Sunday, August 27, 2017

This is the story of The Hurricane


It's flooding down in Texas
   -Stevie Ray Vaughn

They're trying to wash us away 
    - Randy Newman



Greetings

      Once again, the chickens are coming home to roost .   What to do?  Maybe the force?  "Help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope".  I wonder what our only hope is now?

        I just ran across two articles that illustrate that we have a bit of a blind spit when it comes our "only hope " .

       First Robert Scribbler had a long response in comment section of his blog.   He argues against the necessity for "degrowth",  ( It was  somewhat of a straw man argument argument as it is phrased arguments gains "degrowth alone".)    He argues that wind and solar are making great strides in the field of electric  generation,  and that great leaps can be expected in transportation and industrial use a well.     But hidden away in the technical argument is the political reality. -that a world without growth is inconceivable .     In other words a technological solution must exist, because degrowth is not politically acceptable .  Here is what he says:


"But degrowth in energy consumption without renewable alternatives that are capable of filling in the economic activity gap more efficiently would crush the very economic engines that are now capable of performing a complete transformation of the energy system in ever-shrinking time horizons. To be clear, radical de-growth philosophy is little more than an argument for enforced economic austerity at a scale that we have never before seen in the 20th or 21st centuries. And politically, this philosophy would fail as soon as it got out of the gate. A fact that even proponents, if they think for just one second, would realize.
Overall, increases in societal efficiency (as a pure metric) are certainly desirable and attainable — but only on longer time scales unless your ultimate aim is to destroy economies wholesale rather than to transform them. And from the perspective of climate change, there is no way to deal with the problem effectively without a massive renewable energy build out now. For degrowth alone does not remove the very sources of carbon emission — fossil fuels — that are causing the problem.


        Similarly, Dave Roberts argues for a different technological solution,  suggests that it's time to start talking about negative emissions
Roberts seems to recognize that no amount of solar panel and electric cars can get us to two degrees, and that it would also take a additional significant "degrowth " to actually reduce emissions by the amounts needed. 

In fact the needed decline rate is so steep Roberts calls that path "ludicrous".  

"If we do not allow negative emissions into the models, they show that to hit our target, emissions have to decline at an absolutely ludicrous rate:
1.5 scenarios
"Absent a meteor wiping out advanced civilization, that’s not going to happen. So, negative emissions it is!"
       So, he favors a  slightly more leisurely approach, which admittedly busts the carbon budget.  But then, technology steps in and saves the day .  We have to have "negative emissions", which means pulling carbon out of the air. .   The favorite idea is called. Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Sequestrstion.  Or BECCS

 " The idea is that as plants grow, they absorb carbon from the air. When biomass is burned for energy, that carbon is released. If you can capture that released carbon and bury it, you have a net carbon negative process — carbon is removed from the atmosphere.
To bury enough carbon to put the 2C target in reach, BECCS will have to be massively scaled up, requiring biomass planted and harvested over an area as large as India, or larger. (One reason many scientists, including Kevin Anderson, think it will never happen.) It is a truly gargantuan undertaking."

He points to a nice article by Brad Plummer, which describes how it might work in theory, but notes. 
The sober news is that this technology is still in its infancy, far from commercialization, and expected to be quite expensive.

       Another view, taken by Richard Heinberg, is that we are not going to voluntarily degrow, and that technology is not going to save the day. His most recent article is called " Why Climate Change is not our biggest environmental problem, and why technology isn't going to save us"
"Our core ecological problem is not climate change. It is overshoot, of which global warming is a symptom. Overshoot is a systemic issue. Over the past century-and-a-half, enormous amounts of cheap energy from fossil fuels enabled the rapid growth of resource extraction, manufacturing, and consumption; and these in turn led to population increase, pollution, and loss of natural habitat and hence biodiversity. The human system expanded dramatically, overshooting Earth’s long-term carrying capacity for humans while upsetting the ecological systems we depend on for our survival. Until we understand and address this systemic imbalance, symptomatic treatment (doing what we can to reverse pollution dilemmas like climate change, trying to save threatened species, and hoping to feed a burgeoning population with genetically modified crops) will constitute an endlessly frustrating round of stopgap measures that are ultimately destined to fail."

          I've been reading a new book on evolutionary psychology and meditation, which argues that our perceptions are often skewed, due to the way our brains were formed during our evolution.  And that we therefore have many fixed ideas that may have been useful for the survival of the species, in an environment totally different than this one.  For instance,  our love of junk food and drugs, our inclination toward tribalism, and "justified rage", and our  delusions about our own abilities, (we all think we are "above average")  and actions (we act rationally) .
        This got me thinking about how we look at all the coming "hurricanes" , and our faith in our technological salvation.  We all seem to share the illusion of agency - i.e.that we are in control.   Which reminded me of piece by Eric Lindberg from a few years ago.   He was discussing  The difference between the peak oil and climate change "narrative" 
"The limits of agency in peak oil narratives becomes more visible when compared to mainstream liberal environmentalism, for instance.  The latter is likely to believe that human ingenuity and innovation, along with our technical prowess provide limitless choices and opportunities to maintain our pre-peak trajectory of growing material prosperity.  American ingenuity and our spirit of freedom, they will suggest, allow us to make history as we please, especially when confronted with great challenges.  
 Peak oilers see this view as hopelessly naïve, an expression of ideological false consciousness: it fails to understand that all the technical prowess that most people believe are a result of our ingeniousness or a free society actually have more to do with our plentiful and growing supply of oil and other natural resources.  These techno-optimists don’t, to borrow David Holmgren’s  metaphor, understand that wealth comes from holes in the ground—and worse that these same holes in the ground have made possible our freedoms, our privileges, and everything else that they value. They fail to understand that energy is the true mover of history.
Peak oil narratives are brutally aware of the limits on human agency.  What little agency humans might have can only be achieved by understanding the underlying logic of history and by accepting the limits that logic imposes.  When we realize this, we won’t try to grow the economy, develop the “developing world,” depend on genetically modified seeds and chemical fertilizers, look for a new source of fuel on Mars, and so on.  Instead we will accept the coming contractions and adapt to them as best we can.

        Luckily, we don't have very many hurricanes in Oregon.   my heart goes out to the folks who are going through Hurricane Harvey.  Here is a list of charities highly rated by Charity Navigator for your consideration.   Here in Oregon, our " hurricane" is more likely to be a wildfire.   the Chetko fire is about 5 miles from Brookings.

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Sunday, August 6, 2017

Free riders, death spirals, cabbages and kings


From all these mistakes
We must surely be learning
     -Beatles

I don't need no sports car
I can walk anytime around the block
      -Bob Dylan

Greetings


Is it overshoot day already?  How time flies.  Happy Overshoot Day


"This means that in seven months, we emitted more carbon than the oceans and forests can absorb in a year, we caught more fish, felled more trees, harvested more, and consumed more water than the Earth was able to produce in the same period," World Wildlife Fund and Global Footprint Network said in a statement.
"The costs of this global ecological overspending are becoming increasingly evident around the world," the groups added, "in the form of deforestation, drought, fresh-water scarcity, soil erosion, biodiversity loss, and the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere."
Last year, Earth Overshoot Day fell on August 8, an indication that the world's population is accelerating the pace with which it blows through the planet's annual resource budget from year to year. 

          Just another reminder of the need to turn the "SS Industrial Economy" away from the iceberg, and quickly.  But just how quickly can we turn, and who's going to pay the bill?

          Let's take a look at utilities.  For years their mandate was to provide power reliably, and a low cost.  For their troubles, they we entitled to a reasonable profit, as determined by the PUC.  Large centralized coal and gas plants worked pretty well .  They lasted a long time, so construction costs were spread out, and a big chunk of the costs were fuel, which didn't have to be paid upfront. 

          But, times change .   Now people want clean energy.  Some people want to generate their own energy and use the utility as aback up.  Some people want to have their own back up.  Some want to walk away.     Now , with the advent of cheap rooftop solar, and cheaper batteries , it is much more feasible for customers to walk away, especially in sunny states .  For some customers, that is.  Customers who can afford the up front costs .  But once they have left, who will be left to pay for grid, and all the sunk costs that the utility has in large centralized plants?  The remaining ratepayers ?   The government ?
    
           Sound familiar?   Kind of like the medical insurance mess we are in.   Are we going to have a "hookup mandate", like the "medical insurance mandate"?

          In this post Dave Roberts explains the utilities (and our) conundrum.      And here he suggest ways to reorganize our relationship with electricity and the grid.  .


          There's a similar problem with transportation. Robert Scribbler has an enthusiastic piece about the Tesla, calling it a Beautiful Machine to Change the World   It is p[retty.  And it will go pretty fast  ( 140 mph, 0-60 in 5.5 secs)   He points to a study that says electric vehicles could reduce our CO2 emissions to  between 1/2 and 1/10th that of a fossil fuel vehicle including manufacturing.     But,  we have a huge investment in the current transportation system.  In order to move to an electricity based system we will need to scrap a lot of infrastructure  - like fueling stations , fuel trucks, tankers, tank farms, refineries,  and of course cars.

           Let's look at cars.   The current fleet is overwhelmingly fossil based -  although there are 2 million EVS they only amount to .02% of the fleet..  Sales of EVS are growing rapidly,  but they have been unable to catch up to sales of regular IC vehicles.  In fact it may take more than a decade for the EV sales to stop the continuing growth in the total number of fossil fueled vehicles.  Here is an interesting article from Robert Rapier, where he points out that EVS are not substituting for IC sales, but are merely supplementing them. 

         Its a pretty straightforward arithmetic problem.  Every year a huge number of cars are sold.  Some are replacing cars that are junked.  Some are to meet the demand of new drivers.  Last year 88 million cars were sold,  up 4.8% from the previous year.  Less than 1 million were EVS .    That 4.8% growth represents the new demand.    So let's say car sales grow 3% next year.  So that's (88*.03) =2.64 million new cars added!  Let's say the EV growth rate is 25%,  so 950,000 units would be sold.   Still more IC than EV!   The next year its around 3 million and 1 million.  The tortoise and the hare.   At some point, the EV sales catch up, and then, hopefully, oil use begins to drop.    But, as  noted, that may be ten years from now.
           (I am going to ignore, for the time being that cars consume only 50% of the oil used , and that , so far, there is no mass producued electricity based, tractor trailer, , agricultural machinery, airplane, container ship etc) ,  

       And there is still a question of how much, and how soon,  the EV sales would reduce fossil fuel consumption.  See  this study which suggests that if 75% of the fleet were electric tomorrow, CO2 emissions would drop by less than 20%.    Why is that?  Well, the electrical system just isn't that clean yet..  

       Is the electric system likely to become clean quickly?   Not as quickly as we'd like to imagine.  The size of the investment is mind boggling.  See here


"...phasing out fossil fuels over 50 years – wind and solar plants need to be installed at eight to ten times current rates by 2035.
Financially, this corresponds with capital investment in wind and solar PV plants plus batteries of around US$3 trillion per year (in 2015 dollars) and average lifetime capital cost in the order of US$5 trillion to US$6 trillion per year.
This implies that total expenditure on energy supply will increase its share of world spending, reducing scope for other expenditure. "



       Here's an odd note-  even though renewables have been growing steadily, the percent of electric generation by fossil fuels has not changed in the last 10 years.

"...over the last decade (2005-2015) the share of renewables in our electricity mix has increased by approximately 5-6 percent. This is good news. However, over this same period, the share from nuclear production has decreased by almost exactly the same amount (5-6 percent)."

        So, are EV's the solution?   They might help, but not as much as we'd like to believe.  We actually need to get out of our cars altogether..   Here is a nice piece by George Monbiot  on our transportation system. His conclusion?



"Electric cars solve only part of the problem. They occupy less air, but just as much road and parking space. The resources required to manufacture them – and the volume of mines and ports and processing plants that wreck rare habitats around the world – might even intensify. While the total carbon emissions and air pollution caused by electric cars will be lower than those the fossil system produces, electricity use will have to rise. If you are among those who support electric cars but oppose nuclear power, you may have to reconsider one of your positions.
So let’s explore some pollution solutions that change this ridiculous system, rather than extending it indefinitely. Why not – through shifting road space from cars to bicycles in the form of safe cycle lanes – aim to make cycling the main form of urban transport? Why not launch a scrappage scheme that trades cars for public transport tokens

See also  this  suggesting that  we don't need "different" cars as much as we need "fewer cars"
'
"Oliver Hayes, Friends of the Earth air pollution campaigner, said: “Electric cars are critical in the fight against climate change and deadly air pollution, but they’re not a panacea. We must now build the infrastructure that reassures ordinary people that cycling and walking is safe, and invest in public transport that is consistently clean, cheap and reliable.”
   It seems the road between here and Our Renewable Future is filled with potholes.   We'd like to ride in style, and not have to give up any of our perks.  But if we don't change our ways, by  the time we get to that golden future, what do you suppose the world will look like?

         Here's one view from the IPPC.   On average its not so bad.  But there are winners and losers.  Some remain kings, some hope for cabbage.



 



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