Teach your children well

Sweet child of mine.

   -  Guns and Roses

Oh, what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what'll you do now, my darling young one?' 

      -Bob Dylan

Greetings

I just watched Nate Hagens's latest video, which is a mini version of his " Reality 101"  course that he teaches at the University of Minnesota.

It's a pretty ambitious program.  Here is a short description:

"An intensive series of reading, lectures and discussion will cover primary/summary literature in: systems ecology, energy and natural resources, thermodynamics, history, anthropology, human behavior, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, environmental science, sociology, economics, globalization/trade, finance/debt with an overarching goal to give students an understanding of how the modern human ecosystem really functions, and what are the opportunities and constraints facing us in the 21st century.  

You can find the syllabus here (2014 version)

It seems like it might be a useful course, given how fast things are changing!  

Here's a graph from a recent paper, showing the temperature variation during the last 10,000 years.   Notice the far right, the divergence in the last few years.   What should we expect?

 

Hagens assumes that we will continue on this path. which seems reasonable see this from Climate Code Red 

The climate system will heat well past 1.5 degrees Celsius (°C) and perhaps up to 2°C without any further fossil fuel emissions. That’s the conclusion to be drawn from new research which should also help demystify the rhetoric from the 2015 Paris climate talks of keeping warming to below 1.5°C .

It’s not that 1.5°C isn’t dangerous: in fact, at just 1–1.1°C of warming to date, climate change is already dangerous. A safe climate would be well below the present level of warming, unless you think it is OK to destroy the Arctic ecosystem, tip West West 

Antarctic glaciers into a self-accelerating melt, and lose the world’s coral reefs, just for starters

.

And this "Has the Arctic Finally Reached a Tipping Point?”

“‘The Holocene climate system is unraveling,’ Jason Box, an ice researcher at the Danish Meteorological Institute, told Earther in an email. ‘We should not be surprised if/when ongoing de-glaciation of the Arctic combined with global (and Arctic) atmospheric heating and humidification causes climate shifts that appear to be step changes.'

James Anderson, a Harvard University professor of atmospheric chemistry best known for establishing that chlorofluorocarbons were damaging the Ozone Layer, says

"People have the misapprehension that we can recover from this [ice free] state just by reducing carbon emissions" , Anderson said in an appearance at the University of Chicago. " Recovery is all but impossible, he argued, without a World War II-style transformation of industry—an acceleration of the effort to halt carbon pollution and remove it from the atmosphere, and a new effort to reflect sunlight away from the earth’s poles.”….”This has do be done…. within the next five years.”

So, how does one make long term plans that factor in rapid climate change?

Here is an interesting report on the frustration of city planners 

“Given that all the scientific models are failing to predict the pace that climate impact’s actually having, how do you do good public policy?” he said on the sidelines of the C40’s Women4Climate conference.

Nearly half of the 92 cities in the C40 network saw extreme flooding last year, according to Watts, who said an “optimism bias” was built into scientific forecasts.

See also Dave Roberts on flood risk.  We’ve radically underestimated how vulnerable Americans are to flooding

and this : What Can California do about sea level rise?

We are approaching the era of "Climate Departure", when the climate is so different from our historical experience, as to represent something completely new. See this 

Camilo Mora: The timing of climate departure is an index that calculated the year after which the climate will become like something that we’ve never seen. We calculated the minimum and maximum values for the historic variability in the last 150 years. And we analyzed when climate change is going to move the climate beyond those thresholds. At the broadest scale, we calculate that year, under a business as usual scenario, is going to be 2047. Basically, by the year 2047 the climate is going to move beyond something we’ve never seen in the last 150 years. 

e360: The results of your analysis were startling, I think, even to you and your team. Under the scenario that assumes current emissions trends, part of Jamaica and Indonesia are just a few years away from climate departure; you predict Mexico City will experience this in 2031. 

See e.g.North Pole surges above freezing in the dead of winter”

"The sun won’t rise at the North Pole until March 20, and it’s normally close to the coldest time of year, but an extraordinary and possibly historic thaw swelled over the tip of the planet this weekend. Analyses show that the temperature warmed to the melting point as an enormous storm pumped an intense pulse of heat through the Greenland Sea.

And Carbon Capture ideas don't appear too likely, as this report discusses

Ways of sucking carbon dioxide from the air will not work on the vast scales needed to beat climate change, Europe’s science academies warned on Thursday.

From simply planting trees to filtering CO2 out of the air, the technologies that some hope could be a “silver bullet” in halting global warming either risk huge damage to the environment themselves or are likely to be very costly.

Virtually all the pathways laid out by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to reach the targets in the Paris agreement require huge deployment of so-called negative emissions technologies (NETs) in the second half of the century.

This is because cuts in CO2 are expected to be too slow to hit zero emissions quickly enough, so the overshoot has to be recaptured later by NETs. The IPCC calculates that about 12bn tonnes a year will need to be captured and stored after 2050 – the equivalent of about a third of all global emissions today.

“You can rule out a silver bullet,” said Prof John Shepherd, at the University of Southampton, UK, and an author of the report. “Negative emissions technologies are very interesting but they are not an alternative to deep and rapid emissions reductions. These remain the safest and most reliable option that we have.”

The new report is from the European Academies Science Advisory Council(EASAC), which advises the European Union and is comprised of the national science academies of the 28 member states. It warns that relying on NETs instead of emissions cuts could fail and result in severe global warming and “serious implications for future generations”.

In conclusion, here's a postcard from tomorrow

"And we know now what the dread was we felt in December. Call it climate change or climate collapse, that was the Big Dread behind the smaller ones. Climate believers, climate deniers, deep in our hearts we think it will happen somewhere else. Or, in some other time, in 2025 or 2040 or next year. But we are here to tell you, in this postcard from the former paradise, that it won’t happen next year, or somewhere else. It will happen right where you live and it could happen today. No one will be spared.”

So, if you are driving around and flying on airplanes and ordering things to be shipped by truck and making money off oil stock the way so many of us are – like there’s no tomorrow? We are here to tell you there is a tomorrow and we are living in it.

What about energy?

Hagens believes that oil production will peak in the next ten years.   This view is consistent with trends over the last decade of both higher costs of production,  as well as a lower rate of investment in new fields see here  .(Note that, this lack of investment has nothing to do with the recent decline in the oil price, which started in 2014. This has been an on-going problem for the past 30 years. Now, the IEA is predicting oil shortages by ~2020 due to declining exploration. )

For an interesting model of oil production out to 2050 see here.  It predicts a world peak at 2020

There is a lot of talk about "peak demand" and the associated theory that, peak supply will not be a problem, because the transportation system will have already moved on the electric vehicles.   This is of course dependent on the taste at which electric vehicles are adopted.   There are a number of predictions about when EV sales would have an impact on oil use.  You can take your pick from 2020 (Grantham Foundation) , 2025 (Bloomberg); 2030 (World Energy Council); or 2040 (BP),  see here 

As for the impact of EV's there remains some skepticism.

Robert Rapier points out that oil use continues to grow, even accelerate

The flaw in the scenario is that for over 30 years average oil demand has grown each year by more than a million BPD’’ Over the past decade, oil demand has grown each year by 1.1 million BPD. Over the past five years, 1.4 million BPD. Last week the bible of energy statistics was released — the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2017 — and it showed that oil consumption grew by 1.6 million BPD last year

The bottom line is that even in a best case scenario for EV growth rates, demand for oil rose by 1.6 million BPD last year, and it’s projected to increase by 1.4 million BPD this year.

  And see this from IEA director, Fatih Birol

“Oil demand growth today is not driven by cars, it’s driven by trucks, planes, ships and the petrochemical industry,” the IEA’s executive

director Fatih Birol said in January. “Even if there was a big electrification of cars in the years to come, oil demand will still grow.”

Birol also points to the world’s poor track record since the 1980s on weaning itself off fossil fuels to decarbonize energy supplies.

Over the last 30 years, he said, the share of fossil fuels has not fallen from 81%.

Thus, there is no guarantee that peak demand will precede peak supply.  If peak supply comes first, then the price of oil is likely to rise likely affecting economic activity.  See this study

When you don't know what is coming, Hagens suggest resilience and flexibility.   And learning to live with less.

The "elite" apparently plan to seal themselves in their "enclaves" and tough it out.   Or maybe Mars?

But whats about the rest of us? What about those students?

Its unlikely that these students can expect to live the same lifestyle as their parents.  See here

What sort of  models are available for achieving the "good life" in a sustainable manner? Are there any counties where that happens?  Not really, according to this study

That's the conclusion of a new study which looked at 151 nations and found not a single one was running itself in a sustainable way – ensuring a decent life for its inhabitants without taking more than it gives back in terms of natural resources.

....

"We examined international relationships between the sustainability of resource use and the achievement of social goals, and found that basic needs, such as nutrition, sanitation, and the elimination of extreme poverty, could most likely be achieved in all countries without exceeding global environmental limits."

"Unfortunately, the same is not true for other social goals that go beyond basic subsistence such as secondary education and high life satisfaction. Meeting these goals could require a level of resource use that is two to six times the sustainable level."

"Although wealthy nations like the US and UK satisfy the basic needs of their citizens, they do so at a level of resource use that is far beyond what is globally sustainable.

"In contrast, countries that are using resources at a sustainable level, such as Sri Lanka, fail to meet the basic needs of their people."

Among the countries doing the best job are Vietnam, with 6 social thresholds achieved and only 1 biophysical boundary transgressed, and Germany, which hits all 11 social thresholds but has exceeded 5 of the 7 biophysical boundaries.

...

However there is some hope: the researchers say we can make adjustments to both ensure a good quality of life for the population and avoid destroying the planet at the same time.

In other words, these feedback loops – which show better lives costing more resources – are not fixed, and we can work towards finding ways to support our population without taking too much out of what the planet can give us.

"Radical changes are needed if all people are to live well within the limits of the planet," says one of the team, Julia Steinberger from the University of Leeds.

"These include moving beyond the pursuit of economic growth in wealthy nations, shifting rapidly from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and significantly reducing inequality.

"Our physical infrastructure and the way we distribute resources are both part of what we call provisioning systems. If all people are to lead a good life within the planet's limits then these provisioning systems need to be fundamentally restructured to allow for basic needs to be met at a much lower level of resource use."

Such a "radical change " may require giving up on "time saving" devices and "conveniences", which provide more "free time" . But for what?

see The Cult of Convenience

So, if Hagens is right, we are likely to see more climate chaos, and we will have less resources to deal with it.  

But he is not despairing.  He knows this means a lower "standard of living"  with less conveniences,  probably with a lot more work.  Less flying, less driving, less buying.  But perhaps more community, more time , more neighborliness.   

Is there no hope?  Perhaps that isn't the right question?   This climate scientist suggest that what we need now is not hope, but courage.

As a climate scientist, I am often asked to talk about hope. Particularly in the current political climate, audiences want to be told that everything will be all right in the end. And, unfortunately, I have a deep-seated need to be liked and a natural tendency to optimism that leads me to accept more speaking invitations than is good for me. Climate change is bleak, the organizers always say. Tell us a happy story. Give us hope. The problem is, I don’t have any.

I have no hope that these changes can be reversed. We are inevitably sending our children to live on an unfamiliar planet. But the opposite of hope is not despair. It is grief. Even while resolving to limit the damage, we can mourn. And here, the sheer scale of the problem provides a perverse comfort: we are in this together. The swiftness of the change, its scale and inevitability, binds us into one, broken hearts trapped together under a warming atmosphere.

 We are all fated to live lives shot through with sadness, and are not worth less for it. Courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending. Little molecules, random in their movement, add together to a coherent whole. Little lives do not. But here we are, together on a planet radiating ever more into space where there is no darkness, only light we cannot see.

We need courage, not hope. Grief, after all, is the cost of being alive. We are all fated to live lives shot through with sadness, and are not worth less for it. Courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending. Little molecules, random in their movement, add together to a coherent whole. Little lives do not. But here we are, together on a planet radiating ever more into space where there is no darkness, only light we cannot see.

The Post Carbon Institute (now located in Corvallis)  offers a number of resources to help people deal with our future.  Besides books such as the Community Resilience Reader,

National and global efforts have failed to stop climate change, transition from fossil fuels, and reduce inequality. We must now confront these and other increasingly complex problems by building resilience at the community level. The Community Resilience Reader combines a fresh look at the challenges humanity faces in the 21st century, the essential tools of resilience science, and the wisdom of activists, scholars, and analysts working with community issues on the ground. It shows that resilience is a process, not a goal; that resilience requires learning to adapt but also preparing to transform; and that resilience starts and ends with the people living in a community.

PCI also offers on line courses such as Think Resilience:Preparing Communities for the Rest of the 21st Century

Post Carbon Institute Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg sat down to deliver a 22-chapter lecture series entitled “Think Resilience: Preparing Communities for the Rest of the 21st Century,” which explores how communities can build resilience in the face of our intertwined sustainability crises. The series is intended for students and concerned individuals of all ages.

New chapters will be rolled out on a regular basis over the coming weeks, but you can also sign up to view all the videos right away or watch them as part of an online, interactive course taught by Richard Heinberg himself.

I am waiting

      -Rolling stones

Like desperados

waiting for a train

      - Townes Van Zandt

Greetings

Bonus Feature:   A new Nate Hagens video.  A Guide to Being Human in the 21st Century  (This one is about ten times better than the others - he got an editor )

     OK  So perhaps we have come to fork in the road..   

     On the one hand we have, the opportunity to reduce consumption .  This is the most straight forward way to reduce carbon emissions.  And reducing consumption by the 20% that are responsible for 80% of the emissions would not have a significant effect on our quality of life.    Here is an article:   The historical ecological footprint : From over population to over consumption    , which makes very interesting reading.  One of the conclusions our move to overshoot in the 70's was caused by over consumption, not increased population. Interestingly they also assert that  if we had the continued the consumption pattern of the 50's we would still be using only one earth, despite the increase in population during the last 60 years!    Here are some hints on how to do that:   http://www.plancurtail.org

     In the Hagens video, you will see that he takes the position that reduced consumption is unavoidable.  As he points out for 95 percent of us, growth is over - as measured by income.   He suggests, we will go through some turmoil and re-set at a less complex society, one that uses 1/4 to 1/3 the energy.

      Nevertheless, this seems  we are not likely to take this road voluntarily.  Why?  Because,  as Hagens explains we are are "programmed, by natural selection",  to want to accumulate stuff in order to improve our status, to get more power influence,  (and opportunities for mating. !).   While some people can break free of that conditioning, especially when "all the cool kids" are still doing it.   see e.g. Evolutionary psychology and consumer behavior

    

 Another option is accelerated construction of renewable facilities, DC lines, and storage, as well as new electric based  transport options.    Some version of this will , no doubt, be what H. Clinton will be suggesting.  see here This seems to be physically possible.   Dave Roberts,:  "Here's what it would take for the US to run on 100% renewable energy   (based on this study)    and Ugo Bardi:   How much for the sustainable energy transition. (based on this study  A Net Energy-based Analysis for a Climate-constrained Sustainable Energy Transition. )  

       But its not free

"We said that we need to increase the installation rate of about a factor of 8 in energy terms. Assuming that the cost of renewable energy won't radically change in the future, monetary investments should of about the same factor. It means that we need to go from the present value of about 300 billion dollars per year to some 2 trillion dollars/year. This is a lot of money, but not an unthinkable: amount. If we sum up what we are investing for fossils (about $1 trillion/year), for renewables ($300 billions/year) and nuclear (perhaps around $200 billions/year) we see that we are not far from there, as we can see in the image below. The total amount yearly invested in the world for energy supply is about 2% of the Gross World Product, today totaling about US$78 trillion".

       Relying on the market will probably not do the trick.   Its interesting to note that while we continue to see headlines about how wind and solar are so cheap, and how they will naturally conquer the world,  investment in renewable energy (which had had been rising dramatically )  has plateaued  since 2011 at the 300 billion dollar level.  see here  Another issue is the cost of retrofitting or junking the current equipment which does not run on electricity.  Hagens estimates that 80% of our energy use uses such equipment, and would cost $100 trillion to replace

        So, whats left  ?   .Straight ahead, I suppose.  BAU - continued growth of consumption and the economy, as long as possible, ,  based mainly on fossil energy, with renewable power slowly added in to address growing demand, and to replace existing facilities as they decay.  ( i.e. Boardman).  Carbon emissions stay pretty steady, and the price of energy rises and the EROI declines. 

            So, how does BAU play out?    Hall and Murphy sketched out one model in their 2011 paper,    "Adjusting the economy to the new energy realities of the second half of the age of oil".  

     (1) economic growth increases oil demand, (2) higher oil demand increases oil production from lower EROI resources, (3) increasing extraction costs leads to higher oil prices, (4) higher oil prices stall economic growth or cause economic contractions, (5) economic contraction leads to lower oil demand, and (6) lower oil demand leads to lower oil prices which spur another short bout of economic growth until this cycle repeats itself

       

 We have seen this play out in recent years.  The economy crashed in 2008, lower demand, and  oil prices, then as demand increased, (thanks to record breaking debt), oil companies invested in high cost  and high EROI projects, (fracking and oil sands).  The resulting over supply crashed the price.  

         And many companies have also crashed.  Bloomberg reports

“Three bankruptcies this week shows that $45 a barrel oil isn’t enough to rescue energy companies on the verge of collapse…

…Since the start of 2015, 130 North American oil and as producers and service companies have filed for bankruptcy owing almost $44 billion, according to law firm Haynes & Boone. The tally doesn’t include Chaparral Energy Inc., Penn Virginia Corp. and Linn Energy LLC, which filed for bankruptcy this week owing more than $11 billion combined.”

   

Here's some interesting speculation about how this might develop.  (from a longish article here  

Jason Schenker, president and chief economist at Prestige Economics, says: “Oil prices simply aren’t going to rise fast enough to keep oil and energy companies from defaulting. Then there is a real contagion risk to financial companies and from there to the rest of the economy.”

Schenker has been ranked by Bloomberg News as one of the most accurate financial forecasters in the world since 2010. The US economy, he forecasts, will dip into recession at the end of 2016 or early 2017.

Mark Harrington, an oil industry consultant, goes further. He believes the resulting economic crisis from cascading debt defaults in the industry could make the 2007-8 financial crash look like a cakewalk. “Oil and gas companies borrowed heavily when oil prices were soaring above $70 a barrel,” he wrote on CNBC in January.

“But in the past 24 months, they’ve seen their values and cash flows erode ferociously as oil prices plunge—and that’s made it hard for some to pay back that debt. This could lead to a massive credit crunch like the one we saw in 2008. With our economy just getting back on its feet from the global 2008 financial crisis, timing could not be worse.”

Ratings agency Standard & Poor (S&P) reported this week that 46 companies have defaulted on their debt this year—the highest levels since the depths of the financial crisis in 2009. The total quantity in defaults so far is $50 billion.

An environment where prices are continually gyrating is not conducive to investment.  And without investment discoveries decline   IHS reports that conventional oil discoveries continue to decline from about 30 bbl in 2910 to about 3 in 2015.  They note that while high prices can stimulate prompt response in short term projects like fracking, the lead times for conventional projects are much longer.  But tight oil cannot fill the gap as it much smaller.

"North American tight oil alone cannot cover future supply gap—exploration will need to resume

According to IHS Energy Conventional Exploration and Discovery Trends analysis from our Upstream Industry Future Service, conventional oil and gas discoveries made outside onshore North America continued their multi-year decline trend last year, based on initial 2015 results. And the drop is dramatic:  Oil and gas volumes discovered in 2015 were the lowest since 1952, with oil finds setting a record low since the significant ramp-up of oil and gas exploration began following World War II. As anticipated, exploration and appraisal (E&A) drilling fell sharply in 2015, exacerbating the annual drop in resources found."

        
This comes as no surprise to Art Berman, an oil geologist  who, while the rest of the media was trumpeting the "Shale Revolution, pointed out,  in 2012,  that it was not a revolution but a "Retirement Party".  

"Oil companies have to make a big deal about shale plays because that is all that is left in the world. Let's face it: these are truly awful reservoir rocks and that is why we waited until all more attractive opportunities were exhausted before developing them. It is completely unreasonable to expect better performance from bad reservoirs than from better reservoirs."  from here 

    .  Berman also noted that it was clear from the public filings of the companies involved, that they wren't making money, even at $100 a barrel. But that thanks to cheap debt they still  make the payments, and keep the stock price up.

      So, what does Berman say now?  He says the price will not stay low, but will rise soon.  That in all likelihood it will rise sharply, and that thanks to years of little of no investment, it will stay high.  from here

   "Here’s what I see: I look at this chart and I talk about this in talks and I say “Hey look from 2005 to 2012 the world spent about three trillion dollars on upstream oil and gas exploration and production and basically got the same amount of crude and condensate out of ground for its trouble," right? We doubled our investment on a yearly basis from $300 to $600 billion and basically held production flat. I can only imagine what happens to production once you take a trillion in spend off of the top of that."

"And so if we get to a point— and we will, we almost certainly will—where suddenly everybody wakes up and says “Oh my God we don’t have enough oil." We’re now half a million barrels a day low, and what happens? The price shoots up, okay? That’s the way commodity markets work. And everybody says “Whoopee, let’s get back to drilling big time." Well there’s a big lag. There’s a huge time lag between when the price responds and people actually get around to drilling and they actually start bringing the oil onto the market and it becomes available as supply, because they’ve been asleep at the wheel for  how many months or years. You don’t just turn a valve and all of a sudden everything is okay again. 

  Are consumers preparing for a likely jump in oil prices?   Consumers not worried about energy.  See Gallup poll    In this low price environment, consumers tend to ignore MPG.  See here; and here

 "The overwhelming popularity of SUVs trumps just about any other trend in today's market," says Caldwell. "SUV sales are up 22 percent in the last five years, and almost every other segment has suffered as a result. It's especially true for hybrids and EVs, which generally don't offer the size that today's shoppers crave."

...

 "In fact, Edmunds found that a hybrid or electric trade-in is more likely to go toward the purchase of a SUV (33.8 percent) than another hybrid or EV. The trend is even more apparent when looking only at EV trade-ins — 25.7 percent of EV trade-ins went toward the purchase of a SUV, compared to just 4.8 percent that went toward another EV.

         So, what's Hagens' recommendation?    Not guns and gold.  But more of a mental attitude.  Reject the "consensus trance" (what the cool kids are doing.  Choose your own tribe wisely - people who won't try to draw you back in to the trance.  Go on an internet/electricity holiday.  Spend time in woods.  Work on your "meta cognition"  watching the thoughts and feelings that arise.  Which ones are useful?
     And above all, in the words of Bill and Ted  "Be excellent to one another!"