Too Big To Think About

In this essay at Tomdispatch, “The Age of Inhuman Scale,” Rebecca Solnit reflects on the difficulty of placing climate change in any sort of reasonable human perspective. She goes on to make a case for divestment and other forms of direct action against energy producers, a path I do not think I can follow. But in this extract, about a fourth of the original essay, she traces out brilliantly the radical sense of disproportion we feel in confronting things that are not only bigger than everything else, but “bigger than everything else put together.”

* * *

Last Saturday, . . . the New York Times gave its story on the International Panel on Climate Change’s six-years-in-the-making report on the catastrophic future that’s already here below-the-fold front-page placement, more or less equal to that given a story on the last episode of Breaking Bad. The end of the second paragraph did include this quote: “In short, it threatens our planet, our only home.” But the headline (“U.N. Climate Panel Endorses Ceiling on Global Emissions”) and the opening paragraph assured you this was dull stuff. Imagine a front page that reported your house was on fire right now, but that some television show was more exciting.

Sometimes I wish media stories were organized in proportion to their impact.  Unfortunately, when it comes to climate change, there is not paper enough on this planet to properly scale up a story to the right size.  If you gave it the complete front page to suggest its import, you would then have to print the rest of the news at some sort of nanoscale and include an electron microscope for reading ease. . . .

As it happens, we’re not very good at looking at the biggest things. They may be bigger than we can see, or move more slowly than we have the patience to watch for or remember or piece together, or they may cause impacts that are themselves complex and dispersed and stretch into the future. Scandals are easier.  They are on a distinctly human scale, the scale of lust, greed, and violence. We like those, we understand them, we get mired in them, and mostly they mean little or nothing in the long run (or often even in the short run).

A resident in a town on the northwest coast of Japan told me that the black 70-foot-high wave of water coming at him on March 11, 2011, was so huge that, at first, he didn’t believe his eyes. It was the great Tohoku tsunami, which killed about 20,000 people. A version of such cognitive dissonance occurred in 1982, when NASA initially rejected measurements of the atmosphere above Antarctica because they indicated such a radical loss of ozone that the computer program just threw out the data.

Some things are so big you don’t see them, or you don’t want to think about them, or you almost can’t think about them. Climate change is one of those things. It’s impossible to see the whole, because it’s everything. It’s not just a seven-story-tall black wave about to engulf your town, it’s a complete system thrashing out of control, so that it threatens to become too hot, too cold, too dry, too wet, too wild, too destructive, too erratic for many plants and animals that depend on reliable annual cycles. It affects the entire surface of the Earth and every living thing, from the highest peaks to the depths of the oceans, from one pole to the other, from the tropics to the tundra, likely for millennia -- and it’s not just coming like that wave, it’s already here.

It’s not only bigger than everything else, it’s bigger than everything else put together.  But it’s not a sudden event like a massacre or a flood or a fire, even though it includes floods, fires, heat waves, and wild weather.  It’s an incremental shift over decades, over centuries.  It’s the definition of the big picture itself, the far-too-big picture. Which is why we have so much news about everything else, or so it seems.

To understand climate change, you need to translate figures into impacts, to think about places you’ll never see and times after you’re gone. You need to imagine sea level rise and understand its impact, to see the cause-and-effect relations between coal-fired power plants, fossil-fuel emissions, and the fate of the Earth. You need to model data in fairly sophisticated ways. You need to think like a scientist. . . .

Not quite a year ago, a climate-change-related hurricane drowned people when superstorm Sandy hit a place that doesn’t usually experience major hurricane impact, let alone storm surges that submerge amusement parks, the New York City subway system, and the Jersey shore. In that disaster, 148 people died directly, nearly that many indirectly, losses far greater than from any terrorist incident in this country other than that great anomaly, 9/11. The weather has now become man-made violence, though no one thinks of it as terrorism, in part because there’s no smoking gun or bomb -- unless you have the eyes to see and the data to look at, in which case the smokestacks of coal plants start to look gun-like and the hands of energy company CEOs and well-paid-off legislators begin to morph into those of bombers. . .

We tend to think about climate change as one or two or five things: polar ice, glaciers melting, sea-level rise, heat waves, maybe droughts. Now, however, we need to start adding everything else into the mix: the migration of tropical diseases, the proliferation of insect pests, crop failures and declining crop yields leading to widespread hunger and famine, desertification and flooded zones and water failures leading to mass population shifts, resource wars, and so many other things that have to do with the widest systems of life on Earth, affecting health, the global economy, food systems, water systems, and energy systems. . . .

It’s huge. I think about it, and I read about it, following blogs at Weather Underground, various climate websites, the emails of environmental groups, the tweets of people at 350.org, and bits and pieces of news on the subject that straggle into the mainstream and alternative media. Then I lose sight of it. I think about everything and anything else; I get caught up in old human-scale news that fits into my frameworks so much more easily. And then I remember, and regain my sense of proportion, or disproportion. . . .

* * *

Cf. Dickson G. Watts: “The distant is the great, the near the little. But the little-near controls man rather than the distant-great.”

Rebecca Solnit, “The Age of Inhuman Scale,” TomDispatch.com, October 6, 2013. Solnit is a amazing talent who writes regularly for TomDispatch and has published a number of remarkable books, including Wanderlust: A History of Walking,  A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, and (just out) The Faraway Nearby (available via TomDispatch).

300 Years of Fossil Fuels (in 5 minutes)

This nice little ditty, put together by Richard Heinberg and the Post-Carbon in December 2010, lays out the peak-everything view. Click on the picture for the video.

Apocalyptic Visions

 

This piece by Malise Ruthven from the New York Review, “Waiting for the Apocalypse: From the Romantics to Romney,” (8/25/12) provides a nice tour of apocalyptic visions over the centuries. It is interesting to think about such visions, often religiously inspired, in the context of nightmare projections today emphasizing ecological, financial, and other forms of collapse. Today, predictions of apocalypse often take the form of “settled science,”  making them fundamentally different in origin and tenor from earlier ideas. And yet there are some similarities:  

The idea of impending doom, whether divinely ordained or inferred by creative imaginations in the wake of absent deities, is a recurring theme not only in the work of writers such as Yeats, Eliot and Beckett. Imagining—or predicting—the end of the world has been the stuff of popular culture from the doomsday panoramas of the English artist John Martin (1789-1853) to the events of the “Rapture” described in the Left Behind series of novels by Tim F. LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. In recent years, apocalyptic rhetoric has turned up in international politics among terrorists and hard-line governments such as Iran, but also their adversaries in Washington, Israel, and elsewhere including the current Republican candidate for president. 

Perhaps this should not surprise us. Apocalyptic movements have been motors of religious—and secular—change throughout history. The origins of Christianity are inseparable from the apocalyptic spirit that consumed the Judeo-Hellenistic world in late antiquity. Albert Schweitzer in his highly influential The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), saw Jesus as the archetypical messianic prophet who expected to see the establishment of God’s rule on earth—as theologian John Riches puts it—through a “mighty act of divine intervention in history which would put an end to the evil age.” Muhammad’s original mission cannot be explained without reference to the apocalyptic admonitions, the foreseen calamities and terrors of the Day of Judgment described in the early suras (chapters) of the Koran “when mankind shall be like moths, besprinkled, when mountains shall be like tufts of wool…” [101:4-5] 

Apocalyptic rumblings—to name a few examples—surrounded Luther’s call for reforming the Catholic Church, Sabbatai Zevi’s claim to be the Jewish messiah, the French and American Revolutions (with George III as the Antichrist of Revelation) and the Babist movement in Persia led by Sayyid ‘Ali al-Shirazi, known as the Bab or ”Gate” (1819-1850), who claimed to be the Hidden Imam of the Shi’a and a “manifestation” of God on a par with Jesus and Muhammad. Although Shirazi was executed—along with thousands of his followers—his movement eventually evolved into the separate faith of Bahaism. 

Many such notions are also present in modern totalitarian movements. The most obvious example is Hitler’s thousand-year Reich. The historian Peter Fischer sees Nazism as a “synthesis of nationalist ideology and Apocalyptic Christian mythology” with the “warrior-dictator” leading “Germany to the Promised Land …once he has destroyed evil, sin and death in their earthly embodiment as the potent, satanic Jew.” . . . 

The paradox of apocalypticism is that the prophets who predict the end of the world can also be great initiators and innovators. The fear of catastrophe, despite its perceived inevitability, acts as a spur to construction. A striking example is the evolution of the Mormon Church from a doomsday cult that originated in upstate New York during the 1830s to the formidable “kingdom” created in the Utah desert by the end of the nineteenth century. The sense of impending disaster inspired the Latter Day Saints, who saw themselves as a “saved remnant” of humanity, to congregate first at Kirtland, Ohio, then near modern Independence, Missouri, and eventually at Nauvoo, on the banks of the Mississippi in Illinois (where the movement’s founder Joseph Smith was assassinated in 1844), before the great migration across the Great Plains and Rockies under Smith’s successor Brigham Young. 

The early Mormon experience can usefully be compared with that of early Islam: the persecution suffered by the Saints in Jackson County, Missouri, which they were forced to leave after being disarmed and flogged by slave-owning settlers, may be compared with that experienced by Muhammad’s first Muslim converts in Mecca, while the utopian community forged by Joseph Smith under divine guidance in Nauvoo corresponds to Muhammad’s reign in Medina. As the German historian Eduard Meyer noted in 1912: “Without the least exaggeration, we may designate the Mormons as the Mohammedans of the New World according to their origins and their manner of thinking. There is hardly a historical parallel which is so instructive as this one; and through comparative analysis both receive so much light that a scientific study of one through the other is indispensable.” . . .

You've just got to love that bit about the Mormons and Muhammad.

"Bringing Nature Back In" to Social Science

The influence of nature on society was once a subject of detailed investigation by philosophers, social scientists, and historians, but it was almost entirely displaced in post World War II social science. Social outcomes had social causes, the received wisdom went. These were the only independent variables that theory need consider. The effect, as Daniel Deudney has argued, was to denature social science, leading to “the expulsion of nature from social science in general, and from political science in particular.”[i]   

Surprisingly, notes Deudney, the history profession moved in a direction opposite to political science. There were two notable developments. One was the partial displacement of “actor-centered history as the narrative of leaders, great events, and peoples” by “bottom-up history.” A second was the tendency of historians of “wide ranges of space and time,” such as Fernand Braudel, William McNeill, and Geoffrey Barraclough, to emphasize the role of material variables in historical change. The central theme in such historiography, Barraclough observed, “is man’s conflict with his environment.” History, too, readily accommodated the work of environmental historians, like the superbly accomplished (but recently victimized) William Cronon.[ii]

Deudney identifies climate, arable land, mineral resources, population, and topography as the top five “natural independent variables” explored by Aristotle, Montesquieu, and other thinkers in this tradition. “To bring nature back in” to social science theories means to be alive to the ways in which such factors, and their modern equivalents, influence social outcomes. “While it is not determined that people will make a particular response or adaptation to a particular material environment, it is inevitable that they will bear the consequences of not making an appropriate response. Human institutions are not passive before nature, the puppets of nature, or parts of nature, but it is nature and not humanity that significantly determines whether human actions achieve their goals.” Nature is permissive, it would appear, but seeks retribution. [iii]

There are various ways in which nature can figure in social science explanations, which Deudney investigates in detail. He rejects “analogic naturalisms,” which hold “that the logic of human social systems can be understood as analogous to the operation of natural ones. . . . The biological sciences have a rich language and diverse set of examples, but biological analogies can never be more than interesting suggestions for understanding politics.” Instead, he calls for a return to “functional-materialist” theory, which sees political institutions as “congealed functional practices—solution sets” to meet recurring needs in the context imposed by geography, climate, and technology. 

Whereas there is a lot of precedent for a “natural social science” (that is, one which identifies natural causes for social outcomes), there is little precedent for a "social natural science" (that is, one that makes human activity central to earth processes). Yet such is the extraordinary novelty in the idea of an Anthropocene, of "human dominance of biological, chemical and geological processes on Earth." It would not have occurred to Aristotle or Montesequieu, but it is one of the central propositions on the table today. Notes the Economist: "The term paradigm shift is bandied around with promiscuous ease. But for the natural sciences to make human activity central to its conception of the world, rather than a distraction, would mark such a shift for real. For centuries, science has progressed by making people peripheral. In the 16th century Nicolaus Copernicus moved the Earth from its privileged position at the centre of the universe. In the 18th James Hutton opened up depths of geological time that dwarf the narrow now. In the 19th Charles Darwin fitted humans onto a single twig of the evolving tree of life. As Simon Lewis, an ecologist at the University of Leeds, points out, embracing the Anthropocene as an idea means reversing this trend. It means treating humans not as insignificant observers of the natural world but as central to its workings, elemental in their force."

The specter of technology that is of human invention but that has essentially escaped human control, to be sure, is not a new one; the environmental fear of today is similar in that respect to the antinuclear fear of the Cold War, or even to the Erasmian revulsion to war in early modern Europe. In all there is the vision of human technology run amok, of human prowess inventing the instruments of its own destruction. Apparently, we have a lot to be thankful for, and a lot to be fearful of--only more so.

The energy problem shows an intensive interaction between natural constraints and social objectives. The nub of the “peak oil” case, as of other pleas for depletion, is that natural geologic restraints will press upon even the most enterprising and efficient; we will “hit the wall” after having digested the low hanging fruit. The opposing view, favored by neoclassical economics, is that with the right social arrangements (a free market that rewards ingenuity and responds to price signals) such constraints will be readily overcome.This in turn is met by the environmentalist objection that the higher we fly, the harder we will fall, as the consequences in nature of our very success at resource extraction become apparent.

Liberalism started out, whether in Hugo Grotius or John Locke, postulating an economy of abundance. The “Promethean ambition” of harnessing the forces of nature “for the relief of man’s estate,” in Francis Bacon’s phrase, is a defining aspect of modernity. Whether anything resembling the old liberalism can survive an age of energy scarcity is an important question. In the 1970s, Malthusian projections of immense scarcity in food or fuel were invariably paired with predictions that it would encourage political despotism.

One of Deudney's key points in his 1999 essay is to show the limitations of social constructivism. He offered, in contrast, a non-Marxist New Materialism. He gives a concise statement of the imperious forces of nature as against these "worlds of our own making":  

[S]ocial practices rise and fall and are valued or rejected not solely—or even primarily—because of socially constructed criteria, but rather because of their ability to function successfully in meeting enduring human needs in material contexts that are both diverse and shifting. Social constructions inevitably shape how nature is perceived and acted upon, but nature itself is not socially constructed, and any social science that assumes so will inevitably be blind to important aspects of human life. Nature constitutes a structuring reality for human beings that is not socially constructed.

 NOTES

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[i]  Daniel H. Deudney, “Bringing Nature Back In : Geopolitical Theory from the Greeks to the Global Era,” in Deudney and Richard A. Matthew, eds., Contested Grounds: Security and Conflict in the New Environmental Politics (1999).  Among post World War II writers, Raymond Aron gave these questions extensive examination in his Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (New York, 1966).  Aron, however, was definitely an exception; such approaches were peripheral to, if not nonexistent in, the leading U.S. thinkers. (Aron’s treatment of these factors in Part III of Peace and War was taken out in the abridged American edition published later.) Deudney explores these issues further in Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton, 2007).

[ii] In re William Cronon: The State demands to see all of your emails because you wrote an article critical of us!

Cronon's "Seasons of Want and Plenty" (1983), whose principal theme is the shifting relation of New England Indians with their environment, revolving around the wheel of the seasons, is reprinted in Bill McKibben, ed., American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (Library of America, 2008). Cronon does not neglect the importance of social practices, as the following anecdote well illustrates:

To the colonists, only Indian women appeared to do legitimate work; the men idled away their time in hunting, fishing, and wantonly burning the woods, none of which seemed like genuinely productive activities to Europeans. English observers often commented about how hard Indian women worked. "It is almost incredible," Williams wrote, "what burthens the poore women carry of Corne, of Fish, of Beans, of Mats, and a child besides." The criticism of Indian males in such remarks was usually explicit. "Their wives are their slaves," wrote Christopher Levett, "and do all the work; the men will do nothing but kill beasts, fish, etc." For their part, Indian men seemed to acknowledge that their wives were a principal source of wealth and mocked Englishmen for not working their wives harder. According to the lawyer Thomas Lechford, "They say, Englishman much foole, for spoiling good working creatures, meaning women: And when they see any of our English women sewing with their needles, or working coifes, or such things, they will cry out, Lazie squaes."

[iii] Recalling Dickson G. Watts: "Don't fool with Nature: she 'strikes back.'"

Consciousness Of the Species, By the Species, and For the Species

From the Dot Earth blog at the New York Times, a statement from Bob Doppelt of the Resource Innovation Group:

Humans suffer from what psychologists call “bounded rationality.” We just can’t think about everything and are especially bad at projecting the consequences of our actions over time and space or imagining delays in the social and ecological systems we are embedded within.

If we are now in control of the planet, transformative cognitive and cultural changes will be needed in a very short time frame to prevent us from continually making conditions worse all while thinking we are doing good. That’s because humans are mostly skilled at “first-order change” — tweaks and improvements to our existing cognitive, behavioral, social, institutional systems that leave the basic goals, structures — and outcomes — of those systems in tact.

But if we are now charged with sustainably managing the planet, second order changes will be needed. These are transformative shifts in values, beliefs, and thought processes that produce fundamentally different types of behaviors, practices, institutions, technologies and policies. Second order change does happen — but mostly through major crisis — and even then there is no guarantee that the outcomes will be constructive.

So yes, we are now in control of the planet. This means our primary task must be to put massive amounts of resources into figuring out how to manage the process of human change so that second-order change comes about with as little harm as possible.

Doable? Yes.

Likely? The jury is out, as most of our resources now go to technologies and resources rather than to scaling up human change processes.

I'm not sure what this means--"to manage the process of human change so that second-order change comes about with as little harm as possible"--but I'm pretty sure it is not doable. I should think the jury is in: its verdict is that human beings are not going to undergo a revolution of global consciousness that will make them yield their immediate interests to the forebodings of a scientific elite. Whether they should do so is certainly a vital question; whether they will do so (that is, make the correct anticipations and achieve political consensus for them, all the while undergoing a revolutionary shift of consciousness in the same direction) can with near certainty be answered in the negative.

Because there is an Anthropocene, it does not follow that a world government putting "us" "in control of the planet" is possible.  In a very short time frame? There is not a scintilla of evidence for this in the real world, concerning the domains that Doppelt is apparently concerned with. In China, India, and Pakistan, the people clamor for more energy, more electricity, more power, for themselves and their country.

Doppelt of course doesn't call for World Government in this passage, but he calls for something even more implausible--that is, a revolutionary change in consciousness or "second order thinking" that would deliver the results of a world government without actually having the thing. For the evident frustrations of international cooperation in the here and now, he seems to substitutes an agentless remedy (a change in consciousness that would direct individual wills to the same end).

This way of thinking has striking parallels with Woodrow Wilson's attempt to transform the world through the League of Nations. There is the same gap between the end to be realized and the means that were (and are) available.

It is very likely that this gap will prove tragic or terrible in its dimensions, as the Wilsonian episode did previously. There is a lot of evidence for an Anthropocene--that is, a global ecosystem profoundly influenced by human habitation on earth--from which one can easily deduce the need for government of the species, by the species, and for the species. But in the distant no less than in the recent past, human beings are ruled by separate entities called empires, city-states, kingdoms, and nation-states. These entities have a moral duty to cooperate in addressing common predicaments, but they will retain their freedom of action and cannot be coerced into submission. That fact, which has a more secure epistemological footing than the science of climate change itself, adds up to a huge collective action problem.

This objection simply extends Doppelt's own admission that "second order change" occurs "mostly through major crisis." Human beings are "especially bad" about doing it any other way. By hypothesis, the major crisis looked for is that which will occur in a great hereafter (say, in 30 to 50 years' time) as opposed to the felt crises of the here and now (floods, droughts, famine, pestilence). Whence it follows that, in the absence of major crisis, based only on the anticipation thereof, such change is exceedingly unlikely.

World Population and Energy Demand Growth

Projections of energy demand over the next hundred years are inherently uncertain, but this graph gives some idea of the potential explosion in energy use that will come from the development of emerging economies such as China, India, and Brazil.




Graph from the National Energy Technology Laboratory


Here are the French energy major Total's projections of population, GDP, and energy demand growth to 2030.

 

6/11/11

Global Energy System Under Severe Stress

From Steve Levine at Foreign Policy:

Over the last several months, we've learned the hard way in incredibly coincidental events that we are in firm control of almost none of our major sources of power: Deep-water oil drilling can be perilous if the company carrying it out cuts corners. Because of chronically bad-governance by petro-states, we can't necessarily rely on OPEC supplies, either. Shale gas drilling may result in radioactive contamination of water, though who knows since many of the companies involved seem prepared to risk possible ignominy and lawsuits later rather than proactively straighten out their own bad actors. As for much-promoted nuclear power, we know now that big, perfect-storm, black-swan natural disasters can come in twos.

The Big Three

Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas are the big three energy providers, taking between them a whopping 78% of world energy, as is shown in the chart above from British Petroleum and the table below from Matt Simmons.




Here's a more recent summation from The Oil Drum of U.S. consumption:

Here's the most recent view of global primary energy production, showing "something new under the sun" since 1945:

Official Projections Show Big Increase to 2025

This chart gives the official view, long maintained by both the International Energy Agency and the US Energy Information Administration, that substantial increases in oil, coal, and natural gas production would satisfy the world's steadily increasing appetite for energy.

Jim Hansen's Tipping Point

The foregoing chart from the International Panel on Climate Change, which shared the Nobel Prize with Al Gore in 2007, shows the dimensions of the warming problem under three different scenarios: mild, hot, and extra spicy.

This chart is from the IPCC's 2007 presentation to policy-makers of the science behind global warming, which urged upon them the gravity of the situation.

The specter of global warming, and the disastrous climatic effects that might ensue from it, has waxed and waned in public consciousness over the past two decades. It was only in 1988 that an obscure NASA scientist named Jim Hansen brought the prospect of global warming to widespread attention, in testimony before Congress. The message was not popular then--"The American way of life is not up for negotiation," declared the first President Bush. As a way of declaring its indifference, Congress rejected carbon taxes in 1993. But anxiety has heightened dramatically in recent years as the scientific evidence has accumulated.

In a recent paper, Hansen's conclusion, with other colleagues, "is that, if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, CO2 must be reduced from its present 385 ppm (parts per million) to, at most, 350 ppm."

350.org has made this a rallying cry.

It is an extremely tall order, as Hansen acknowledges: just to keep Co2 at 425 ppm, assuming plentiful oil and gas, coal use must be phased out by 2030 unless a means is found of "capturing and sequestering" the CO2 emissions it produces. Unconventional sources of fossil fuels like tar sands or shale oil could also not be developed on any appreciable scale if the target were to be met. Hansen also calls for an immediate moratorium on coal-fired power plants and constraints on oil extraction on "public lands, off-shore regions under government control, environmentally pristine regions and extreme environments."

Time is running out, writes Bill McKibben. A change of course is urgent. That "means no more new coal-fired power plants anywhere, and plans to quickly close the ones already in operation. (Coal-fired power plants operating the way they're supposed to are, in global warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.) It means making car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way we made them turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II. It means making trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo. . . . it means the rich countries of the world sharing resources and technology freely with the poorest ones, so that they can develop dignified lives without burning their cheap coal."

Lots of questions may be raised about this perspective. Is it remotely feasible? What is the cost? Assuming it is the right objective, what prospects are there for a domestic reconsideration of our profligate ways or for international collaboration that goes well beyond the Kyoto Protocol?

No realistic accounting can ignore the profound obstacles that stand athwart attempts to lower the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. The gap in perspective between the developed world, and especially the United States, which seeks to preserve its "energy-intensive lifestyle," and the developing world, which refuses to be condemned to 1/10th the per capita consumption of the rich countries, constitutes a huge obstacle to any consensus agreement.

If the Cassandras are right, we have an enormous challenge and a profound moral responsibility to adjust our course so as not to visit upon future generations the ill consequences foreseen. But given the way of the world, the likelihood of this adjustment is remote. "A long-term overshoot of the 350 ppm target level, with potentially disastrous consequences," Hansen notes, is "a near certainty if the world stays on its business-as-usual course."

What would knock the world off its rocker? Is the idea of future devastating consequences, in a sort of great hereafter, sufficient to change its "business-as-usual course"? Will Asia consent? Will China and Russia and Brazil and India consent? Can America offer an attractive bargain to them? What would that be?

Asia Likes Energy, Especially Coal

This chart from BP's Statistical Review of World Energy shows coal production and consumption in 1997 and 2007. Whereas both production and consumption stayed relatively flat in most regions, Asia was a huge exception.

Coal consumption grew in 2007 by 4.5%, according to BP, well above the 10-year average. "Coal was the world's fastest-growing fuel for the fifth consecutive year. Growth was above average in all regions except the Middle East. Chinese consumption growth accounted for more than two-thirds of global growth." Coal is especially important in Asia, as the chart below shows. It makes up 70% of China's energy use.

The reserves situation also shows the pronounced domination of coal, which has a reserves to production ratio of 130 years, far larger than oil or natural gas. BP says that coal has emerged as "the world's fastest growing fuel in part because reserves are located in key consuming countries."

Several years ago, Marc Faber looked to previous experiences of rapid industrialization to forecast the growth in Chinese and Indian oil demand. In the United States, per capital consumption of oil rose from one barrel per year in 1900 to 28 barrels a year in 1970; in Japan the rise from 1950 to 1970 was from one barrel to 17. In China, by contrast, "oil demand per capita [in 2004] is still only 1.7 barrels per year, and for India it has only reached 0.7 barrels. By comparison Mexico consumes annually about 7 barrels of oil per capita and the entire Latin American continent around 4.5 barrels."

According to Simmons' latest figures (October 21, 2008), India now uses 3.2 million barrels per day and 1.1. barrels per person a year. China uses 8 million barrels per day (up from 3.5 million in 1997), but still only 2.3 barrels per person a year. Demand in the United States, by contrast, totals 24 barrels per person a year.

The main point: If the developing world develops per capita energy consumption anywhere near the levels of previously industrializing societies, the effort to arrest the rise in global temperatures seems doomed. The following chart from National Geographic suggests as much.

Update: here are the July 2010 projections of the Energy Information Administration for world use of coal:

Asia Likes Petrol, Too

In the International Energy Agency's 2007 estimate of oil demand to 2030, China, India, and other developing countries make the largest contribution. The following charts suggest why.






In 2007, the IEA projected that China's car sales would overtake the United States in 2015. In fact, they did so in 2010, as the following chart shows:



Jan. 25, 2011: From the Early Warning blog, here is a graph of China's explosive growth in oil consumption, plotted alongside U.S. oil consumption:

Oil in the Middle East

This graph shows that over 60% of the world's oil reserves lie in the Middle East, embracing Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, together with a handful of other states. So it was in 1987, so again in 2007, so it is likely to be in the future.

This great geopolitical fact has been a vital feature of the energy predicament for more than half a century. Oil was a key foundation of world economic recovery after 1945, as Western Europe especially imported huge quantities to fuel its recovery from World War II.

So another essential aspect of the energy problem is the concentration of the most irreplaceable form of energy in the world's most volatile region. Over the years, a geopolitical competition has ensued whose stake was either control over this great resource, or denial of control to others, but in either case fixed on the transcendent significance of this resource, more valuable than gold.

The United States has been deeply interested in the region since the 1940s. Its armed forces are now overwhelmingly deployed either directly or indirectly in support of two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

US policy in the Middle East is not solely reducible to oil by any means, but the fact is undeniable that the existence of the great oil reservoirs in the region has always been a vital conditioning factor in US policy.

The map from British Petroleum shows "proved reserves." In fact, however, the "proved reserves" aren't proven; a cloak of mystery surrounds the true state, for instance, of the Saudi oil fields. But in all probability the figure does not lie too much. Most of the easily accessible, cheap to produce oil lies in the Middle East.

In thinking about the energy problem from a geopolitical perspective, we confront a much different world from that seen by the scientists. Their perspective is, as it were, from “on high”; this is “down low.” It is thick with avarice and selfish ambition, clever (and not-so-clever) Machiavellian calculations. It has lots of different dimensions, later to be explored. But the chart speaks volumes. The concentration of oil reserves in the Persian Gulf is a fact of commanding importance in thinking about the energy predicament. The role it plays in the global energy system has decisive implications for the viability of other forms of energy.

Oil Reserves and Consumption: The Mismatch

This nice graphic first appeared in Energy Bulletin, via William Tamblyn. In the graph, the size of each country reflects the relative size of its oil reserves. It is based on the same data (though from 2004) as the preceding chart from BP, though is more useful in giving the country-by-country breakdown. The colors in the above chart reflect different levels of oil consumption per country (not, as is sometimes done, per capita oil consumption). Click the graph for enlargement and to see the consumption per country key on the lower left.

Tamblyn's map above is a clever way of rendering the production-consumption disparity, though a simple pie chart comparison showing the consumers, as in the pie chart to the right, is also revealing. This "Production and Consumption" graph is from the folks at oilposter.org (whose renowned poster projecting peak oil is available free to educators and at modest cost to individuals).

11/01/08

The Growth of Dependence: US Oil Imports from 1950

This graph from the Energy Information Administration shows US production declining from a peak of 10 million barrels per day in the early 1970s to only 6 mbd by 2007. Consumption fell steeply in the 1970s as the economy fell into recession from the two oil shocks, but rose again when oil prices collapsed in 1985. Net imports are now some 12 mbd.
 

Questions: is it likely that net imports will fall further under the impact of domestic recession? Can the United States make up the gap between production and consumption by more production? What are the costs of this dependency?

Oil Fields in Middle East

The above map is a closeup of the Persian Gulf from a 2007 CIA rendering of Middle Eastern Oil Fields, giving us a yet finer grain than the two previous entries. Below is a cropped view of the larger CIA map.

Costs of Oil Imports

In 2007, the United States spent $246 billion on oil imports and another $82 billion on imported refined petroleum products, making for a grand total $328 billion.

The cost rose more in the first seven months of 2008, with the total cost of oil and refined imports products at $283.6 billion. The bill was paid for by the "recycling" of dollars into US Treasury debt by the oil exporters.

If you were to ask most Americans, the big problem with high oil prices is high gas prices. They care about that. Presidential approval ratings have been shown to rise and fall inversely with the price of gasoline.

But there are two other very important aspects of this import bill.

One is its significance to the the US role in the world financial system. The US current account deficit stayed stubbornly high in the first two quarters of 2008 because of the rising cost of oil; the movement of investment funds into the commodity markets, which changed their character, contributed to the sharp spike in oil in 2008; movement into hard assets, of which oil was a beneficiary, was in part a response to market distrust of paper assets, so the price of oil was in part a function of doubts over the value of paper currency. Oil influences, and is itself influenced by, the financial system.

The financial deficit is also a geopolitical deficit. The obverse fact of high oil import bills is that nations with which the United States has embittered relations were often the biggest immediate gainers from a rising oil price: Iran, Venezuela, and Russia were especially important in this regard. Both presidential candidates exclaimed in 2008 against "sending $700 billion a year to tyrants and dictators for their oil," as Obama put it in words closely echoing McCain's.

Both McCain and Obama mistated the facts. Had the price of oil held in the three figures, the total bill could well have amounted to $700 billion, but it subsequently fell. Most US remittances, moreover, do not go to "dictators and tyrants," but rather to such decent folks as Canadians.

Still, it is a very big yearly bill. And ultimately the world price of oil, to which America contributes by its massive consumption, does mean that US oil imports replenish the coffers of states not exactly friendly, as this chart from Matt Simmons shows.

Another chart from Simmons estimates the impact of successively higher oil prices on the 13 poorest oil producers. He sees that as a powerful impetus to development, but it is also indicative of the power shift to petro states such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezeula that a high oil price brings.

Oil consumption has financial consequences. It has geopolitical consequences. Those should count as costs of our acknowledged "addiction."

The Specter of Peak Oil

There is no consensus among the experts over what the future holds in the way of oil production. As this 2007 chart from Energy Watch Group shows, the advocates of "peak oil" believe that production will fall inexorably over the next several decades to less than half of present output, from some 85 mbd to 40mbd. The official outlook, as represented for instance by the World Energy Outlook of the International Energy Agency, saw production rising from 85mbd to 116 mbd by 2030 in its 2006 report. The IEA subsequently reduced its projections to 106 mbd by 2030 in its 2008 World Energy Outlook, a considerable volte-face for the IEA but still worlds apart from the projections of the Energy Watch Group.

Who is right?

A lot rides on the answer to that question. It's a complicated debate with a long history, pitting at the most general level "neo-Malthusians" with a harsh view of inexorable natural limitations against "cornucopians" who think that humanity, with the aid of the market system, will prove sufficiently inventive to overcome these limitations.

The advocates of Peak Oil make a very strong case. We will review the evidence they put forth later on. Like other key questions, some of it involves questions that neither you nor I have the technical capacity to resolve. Don't feel bad: the experts themselves do not have access to key data and have difficulty arriving at an informed judgment themselves.

So we can't resolve it to 100% satisfaction. But we've got to have a view of it. It is one of the keys to the puzzle, a basic factor in understanding the energy predicament.

Peak Oil and Climate Change: Alternate Universes

Richard Heinberg has a terrific deconstruction of the sometimes clashing, sometimes complementary, perspectives of peak oil and climate change activists:

"Most advocates for the Peak Oil concept—sometimes known as “depletionists”—are energy experts, economists, journalists, urban planners, or workers retired from the oil industry (usually geologists or petroleum engineers). Among climate analysts and activists there are more environmentalists, fewer energy experts, and far fewer retired oil industry employees. It is my experience that, when placed in the same room together, the two groups often talk past one another."'

Heinberg notes that considerable internal diversity exists within each grouping:

Some individuals and groups working on issues related to oil and natural gas depletion are well informed about climate science, while some are not. Some climate protection groups are sensitive to fuel-supply vulnerability issues; others are not. Some Peak Oil activists are what have come to be known in the blog world as “doomers”—that is, they believe that there is no hope at this point for the preservation of modern civilization in any recognizable form; others are “techno-fixers,” who think that the world will adjust—painfully perhaps, but in the end successfully—to oil depletion through conservation and the development of alternative energy sources. Similarly there are “moderate” climate-change scientists and activists who see the problem as serious but solvable, while there are some who believe that the world has already passed a “tipping point” beyond which catastrophic impacts are inevitable. It is probably fair to say that the substantial majority of both groups find themselves somewhere midway between extreme positions staked out by some of their spokespeople."

...Some Peak Oil analysts seem to be of the opinion that oil depletion constitutes a solution to the dilemma of global greenhouse gas emissions, or that Climate Change is actually not a problem at all. This appears to be the view primarily of some former oil industry geologists, but is probably not that of the majority of depletion analysts. The view is rarely stated openly (I was unable to find a glaring instance in print, though I have heard it expressed in conversation).

Climate change activists, by contrast, "argue that, even if global oil production peaks soon, this will provide no solution whatever to Climate Change because society will replace oil with coal and other low-grade fossil fuels—which will simply worsen greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, since the remedies for carbon emissions that climate activists propose will inevitably lead to increased energy efficiency and a reduction in oil consumption, they often feel such efforts constitute an adequate answer to the Peak Oil problem."

For many Climate Change activists, theirs is primarily a moral issue having to do with the fate of future generations and other species. Their message implies an appeal to self-preservation, but since they cannot prove that the most horrific climate consequences being predicted (the drowning of coastal cities by rising seas, rapidly expanding deserts, collapsing agricultural production) will occur within the next decade or two, the motive of self-preservation is often downplayed. This emphasis on the moral dimension of climate activism is clear in Al Gore’s documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth."

Perhaps because Climate Change activists see that a dramatic reduction in emissions must be undertaken voluntarily and proactively, and that the depletion of fossil fuels will not occur quickly enough to deter catastrophic emissions levels, they tend to accept generous estimates of remaining fossil fuels as a way of dramatizing the need for action. They see the argument that depletion will take care of the carbon emissions problem as a threat, because it could lead to apathy. They argue that there are enough fossil fuels left on the planet to trigger a climatic doomsday; and, to underscore the argument, Climate Change often quote robust estimates of remaining oil reserves and amounts awaiting discovery issued by agencies such as the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA), and by companies like ExxonMobil and Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA)—most of whose forecasts seem unrealistically optimistic compared to the majority of expert forecasts.

After discussing the contending perspectives of the two camps over natural gas, coal, and unconventionals like tar sands, which I excerpt later, Heinberg comes to the main pitch:

the two problems of Climate Change and Peak Oil together are worse than either by itself. Strategies that might help to keep lights burning and trucks moving while reducing emissions are questionable from a depletionist point of view, while most strategies to keep the economy energized as oil and gas disappear simply increase greenhouse gas emissions.

With regard to both problems there are only two kinds of solutions: substitution solutions (finding replacement energy sources) and conservation solutions (using energy more efficiently or just doing without). . . .

Several questions become critical: How much of a change in energy supply will be imposed by the peaking of production of oil and natural gas? How much will be required in order to minimize Climate Change? And how much of that supply shortfall can be made up for with substitution and how much with efficiency, before we have to resort to curtailment?

Though noting various tensions among the two camps, Heinberg finds a basis for cooperation among them: "Taken together, Climate Change and Peak Oil make a nearly air-tight argument. We should reduce our dependency on fossil fuels for the sake of future generations and the rest of the biosphere; but even if we choose not to do so because of the costs involved, the most important of those fossil fuels will soon become more scarce and expensive anyway, so complacency is simply not an option."

At the same time, Heinberg does find fault with both camps:

Climate activists could start using depletion arguments and data in tandem with their ongoing discussions of ice cores and melting glaciers, but to do so they would need to stop taking unrealistically robust resource estimates at face value.

For their part, depletionists—if they are to take advantage of increased collaboration with emissions activists—must better familiarize themselves with climate science, so that their Peak Oil mitigation proposals are ones that lead to a reduction rather than an increase of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

The bottom line, Heinberg believes, is that "energy efficiency and curtailment will almost certainly have to be the world’s dominant responses to both issues."

Nuclear Options

Civilian nuclear power, offering the prospect of relatively cheap electricity, arose in the 1950s as a cure-all for the energy predicament. Eisenhower was an enthusiast; he called it "Atoms for Peace." The idea was to spread nuclear knowledge around the world and convert it to abundant energy. He thought desalinization plants powered by nuclear energy could solve the Middle East's notorious water problem. How quaint, the modern reader says, for nuclear power sharply diminished in appeal once concerns over safety and nuclear proliferation took center stage in the 1960s.

The dangers of global warming, the existence of high oil prices, and the specter of peak oil have all conspired to give nuclear power a "new look." The absence of CO2 emissions is a huge plus (though the construction of nuclear plants are themselves energy intensive). Abundant electricity could encourage a shift to a transportation system keyed to electricity, diminishing the need for oil. Is nuclear power the key to dealing with both global warming and peak oil?

There are serious downsides: the waste problem has not been resolved; cost pressures in the industry rose enormously in recent years, plus various other environmental dangers including carbon intensive construction and cleanup costs. On the other hand, the French seem to be living smartly with nuclear power. The Swiss and the Swedes are in the game. Are they all idiots? It is doubtful one should proceed on that premise.

I'm not ready to make a case for nuclear power, but we are obliged to listen to the cases that are being made. The potential contribution to mitigating the emissions problem has made some prominent environmentalists reconsider their previous opposition and come out strongly for the nuclear option. One example is James Lovelock, inventor of the "Gaia hypothesis," who argues that we "cannot turn off our energy-intensive, fossil-fuel-powered civilization without crashing." Lovelock believes that wind and solar do not offer a short range solution and recommends a crash program to build nuclear reactors.

Others, like Lester Brown, dismiss the nuclear solution. Brown notes that "Amory B. Lovins and Imran Sheikh put the cost of electricity from a new nuclear power plant at 14¢ per kilowatt hour and that from a wind farm at 7¢ per kilowatt hour. This comparison includes the costs of fuel, capital, operations and maintenance, and transmission and distribution. It does not include the additional costs for nuclear of disposing of waste, insuring plants against an accident, and decommissioning the plants when they wear out. Given this huge gap, the so-called nuclear revival can succeed only by unloading these costs onto taxpayers. If all the costs of generating nuclear electricity are included in the price to consumers, nuclear power is dead in the water."