Biofuel Blues

Greetings Peaksters

       Liquid biofuel seems to be on the ropes.   Corn based ethanol has got that nasty food/ fuel problem.   And then there is the other inconvenient problem. - the corn belt has got that whole dustbowl/ desert issue.    Kansas today

Predicted Dustbowl 2.0

 

      And technology forcing decrees, seem to lack the mojo we'd hoped for.    If you decree it,  can they build it?   What ever happened to those high tech magicians, like Vinod Khosla,  who were going to solve our liquid fuel problems?   Taxpayers on the hook?

     Now a federal court has looked behind the curtain and declared celulosic ethanol to be vapor ware?    (No no,  it's just around the corner!)

  You don't suppose its like Robert Rapier  has been telling us?. Check out  Rapier's latest:  Why I don't ride a unicorn to work

Court Overturns E.P.A.’s Biofuels Mandate

By MATTHEW L. WALD

Published: January 25, 2013

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court threw out a federal rule on renewable fuels on Friday, saying that a quota set by theEnvironmental Protection Agency for incorporating liquids made from woody crops and wastes into car and truck fuels was based on wishful thinking rather than realistic estimates of what could be achieved.

Enlarge This Image

John Van Beekum for The New York Times

Ineos Bio is one of several companies that have invested in factories that convert woody material and wastes to ethanol. Its venture is in Vero Beach, Fla.

A blog about energy and the environment.

Go to Blog »

The ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia involved a case brought by the American Petroleum Institute, whose members were bound by the 2012 cellulosic biofuels quota being challenged.

Production of advanced biofuels for use in gasoline is a cherished goal of the Obama administration and a major long-term hope for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.

But production of the “cellulosic” fuel, made from woody material, has been slow to start up, making it virtually impossible to come by. That has presented the refiners, the ones required to buy the cellulosic fuel, with a quandary.

From 2010 through 2012, the E.P.A. has required gradually higher levels of cellulosic fuel to be incorporated into motor fuel each year, for a total of 20 million gallons to date.

But actual production has been near zero.

While the mandate springs from a 2007 act of Congress meant to promote advanced biofuels to run cars and trucks, “we are not convinced that Congress meant for E.P.A. to let that intent color its work as a predictor, to let the wish be father to the thought,” the court wrote.

Bob Greco, the American Petroleum Institute’s director for downstream and industry operations, welcomed the decision, saying that the structure for setting the quota was flawed.

“There is no onus or accountability on the person who is producing the fuel,” he said of the emergent cellulosic fuel ventures in an interview. “They’re incentivized to pump up their projections via press release, and make rosy estimates because there’s no skin off their back if they fail to hit those.”

Then the E.P.A. sets quotas that are too high, he said.

The three-judge panel made a similar point in its decision. The cellulosic fuel rule is fundamentally different from other regulations, it said.

It is intended to force an industry to develop new technology to meet environmental goals, but in this case, the regulated industry was the refiner, not the producer, the court said.

“Apart from their role as captive consumers, the refiners are in no position to ensure, or even contribute to, growth in the cellulosic biofuel industry,” the judges wrote.

They said the E.P.A.’s message was essentially, “Do a good job, cellulosic fuel producers. If you fail, we’ll fine your customers.”

But the Renewable Fuels Association, a trade group that represents the cellulosic manufacturers, said the agency had acted reasonably.

“The E.P.A. did not determine a reasonably achievable volume and then inflate it,” the association said in a statement. “Rather, it set the volume based on the best information available to it at the time.”

The group also said that the decision did not constitute a broader rollback of the renewable fuel standard, which is what the oil industry was seeking.

Given that the larger category of advanced biofuels is left intact, the decision could lead to increased use of two noncellulosic fuels that are “advanced,” biodiesel made from fat and waste or soybeans, and ethanol from Brazilian sugar cane, to fill the gap. The Brazilian ethanol is considered advanced because making it from sugar requires less energy than making it from corn, as producers do in this country.

Cellulosic fuel that is produced from woody crop matter or waste can either be ethanol or components of gasoline or diesel fuel.

If cellulosic biofuel can eventually be commercialized, it would represent a triple play for administration policy. It would help cut oil imports, which would advance the nation’s energy security and its balance of payments. It would lower the amount of carbon loaded into the atmosphere. And if the technology can be exported, it would also reduce the importance of oil-exporting countries globally.

There are signs that the cellulosic sector could soon gain some momentum. Several companies have invested tens of millions of dollars in building commercial-scale projects. Last year, two companies said they were near production.

KiOR, one of the two companies, said on Friday that it had sold 1,024 gallons of diesel fuel in December that was produced at its plant in Columbus, Miss., but that it could provide no additional details in advance of its next earnings report.

The other venture, Ineos Bio, said it could not immediately respond to questions about the production status of its cellulose-to-ethanol plant in Vero Beach, Fla.

Rite of Passage

Greetings Peaksters

      Doomer Dan has a cryptic phrase he utters occasionally, to wit:  "It's all free!".  My first reaction was, "No no its all getting more expensive! "  But slowly I believe I am coming some understanding  - i.e that the current crop of humans has available  huge quantities of energy, machinery are entertainment - and they have access to all this stuff by working - but working much less than any humans before us.   So its all so cheap, it might as well be free.

      So, having gotten used to this increasing luxury, we are in a panic when we discover that our opulence is about to shrink.  And we are doing hand springs to get out more oi, to build our turbines and solar.  But perhaps there is another way to approach the issue.  

   

     So, I stumbled across this article , which starts out with a nice discussion of energy and economy, and the decline rates and feasibility of alternative.  Al standard stuff.  All laid out quite logically with footnotes.  But towards the end he veers into psychology  and he has a nice way of looking at the future.   

      When you think about it, the person in society  who gets everything for free, and doesn't have to work is the child.   And we have gotten used to that role, and cling to it.  But we need to to move to different role, the role of the adult, who knows what things cost, and that nothing is free, and everything has trade offs.  But its difficult to make this move.  We need a rite of passage. 

Here is the concluding passage:

     

The Impending Rite of Passage

Believe it or not, I’m a friendly guy with a great sense of humor and a positive outlook on life, both for myself and for others. Friends constantly ask me how my upbeat demeanor coexists with my downbeat energy outlook. No, I don’t suffer from multiple personality disorder or have a superhuman capacity to cope with cognitive dissonance. The answer is simple: I see an easy way out.

Fossil fuel depletion and the inadequacy of alternative energy technologies to fill the resulting energy supply gaps at reasonable prices aren’t inherently problematic. Outside of civilization supplies of key resources rise and fall, and the ‘affluence’ of species that depend on those resources rises and falls with them. Despite the cyclical nature of life outside of civilization, animals generally don’t descend into depression or go psychotic. Perhaps my single most powerful revelation came when I realized that, growing up in an industrialized nation like the United States, I’d become so spoiled by the rising availability of cheap resources and had so infused the notion of perpetually increasing affluence into my identity that my worldview left no room for declines.

A worldview encompasses a person’s conception of how the world works, what’s possible, and what’s desirable. A key maladaptive feature of the worldview I grew up with is that I defined my success by the growth of my standard of living, the growth of my country’s economy and the growth of my country’s influence more generally. A look through history shows that growth in any metric is a fleeting part of the development of societies [9]. As I woke up to the realities of fossil fuel depletion and its economic consequences, I realized my first task would be to design more realism into my worldview.

In some societies children go through a rite of passage during which the child’s worldview – defined by rapid physical growth, no responsibilities and instant gratification – is extinguished [10]. As their rite progresses their worldview is re-formulated to accept the roles and responsibilities of adulthood in their community, whatever those might be. I can’t help but wonder if the growth fetish I found hidden in my worldview was a childish way of thinking that, psychologically, I never left behind in my transition into adulthood.

Over the past decade I’ve muddled through a series of informal rites of passage, each including the archetypal stages of preparation, severance, crossing a threshold, return and reintegration. Preparation involved recognizing that my worldview had some shortcomings, and taking stock of the physical, financial and community resources I had at my disposal. Severance involved articulating relevant parts of my current worldview and opening myself up to leaving them behind. Crossing the threshold demanded that I ask hard questions about how the world works, about my goals and intentions, and about what path forward was worth committing to. My return involved using the answers to these questions to design for myself a new worldview, and reintegration involved turning this worldview into habits and stories to help me avoid repeating past mistakes and falling back into old patterns. The process isn’t over. While large chunks of my old worldview have been extinguished and replaced with more adaptive beliefs and patterns, there are still a few relics I keep working on and I expect the work to continue throughout my adult life.

My emerging worldview places less importance on my income and consumptive habits as the basis for my identity, and more on the connections I create and nurture in my community. My goal in life is still growth, but not so much in the physical or monetary realms. In those areas I’m quite content with ‘enough’, and I’ve noticed that ‘enough’ tends to shrink over time on many fronts. I’ve stopped investing in the stock market and similar schemes, and instead invest surplus income collecting practical skills, starting hobbies that I can scale up to earn another income stream if needed, and building community with others who share my goals of creating resilience and adaptability.

Parting Thoughts

Earlier in this article I asked why we can’t seem to escape from our current economic recession, and answered with discussions of emerging fossil fuel supply constraints, declining net energy returns, and the inability to replace scarce fossil energy with alternatives. I noted the growth fetish hidden in my old worldview and the value of sculpting it into something more adaptive, something more in-tune with reality. That sculpting led naturally to a range of lifestyle choices that, overall, have given me a much greater sense of personal security and a higher quality of life.

When just one person follows this path it doesn’t help much. We need millions of people to jump on board, millions to muddle through their thresholds and millions to return to their communities with more adaptive worldviews and visions of how they can meaningfully contribute. Civilization itself needs a rite of passage, and perhaps the economic consequences of fossil fuel depletion will deliver exactly that. I can’t pretend to know the particulars of how the coming years and decades will progress, but I trust it will be powerful, enlightening, and certainly interesting. Perhaps more interesting than we’d prefer, but then we live in interesting times, so go figure. 

Kansas (and biofuels) going bye bye

Greetings Peaksters

       Liquid biofuel seems to be on the ropes.   Corn based ethanol has got that nasty food/ fuel problem.   And then there is the other inconvenient problem. - the corn belt has got that whole dustbowl/ desert issue.   

Dustbowl 2.0

 

      And technology forcing decrees, seem to lack the mojo we'd hoped for.    If you decree it,  can they build it?   What ever happened to those high tech magicians, like Vinod Khosla,  who were going to solve our liquid fuel problems?   Taxpayers on the hook?

     Now a federal court has looked behind the curtain and declared celulosic ethanol to be vapor ware.

  Just like Robert Rapier told us.

Court Overturns E.P.A.’s Biofuels Mandate

By MATTHEW L. WALD

Published: January 25, 2013

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court threw out a federal rule on renewable fuels on Friday, saying that a quota set by theEnvironmental Protection Agency for incorporating liquids made from woody crops and wastes into car and truck fuels was based on wishful thinking rather than realistic estimates of what could be achieved.

Enlarge This Image

John Van Beekum for The New York Times

Ineos Bio is one of several companies that have invested in factories that convert woody material and wastes to ethanol. Its venture is in Vero Beach, Fla.

A blog about energy and the environment.

Go to Blog »

The ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia involved a case brought by the American Petroleum Institute, whose members were bound by the 2012 cellulosic biofuels quota being challenged.

Production of advanced biofuels for use in gasoline is a cherished goal of the Obama administration and a major long-term hope for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.

But production of the “cellulosic” fuel, made from woody material, has been slow to start up, making it virtually impossible to come by. That has presented the refiners, the ones required to buy the cellulosic fuel, with a quandary.

From 2010 through 2012, the E.P.A. has required gradually higher levels of cellulosic fuel to be incorporated into motor fuel each year, for a total of 20 million gallons to date.

But actual production has been near zero.

While the mandate springs from a 2007 act of Congress meant to promote advanced biofuels to run cars and trucks, “we are not convinced that Congress meant for E.P.A. to let that intent color its work as a predictor, to let the wish be father to the thought,” the court wrote.

Bob Greco, the American Petroleum Institute’s director for downstream and industry operations, welcomed the decision, saying that the structure for setting the quota was flawed.

“There is no onus or accountability on the person who is producing the fuel,” he said of the emergent cellulosic fuel ventures in an interview. “They’re incentivized to pump up their projections via press release, and make rosy estimates because there’s no skin off their back if they fail to hit those.”

Then the E.P.A. sets quotas that are too high, he said.

The three-judge panel made a similar point in its decision. The cellulosic fuel rule is fundamentally different from other regulations, it said.

It is intended to force an industry to develop new technology to meet environmental goals, but in this case, the regulated industry was the refiner, not the producer, the court said.

“Apart from their role as captive consumers, the refiners are in no position to ensure, or even contribute to, growth in the cellulosic biofuel industry,” the judges wrote.

They said the E.P.A.’s message was essentially, “Do a good job, cellulosic fuel producers. If you fail, we’ll fine your customers.”

But the Renewable Fuels Association, a trade group that represents the cellulosic manufacturers, said the agency had acted reasonably.

“The E.P.A. did not determine a reasonably achievable volume and then inflate it,” the association said in a statement. “Rather, it set the volume based on the best information available to it at the time.”

The group also said that the decision did not constitute a broader rollback of the renewable fuel standard, which is what the oil industry was seeking.

Given that the larger category of advanced biofuels is left intact, the decision could lead to increased use of two noncellulosic fuels that are “advanced,” biodiesel made from fat and waste or soybeans, and ethanol from Brazilian sugar cane, to fill the gap. The Brazilian ethanol is considered advanced because making it from sugar requires less energy than making it from corn, as producers do in this country.

Cellulosic fuel that is produced from woody crop matter or waste can either be ethanol or components of gasoline or diesel fuel.

If cellulosic biofuel can eventually be commercialized, it would represent a triple play for administration policy. It would help cut oil imports, which would advance the nation’s energy security and its balance of payments. It would lower the amount of carbon loaded into the atmosphere. And if the technology can be exported, it would also reduce the importance of oil-exporting countries globally.

There are signs that the cellulosic sector could soon gain some momentum. Several companies have invested tens of millions of dollars in building commercial-scale projects. Last year, two companies said they were near production.

KiOR, one of the two companies, said on Friday that it had sold 1,024 gallons of diesel fuel in December that was produced at its plant in Columbus, Miss., but that it could provide no additional details in advance of its next earnings report.

The other venture, Ineos Bio, said it could not immediately respond to questions about the production status of its cellulose-to-ethanol plant in Vero Beach, Fla.

Monday Morning

Greetings Peaksters

      OK It's Monday.   Enough of the weekend cheer.     Lets get back to doom!

Bonus Features:  50 doomiest graphs of 2012     from Desdemona Despair

Economist Stern: ‘I Got It Wrong on Climate Change—It’s Far, Far Worse

Everything is awful

By David Roberts

Grist finally got around to having its holiday party last night. Consequently, I am rather hungover and haggard, which is unfortunate, since the moment I arrived at my computer this morning I was besieged by bad news. Here’s an annotated list of awful things that have happened this week:

1. Filibuster reform collapses.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) came to an agreement [PDF] on the filibuster today. Joining hands in the spirit of bipartisan comity, they agreed to do nothing. It’s pathetic, worse even than I expected, and I generally expect the worst from the Senate. Even the most egregious filibuster abuse — filibustering the motion to proceed with a bill — will remain in place. Reid will still need McConnell’s permission to bring anything to the floor.

Why did Reid punk out? Because he supports the 60-vote supermajority threshold, as do many of his Democratic colleagues. In the thick air of the Senate they have bought the “world’s most deliberative body” mythology wholesale, losing track of the distinction between deliberative and dysfunctional. They view Senate tradition as a fragile treasure and the clubby, insular atmosphere as an advantage. When the hero of filibuster reform, Sen. Jeff Merkley, called out Democratic reform opponents by name, Reid scolded him. They don’t want to go on record as opposing reform. But they don’t want to lose their individual leverage either.

And so the Senate will remain the only legislative body among advanced democracies (or U.S. states) to give the minority absolute veto power over legislation. It is so frightened of democracy it won’t even allow itself to be ruled democratically. So nothing will pass, certainly nothing bold or effective, on climate or anything else. And those who speak most solemnly about Senate tradition will continue to render the institution a laughingstock.

2. The Washington Post humps for Keystone.

The Washington Post editorial board is concerned about climate change. They think it’s very bad that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and other Republicans deny climate change. They think Obama should do more to address climate change in his second term.

And in an editorial today, they encourage Obama to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. The word “climate” appears nowhere within.

In this, as in all things, WaPo editors hew to D.C. conventional wisdom, which is that something should be done about climate change, like maybe a carbon-tax unicorn, but fossil fuel production should also be increased. Magical thinking.

3. The public is ignorant and fickle.

Yet another study has shown that public opinion on climate change — especially among Independents — drifts back and forth with changes in weather.

Interviewed on unseasonably warm days, Independents tend to agree with the scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic climate change. On unseasonably cool days, they tend not to.

One implication is that even when the public says it “believes” in climate change, it doesn’t understand climate change.

Another is that the recent enthusiasm of green groups for using extreme weather as a climate communication tool could very easily backfire if we enter a few years with unseasonably cool temperatures or low storm activity, which is entirely possible.

4. Arizona goes backward on solar.

Remember when I wrote, late last year, that a crucial showdown over clean-energy was taking place in Arizona? That Arizonans elect the members of the public utilities commission and that three far-right nutjobs were running against three clean-energy Democrats?

Well, all three of the nutjobs won. The Arizona Corporation Commission (the state’s PUC) is now entirely Republican. And sure enough, it just slashed incentives for home solar and eliminated incentives for commercial solar.

Oh well. Not like there’s any sun in Arizona.

5. Federal court screws the public (again).

Back in August, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court (two appointed by Republicans, one by a Democrat) struck down EPA’s cross-state pollution rule, which the agency estimated would have prevented 34,000 premature deaths a year. The Democrat-appointed judge dissented.

Today, a broader panel judges on the same court (four appointed by Republicans, three by Democrats) denied the administration’s appeal and refused to reconsider the decision.

Kinda makes you wish Dems generally and Obama specifically paid more attention to courts and didn’t leave so many judgeships unfilled.

Anyway, now more kids will suffer and die of preventable heart and lung ailments. Whee!

6. U.S. airlines profit from carbon scheme they helped squash.

If you recall, the European Union has been trying to bring air travel under the rubric of its emissions trading system (ETS). It plans to charge airlines (or rather, airline passengers) a small carbon fee for flying into or out of E.U. airports.

The U.S., along with China and Saudi Arabia, have gone apeshit over this and done everything possible to kill the system. In November of last year, the pressure from polluting countries was too much and the E.U. agreed to postpone the system for a year.

But wait! Turns out airlines have been collecting the fees that were intended to go into the E.U. ETS trust fund. In fact, U.S. airlines alone have collected between $41.8 million and $83.7 million in such fees, according to a new report from Transport & Environment. And now they’re pocketing that money, profiting from the delay (and perhaps death) of a climate-mitigation effort they helped sabotage. Super.

In short: Everything sucks today. Let’s hope for better tomorrow.

Adjusting

Greetings Peaksters

      Happily humans are a resilient bunch.  We get used to stuff .  We adjust.  For example, what does it mean to be "comfortable"   ?   It depends on what you have gotten used to.  .     In terms of heat it can mean between  anywhere between 43 and 86 degrees !     ( Here at Peaksters central, we can get along at 62, but we still need sweaters and hats).

    Speaking of adjusting.,  Here is a good interview with Kathy McMahon  .  She's a clinical psychologist, who specializes in "Peak Oil Blues".
 
Here's her blog.    

     Dealing with all of this sh*t, both resources,a nd climate,  definitely has a psychological component.   Many of us have gone through the stages of Peak. (denial bargaining etc etc)     And it takes some time to accept that the future we've all planned for just isn't going to be there.   This can result in some wacky behavior.  So, she recommends waiting for two years before making any big decisions, until the acceptance of peak has worked its way in.

    She addresses other issues in the interview.  For instance, dealing with your brother-inlaw who is still in denial and good at avoidance:   "Sure, production hasn't increased, and the price keeps going up, but things aren't that bad.  I don't see anarchy in the streets"  (So no need to  adjust lifestyle now).

         How about the "one-wayers".  "You are either with us, or you are "sheeple"

    There's a also the "fast crashers" who just want the whole thing to fall, and then they'll be proven right.      But,so far the slow crash seems more likely.  Which means most people won't even know that the "long emergency" had anything to do with resource limits.  They'll just know that things kept on getting worse.  There's a technical term for that.  Its known as a "Sucky Collapse"

Check it out:

http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/entry/2013-01-09T16_48_14-08_00

"KMO welcomes Kathy McMahon, the Peak Shrink of PeakOilBlues.com, back to the C-Realm to talk about the psychology of predictions. We gravitate to flashy predictions over nuanced forecasts and don’t hold poor track records against those prophets whose predictions promise to vindicate us for holding the right beliefs. Unfortunately for Doomers who hope for a rapid collapse that will vindicate them for being early adopters of the Peak Oil collapse narrative, we seem to be in the midst of a slow degeneration that eats away at our security and wealth but never proves us right in the eyes of our doubters and critics. You may be braced for a sudden, sexy collapse, but do you have the gumption to endure the sucky collapse? KMO and Kathy last spoke at the beginning of the current economic malaise, and now, 3.5 years later, Kathy describes how the prolonged downturn has effected her family, her career, and her outlook"

Wall Street chanelling Charlie Hall

Greetings Peaksters

      I presume you all know who Prof Charlie Hall is, He's the guy who came up with the concept of looking at the energy situation through the lens of EROI (Energy returned on energy Invested).  He's been pounding the table for about 40 years trying to get someone to notice.

       I just came across a report put out by a wall street firm called Tullett Prebon .  According to wikipedia they are is "one of the largest inter-dealer  money brokers in the world.  They operate as an intermediary in wholesale financial markets

facilitating the trading activities of their clients, in particular commercial and investment banks".  So they are a player.

  These guys put together a report called   Perfect Storm   (PDF warning) .   And they  really hit it out of the park on a number of issues:.

  Its about 80 pages,  but a lot of those pages are pretty pictures -interestingly ; pictures ancient civilizations that have collapsed.  (!!)   

    Lets just say, its not your ordinary wall street report.

  Lets' go to the bottom line (spoiler alert!).  

They say EROI is dropping like a stone.  In 1990 it was about 40:1, by 2010 it dropped to 17:1, and they project a further slide to 11:1 in 2020, and 8:1 by 2030.      This is not the end of "civilization" (which Hall puts somewhere between 3 and 5:1) ,  but it is pretty much the end of high energy, consumer world we are used to. 

   Bottom Line:

 "...the economy, as we have known it  for more than two centuries, will cease

to be viable at some point within the next ten or so years unless, of course,  some way is found to reverse the trend."

But lets back up a minute.  Lets walk this through step by step.

  Looking at money/debt/ energy nexus, they say:

         

"The appreciation of the true nature of money as a tokenisation of energy also enables us to put debt into its proper context. Fundamentally, debt can be defined as ‘a claim on future money’. However, since we have seen that money is a tokenisation of energy, it becomes apparent that debt really amounts to ‘a claim on future energy’. Our ability, or otherwise, to meet existing debt commitments depends upon whether the real (energy) economy of the future will be big enough to make this possible.

"Therefore, the viability (or otherwise) of today’s massively-indebted economies depends upon the outlook for energy supply. If one chooses to believe that the exponential expansion in energy use that has powered the growth of the economy (and the global

population) since the dawn of the industrial age can continue into the future, debts may be serviceable and repayable out of the economic (for which read ‘energy’) enlargement of the future. If such enlargement cannot be relied upon, however, then the debt burden can only be regarded as unsustainable."

They then take a close look at energy, and the Hubbert curve, noting that critical question is not how much reserves there are, but what the EROI of those reserves are.  If they are too hard to get out of the ground,they will remain in the ground.  If the "cost" a lot of energy to remove, energy will be taken away from the rst of the economy to get them.  Energy we now use for MP3 players, SUV's, food and health care.

-----------

EROI

"An absolute decline in available energy volumes, serious though that would be, is not the immediate concern. The truly critical issue is the relationship between energy extracted and the amount of energy consumed in the extraction process. Known as the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI), this is the ‘killer equation’ where the viability of the economy is concerned. Put very simply, there is no point whatsoever in producing 100 barrels of oil (or its equivalent in other forms of energy) if 100 barrels (or more) are consumed in the extraction process.

"Below an EROEI of about 15:1, however, the “profit” element falls off a cliff, because there is an exponential increase in the “cost” component, which rises from 4.8% at an EROEI of 20:1 to 6.3% at 15:1, 9.1% at 10:1 and 16.7% at 5:1. This process of “cost”

escalation is illustrated in fig. 5.11, which shows that energy cost is yet another addition to the collection of exponential progressions (including population, energy consumption and economic output) which dominate the world as we know it. This time, however, the exponential progression is a negative one."

Then they have nice discussion of the EROI of various fuels

"Oil discoveries in the 1930s offered EROIs well in excess of 100:1, whereas this ratio had declined to about 30:1 by the 1970s, and few discoveries today offer an EROI of much better than 10:1. I

"Newer energy sources display a  similarly disturbing trend. At first glance, the claimed EROEIs for onshore wind power look pretty reasonable at perhaps 17:1. However, the returns claimed for wind seem to make some pretty heroic assumptions about the longevity of generating plant and, in any case, wind turbines produce electricity, not the highly-concentrated transport fuels upon which the economy depends.

"Other energy sources look even worse in EROEI terms. Biofuel EROEIs seldom exceed 3:1, and some are negative. 

"Policymakers who pin their hopes on unconventional hydrocarbon sources are guilty of a quite extraordinary degree of self-delusion.

"The EROEI of surface-mined tar sands is probably little better than 3:1 (if that), and those sands (accounting for about

four-fifths of the total) which cannot be surface-mined can only be extracted using massively energy-intensive techniques such as SAGD (steamassisted gravity drive), such that EROEIs are minimal, or even negative.

"The latest fashion in collective delusion concerns shale gas and oil. These may indeed exist in vast quantities, but EROEIs of barely 5:1 should make it abundantly clear that shales most emphatically are not the quick-fix that many governments (and their electorates) might like to suppose."

............

"In an excellent discussion published in 2010, analyst Andrew Lees suggests that the overall EROEI, having declined from 40:1 in 1990 to 20:1 in 2010, might fall to as little as 5:1 by 2020. Though Mr Lees does not cite sources for these numbers, his figures for 1990

and 2010 accord pretty closely with our own estimates.

"Policymakers must hope that he is very wrong indeed, however, about the global average EROEI in 2020 because, if this ratio does indeed decline to just 5:1 over the coming seven years, the economy as we know it is finished. It is as simple as that.

"The cost point here is critical. At the 40:1 ratio cited by Andrew Lees for 1990, the theoretical cost of energy would have been 2.43% (1/41) of GDP. If the correct figure for 2010 was indeed 20:1, then the ratio in that year would have been 4.76% (1/21), a painful increase since 1990 but, nevertheless, a ratio at which the surplus energy economy cans till function.

"At a ratio of 5:1, however, energy would absorb 16.67% (1/6) of GDP, meaning that energy costs would have increased by 250% (16.67 compared with 4.76) over just ten years. Put very simply, and ignoring (for now) intervening inflation, this would be equivalent to the annual average reference price of Brent crude oil having soared from $79.50/bbl to almost $280/bbl.

...................

They do their own projection of EROI and conclude that the EROI will drop to 12:1 in 2020, and 8:1 by 2030

"Though our forecasts and those of Mr Lees may differ in detail, the essential conclusion is the same. It is that the economy, as we have known it for more than two centuries, will cease to be viable at some point within the next ten or so years unless, of course,some way is found to reverse the trend.

They do a good explanation of what happens to the economy as EROI drops

"If EROEI falls sharply, as in fig. 5.15, much more of the gross energy is consumed in the extraction process,

resulting in a corresponding squeeze on the energy available to the economy. The essentials may still

be affordable, but the leverage in the equation is such that energy available for discretionary uses diminishes

very rapidly indeed. There, through the EROEI squeeze, goes the car, the holiday, the bigger home, the MP3,

the meal out, toys for the children, the afternoon at the golf club or the soccer match. If EROEI falls materially, our

consumerist way of life is over.

"There are two really nasty stings in  the tail of a declining EROEI. First, net energy availability may fall below the

amount required for essential purposes including healthcare, government and law. It is hardly too much to say that a

declining EROEI could bomb societies back into the pre-industrial age. 

"Indeed, a decrease in net energy below subsistence levels is an implicit consequence of EROEI decline beyond

a certain point – one which is difficult to estimate, but is likely to occur within the next decade – which means that

this is when the nastiest results of all start happening. Second, of course, a decline in net energy availability could (indeed,

almost certainly will) result in conflict driven by competition for access to diminishing surplus energy resources

-------------------------

knowing the score

"Where the surplus energy equation is concerned, one question remains – how will we know when the decline

sets in?

The following are amongst the most obvious decline-markers:

- Energy price escalation. The

inflation-adjusted market prices of

energy (and, most importantly, of oil)

move up sharply, albeit in a zig-zag

fashion as price escalation chokes

off economic growth and imposes

short-term reverses in demand.

- Agricultural stress. This will be most

obvious in more frequent spikes in

food prices, combined with food

shortfalls in the poorest countries

-Energy sprawl. Investment in the

energy infrastructure will absorb a

steadily-rising proportion of global

capital investment.

- Economic stagnation. As the decline

in EROEIs accelerates, the world

economy can be expected to become

increasingly sluggish, and to fail to

recover from setbacks as robustly as

it has in the past.

- Inflation. A squeezed energy surplus

can be expected to combine with an

over-extended monetary economy

to create escalating inflation.

With the exception (thus far) of

inflation, each of these features has

become firmly established in recent

years, which suggests that the energysurplus

economy has already reached

its tipping-point.

----------------------------

Read more here

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/files/2013/01/Perfect-Storm-LR.pdf

Perfect Storm

The economy as we know it is facing a lethal confluence of four critical
factors – the fall-out from the biggest debt bubble in history; a disastrous
experiment with globalisation; the massaging of data to the point where
economic trends are obscured; and, most important of all, the approach
of an energy-returns cliff-edge.



trend #1 – the madness of crowds
The first of the four highly dangerous
trends identified here is the creation,
over three decades, of the worst
financial bubble in history.

From the early 1980s, as figs. 1.1
and 1.2 show, an unmistakeable and
seemingly relentless upwards trend
in indebtedness became established.
Between 1981 and 2009, debt grew
by 390% in real terms, far out-pacing
the growth (of 120%) in the American
economy. By 2009, the debt ratio had
reached 381%, a level unprecedented
in history. Even in 1930, when GDP
collapsed, the ratio barely topped
300%, and thereafter declined very
rapidly indeed.


trend #2 – the globalisation disaster
The compounding mistake, where the
Western countries were concerned, was
a wide-eyed belief that ‘globalisation’
would make everyone richer, when
the reality was that the out-sourcing
of production to emerging economies
was a self-inflicted disaster with few
parallels in economic history. One would
have to look back to a Spanish empire
awash with bullion from the New World
to find a combination of economic
idiocy and minority self-interest equal
to the folly of globalization.
The big problem with globalisation
was that Western countries reduced
their production without making
corresponding reductions in their
consumption. Corporations’
outsourcing of production to
emerging economies boosted their
earnings (and, consequently, the
incomes of the minority at the very
top) whilst hollowing out their
domestic economies through the
export of skilled jobs.

trend #3 – an exercise in
self-delusion
One explanation for widespread public
(and policymaker) ignorance of the
truly parlous state of the Western
economies lies in the delusory nature
of economic and fiscal statistics, many
of which have been massaged out of
all relation to reality.

The critical distortion here is clearly
inflation, which feeds through into
computations showing “growth” even
when it is intuitively apparent (and
evident on many other benchmarks)
that, for a decade or more, the
economy has, at best, stagnated, not
just in the United States but across
much of the Western world. Distorted
inflation also tells wage-earners that
they have become better off even
though such statistics do not accord
with their own perceptions.

trend #4 – the growth dynamo
winds down
One of the problems with economics
is that its practitioners preach a
concentration on money, whereas
money is the language rather than
the substance of the real economy.
Ultimately, the economy is – and
always has been – a surplus energy
equation, governed by the laws of
thermodynamics, not those of
the market.

Research set out in this report suggests
that the global average EROEI, having
fallen from about 40:1 in 1990 to
17:1 in 2010, may decline to just
11:1 by 2020, at which point energy
will be about 50% more expensive, in
real terms, than it is today, a metric
which will carry through directly into
the cost of almost everything else –
including food.

The old days

Greetings peaksters

     I sit here by my computer I can hear the ticking of the grandfather clock.  My grandfather gave it to my grandmother  around 1915.  I took it to a clock shop, and the fellow said that in those days the clock makers were competing to see who could make the most durable clcok.  And it worked - its still ticking about 100 years later.  Now compare that to the latest IPAD.  The whole idea is to get a new one in one year!  (or less).

    Consider this :Suppose the folks who wrote Perfect Storm are correct, that the high energy consumer economy is on its way out (within the next decade?) .  The stuff that will valuable will be the stuff that is simple and  durable.  Stuff like well made gardening tools,  a well made wood stove, and  Havel's forest tools.  (plug).   

     And the skill necessary to use those tools effectively. 

    Time to Carpe a little Diem, wouldn't you say?

Bonus feature: Degrowth pod cast  (warning long -  perfect for stacking wood)

  How to make a chicken run;   (humor) 

Four things that were better in 1899

by Erik Curren, originally published by Transition Voice  | TODAY

In 1899, no booty shorts. Even the immigrant poor on New York’s Mulberry Street looked more dignified than today’s average middle-class American.

It’s no accident that the 1960 film adaptation of The Time Machine opens with host HG Wells welcoming four friends to a dinner party in London on January 5, 1900 to recount events that had occurred since he last met them, on New Year’s Eve, 1899.

What year could be more symbolic of the end of an era, for good or ill, than 1899?

Since Americans worship at the altar of progress, we hardly need to be reminded that plenty of things in the 1890s were certainly much worse than they are today.

Women couldn’t vote. Separate but Equal was the law of the land. Railroads and banks beggared farmers. Police and federal troops helped bosses of factories and coal mines crush labor unions. And all this while robber barons sipped champagne in Newport, RI and packed their daughters off to Europe to collect Rembrandts and aristocrat-husbands, both at bargain-basement prices.

At the same time, as a guy who lives in a small city with lots of historic architecture, I can’t help but be reminded that plenty of other things were great in 1899.

1. Food. There’s a good reason why food guru Michael Pollan says not to eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t have recognized as food. Back in 1899, most food was whole and it was grown organically by local farmers. Today, it’s hard to avoid processed foods. And nearly all of them contain newfangled ingredients that, if they won’t kill you quickly, will certainly kill you slowly: high fructose corn syrup, MSG, soy. With hybrids and GMOs, even whole foods like corn and wheat are now suspect. It’s a scandal that the Bible’s staff of life and America’s amber waves of grain was degraded in the 1960s and 70s into “dwarf wheat,” a high-yield hybrid that cannot be properly digested by humans. Sadly, this pseudo-wheat is probably what’s in that loaf of peasant bread you just got at Whole Foods. Yuck.
2. Local Economies. Back in 1899, about the only thing besides opium that came from China was tea and, well, China. Imports from other countries were mostly luxuries like the aforementioned champagne. Today, I don’t know if you can even buy an American-made microwave oven. But in 1899, people in my town could buy a rock solid cast-iron stove forged locally by the WJ Loth Stove Company. Indeed, nearly everything Americans needed everyday was made in the USA, from trousers to tables to tallow candles to horse-drawn carriages. And like the hay to fuel the horse that pulls the carriage — whether barouche, fiacre, hackney or landau — both our food and our energy in 1899 were not just domestic, but they were also overwhelmingly local.
3. Streets and Buildings. Speaking of transportation, when you have automobiles, you get today’s landscapes built for cars, with monster expressways, six-lane highways running past cul-de-sac subdivisions and cities covered in parking lots. Back in 1899, horse buggies and mule carts and the occasional streetcar didn’t overwhelm streets built at a human scale, so all cities were walkable. And I dare you to compare any building of 1899 against the mid- and late-century concrete boxes found in every city and town today. Italianate and Queen Anne Victorian or Planet of the Apes modernism? It’s no contest.
4. Clothing. Call me an old fogy, but I have to agree with your grandmother that the flashing basketball sneakers, sweatpants, sweatshirts and baseball caps worn by both sexes on the streets of any big city today — a look that James Howard Kunstler has aptly described as “clownish” — are no improvement on the dignified and gender-specific clothing that people wore in public in the 1890s. Give me a woman in an A-line skirt and leg o’ mutton sleeves and a man wearing a gray coat with covered buttons and matching waistcoat, dark trousers, short turnover shirt collar, and floppy bow tie any day. When our fellow citizens look intelligent and confident and move with grace, we respect them more and our whole society acts with more seriousness.

This exercise in time travel is not just about nostalgia or even mourning what we’ve lost, which is so, so much. It’s about trying to preserve what’s left, as folks have done pretty well in my city and in hundreds of other historic areas nationwide from Savannah, GA to Brooklyn, NY.

Then, it’s about planning for the future. That will mean building an America resilient enough to withstand the shocks of climate change, peak oil and permanent economic downturn.

That America should be a place where citizens of a free society can enjoy enough prosperity and robust good health while living with dignity. And beauty. If we need a time machine to get there, then let’s build one together with our words. Regaining our collective memory may be crucial to envisioning the future we want.

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

Life After Growth

Greetings Peaksters

       Richard Heinberg lays out the argument piece by piece. This is one the few times  I wish I had the video, but here is the audio.   Growth

Cute animated video

      Heinberg argues that the confluence of too much debt, resource limits , and climate change dictate a return to lower or no growth, at least in the US.   

     So, does that mean we don't have to worry about climate change?    Probably not - growth may continue in other parts of the world.  Also the reduction in growth may not be fast enough to keep emissions within the carbon budget.

     What are the implications for mitigation and adaptation?  Well, less growth means less money available for all government spending.  So it may be harder to continue with tax credit for wind and solar.  Also for adaptation projects like sea walls, or  buying low lying lands. 

Heinberg cites a recent paper by Gordon  Here is  the abstract.    Here is a critique

Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds

Robert J. Gordon

NBER Working Paper No. 18315
Issued in August 2012
NBER Program(s):   DAE   EFG   PR 

This paper raises basic questions about the process of economic growth. It questions the assumption, nearly universal since Solow’s seminal contributions of the 1950s, that economic growth is a continuous process that will persist forever. There was virtually no growth before 1750, and thus there is no guarantee that growth will continue indefinitely. Rather, the paper suggests that the rapid progress made over the past 250 years could well turn out to be a unique episode in human history. The paper is only about the United States and views the future from 2007 while pretending that the financial crisis did not happen. Its point of departure is growth in per-capita real GDP in the frontier country since 1300, the U.K. until 1906 and the U.S. afterwards. Growth in this frontier gradually accelerated after 1750, reached a peak in the middle of the 20th century, and has been slowing down since. The paper is about “how much further could the frontier growth rate decline?”

The analysis links periods of slow and rapid growth to the timing of the three industrial revolutions (IR’s), that is, IR #1 (steam, railroads) from 1750 to 1830; IR #2 (electricity, internal combustion engine, running water, indoor toilets, communications, entertainment, chemicals, petroleum) from 1870 to 1900; and IR #3 (computers, the web, mobile phones) from 1960 to present. It provides evidence that IR #2 was more important than the others and was largely responsible for 80 years of relatively rapid productivity growth between 1890 and 1972. Once the spin-off inventions from IR #2 (airplanes, air conditioning, interstate highways) had run their course, productivity growth during 1972-96 was much slower than before. In contrast, IR #3 created only a short-lived growth revival between 1996 and 2004. Many of the original and spin-off inventions of IR #2 could happen only once – urbanization, transportation speed, the freedom of females from the drudgery of carrying tons of water per year, and the role of central heating and air conditioning in achieving a year-round constant temperature.

Even if innovation were to continue into the future at the rate of the two decades before 2007, the U.S. faces six headwinds that are in the process of dragging long-term growth to half or less of the 1.9 percent annual rate experienced between 1860 and 2007. These include demography, education, inequality, globalization, energy/environment, and the overhang of consumer and government debt. A provocative “exercise in subtraction” suggests that future growth in consumption per capita for the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution could fall below 0.5 percent per year for an extended period of decades.

Don't Just Do Something, Sit There

We got so busy keeping up the Jones

Four car garage and we're still building on

Maybe its time we got back

to the basics of life

-Luckinbach Texas

Willie and Waylon

Greetings Peaksters

      In our culture, we assume that there is no such thing as being too busy..   Its a symbol of status to be so busy that we can't keep track of it all.   Maybe it makes us feel important.   But is it really useful?      Does it really solve the problem?       Maybe if we had more time, we could see a different way to be..    

Adding Through Taking Away

The Art of Adding by Taking Away

By MATTHEW E. MAY

Published: January 19, 2013

NORMALLY I have more ideas than I know what to do with. Several years ago, however, I ran out of them.

At the time, I was working closely with the senior leadership of a very large and successful Japanese company. I had been hired to help it develop new ideas and strategies in the United States, but was struggling with a particularly difficult project that required me to reconcile two completely different perspectives. (Eastern and Western ways of thinking are often at odds with each other.) I found myself at a standstill

I must not have done a very good job of hiding how useless I was feeling, because a 2,500-year-old snippet of Chinese philosophy found its way to me anonymously, via a handwritten note on a Post-it stuck to my work space.

“To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day,” it said, capsulizing teachings of Lao Tzu. “Profit comes from what is there, usefulness from what is not there.”

My first thought was, “Someone wants me gone — I’d be more useful that way.” But as I read it again and thought about it, lightning struck.

It dawned on me that I’d been looking at my problem in the wrong way. As is natural and intuitive, I had been looking at what to do, rather than what not to do. But as soon as I shifted my perspective, I was able to complete the project successfully.

Even though the idea of subtracting things every day was thousands of years old, it was still radical to me. I decided to explore the idea further.

I discovered an essay by the management educator Jim Collins, in which he confirmed the ancient philosophy: “A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally important, what is not. It is the discipline to discard what does not fit — to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort — that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company or, most important of all, a life.”

In reading several articles in scientific literature, I discovered that subtraction lights up a brain scan differently than addition does, because it uses different circuitry. In fact, accident victims suffering brain injuries often lose their ability to both add and subtract, retaining only one of the two. Subtraction is literally a different way of thinking.

While it hadn’t occurred to me to use subtraction in my own job, I realized that it is at the root of many professions. Scientists, mathematicians and engineers search for theories that explain highly complex phenomena in stunningly simple ways. Musicians and composers use pauses in the music — silence — to create dramatic tension. Athletes and dancers search for maximum impact with minimal effort. Filmmakers, novelists and songwriters strive to tell simple stories that foster both multiple meanings and universal resonance.

The principle of subtraction carries over to the corporate world. Here are some examples: W. L. Gore, recognized as one of the world’s most innovative companies, eliminated job titles in order to release employees’ creativity. When it started out, Scion, the youth-oriented unit of Toyota, decided not to advertise, and it reduced the number of standard features on its vehicles to allow buyers to customize their cars. The British bank First Direct operates successfully without branches, relying instead on Internet, telephone and mobile transactions. Steve Jobs revolutionized the world’s concept of a cellphone by removing the physical keyboard from the iPhone. Instagram, acquired last year by Facebook, grew quickly once its first version, called Burbn, was stripped of many of its features and reworked to focus on one thing: photos.

THINK about what you could do — or rather not do — in your own life that would put these principles into play. There are two easy ways to begin subtracting things every day:

First, create a “not to do” list to accompany your to-do list. Give careful thought to prioritizing your goals, projects and tasks, then eliminate the bottom 20 percent of the list — forever.

Second, ask those who matter to you most — clients, colleagues, family members and friends — what they would like you to stop doing. Warning: you may be surprised at just how long the list is.

The lesson I’ve learned from my pursuit of less is powerful in its simplicity: when you remove just the right things in just the right way, something good happens.

Matthew E. May is the author of “The Laws of Subtraction: 6 Simple Rules for Winning in the Age of Excess Everything.”