertilizers)
and clean water from ever scarcer and shrinking lakes and rivers and
ever shrinking underground aquifers.

A shrinking global food supply is not just a problem for the third
world. Everybody has to eat and we in the developed world tend to
like to do that far more than those in the third world.

Reversion to organic farming methods not dependent on artificial
fertilizers and pesticides will not be as easy as the uninitiated
may think. Our commercial agricultural land is essentially toxic
and sterile through our use of petrochemicals and limited-nutrient
artificial fertilizers. Commercial agriculture is essentially an
export business, exporting the nutrients from the soil on which we
grow the crops and never re-importing those nutrients. If the
agrichemicals on which commercial agriculture relies were to
disappear tomorrow, it is reliably estimated that those same
commercial soils will produce between 5-20% of the crops they do
today, assuming even then that there is sufficient fresh water to
irrigate them. It is estimated that it would take 10-20 years or
more to rebuild the natural fertility of thyose commercial soils.
Without those agrichemicals that means a drop of 80-95% in the
productivity of those soils until their natural fertility is
restored.

The other key factor, of course, is crop pests. Without oil-derived
pesticides crops will be susceptible to invasion by those pests in
numbers possibly never seen before. We have, through our use of
pesticides, helped those pests evolve resistance. Commercial
farmers today use 33 times as much pesticides as just three decades
ago and yet lose 25% more of their crop to pests than they did
then. We are already losing the battle against crop pests. When
the pesticides are gone we will lose the war. That same use of
pesticides have also prevented our crops from evolving their natural
defences against pests. Our current crops generally have very low
survival potential without those pesticides. All of this, of
course, parallels our own weakened immune systems because of the
over-use of antibiotics, vaccines and other modern medicines, all of
which take over the immune response rather than strengthen the
immune system.

In closing, this is the important point. People will not
really "get it" about peak oil until they get their heads away from
worrying about transportation fuels and understand the implications
for food in our world of 6.5 billion people.

Rick Embleton,
Richmond Hill, ON
Author: Oilephant Down: Canada at the End of the Age of Cheap Oil
posted by Paul at 6:14 PM

Another gem from the Yahoo Energy Resources group

http://www.energybulletin.net/14102.html

Published on 22 Mar 2006 by Museletter / EB. Archived on 22 Mar 2006.

George W. Bush and Peak Oil: Beyond Incompetence
by Richard Heinberg

(Note to readers: This month's MuseLetter was written as a chapter to be
published in a forthcoming book by Project Censored titled The Case for
Impeachment of Bush and Cheney, Seven Stories Press, Summer 2006. For permission
to republish this essay, please contact me at rheinberg@....)

While it would be difficult to create an airtight legal case for impeaching
George W. Bush based on his ignoring the very real threat posed by Peak Oil,
nevertheless I believe that his actions -- and inaction -- in this regard
constitute dereliction of duty on an unprecedented scale.

It is part of the job of leaders to foresee problems and either steer around
them or prepare for them. A head of state is analogous to the captain of a ship,
who is responsible not only for keeping his vessel on course but also for
avoiding hazards such as storms and icebergs. Some problems are not foreseeable;
others are. A ship's captain who loses his vessel to a freak "perfect storm" may
be blameless, but one who steers his passenger liner directly into a foggy ice
field, having no sonar or radar, is worse than a fool: he is criminally
negligent.

The argument I will make, in brief, is this:

* Peak Oil is foreseeable.
* The consequences are also foreseeable and are likely to be ruinous.
* The Bush administration has been repeatedly warned.
* Actions could be taken to reduce the impact, but the longer those actions
are delayed, the worse the impact will be.
* The administration, rather than taking steps to mitigate these looming
catastrophic impacts, has instead done things that can only worsen them.

Let us go through these points one by one.


Is Peak Oil Foreseeable?


Peak Oil -- the point at which the rate of global production of petroleum begins
its inevitable historic decline -- is a subject of growing public interest. The
basic concept is derived from experience: during the past century-and-a-half all
older oil wells have been observed to peak and decline in output. The same has
been noted with entire oilfields, and with the collective oil endowment of whole
nations. Indeed, most oil-producing nations have already seen their output enter
terminal decline. Few informed observers doubt that the rate of oil production
for the world in total will reach a maximum at some point and then slowly wane.

The science of Peak Oil was worked out in the 1950s by veteran geophysicist M.
King Hubbert, who successfully used his method to predict the U.S. peak (1970).
Declassified CIA documents show that by the late 1970s the Agency was using
similar methods to forecast the Soviet Union's oil peak.1

We do not know exactly when the global peak will occur, but it will almost
certainly happen within the period between now and 2035.

Considering the importance of the peaking event, the range of uncertainty
regarding its timing is disturbing. If the peak were to occur within the next
five years, our national economy would be unable to adjust quickly enough to
avert calamity (as we will discuss below), while a peak 30 years from now would
present a much greater opportunity for adaptation.

Though there is continuing controversy over the question of when the peak will
happen, there is strong evidence for concluding that it may come sooner rather
than later, and that the world may already have entered the peaking period.
Signs of a near-term peak include the fact that global rates of oil discovery
have been falling since the early 1960s -- as has been confirmed by ExxonMobil.
Declining discovery rates represent a well-established trend and cannot be said
to be the result merely of transient factors. In 2005, according to IHS Energy
Inc., a total of 4.5 billion barrels of oil were discovered in new fields, while
30 billion barrels of oil were extracted and used worldwide. Thus, currently
only about one barrel of oil is being discovered for every six extracted.2

Until now, the global oil industry has been able to replace depleted reserves on
a yearly basis, mostly by re-estimating the size of existing fields. The Royal
Swedish Academy of Sciences, in a recent publication, "Statements on Energy,"
describes the situation this way:

In the last 10–15 years, two-thirds of the increases in reserves of
conventional oil have been based on increased estimates of recovery from
existing fields and only one-third on discovery of new fields. In this way, a
balance has been achieved between growth in reserves and production. This can't
continue. 50% of the present oil production comes from giant fields and very few
such fields have been found in recent years.3

The 100 or so giant and super-giant fields that are collectively responsible for
about half of current world production were all discovered in the 1940s, '50s,
'60s, and '70s and most are now going into decline. These days, exploration
turns up only much smaller fields that deplete relatively quickly.

Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroleum Review and author of the study "Oil Field
Megaprojects," notes that "90% of known reserves are in production," and that
"as much as 70% of the world's producing oil fields are now in decline" with
decline rates averaging between four and six percent per year.4

Thus, while the US Department of Energy predicts that world oil production will
increase over the next 20 years from 85 million barrels per day (Mb/d) to 120
Mb/d in order to meet anticipated demand, a growing chorus of petroleum
geologists and other energy analysts warns that such levels of production will
never be seen.

A French report from the Economics, Industry & Finance Ministry, "The Oil
Industry 2004," took a careful look at future supply issues, forecasting a
possible peak in world production as early as 2013.5

Ford Motor Company Executive Vice President Mark Fields, in his keynote address
in October, 2005 at the Society of Automotive Engineers' "Global Leadership
Conference at the Greenbrier," noted the seven most serious challenges to his
industry, one of which was that "oil production is peaking."6 Volvo motor
company has for several years acknowledged in its company literature that a
global oil production peak is likely by 2015.7

Legendary petroleum geologist T. Boone Pickens, who started his career in the
early 1950s as a roughneck in oilfields in Oklahoma and Texas and went on to
co-found Mesa Petroleum and Petroleum Exploration, told the 11th National Clean
Cities conference in May, 2005 that "Global oil [production] is 84 million
barrels [a day]. I don't believe you can get it any more than 84 million
barrels. . . . I think they are on decline in the biggest oil fields in the
world today and I know what it's like once you turn the corner and start
declining, it's a treadmill that you just can't keep up with."8

Royal Dutch Shell Chief Executive Jeroen Van Der Veer has said, "My view is that
‘easy' oil has probably passed its peak."9

J. Robinson West, founder and chairman of PFC Energy, one of Washington's most
influential international energy consulting firms, and a former Assistant
Secretary of the Interior in the Reagan Administration, predicts that the
"tipping point" when global supply of oil ceases to grow could arrive in 2015.10

Veteran petroleum geologist Henry Groppe, a Houston-based independent analyst
who began his career in 1945 and who is today a consultant to global
corporations as well as to nations, said in 2005 that "Total crude oil
production may have peaked this year, or perhaps will peak next year."11

Matthew Simmons, founder of Simmons & Company International energy investment
bank, has been perhaps the most outspoken of oil analysts and investors
regarding Peak Oil. A consultant to the Cheney Energy Policy Development Group
that met in secret in 2001, he is the author if Twilight in the Desert: The
Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy (Wiley, 2005). Simmons has
concluded, on the basis of his study of technical papers from the Society of
Petroleum Engineers, that Saudi Arabian oil production is close to its maximum,
and that world oil production is also therefore close to its peak.

On March 1, 2006 the New York Times published an editorial by Robert Semple,
Associate Editor of the Editorial Page for the Times since 1998, in which he
wrote, "The concept of peak oil has not been widely written about. But people
are talking about it now. It deserves a careful look -- largely because it is
almost certainly correct."12

In short, the science behind Peak Oil is well established, and, while there is
some disagreement about exactly when the global peak will arrive, there can be
no excuse at this stage for ignoring the problem.


Does the Administration Know About Peak Oil?


The New York Times knows about Peak Oil, but does the president? On this point
the evidence is conclusive.

First of all, agencies within the government clearly understand the problem, and
therefore relevant information must be readily available to the chief executive
if he wishes to have it.

Explicit warnings of Peak Oil have started to turn up in official U.S.
government literature. For example, a paper prepared for the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers titled "Energy Trends and Implications for U.S. Army Installations"
(Sept., 2005) includes the following tidbit:

The supply of oil will remain fairly stable in the very near term, but oil
prices will steadily increase as world production approaches its peak. The
doubling of oil prices in the past couple of years is not an anomaly, but a
picture of the future. Peak oil is at hand. . . .13

Then there is the following from the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Deputy
Assistant Secretary for Petroleum Reserves, Office of Naval Petroleum and Oil
Shale Reserves, dated March 2004:

The disparity between increasing production and declining reserves can have
only one outcome: a practical supply limit will be reached and future supply to
meet conventional oil demand will not be available. The question is when peak
production will occur and what will be its ramifications. Whether the peak
occurs sooner or later is a matter of relative urgency. . . . In spite of
projections for growth of non-OPEC supply, it appears that non-OPEC and
non-Former Soviet Union countries have peaked and are currently declining. The
production cycle of countries . . . and the cumulative quantities produced
reasonably follow Hubbert's model. . . . The Nation must start now to respond to
peaking global oil production to offset adverse economic and national security
impacts.14

And then there is the 2005 Report, "Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts,
Mitigation and Risk Management," commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy,
about which we will have more to say below.15

If none of this is specific enough (in fairness, we cannot expect George W. Bush
to spend his evenings poring over obscure Army Corps of Engineers studies), we
have the fact that Representative Roscoe Bartlett, Republican from Maryland's
sixth district -- who has made many speeches about Peak Oil on the floor of
Congress -- has spent thirty minutes in private conversation with the president
explaining the science of Peak Oil and seeking to convey the enormity of the
problem.16

But what if Bush wasn't able to understand what Bartlett was telling him? After
all, Bartlett has a Ph.D. in physics; perhaps he was using words that were too
big, or concepts too abstruse for our president to grasp.

Even if that were the case, we have evidence that Bush's second-in-command, vice
president Cheney, understands Peak Oil; given time, Cheney could surely make the
concept comprehensible to his superior. In a speech in 1999 (while he was still
CEO of Halliburton Corporation, the giant oil services company) to the Petroleum
Institute in London, Cheney pointed out that

By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in
global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per
cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we
will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day.17

This is a fair statement of the depletion dilemma: 50 million barrels per day is
almost five times the current output of Saudi Arabia.

Finally there is the fact that is that Bush and Cheney are themselves former
oilmen: their inside knowledge of the industry should give them enhanced insight
into the problem of Peak Oil. Some would say that these officials' former ties
to the petroleum industry imply a conflict of interest (they have been accused
of giving perks to oil companies, even to Halliburton -- perish the thought!).
However, some of the most outspoken authorities on Peak Oil are retired
petroleum geologists or engineers who have spent decades working for oil
companies. Having former industry insiders in public office today could be good,
if they used their technical knowledge to benefit the country by warning of the
consequences of continued oil dependency. But, as we will see below, there is no
evidence that the particular former oilmen currently occupying the highest
offices in the land are doing any such thing -- at least not genuinely or
effectively.

In sum, while it is impossible to say whether Mr. Bush understands Peak Oil, no
one could credibly argue that that he simply hasn't heard about it.


How Serious Is the Threat?


Addressing this question requires some speculation: the peaking of global oil
production is an event that has never occurred before. However, we need not
speculate baselessly; for guidance we have a U.S. government-funded study that
could hardly be more relevant -- "The Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts,
Mitigation and Risk Management," prepared by Science Applications International
(SAIC) for the U.S. Department of Energy, released in February 2005. The project
leader for the study was Robert L. Hirsch, who has had a distinguished career in
formulating energy policy. The report on the study will hereinafter be referred
to as "The Hirsch Report."

The first paragraph of the Hirsch Report's Executive Summary states:

The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an
unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel
prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely
mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented.
Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have
substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of
peaking.18

As the Hirsch Report explains in detail, due to our systemic dependence on oil
for transportation, agriculture, and the production of plastics and chemicals,
every sector of society will be impacted.

The Hirsch Report effectively undermines the standard free-market argument that
oil depletion poses no serious problem, now or later, because as oil becomes
scarcer the price will rise until demand is reduced commensurate with supply;
meanwhile, higher prices will stimulate more exploration, the development of
alternative fuels, and the more efficient use of remaining quantities. While it
is true that rising prices will do all of these things, we have no assurance
that the effects will be sufficient to avert severe, protracted economic,
social, and political disruptions.

First, price increases may or may not stimulate more exploration, or do so
sufficiently or productively. During the early 20th century, more exploration
resulted in more oil being discovered. However, in recent decades, expanded
exploration efforts have turned up fewer and fewer finds. It is difficult to
avoid the obvious conclusion that there simply isn't much oil left to discover.

Higher prices for oil will also no doubt spur new investment in alternative
fuels. But the time required to produce substantial quantities of alternative
fuels will be considerable, given the volume of our national transportation fuel
consumption. Moreover the amount of investment required will be immense. And it
would be unrealistic to expect most alternatives to fully or even substantially
replace oil at any level of investment, and even with decades of effort, given
practical, physical constraints to their development.

Higher prices will also no doubt spur efficiency measures, but the most
productive of these will likewise require time and investment. For example,
raising the fuel efficiency of the U.S. auto fleet would require years for
industry retooling and more years for consumers to trade in their current
vehicles for more-efficient replacements.

James Schlesinger, who served as CIA director in the Nixon administration,
defense secretary in the Nixon and Ford administrations, and energy secretary in
the Carter administration, in November, 2005 testimony before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee urged lawmakers to begin preparing for declining oil
supplies and increasing prices in the coming decades. "We are faced with the
possibility of a major economic shock and the political unrest that would
ensue," he said.19

Schlesinger was far from overstating the threat. In fact, it would be no
exaggeration to view Peak Oil as potentially representing the economic, social,
and political impact of a hundred Katrinas. And that impact will not subside in
a few days' or years' time: once global oil production has peaked, the energy
shortfalls for transportation and agriculture will be ongoing, relentless, and
cumulative.


What Should the Administration Be Doing?


Responsible and competent people who have studied the problem of Peak Oil,
(including Robert Hirsch and his colleagues) agree that efforts will be needed
to create alternative sources of energy, to reduce demand for oil through
heightened energy efficiency, and to redesign entire systems (including both
cities and the rural agricultural economy) to operate with less petroleum.

The Hirsch Report's methodology involved the examination of three scenarios:

* Scenario I assumed that action is not initiated until peaking occurs.
* Scenario II assumed that action is initiated 10 years before peaking.
* Scenario III assumed action is initiated 20 years before peaking.

In all three scenarios, the Hirsch study assumed a "crash program" scale of
effort (that is, all the resources of government and industry are marshalled to
the tasks of creating supplies of alternative fuels and reducing demand through
efficiency measures). The study found that, due to the time required to start
efforts and the scale of mitigation required, Scenario I will result in at least
20 years of fuel shortfalls. With 10 years of preparation, a 10-year shortfall
is likely. And with 20 years of advance mitigation effort, there is "the
possibility" of averting fuel shortages altogether. The Report also concludes
that "Early mitigation will almost certainly be less expensive than delayed
mitigation."20

In other words, if global Peak Oil is 20 years away or fewer, or we believe it
might be, then we must begin immediately with a full-scale effort to address the
problem.

Most Americans would understandably prefer to solve the dilemma simply by
switching to alternative fuels, thus enabling them to maintain their current
habits. But, as we have already noted, there are problems with that strategy.

Biofuels (ethanol, wood methanol, and biodiesel) require land area for
production and are plagued by the problem of low net-energy yields. According to
the calculations of Jeffrey Dukes of the University of Massachusetts, over a
hundred tons of ancient plant matter are concentrated in every gallon of
gasoline we use today.21 Granted, modern methods of biofuels production are more
efficient than nature's slow means of producing crude oil, but still this
analysis should give us pause: trying to replace a substantial fraction of our
20 million barrels per day of national oil consumption with biofuels could
potentially overwhelm an agricultural system already destroying topsoil and
drawing down ancient aquifers unsustainably.

It is possible to produce liquid transportation fuels from coal and natural gas.
However, natural gas is itself a problematic fuel in North America (domestic
production peaked in 2001), and coal -- a low-quality hydrocarbon -- would
present a host of environmental and practical quandaries if we tried to increase
mining sufficiently to replace a significant proportion of our oil budget. In
the end, coal is likewise a depleting fossil fuel: while it is often said that
we have hundreds of years' worth of the stuff, that assumes current rates of
consumption and ignores variable quality; assuming dramatic increases in
consumption (for oil replacement) and taking into account the fact that much
coal offers a low energy yield, those centuries shrink to a very few decades.22

Which brings us to the strategies of conservation, efficiency, and curtailment.
These clearly present the best opportunities, though efforts along these lines
will eventually require significant changes in Americans' habits and
expectations.

Our automobiles could be made much more fuel-efficient, though this will require
government leadership via higher CAFE standards. But over the long term
automobiles and trucks simply aren't good options for transportation, given
their inherent energy inefficiency. Thus the nation will need a much-expanded
freight and passenger rail system. Our cities, most of which have been designed
for the automobile, need to be made more neighborhood-oriented and walkable, and
provided with light-rail transit systems. Meanwhile agricultural production must
be freed, as quickly and completely as possible, from fossil-fuel inputs. All of
these efforts will require substantial investment and many years of work.

If, as the Hirsch Report tells us, the market will be incapable of shifting
investment incentives quickly enough away from the old oil-based,
energy-guzzling energy infrastructure and toward the new alternatives-based,
super-efficient one, then government will have to lead the way through a
sustained commitment of effort on a wartime scale. The estimated one to three
trillion dollars consumed so far in the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan
and Iraq, had they been spent instead on domestic energy security, would
probably have represented an appropriate level and rate of funds allocation.


What Has the Administration Done?


Before examining what Bush and Cheney have done (and not done), we should in
fairness note that previous administrations are far from blameless. During the
Clinton–Gore years, imports of oil increased while CAFE standards languished.
However, in a court of law the incompetence or even criminality of others is
seldom a viable defense for one's own culpable actions.

That said, in light of the threat and the needed effort, what has the current
president actually accomplished?

First of all, the administration effectively buried the Hirsch Report. For many
months it was available only on a high school web site, then on the Project
Censored site; only toward the end of 2005 did it appear on a Department of
Energy site. There has been no public mention whatever of the Report by any
official in the Executive Branch. Thus the administration has sought not to
respond to warnings of approaching crisis, but simply to muffle the warnings.

During the past six years, funding for renewable energy programs and for energy
efficiency has not increased substantially. Meanwhile the administration has
consistently sought to remove subsidies for the nation's passenger rail system,
Amtrak, while continuing to support immense subsidies for highways.

To be sure, Bush has occasionally spoken about the need for an energy policy, as
in a speech to the nation in April 2005:

First, we must better use technology to become better conservers of energy.
And secondly, we must find innovative and environmentally sensitive ways to make
the most of our existing energy resources, including oil, natural gas, coal and
safe, clean nuclear power. Third, we must develop promising new sources of
energy, such as hydrogen, ethanol or bio-diesel. Fourth, we must help growing
energy consumers overseas, like China and India, apply new technologies to use
energy more efficiently and reduce global demand of fossil fuels.23

I would disagree with a few of these suggestions, but over all this is not a bad
summary of what actually needs to happen. But talk is cheap, and talk that
accomplishes next to nothing is, in this situation, a criminally negligent
diversion and waste of time. The words just quoted were spoken in the context of
the president's promotion of an energy bill that actually did very little except
to increase tax breaks to the fossil fuel industry.

In his 2006 State of the Union address, Bush said that the U.S. is "addicted to
oil," and put forward the goal of reducing oil imports from the Middle East. The
next day his staff backpedaled, saying that this goal was only an "example."24

Five years into the Bush administration, the nation is more dependent on
imported oil than ever before. It is facing an impending energy crisis that a
government-funded study says will be "unprecedented" in scope and consequences.
And needed preparation efforts are nowhere to be seen.

* * *


Given all this, how will impeachment help? While it would be justified as a
punishment for ineptitude or criminality, impeachment will not materially assist
the nation to deal with Peak Oil unless current officials are replaced with ones
who understand the problem and who are prepared to implement policies that
radically shift America's priorities in terms of energy, transportation, urban
infrastructure, and agriculture. Looking out over the current political
landscape in Washington, it is difficult to identify who those new officials
might be. Nevertheless, it would help the nation to start now with a clean
slate, and with a popular mandate for the new team of leaders to move rapidly to
achieve energy security.


Notes


1. See discussion of this topic in my book Powerdown: Options and Actions for a
Post Carbon World (New Society, 2004), pp. 40–41.

2. IHS discovery numbers are proprietary and costly, and so cannot be referenced
directly; however this 4.5 billion-barrel figure was confirmed in personal
correspondence by Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroleum Review.

3. "Statements on Oil" Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Energy Committee. (17
Oct. 2005) www.energybulletin.net/9824.html (accessed 17 Jan., 2006)

4. Chris Skrebowski, "Prices Set Firm, Despite Massive New Capacity," Petroleum
Review, October 2005.

5. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4077802.stm (accessed 13 March, 2006)

6. www.greencarcongress.com/2005/10/ford_exec_oil_p.html (accessed 13 March,
2006)

7.
www.volvo.com/NR/rdonlyres/A9A59F6A-AA6F-F48E-A048-BF9D6DE505DB/0/future_fuels_large.pdf (accessed 13 March, 2006)

8. Michael DesLauriers, "Famed Oil Tycoon Sounds Off on Peak Oil, Resource
Investor, 23 June, 2005 www.resourceinvestor.com/pebble.asp?relid=10766
(accessed 13 March, 2006)

9. Jeroen Van Der Veer, "Vision for Meeting Energy Needs Beyond Oil," Financial
Times, 24 January 2006
news.ft.com/cms/s/fb775ee8-8d0e-11da-9daf-0000779e2340.html (accessed 13 March,
2006)

10.
www.nixoncenter.org/Program%2520Briefs/PB2005/Vol11no12GlobalEnergyMarkets.pdf
(accessed 13 March, 2006)

11. Michael DesLauriers, "Oil Forecasting Legend Discusses Peak Oil, Share
Prices," Resource Investor, 19 October, 2005
www.resourceinvestor.com/pebble.asp?relid=13837 (accessed 13 March, 2006)

12. Robert B. Semple, Jr., The End of Oil, New York Times, 1 March, 2006
select.nytimes.com/2006/03/01/opinion/01talkingpoints.html (accessed 13 March,
2006)

13. Adam Fenderson and Bart Anderson, "US Army: Peak Oil and the Army's Future,"
Energy Bulletin 13 March, 2006 www.energybulletin.net/13737.html (accessed 13
March, 2006)

14. "Strategic Significance of America's Shale Oil Resource," Vol. 1,
"Assessment of Strategic Issues," Office of Deputy Assistant Secretary for
Petroleum Reserves, Office of Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves, U.S.
Department of Energy, March 2004 .

15. Robert L. Hirsch, et al., "The Peaking of World Oil Produciton: Impacts,
Mitigation and Risk Management," February 2005.
www.projectcensored.org/newsflash/the_hirsch_report.pdf (accessed 13 March,
2006)

16. "Congressman Bartlett Discusses Peak Oil with President Bush," staff, Energy
Bulletin, 29 June, 2005 www.energybulletin.net/7024.html (accessed 13, March,
2006)

17. www.energybulletin.net/559.html (accessed 13 March, 2006)

18. Hirsch, op. cit.

19. www.senate.gov/~foreign/testimony/2005/SchlesingerTestimony051116.pdf
(accessed 13 March, 2006)

20. Hirsch, op. cit.

21. "Price of Gas," ScienCentral News, 28 July, 2005,
www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?article_id=218392605&cat=all (accessed
13 March, 2006)

22. Gregson Vaux, "The Peak in US Coal Production," From the Wilderness, 27 May,
2004 www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/052504_coal_peak.html (accessed 13
March, 2006)

23. www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/04/20050428-9.html (accessed 13 March,
2006)

24. www.whitehouse.gov/stateoftheunion/2006/index.html (accessed 13 March, 2006)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This article is the April 2006 edition (#168) of Richard Heinberg's MuseLetter
series. For regular editions of the MuseLetter, subscribe at
www.museletter.com/subscription.html

Heinberg is the author of two of the most essential books in the Peak Oil canon,
The Party's Over and Powerdown as well as a forthcoming small book to introduce
the Depletion Protocol to a wide audience.

-AF
posted by Paul at 10:13 AM

Cloudy With a Chance of Chaos
http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/17/news/economy/climate_fortune/index.htm

Climate change may bring more violent weather swings -- and sooner -- than experts had thought.
Fortune Magazine
By Eugene Linden
January 17, 2006: 5:07 PM EST


(FORTUNE Magazine) - A disturbing consensus is emerging among the scientists who study global warming: Climate change may bring more violent swings than they ever thought, and it may set in sooner. Lately John Browne, the CEO of BP, has been jolting audiences with a list of proposed solutions that hint at the vastness of the challenge. It aims at stabilizing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at about double the pre-industrial level while continuing economic growth. To do that, carbon emissions would have to be reduced ultimately by seven gigatons a year. A gigaton, or a billion tons, is even bigger than it sounds. Eliminating just one, argues Browne, would mean building 700 nuclear stations to replace fossil-fuel-burning power plants, or increasing the use of solar power by a factor of 700, or stopping all deforestation and doubling present efforts at reforestation. Achieve all three of these, and pull off four more equally large-scale reallocations of capital and infrastructure, and the world would probably stabilize its carbon emissions.

There's just one catch: Even change on this vast scale might not stop global warming.

What if the secret behind civilization is that we've had really good weather? Humankind has prospered and multiplied during one of the most benign climate eras in the history of the planet. And the past two centuries -- which witnessed the great expansion of the Industrial Revolution, a sixfold increase in human population, the triumph of the consumer society, and the rise of the integrated global economy -- have been particularly stable. One would have to go back 115,000 years to find a time as tranquil and warm as the present.

Even so, during the relative calm of recorded history, climate has periodically turned angry. And while this moodiness is but a shadow of the cataclysmic weather violence of the Ice Ages, it has been sufficient to shake or destroy civilizations. A sudden cooling and drying 8,200 years ago set back the development of the first cities in the Fertile Crescent. Some 4,000 years ago, decades of drought accompanied by howling winds scoured the Mesopotamian plain of the Akkadians, the most powerful civilization of the region. The Mayans never recovered from intense drought in the first decade of the tenth century A.D. And were it not for the Little Ice Age that thwarted the expansion of Viking civilization just six centuries ago, Europeans living in Canada and the U.S. might be speaking Norse rather than English.

Now climate is changing again. Most scientists recognized the reality of global warming more than a decade ago; most also agree that humans play a role in the changes. The consensus on climate change has solidified to rival the medical consensus on the dangers of smoking--but in the matter of climate, public perception has yet to catch up. Like the tourists on Phuket beaches who stood and gazed at an oncoming tsunami because it was outside their experience, society is reacting to the coming wave of climate change without urgency. People still believe that the science is controversial and the threat of climate change far off in the future; and while a few businesses, notably major insurers, have begun to adapt, governments are responding only slowly, as the lack of progress at this fall's international forum in Montreal showed.

The wave is coming, though. The last decades of the 20th century saw an unmistakable and extraordinary warming. During this same period, we suffered by some measures the strongest El Niño in 130,000 years and a swarm of statistically extraordinary droughts, floods, and other weather extremes. In 2005 precedents continued to fall, as wave after wave of tropical Atlantic storms continued right through the end of the year. The hot ocean waters that helped nurture storms in 2005 may also play a role in an intense drought in the Amazon rain forest, normally one of the wettest places on earth.

These and other weather surprises make scientists uneasy because they resonate with a new understanding of how climate changes. Just 40 years ago the consensus was that climate shifted from warm to cold and vice versa, smoothly and over many centuries. Since the early 1990s, however, scientists have been coming to see climate change as less like a dial and more like an on-off switch. The transition from, say, warm to cold is far more abrupt--taking decades, not centuries--and far more chaotic than previously supposed (though still not as fast as in The Day After Tomorrow, the 2004 disaster flick in which a new Ice Age arrived in a matter of days). Scientists now compare such transitions to the flickering of a flame or a fluorescent bulb--where the "flickers" may be quite violent, marked by fluctuations in temperatures of more than 18 degrees Fahrenheit in just a few years, as well as extreme variation in wind speeds and precipitation.

The Earth's heat-distribution system has already begun shifting massively in response to rising levels of greenhouse gases. Precipitation patterns, the change of seasons, storm intensity, sea ice, glaciers, temperatures on the tundras--all are in flux. As scientists nervously monitor sea and air currents for signs of major shifts, many believe that today's proliferation of weather extremes may be the prelude to another epochal transition--a possibility first flagged by the great oceanographer Wallace Broecker in the journal Science in 1997.

How bad could it get? Imagine Europe suffering floods and heat waves on a vastly greater scale than those endured in 2002 and 2003, while northern regions experience intermittent deep freezes as atmospheric and ocean circulations struggle to find new equilibrium. At the same time, droughts and floods not seen since ancient times would afflict some of the most densely populated regions on earth. The probability of drought in the American breadbasket would rise, and along with it the possibility that the U.S. grain surplus--which accounts for the dominant share of world grain exports--would disappear.

A flickering climate wouldn't just clobber countries with the wealth and technological resources to try to cope. It would affect every part of the planet, and in so doing reduce the resiliency of the global community. With every nation dealing with local emergencies, it would be more difficult to mobilize resources to aid victims in other areas, and there would be fewer resources to mobilize.

Municipalities around the world would struggle under the burden of greatly increased demands on funds to maintain and repair basic infrastructure. Forget about safety nets--FEMA and its ilk would be bankrupt. In the world's tightly coupled markets, financial tsunamis would surge through the system, leaving banks and corporations insolvent. Financial panics, largely absent for more than 70 years, would return with a vengeance.

Here at home, a flickering climate would impose an enormous tax on every individual and business. Property values in most places would plummet as buyers disappeared and costs of insurance and maintenance soared. The upper-middle-class American family, today so well protected against external shocks, would find its layers of insulation gradually stripped away as fuel, food, jobs, and social order became less certain. Katrina's aftermath exposed how quickly extreme weather can reduce an orderly society to dysfunction.

Some of the calamities that may happen--droughts that last more than a century, an advance of arctic zones southward, incessant and epic storms--simply overwhelm the imagination when we try to envision them in a world of six billion people depending on an exquisitely balanced food system. Earlier civilizations destroyed by climate did not have modern technologies or markets as a bulwark against nature's stresses. But changing climate won't challenge only markets and economies; it will stress the environment too, and by decimating ecosystems, we have undermined crucial buffers against weather extremes.

INEVITABLE SURPRISES

The storms, floods, and other weather calamities of recent years are just a start.

Consider the "500 year" floods in the Midwestern U.S. that caused $27 billion of damage in 1993. Decades of development had channeled and otherwise altered the Mississippi and other great rivers of the Midwest, reducing their access to floodplains that had absorbed and moderated the effects of extreme rainfall. Without those buffers, the rivers in 1993 rose higher than they might have in years past. When they breached dikes and other barriers, they spilled into the old floodplains, now largely occupied with farms and homes, amplifying the damage. We saw this pattern repeated in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and in the Christmas tsunami of 2004. While the tsunami killed more than 280,000 people and destroyed settlements over a swath of several thousand miles, a series of powerful tsunamis in that part of the world during the 19th century passed with far less damage and loss of life. They took place before protective buffers of mangroves were destroyed, before hundreds of millions of people moved into the potential path of the waves, and before cars, trucks, and other contrivances proliferated only to become projectiles when the 2004 tsunami swept them up.

Around the world, humanity has reduced nature's capacity to dampen extremes to an astonishing degree: more than 59% of the world's accessible land degraded by improper agriculture, deforestation, and development; half the world's available fresh water now co-opted for human use at the expense of other species and ecosystems; more than half the world's mangroves destroyed; half the world's wetlands drained or ruined; one-fifth of the world's coral reefs (including crucial barrier reefs) destroyed and one-half damaged--the list goes on and on.

Nature does not alert us to all her tripwires. Perhaps that's why in recent years the unprecedented has become increasingly ordinary. When pushed past a certain magnitude, the damage of natural events increases exponentially, and that threshold falls as natural buffers are eliminated. Research led by MIT climatologist Kerry Emmanuel suggests that hurricanes have doubled in intensity during the past 30 years as the oceans have warmed. Hurricane Katrina surged to its immense power when the storm passed over a deep layer of 90-degree Fahrenheit water in the Gulf of Mexico. Hurricane Rita transfixed meteorologists when it strengthened from Category 2 to 5 in less than 24 hours while moving over those same hot seas. And in October, Wilma bested that by strengthening from tropical storm to Category 5 hurricane in a single day.

Since we are dismantling natural buffers just at the point when we really need them, it's tempting simply to conclude that humanity has a self-destructive streak. The explanation, of course, is not masochism but a collective failure of imagination--compounded by the fact that we are only now learning to weigh the threat. There are no models to estimate the economic impact of rapid changes in temperatures, storm tracks, precipitation, and so on. In a 2001 report entitled "Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises," the National Research Council, the principal operating unit of the National Academy of Sciences, noted that most modeling of impacts has been confined to cases in which changes are gradual and moderate. Modeling the effects of abrupt change is a lot harder, but the study makes a couple of important points.

First, economies can minimize the effects of a gradually changing climate if people recognize the threat and respond. With abrupt climate change, however, things happen so rapidly that neither markets nor ecosystems have time to adapt. Moreover, a dynamic market economy with capacity to respond to intermittent crises by spreading risk and reallocating assets may be unable to respond when crisis is ubiquitous and risks loom everywhere.

Second, even gradual climate change would pose immense challenges. Tim Barnett, an oceanographer at Scripps Oceanographic Institution, took part in a study of the likely effects of climate change on the Los Angeles area. Surprisingly, he says, even modest decreases in rainfall during what he called a "best-case scenario for future climate change" (a gradual and small change, decades in the future) could reduce available water for the area by 50% by 2050. The region has limited storage capacity for water and relies on the winter snowpack that builds up in the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies for water during the dry summer months. Under even modest climate-change scenarios, however, the snowpack would be smaller and would melt earlier. The region would dry up before its driest months.

Angelinos wouldn't necessarily go thirsty. California has plenty of agricultural water that could be diverted to human needs. The ancillary effects would be harder to manage. Farm output would be reduced, and water shortages could idle hydroelectric plants. Drought also makes trees more vulnerable to pests, such as the pandora moth that afflicts ponderosa pine. Dead trees are tinder for wildfires, like the ones that destroyed hundreds of homes in Southern California in 2003. Such impacts would roil the economy. Consider how increased fire risk and other effects of acute water scarcity might affect housing prices or the job market.

Keep in mind that the 50% reduction of available water was a best-case scenario. And while the richest state in the world's richest nation has some ability to weather a drought, such shifts would not be occurring in isolation. The changing climate that brought drought to Southern California would also be affecting weather throughout the American West and beyond--damaging property, disrupting agriculture, and spurring migrations.

PREMIUM HELL

You're in unsure hands.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 opened insurers' eyes to a catastrophic risk that they had been assuming for free. Their reaction provided a foretaste of how the global market might react to abrupt climate change. Following 9/11, insurers stopped writing policies that automatically included coverage of terrorist attacks. A number of major construction projects had to halt because banks would not finance them without terrorism coverage. Ultimately Congress passed and President Bush signed a law shifting responsibility for $100 billion in damage from future terrorist attacks to the U.S. government, and the construction projects got rolling again.

As climate change starts inflicting losses, insurers will again pull back, shifting financial risk to businesses and homeowners, the banks that finance them--and finally to taxpayers. In Florida, huge increases (up to 40%) in insurance rates are already making it harder for people to sell homes, according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

More than 1,000 miles from New Orleans, in Cape Cod, Mass., a far-flung echo of Katrina has been the 20% rise in reinsurance costs (reinsurers are financial institutions that backstop insurance companies). The increase prompted Hingham Mutual Group, a property and casualty insurer, to drop coverage for 6,500 commercial properties. Customers left in the lurch have a fallback in FAIR (short for Fair Access to Insurance Requirements), a program mandated by various states and run by insurers. But Massachusetts's FAIR plan recently requested big rate increases, arguing that past weather patterns may no longer be a guide to estimating future climate risks. That rationale was "unprecedented," a team of industry experts noted in a report entitled "Availability and Affordability of Insurance Under Climate Change"; it's a vivid example of how insurance has difficulty adapting to changing climate.

For insurers the hazards of climate change become more concrete each year. Andrew Dlugolecki, a risk analyst at the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in Britain, recently estimated that if climate gradually warms, the chances of the industry getting wiped out by weather-related catastrophes will rise from about one in 100 worldwide today to nine in 100 by 2050. A ninefold increase in the risk of collapse places a heavy burden on insurers, but the risks may be far greater than that. Asked in 2003 how climate change that's abrupt and chaotic might affect those odds, Dlugolecki speculated that the risk of catastrophic weather-related losses rises to about nine chances in 100 by as early as 2010. To insure a property or business affected by that degree of risk, a carrier would have to charge annual rates as high as 12% of insured value--most businesses and individuals start self-insuring (industry-speak for dropping their coverage and taking their chances) when premiums reach 3% of value.

Already the pain of weather-related insurance risks is being felt by owners of highly vulnerable properties such as offshore oil platforms, for which some rates have risen 400% in one year. That may be an omen for many businesses. Three years ago John Dutton, dean emeritus of Penn State's College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, estimated that $2.7 trillion of the $10-trillion-a-year U.S. economy is susceptible to weather-related loss of revenue, implying that an enormous number of companies have off-balance-sheet risks related to weather--even without the cataclysms a flickering climate might bring.

Corporate leaders could soon feel the heat too. In 2004, Swiss Reinsurance, a $29 billion financial giant, sent a questionnaire to companies that had purchased its directors-and-officers coverage, inquiring about their corporate strategies for dealing with climate change regulations. D&O insurance, as it is called, insulates executives and board members from the costs of lawsuits resulting from their companies' actions; Swiss Re is a major player in D&O reinsurance.

What Swiss Re is after, says Christopher Walker, who heads its Greenhouse Gas Risk Solutions unit, is reassurance that customers will not make themselves vulnerable to global-warming-related lawsuits. He cites as an example Exxon Mobil: The oil giant, which accounts for roughly 1% of global carbon emissions, has lobbied aggressively against efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. If Swiss Re judges that a company is exposing itself to lawsuits, says Walker, "we might then go to them and say, 'Since you don't think climate change is a problem, and you're betting your stockholders' assets on that, we're sure you won't mind if we exclude climate-related lawsuits and penalties from your D&O insurance.' " Swiss Re's customers may be put to the test soon in California, where Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is pushing to restrict carbon emissions, says Walker. A customer that ignores the likelihood of such laws and, for instance, builds a coal-fired power plant that soon proves a terrible bet could face shareholder suits that Swiss Re might not want to insure against.

TURNING DOWN THE HEAT

How business can take action--and why it needs political backup.

As businesses begin to recognize the dangers of climate change, markets will help economies adjust, pricing the risks and shifting resources. Yet markets have blind spots: They typically underprice long-term or novel risks. In the case of climate change, where large-scale actions must be taken lest change hit with full force, a purely market-based response would be too little, too late. To address the risks, governments need to get involved.

With the Earth's atmosphere already warming dramatically, we are probably stuck with some form of climate change. Yet the energy economy is still in the process of squeezing rather than easing the pressure on the trigger. China and other emerging economies are ramping up their consumption of fossil fuels, while the U.S., which is the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases, continues to resist international efforts to rein them in.

In November and December, delegates from scores of nations convened in Montreal to negotiate emissions-control goals for greenhouse gases in the years following the expiration of the Kyoto treaty in 2012. But days of haggling produced nothing more than a resolution to discuss the issue further in coming years. (The U.S. and Saudi Arabia were the last to agree even to that.)

By itself, the Kyoto treaty will have minimal impact on the global-warming threat. Very few of the 160 countries that ratified the treaty (which went into force last February) will meet the targets of reducing emissions 5% below 1990 levels by 2012. The U.S. rejected the treaty, and China, which is likely to surpass the U.S. as a greenhouse-gas producer in the coming years, is not governed by its provisions. Says Elliot Diringer of the Pew Center for Climate Change: "Unless there is continued action after Kyoto expires, it will have been nothing more than a blip" in the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere.

Up to now, the primary objection by the Bush administration and other opponents of reducing greenhouse gases has been economic impact. The unknowns of climate change have made projecting costs and benefits an economist's guessing game. For instance, in 2002 the White House Council on Environmental Quality cited estimates by the federal Energy Information Administration that achieving Kyoto's goals would erode U.S. economic output by $400 billion in 2010. That estimate was the worst of seven scenarios examined by the EIA; another put the cost at only $7 billion to $12 billion by 2010. Other studies, like a recent one sponsored by HSBC and entitled "Carbon Down, Profits Up," cites dozens of companies, cities, and regions that have found reducing carbon emissions to be profitable, in part because carbon reduction is often synonymous with increased efficiency.

But as the weather grows worse, such exercises will become moot. The ambitious proposals that BP's John Browne has been talking about--building nukes by the hundreds, for example--would stabilize the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at 500 parts per million by 2050, vs. 380 ppm today. Yet even that might not be enough to prevent climate chaos. Says Chris Mottershead, a distinguished advisor at BP: "Nobody knows whether climate's tipping point is at 400 ppm, 700 ppm, or if there is a tipping point." Science does know, however, that today's concentration of carbon dioxide is higher than any in 650,000 years; past climate flips took place with far less carbon in the air. What's more, BP developed its proposals with physicist Robert Socolow and ecologist Stephen Pacala, professors at Princeton University who worked with models of gradual, not abrupt, climate change.

Despite the daunting gap between present actions and what's required, plenty more can be done. Politics enables markets: An international agreement limiting carbon that includes the U.S. and the developing nations would supply the discipline necessary for carbon markets to flourish. (Carbon trading lets developed countries achieve emissions-reduction targets by paying to reduce emissions in developing countries.) According to an upcoming study of carbon markets by Ecosystem Marketplace, a website devoted to popularizing environmental derivatives, the carbon market in Europe has already surpassed $4 billion in trading value as utility, industrial, and insurance companies experiment with this new tool.

If U.S. politicians eventually conclude that action on the scale of the BP plan is necessary, they could jump-start change by redirecting the purchasing power of federal, state, and local treasuries--more than $1 trillion a year. Once government at all levels commits to purchasing clean technologies, making efficiency improvements, and using alternative energy where possible, this massive spending would provide economies of scale that would help speed the commercialization of new technologies as well as prepare society for the shift away from fossil fuels. Equally sensible would be to reduce subsidies and tax advantages that abet the waste of fossil fuels.

Such proposals have been on the table since the early 1990s. Many are even more salient today. By not taking action on greenhouse emissions, we are betting our well-being that climate change poses little threat. If we are wrong, we will meet our fate.

This article has been adapted by the author from his new book, The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations (Simon & Schuster); see also eugenelinden.com.
posted by Paul at 9:13 AM

Climate Change, Economic Change

<http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051207/climate_change_economic_change.php>

Patrick Doherty
Wednesday Dec 7, 200511:55 AM

The editors at The Economist got religion this week. The release of a report in the journal Nature, by Harry Bryden of the National Oceanography Centre in Southhampton, Britain, provided the first compelling evidence that global warming threatens more significant near term effects--the rapid cooling of the British Isles and Northern Europe--than previously thought credible. In short, global warming is melting Arctic ice at such a rate that it has reduced the Atlantic currents that warm Europe--by 30 percent.

And that figure reminds us of the Pentagon-sponsored study looking into just this scenario, called Abrupt Climate Change . The scenario makes it clear that if the Atlantic heat conveyor shuts down, Northern Europe goes into a deep freeze, requiring a lot more imported energy to stay warm and dramatically disrupting local food supplies. Now that climate change is getting personal, the Economist appears ready to accept the science. All climate politics is local, it seems.

The Nature report and the Economist's response could not have been better timed. In Montreal, the world is gathering to discuss, among other climate change issues, the future of the Kyoto Protocol after it expires in 2012. Significantly, the Bush administration chose to avoid the talks, having thrown its weight behind its own creation, a voluntary emission reduction program that combines the U.S., China, and Australia, among others.

We don't yet know what the Atlantic revelations will do to the debate. Politicians have a really hard time dealing with the potential collapse of a non-linear system--whether it is the housing bubble or the ecosystem. But two statements by Democratic Senators made it clear this week that U.S. obstructionism will not last too much longer.

Writing in the Financial Times today, Senator Joe Biden stood up to say that he accepts the climate science, that we have to act, and that there exists a great opportunity that doing right by climate change will do well for the American economy. Therefore, Biden said America has to lead: "Without US leadership and participation, there is no way to stabilise global greenhouse gases before irreparable harm is done." Biden and his GOP colleague Richard Lugar have submitted a bill to force the White house to act.

Senator Jeff Bingamon of New Mexico delivered a similar message to the delegates in Montreal in person. According to an account in Environment and Energy Daily , Bingamon told the world's representatives to continue to push forward with post-Kyoto negotiations. Bingamon believes that the Senate is nearing a bi-partisan compromise on how to implement climate change language passed this past summer and that soon we will be back at the table. "We should step up and have a significant role in whatever agreements are being designed for the period following the Kyoto Protocol," Bingamon said.

What's really happening is the undermining of the climate deniers' position. Led by ExxonMobil, which funded millions of dollars of spurious science and Congressional lobbying, climate deniers are becoming more and more marginalized, in part because the American 80 percent of the American public wants something done on global warming, and in part because other elites are recognizing the threat, like the Economist this week.

But that does not mean the battle is won. The folks preparing plans for reducing global warming emissions are not all looking out for our best interest. Accepting that climate change is real and that it is caused by the carbon released by human activity, predominantly the burning of fossil fuels, has major economic implications. Debating how to mitigate climate change is tantamount to debating how the future economy will be structured.

And the industries with the most to lose are big, centralized energy companies, be they oil or gas providers or electricity generators. The threat comes from new technology, in the form of efficiency advances, renewable energy and micro-generation, which together can address most of the problem and at the same time destroy the logic of these old-style energy companies business model.

That model is based on the assumption that energy production is best done at scale and far away from the ultimate consumer. This was true in the 20th Century, but is no longer the case. Efficiency, renewables, and microgeneration can eliminate the need to build new large-scale generators or new hydrogen fuel distribution networks.
Those large capital investments, however, are the core of the energy companies arguments for continued government subsidies and tolerance of monopolistic behavior. Nuclear power is the ultimate case:
dependent on subsidies for research, construction, fuel disposal, and insurance, nuclear power cannot work without government approval.

In the opposite corner are the likes of Honda, and interestingly, BP.
Honda has revealed the prototype of a home energy station that would convert solar power into heat, electricity, and hydrogen for your car. Combined with the 70 percent efficient homes being designed by the DoE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Honda's decentralizing innovation is a shot across the bow. BP, a major oil company and the largest producer of solar energy systems, is starting to team up with Home Depot to further push out solar systems to the household, as the head of BP, Lord Browne, discussed at the Brookings Institute recently.

And that's a real threat to big energy. So it's not a surprise that the World Business Council on Sustainable Development just released a report in Montreal that argues for the preservation of centralized energy production. "Carbon-free energy sources such as nuclear power will need to grow together with alternative sources such as hydropower, wind, geothermal, wave and tidal power." Look closely.
Solar didn't make their list--because it's too distributed for these old business models to incorporate. Neither did biofuels. Yet a 2001 study on the future of the energy industry by Shell revealed that it's solar and geothermal that are the big global sources of renewable power. Big enough to replace fossil fuels and nuclear and provide more than adequate energy to the 10 billion people on the planet in 2050. Do we really want tens of thousands of nuclear power plants scattered around the world?

The real opportunity cost for America, however, is the spate of innovation, manufacturing, and construction a shift from centralized to renewable energy would entail. Rebuilding our communities to use energy more intelligently provides the a powerful and long-term source of domestic economic growth our economists say America is desperate for. And shifting to renewables means we can help the rest of the developing world, 4.5 billion people, get a shot at a better life. If we stick to centralized energy, suburban sprawl, and inefficient consumption, we'll be forced to subsidized it from a treasury that is already trillions in the red. Preserving the old economy is just not a viable option.

These debates over climate change are debates about the future of America. While it is sad that it takes dramatic news like the shutting down of the Atlantic currents to spur some into action, it's essential now that the debate not be limited to how the energy industry giants want to divide up their hard-earned subsidies.

Climate change offers an entry point to really fix what's wrong with America. It's time for progressives to get serious before the debate is done.
posted by Paul at 10:21 AM

Worse Than Fossil Fuel
6/12/2005
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/06/worse-than-fossil-fuel/

Biodiesel enthusiasts have accidentally invented the most carbon-intensive fuel on earth

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 6th December 2005

Over the past two years I have made an uncomfortable discovery. Like most environmentalists, I have been as blind to the constraints affecting our energy supply as my opponents have been to climate change. I now realise that I have entertained a belief in magic.

In 2003, the biologist Jeffrey Dukes calculated that the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter “containing 44×10 to the 18 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet’s current biota.”(1) In plain English, this means that every year we use four centuries’ worth of plants and animals.

The idea that we can simply replace this fossil legacy – and the extraordinary power densities it gives us – with ambient energy is the stuff of science fiction. There is simply no substitute for cutting back. But substitutes are being sought everywhere. They are being promoted today at the climate talks in Montreal, by states – such as ours – which seek to avoid the hard decisions climate change demands. And at least one of them is worse than the fossil fuel burning it replaces.

The last time I drew attention to the hazards of making diesel fuel from vegetable oils, I received as much abuse as I have ever been sent by the supporters of the Iraq war. The biodiesel missionaries, I discovered, are as vociferous in their denial as the executives of Exxon. I am now prepared to admit that my previous column was wrong. But they’re not going to like it. I was wrong because I underestimated the fuel’s destructive impact.

Before I go any further, I should make it clear that turning used chip fat into motor fuel is a good thing. The people slithering around all day in vats of filth are perfoming a service to society. But there is enough waste cooking oil in the UK to meet one 380th of our demand for road transport fuel(2). Beyond that, the trouble begins.

When I wrote about it last year, I thought that the biggest problem caused by biodiesel was that it set up a competition for land(3). Arable land that would otherwise have been used to grow food would instead be used to grow fuel. But now I find that something even worse is happening. The biodiesel industry has accidentally invented the world’s most carbon-intensive fuel.

In promoting biodiesel – as the European Union, the British and US governments and thousands of environmental campaigners do – you might imagine that you are creating a market for old chip fat, or rapeseed oil, or oil from algae grown in desert ponds. In reality you are creating a market for the most destructive crop on earth.

Last week, the chairman of Malaysia’s Federal Land Development Authority announced that he was about to build a new biodiesel plant(4). His was the ninth such decision in four months. Four new refineries are being built in Peninsula Malaysia, one in Sarawak and two in Rotterdam(5). Two foreign consortia – one German, one American – are setting up rival plants in Singapore(6). All of them will be making biodiesel from the same source: oil from palm trees.

“The demand for biodiesel,” the Malaysian Star reports, “will come from the European Community … This fresh demand … would, at the very least, take up most of Malaysia’s crude palm oil inventories”(7). Why? Because it’s cheaper than biodiesel made from any other crop.

In September, Friends of the Earth published a report about the impacts of palm oil production. “Between 1985 and 2000,” it found, “the development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia”(8). In Sumatra and Borneo, some 4 million hectares of forest has been converted to palm farms. Now a further 6 million hectares is scheduled for clearance in Malaysia, and 16.5m in Indonesia.

Almost all the remaining forest is at risk. Even the famous Tanjung Puting National Park in Kalimantan is being ripped apart by oil planters. The orang-utan is likely to become extinct in the wild. Sumatran rhinos, tigers, gibbons, tapirs, proboscis monkeys and thousands of other species could go the same way. Thousands of indigenous people have been evicted from their lands, and some 500 Indonesians have been tortured when they tried to resist(9). The forest fires which every so often smother the region in smog are mostly started by the palm growers. The entire region is being turned into a gigantic vegetable oil field.

Before oil palms, which are small and scrubby, are planted, vast forest trees, containing a much greater store of carbon, must be felled and burnt. Having used up the drier lands, the plantations are now moving into the swamp forests, which grow on peat. When they’ve cut the trees, the planters drain the ground. As the peat dries it oxidises, releasing even more carbon dioxide than the trees. In terms of its impact on both the local and global environments, palm biodiesel is more destructive than crude oil from Nigeria.

The British government understands this. In the report it published last month, when it announced that it will obey the European Union and ensure that 5.75% of our transport fuel comes from plants by 2010, it admitted that “the main environmental risks are likely to be those concerning any large expansion in biofuel feedstock production, and particularly in Brazil (for sugar cane) and South East Asia (for palm oil plantations).”(10) It suggested that the best means of dealing with the problem was to prevent environmentally destructive fuels from being imported. The government asked its consultants whether a ban would infringe world trade rules. The answer was yes: “mandatory environmental criteria … would greatly increase the risk of international legal challenge to the policy as a whole”(11). So it dropped the idea of banning imports, and called for “some form of voluntary scheme” instead(12). Knowing that the creation of this market will lead to a massive surge in imports of palm oil, knowing that there is nothing meaningful it can do to prevent them, and knowing that they will accelarate rather than ameliorate climate change, the government has decided to go ahead anyway.

At other times it happily defies the European Union. But what the EU wants and what the government wants are the same. “It is essential that we balance the increasing demand for travel,” the government’s report says, “with our goals for protecting the environment”(13). Until recently, we had a policy of reducing the demand for travel. Now, though no announcement has been made, that policy has gone. Like the Tories in the early 1990s, the Labour administration seeks to accommodate demand, however high it rises. Figures obtained last week by the campaigning group Road Block show that for the widening of the M1 alone the government will pay £3.6 billion – more than it is spending on its entire climate change programme(14). Instead of attempting to reduce demand, it is trying to alter supply. It is prepared to sacrifice the South East Asian rainforests in order to be seen to do something, and to allow motorists to feel better about themselves.

All this illustrates the futility of the technofixes now being pursued in Montreal. Trying to meet a rising demand for fuel is madness, wherever the fuel might come from. The hard decisions have been avoided, and another portion of the biosphere is going up in smoke.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Jeffrey S. Dukes, 2003. Burning Buried Sunshine: Human Consumption Of
Ancient Solar Energy. Climatic Change 61: 31-44.

2. The British Association for Biofuels and Oils estimates the volume at 100,000 tonnes a year. BABFO, no date. Memorandum to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. http://www.biodiesel.co.uk/press_release/royal_commission_on_environmenta.htm

3. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/

4. Tamimi Omar, 1st December 2005. Felda to set up largest biodiesel plant. The Edge Daily.
http://www.theedgedaily.com/cms/content.jsp?id=com.tms.cms.article.Article_e5d7c0d9-cb73c03a-df4bfc00-d453633e

5. See e.g. Zaidi Isham Ismail, 7th November 2005. IOI to go it alone on first biodiesel plant.
http://www.btimes.com.my/Current_News/BT/Monday/Frontpage/20051107000223/Article/; No author, 25th November 2005. GHope nine-month profit hits RM841mil. http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2005/11/25/business/12693859&sec=business; No author, 26th November 2005. GHope to invest RM40mil for biodiesel plant in Netherlands. http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2005/11/26/business/12704187&sec=business; No author, 23rd November 2005. Malaysia IOI Eyes Green Energy Expansion in Europe. http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/33622/story.htm

6. Loh Kim Chin, 26th October 2005. Singapore to host two biodiesel plants, investments total over S$80m. Channel NewsAsia.

7. C.S. Tan, 6th October 2005. All Plantation Stocks Rally. http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2005/10/6/business/12243819&sec=business

8. Friends of the Earth et al, September 2005. The Oil for Ape Scandal: how palm oil is threatening orang-utan survival. Research report. www.foe.co.uk/resource/reports/oil_for_ape_full.pdf

9. ibid.

10. Department for Transport, November 2005. Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) feasibility report.
http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_roads/documents/page/dft_roads_610329-01.hcsp#P18_263

11. E4Tech, ECCM and Imperial College, London, June 2005. Feasibility Study on Certification for a Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation. Final Report.

12. Department for Transport, ibid.

13. ibid.
posted by Paul at 8:42 AM

How Much Energy Do We Have?
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/11/29/how-much-energy-do-we-have-/

Are there enough renewables to keep the lights on? The answer will be comforting to no one.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 29th November 2005

In one respect, Simon Jenkins is right. “Nobody”, he complained in the Guardian last week, while laying out his case for nuclear power, “agrees about figures”(1). As a result, “energy policy is like Victorian medicine, at the mercy of quack remedies and snake-oil salesmen.”

There is a reason for this. As far as I can discover, reliable figures for the total volume of electricity that renewable power could supply do not yet exist. As a result, anyone can claim anything, and anyone does. The enthusiasts for renewables insist that the entire economy – lights, heating, cars and planes – can be powered from hydrogen produced by wind. The nuclear evangelists maintain, in Jenkins’s words, that “even if every beauty spot in Britain were coated in windmills their contribution to the Kyoto target would be minuscule.” All of us are groping around in the dark.

So though this is not a scientific journal, and though I am not qualified to do it, I am going to attempt a rough first draft, which I hope will be challenged and refined by people with better credentials. Some of my assumptions are generous, others are conservative. This will be far from definitive and, I am afraid, quite complex, but at least, on the day the government’s energy review is announced, we will have something to argue about.

The UK currently has an installed electricity generating capacity of 77 gigawatts (GW)(2). Demand for electricity peaks on winter evenings between 5 and 7pm, when we use some 61.7GW (3). A recent report by Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute estimates that if we do everything possible to improve energy efficiency in the home and install mini-wind turbines and small “combined heat and power” boilers, we could reduce our demand from big power plants by 25GW, or 40%, by 2050 (4).

I haven’t been able to find a comparable study for offices and industry, so my first leap of faith is to assume that the same cut can be applied across the economy. This is likely to be generous. It is now clear that 2050 is too late: drastic cuts – 80 to 90% – in greenhouse gases need to be made by 2030. So my second assumption is that the 40% cut can be evenly spread across time: that we can, in other words, reduce peak electricity demand by 22% by 2030. This means that it falls by 13.6GW, to 48.1.

Because wind doesn’t blow consistently, wind power cannot replace fossil fuels watt for watt. A paper published in the journal Energy Policy estimates that 26GW of installed wind capacity (which could meet about 20% of current electricity demand) would replace 5GW of fossil fuel plant (5). Graham Sinden at Oxford University has shown that a more reliable mixture – 43% wind, 52% wave and 5% tidal stream power – could, at the same volume, replace 8GW of coal or gas (6).

The National Grid company tells me that wind power could directly deliver “at least 20%” of our electricity and remain “economically feasible”(7). Assuming that the same can be said of Graham Sinden’s mixture, 20GW of installed renewable capacity will mop up 20% of our reduced demand (48.1GW), displacing 6.2GW of conventional power plant. This leaves us with 41.9 to find.

Figures from the Energy Technology Support Unit at Harwell suggest that if you build only in places with an average windspeed of at least 7 metres per second, and keep out of national parks, areas of outstanding natural beauty, nature reserves and towns and villages, you could produce a maximum of 58,000 gigawatt-hours (GWh) per year of electricity from onshore wind (a gigawatt-hour is an hour of electricity delivered at a rate of 1GW). If you build only in shallow water with a firm seabed, out of the path of migrating birds and military exercises, and where grid connections are available, you could generate 100,000GWh of electricity from offshore wind (8). These estimates are probably conservative, as wind turbines are already bigger than the researchers envisaged.

The same study estimated that 53,000 GWh can be produced from wave power and 36,000 from tidal stream machines. A House of Lords committee reports that it might be possible to generate 24,000 GWh from tidal lagoons (9). I won’t count electricity from sunlight, because it’s expensive and isn’t produced when we need it most. This means that if we used all the available sources of variable renewable power in the UK, we could produce 271,000GWh of electricity per year.

We have already used up 20GW of installed renewable capacity. Assuming that renewable power is 30% efficient, we can multiply 20 by 8760 (the number of hours in the year) and 0.3, to make 52,600GWh. Subtract this from 271,000 and we are left with 218,400.

Now here comes the biggest leap of faith. I am going to assume that by 2030 a cost-effective energy storage technology has been developed which has a 50% efficiency. The most likely technologies are hydrogen (which can be burnt in gas turbine engines) or a battery system like the one envisaged in the UK’s Regenesys project, which was scrapped last year. Either one would add considerably to the costs of power generation, so investors are likely to become interested only if gas prices keep rising (which is likely) and nuclear operators are forced to carry their own insurance costs (which is unlikely). But if either the market or the government swung behind energy storage, then something like half the output from our variable power sources could be turned into a reliable supply of electricity. That means 109,000 GWh.

To this we could add 17,000GWh from willow plantations grown on the farmland currently under set-aside (10), 6,000GWh from farm and forestry waste, 6,000 from hydro power and 5,000 from landfill gas (11), to give a total for reliable electricity generation from renewables of 143,000GWh. Assuming very conservatively that this is evenly distributed across the year (in reality much of it can be held over to meet peak demand), and that at any one time 85% of it is available, this gives us 19GW of installed capacity. We needed 41.9, so our shortfall is some 23 gigawatts at peak demand, and 34.8GW of total capacity. (The need for spare capacity could be greatly reduced if we managed demand rather than supply, as the great free-thinker on energy systems, Walt Patterson, has suggested)(12).

This is more than the apostles of renewable energy were hoping to see, but much less than the nuclear proselytes have predicted. It suggests that we could cut our demand for fossil fuel without building new nuclear power stations. But it is still too much: even 23GW will help to cook the planet. So the choice then comes down to this: we make up the shortfall either with nuclear power, as Simon Jenkins suggests, or with gas or coal accompanied by carbon burial (pumping the carbon dioxide into salt aquifers or old gas fields). The first option means uranium mining, nuclear waste and the threat of proliferation and terrorism. The second means insecurity (gas) or open-cast mining and air pollution (coal) and a risk (though probably quite small) of carbon seepage.

Neither option, in other words, looks pretty. I fear I have succeeded not only in writing the densest column the Guardian has ever published, but also in demonstrating that this problem is harder to solve than I had hoped. Is there someone out there who can prove me wrong?

George Monbiot will be speaking at the Climate March on Saturday. For details see http://www.campaigncc.org/.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Simon Jenkins, 23rd November 2005. At last Blair seems to see that our future is nuclear. The Guardian.

2. Eg http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/uk.html

3. Brenda Boardman et al. 40% House. The Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford.

4. ibid.

5. Lewis Dale et al, 2004. Total cost estimates for large-scale wind scenarios in UK. Energy Policy no 32, pp 1949-1956.

6. Graham Sinden, 2005. Wind power and diversified renewable energy portfolios. Presentation to the Carbon Trust.

7. Email from Chris Mostyn, Media Relations Manager, the National Grid.

8. Energy Technology Support Unit, 1999. New and renewable energy: prospects in the UK for the 21st century – supporting analysis. ETSU, Harwell.

9. House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, 15th July 2004. Renewable Energy: Practicalities. Volume I: Report. (it gives an installed capacity of 4.5 GW, and a capacity factor of 61% ).

10. Jim Watson et al., April 2002. Renewable Energy and Combined Heat and Power Resources in the UK. Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research Working Paper 22.

11. Energy Technology Support Unit, ibid.

12. Walt Patterson, 2003. Keeping The Lights On: Working Papers 1-3. The Royal Institute of International Affairs.
posted by Paul at 12:48 PM