No Gas Bonanza for Levant

 

I noted earlier Richard Heinberg’s dim forecasts for expanded fracking in Europe, once the expected venue of a geopolitical revolution sparked by energy. Similar hopes have been held out for the Near East. In 2012, Walter Russell Mead heralded the emergence of Israel as an energy superpower, “a tiny nation whose total energy reserves some experts now think could rival or even surpass the fabled oil wealth of Saudi Arabia.” As these extracts from the Economist show, Israel’s political isolation constitutes a serious obstacle to the exploitation of these reserves. The regional situation is unbelievably tangled, but it is likely, argues the Economist, that the governments of the Levant are fooling their people [and probably deluding themselves] with false promises of an offshore gas bonanza.

The sceptics say that the main brake is a lack of regional co-operation rather than a shortage of oil and gas. The Americans’ official Geological Survey estimates that from Gaza’s coast to southern Turkey the eastern Mediterranean holds 122 trillion cubic feet of gas, comparable to the reserves of Iraq. But Lebanon’s caretaker government lacks the authority to pass the legislation needed to persuade foreign oil companies to start drilling; a heralded auction is again likely to be delayed. America’s effort to mediate over a disputed maritime boundary between Lebanon and Israel is stalling progress. The civil war in Syria is scaring away big oil companies. And drilling off the Lebanese coast has yet to begin.

It has done so off Cyprus, but estimates of the amount of gas and oil to be found there have been inflated, too. Delek Drilling and Avner Oil, two Israeli firms involved in exploration, say that Aphrodite, Cyprus’s only proven gasfield, has reserves of just 4.1 trillion cubic feet—barely enough to meet long-term local demand.

Oil companies, including Italy’s Eni and France’s Total, may find more gas there. If not, Cyprus’s LNG venture will depend on getting it from elsewhere, perhaps from Israel’s Leviathan field. In any case, Turkey and Cyprus both claim some of the same stretches of water. The Israelis, for their part, have prevented the Palestinians from developing Gaza Marine, a field off the coast of Gaza where BG (formerly British Gas) found gas a decade ago.

Israel, alone, is romping along. It has verified finds of 35 trillion cubic feet. Noble, an American company that has so far dominated Israel’s production, says that gas from its Tamar field, which began flowing this year, already supplies 45% of the country’s electricity. But development of the much larger Leviathan field, farther west, is slow. Fearing an outcry over the sale of public assets, Israeli ministers have delayed the timetable.

There are other obstacles. Asian buyers, who tend to pay the highest prices, are reluctant for security reasons to ship Israeli gas through the Suez Canal. Turkey, whose energy needs are soaring, might have been an attractive export market for Israel. Construction of a pipeline on the seabed between Turkey and Israel could prove more profitable than an LNG plant, because upfront costs are lower and Turkish gas prices quite high, says Robin Mills, head of consulting at Manaar Energy, an advisory firm in Dubai. But such a pipeline might have to pass through officially recognised Greek Cyprus and the Turkish-ruled north of the island, so an agreement with both would be needed. That will be tricky. An alternative route, under Syrian and Lebanese waters, would be trickier still.

In any case, Israel is loth to strike an export deal with Turkey at a time when that country’s foreign policy has become unpredictable and its prickly prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, could turn off the tap whenever he feels piqued. An Israel-Cyprus deal could make matters worse. Egypt’s decision to discard a Mubarak-era agreement to supply 40% of Israel’s gas serves as a warning against doing business amid unresolved conflicts. “Without peace with the Palestinians, we can’t sell our gas to Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and—who knows?—maybe even to the Europeans,” says an Israeli former energy minister, Josef Paritzky.

Tangled in red tape and regional disputes, even oil companies in Israel may flag. Woodside Petroleum, an Australian firm with LNG expertise, is still pondering an ambitious plan to build a floating LNG platform. Noble lacks the capacity to go it alone. Few developers will invest without secure long-term contracts. And buyers in Asia, the best market, are banking on getting an alternative deluge of gas from new finds in the United States. Without exports, regional prospects are less sunny. Ploughing billions of dollars into platforms, rigs, offshore pipelines or costly LNG plants is feasible only if drillers are confident of shipping gas to foreign markets.

 

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“Israel’s and Palestine’s Gas and Oil: Too Optimistic?” The Economist, January 25, 2014.

Japan's Growing Fossil Fuel Burden

From Platt's Energy Economist, a tally of the sharply growing costs of Japan's fossil fuel imports, a consequence of the near-total shutdown of the nuclear industry after the accident at Fukushima in 2011. For a time in 2012, no nuclear plant was operating in Japan; since then, a few (of the some fifty reactors) have been restarted. The consequences for Japan have proven quite serious.   

It is no surprise that less than three years after Fukushima, the Japanese government is seeking to rehabilitate the nuclear industry’s role in the country’s generation mix as indicated by comments made by Trade and Industry Minister Toshimitsu Motegi in December. Returning the country’s reactors to operation would have a significant impact on the trade balance, Japan’s over-dependence on imported energy commodities, and power prices.

It is a paradox that nuclear power can be described as both cheap and expensive. The cost of new nuclear power has risen over time and new reactor construction is significantly more expensive than in the past. Combined with the high capital cost and other risks involved it is hard to make the case that it is competitive with fossil fuels. But where the capital cost was sunk decades ago and paid down or written off, the ongoing low fuel costs of nuclear mean existing nuclear fleets do provide low cost and low carbon electricity.

 

Japan is the world’s largest importer of LNG, the second biggest importer of coal and the third largest importer of oil. Having minimal production of any of these three key energy commodities, nuclear power has been essential to offsetting the security and economic implications of such a high degree of import dependency. As a result of much reduced nuclear generation, in 2012, Japan spent $289 billion on net imports of fossil fuels, more than any other country in the world, including China and the United States, according to the Institute for Energy Economics Japan. . . .

Fukushima was a disaster not just in human terms, for the nuclear industry or the finances of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, but for the country and economy as a whole. The increase in fossil fuel imports and the money paid to secure them has outweighed economic growth and gains in income. The situation has been exacerbated by depreciation of the Yen, which has made energy commodity price imports, all priced in US dollars, more expensive in local currency terms.

 Spending on net imports of fossil fuels as a ratio of nominal GDP for Japan is thought to have reached 5.3% in 2013, compared with 3.1% for China and 1.5% in the US. According to the IEEJ’s senior economist Akira Yanagisawa, China’s ratio fell because GDP grew more strongly than the increase in net fossil fuel imports, meaning no additional burden on the economy. But for Japan the opposite was the case, while currency depreciation added one percentage point to the increased burden.

 Bringing the country’s reactors back on line is proving a slow and uncertain process, owing to the new regulatory safeguards put in place in the aftermath of Fukushima. But for commodity markets, the impact will fall entirely on oil rather than LNG or coal.

 According to the IEEJ’s medium-case scenario — 16 reactors back in operation for an average of eight months in the year — oil consumption would fall from a projected 241.8 GL in fiscal 2013 to 220.4 GL in fiscal 2014, a drop of 8.6%. In contrast, natural gas use is expected to continue to rise to a record 91.1 mt in fiscal 2014, while coal consumption will increase to 191.1 mt. Even with final energy consumption falling by 0.4%, Japan’s natural gas and coal usage are expected to breach new historic highs. As such, Japan has little choice but to revert to nuclear energy.

 

* * *

Ross McCracken, “The burden that Japan is facing in its higher energy costs,” Platt’s Energy Economist, January 24, 2014. Via Barrel Blog.

Olympic Winter Games at Risk

From Yale Environment 360: 

As few as six of the world's previous 19 Olympic Winter Games sites will likely still be wintry enough to host snow sports at the end of the century, according to a report by Canadian and Austrian researchers. Iconic locales such as Squaw Valley, Utah, and Vancouver, Canada, will likely be too warm by the middle of this century. Even under conservative climate change scenarios, only 11 of the 19 sites would remain climatically stable enough to reliably host the games, the study found. Olympic organizing committees consistently cite poor weather as a major challenge for the winter games, and it's likely to get more challenging: The average February daytime temperature of winter games locations has steadily increased — from 0.4 degrees C at games held in the 1920s to 1950s, to 3.1 degrees C in the 1960s to 1990s, to 7.8 degrees C so far in the 21st century. These sites will likely warm by an additional 2.7 to 4.4 degrees C by the end of the century, according to the report. Technology like snow-making, track refrigeration, and high-resolution weather forecasting can mitigate weather challenges to some extent, but those advances are unlikely to keep pace with climate change, the researchers say. "Despite technological advances, there are limits to what current weather risk management strategies can cope with," said the study's lead author. "The cultural legacy of the world's celebration of winter sport is increasingly at risk."

* * *

“Future Olympic Winter Games At Risk as Climate Warms,Researchers Warn,” Yale e360 digest, January 24, 2014.

Fracking in Europe

Richard Heinberg is an author we’ve cited many times on Energy Predicament. In a recent interview with Selma Franssen talking about his new book, Snake Oil: How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperials Our Future, Heinberg has very interesting things to say about the prospects for fracking in Europe. These new technologies and the vision of energy abundance associated with them have often been seen as heralding a geopolitical revolution—with Poland, for instance, eliminating its dependence on Russia and becoming an energy superpower. Heinberg comments not only on the radical scaling back of the estimates for Poland but also notes the persistence of safety issues in the United States. He also offers an intriguing set of reasons for thinking that fracking faces a much more contentious environment in Europe than in the United States, including the dependence of the technique on a huge number of wells drilled, Europe’s greater population density, and mineral rights that are publicly owned in Europe (as against private ownership in the United States), making for a very different structure of incentives.  

Until test wells are drilled, it’s very difficult to know what the actual shale gas and oil production potential is for Europe. All sorts of numbers have been cited, but they are simply guesses. Back in 2011, the US Energy Information Administration estimated that Poland’s shale gas reserves were 187 trillion cubic feet, but a little on-the-ground exploration led the Polish Geological Institute to downgrade that figure to a mere 27 TCF—a number that may still be overly optimistic. My institute’s research suggests that US future production of shale oil and gas has been wildly over-estimated too. So, without attempting to put a specific number to it, I think it would be wise to assume that Europe’s actual reserves are much, much smaller than the drilling companies are saying. We do know that the geology in Europe is not as favorable as it is in some of the US formations, so even in cases where gas or oil is present, production potential may be low—that is, it may not be possible to get much of that resource out of the ground profitably. That being the case, governments should undertake a realistic cost-risk-benefit analysis using very conservative assumptions about likely production potential. . . .

The petroleum industry has certainly been trying to clean up its act, and it’s true that progress has been made in improving operational safety. However it’s also true that the industry has systematically hidden evidence of pollution, and of environmental and human health impacts. The industry has often claimed that there are no documented instances of such impacts, and that’s arrant nonsense. Where environmental and health harms are clear, the industry typically offers a cash payment to the parties affected, but that is tied to a non-disclosure agreement, so that no one else will ever find out what happened. The industry also points to studies showing low methane emissions and no groundwater contamination. These studies tend to describe operations where everything is working perfectly, with no mistakes or malfunctions. But of course in the real world well casings fail, equipment breaks, pipes leak, and operators cut corners or make simple human errors. Take a look at regions of the US where fracking is happening right now, presumably with state-of-the-art equipment: have all the bugs really been worked out? Evidently not, because there is still a steady stream of reports of bad water and bad air. . . .

There are at least three important factors that might limit fracking socially and politically in the European context. First is the number of wells needed. Because production rates in shale gas and tight oil wells tend to decline very rapidly, petroleum companies have to drill many wells in order to keep overall production levels up. In the US, the current total is over 80,000 horizontal wells drilled and fracked. If Europe says yes to shale gas, prepare for an onslaught of drilling.  

The second factor is population density: Europe, of course, has a much higher population density than the US. So taking these first two factors into account, Europeans face a significant likelihood of living in close proximity to one of these future shale gas or oil wells.

The third factor is the legal status of ownership of subsurface mineral rights. In most of the US, landowners control mineral rights; therefore if a company wants to drill on your land, it must obtain your agreement, pay you an initial fee, and also pay a subsequent royalty for the oil or gas actually extracted. (Gas and oil companies actually avoid paying royalties in many instances, but that’s another story.) As a result, citizens have a financial stake in resource extraction, and they therefore have an incentive to overlook or even help cover up environmental and health impacts from fracking. This is especially true in poor communities, where a little lease or royalty money can go a long way. In Europe, national governments control mineral rights. Therefore there is no incentive for local citizens to take the industry’s side if there are disputes over pollution. There has been a strong citizen backlash to fracking in the US; in Europe it is likely to be overwhelming.

* * *

This is from Heinberg’s January 2014 MuseLetter: Shale Gas, Peak Oil, and Our Future

Frackers Fight Back

It has been a potent argument in the case against fracking for natural gas that it is ruinous for water supplies, especially in arid regions like Texas. But a new study claims that fracking poses a far lesser threat to water than coal. In the summary of Bryan Walsh, Time’s environmental correspondent:  

 

Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin collected water use data from all 423 of the state’s power plants. They estimate that the water saved by switching from coal to natural gas is 25 to 50 times greater than the amount of water used in fracking to extract the shale gas in the first place. In 2011, the researchers estimate that Texas would have consumed an extra 32 billion gallons of water if all its natural gas-fired power plants were instead burning coal. “The bottom line is that hydraulic fracturing, by boosting natural gas production and moving the state from water-intensive coal technologies, makes our electric power system more drought resilient,” said Bridget Scanlon, senior research scientist at the University of Texas’s Bureau of Economic Geology and the lead author on the study.

The study is a reminder that for all the focus on the water consumed in fracking or by farms through irrigation, one of the single biggest users of water is the power industry itself. Thermoelectric generation—that would be technologies like coal, natural gas and nuclear, which use heat to generate steam—account for approximately 40% of the freshwater withdrawals in the U.S. In arid regions and during droughts—like the historic 2012 drought, which at its height covered up to 65% of the U.S.—water can become so scare that power plants may need to reduce operations or shut down altogether. With population increasing—especially in fecund and popular Texas—and demand rising, the so-called “water-energy nexus” will be a growing challenge for decades to come.

But the huge amount of water used by power plants tends not to get the kind of attention that fracking does—probably because fracking, especially on a large scale, is relatively new, while coal and natural gas plants have been around for decades. (The Texas State Water Board estimates that hydrofracking accounts for less than 1% of total water use, while providing more than 10% of the state’s total economic output.) Fracking for oil and gas is also much more distributed than a centralized power plant is; if you live in Texas, chances are much better that you live closer to a fracked well than you do a power plant. Power plants—and the mining of the coal used in many of them—are out of sight, and thus they’re out of mind.

Still, the fact remains that Texas was a water-stressed state well before the first gas well was fracked, and the concentration of fracking in certain areas of the state can strain local water supplies. Water use for fracking in Texas is also growing rapidly, from 36,000 acre-feet in 2008 to 81,500 acre-feet in 2011. That’s why oil and gas drillers will need to start recycling frac water, or find substitutes that don’t need water at all, like the liquid petroleum gel made by the Canadian company GasFrac. Water is scarce now in Texas and its likely to be even scarcer in a hotter and more crowded future. Every industry—including oil and gas—will need to figure out a way to use our most precious resource more efficiently.

* * *

Bryan Walsh, “Fracking for Natural Gas May Help Us Save Water,” Time, December 23, 2013

Follow the Money

How far the climate change debate has been distorted by “dirty money”—that is, money provided by rich foundations and corporations directly interested in fossil fuel production—is a question taken up in a new study by Robert J. Brulle in the journal  Climate Change. The author, a professor of environmental sociology at Drexel University, identifies a range of foundations and think tanks that he calls “U.S. Climate Change Countermovement Organizations."  Then he matches them with their sources of funding. Brulle acknowledges that the majority of these organizations are “multiple focus organizations” and that “not all of this income was devoted to climate change activities.”   Still, he has clearly identified a network of funders and fundees who have thrown scorn upon the climate change movement, and he has demonstrated the intimate nexus of financial ties that exist within this network. His most unsettling finding is that unknown donors have recently assumed by far the most prominent role in funding the “countermovement.” However one understands these ties among conservative foundations and think tanks—a more innocent explanation is possible than the one Brulle offers—it is surely a travesty of democratic norms that those conducting such a big intervention in the debate should be allowed to do so anonymously.

The first pie-chart below shows the relative size of conservative public policy institutes—what Brulle calls the “Climate Change Countermovement Organizations.” The second pie-chart shows the conservative foundations that fund them.
 

 

 

 In perhaps his most interesting finding, Brulle shows the rise to funding prominence of Donors Trust and Donors Capital. Conveniently, these are “third party pass-through foundations” whose funders cannot be traced. In the following graph, we get a picture of changing “node strength,” which is “based on the assumption that a foundation’s influence in the funding network is a function of its overall grant-making levels.”

 

Notes Brulle:

As this graph shows, the overall percentage contribution of Donors Trust/Capital rapidly increased from 2007 to 2010. At the same time, the Koch Affiliated Foundations, which peaked at 9 % in 2006, declined to 2 %. The ExxonMobil Foundation effectively stopped publicly funding CCCM organizations in 2007. Additionally, funding by the Scaife Affiliated Foundations, the second largest funder of CCCM organizations, also declined from 14 % in 2003 to just under 6 % in 2010. Finally, Bradley Foundation funding slightly declined over this time period. The rapid increase in the percentage of funding of the CCCM by Donors Trust/Capital and the decline in both Koch and ExxonMobil corresponds to the initiation of campaigns by the Union of Concerned Scientists and Greenpeace publicizing and criticizing both ExxonMobil and Koch Corporations as funders of climate denial. Although the correspondence is suggestive of an effort to conceal funding of the CCCM by these foundations, it is impossible to determine for certain whether or not ExxonMobil and the Koch Foundations continue to fund CCCM organizations via Donors Trust/Capital or direct corporate contributions. However, it is important to note that a Koch run foundation, the Knowledge and Progress Fund, initiated a pattern of making large grants to Donors Trust in 2008.

 * * *       

Brulle promises a study of the influence of money on the other side of the debate as well. For a pdf of the paper, see Robert J. Brulle, “Institutionalizing Delay: Foundation Funding and the Creation of U.S. Climate Change Counter-Movement Organizations,” Climate Change (accepted November 19, 2013). Tip of the hat to Desdemona Despair.

No Plan Bee

This piece from the Financial Times reviews the causes and implications of a “pollination crisis” resulting from an insufficient number of bees and other insects. Most fruits and vegetables and about three-fourths of all crops rely on these pollinators, which are under severe stress. Dave Goulson, a professor of biology at Sussex University in Britain, notes that in California, beekeepers that are needed to pollinate the almond crop are losing nests, tripling prices; in China, apple and pear farmers use children on stepladders to brush pollen on each flower, as pesticides have wiped out the bees. Goulson stresses that knowledge of the overall state of the world’s pollinators is quite limited—“we do not know how many pollinators we have, nor how their abundance has changed over time”—but is sufficient to indicate a grave crisis.

What is happening to our bees? The answer is complicated – but imagine the following. A flu epidemic sweeps the country, and you catch it. You feel awful but you struggle on, going to the shops to get food. The shop has closed down, and you have to walk an extra two miles to find an open shop. Exhausted and shivering, you buy some food and manage to eat some but it has been poisoned. Not enough poison to kill you if you were feeling well, but in this state?

It sounds a bit melodramatic, but it is a pretty good analogy for our poor bees. We have accidentally spread new parasites and diseases of bees around the world; for example, many bumblebees in the UK are infected with a gut parasite originally from Asian honeybees, while honeybees are being ravaged by the Asian Varroa mite. Modern farming has removed most flowers from the countryside, so pollinators have to travel further to find nourishment – and the range of foods available is restricted. Much is contaminated with a cocktail of pesticides; recent studies found up to 35 different pesticides in the food stores of honeybees. Small wonder, then, that pollinators are not thriving.

Global food production has been heading in an unsustainable direction for decades. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that we will need to double global food production by 2050 to feed the growing population. We continue to clear tropical forests to bring more land in to use, and we try to squeeze ever greater yields from existing land by heavy use of fertilisers and pesticides, creating vast crop monocultures. Yet our efforts are undermining the ability of land to produce food. Agricultural practices are causing soils to be rapidly eroded – washing away in rain or blowing away into the sea – so that 40 per cent of farmed soils are already degraded, and some estimates suggest many countries will have little soil left within 60 years. Aquifers used to irrigate arid soils are fast being depleted. Salt build-up, from poor irrigation practices, is affecting 320m hectares of agricultural lands – an area the size of India.

Extreme climate events expected as a result of build-up of greenhouse gas emissions are likely to cause catastrophic crop failures. Wild fish stocks are being depleted; many have already collapsed. Species are going extinct at about 1,000 times the natural rate, many of which have vital roles in recycling nutrients, storing carbon, creating soil, controlling pests and, of course, pollinating crops. Bees may be canaries in the coal mine, warning us that we must find ways to produce food without destroying the environment on which we depend.

* * *

Dave Goulson, “There is no Plan Bee for when we run out of pollinators,” Financial Times, November 8, 2013

Threat to Food Supplies

A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, still under review but leaked to a climate skeptic, warns that rising temperaturees will pose great risks to the world's food supply in coming decades. From the New York Times:

In a departure from an earlier assessment, the scientists concluded that rising temperatures will have some beneficial effects on crops in some places, but that globally they will make it harder for crops to thrive — perhaps reducing production over all by as much as 2 percent each decade for the rest of this century, compared with what it would be without climate change. . . . The document is not final and could change before it is released in March.

The report also finds other sweeping impacts from climate change already occurring across the planet, and warns that these are likely to intensify as human emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise. The scientists describe a natural world in turmoil as plants and animals colonize new areas to escape rising temperatures, and warn that many could become extinct.

The warning on the food supply is the sharpest in tone the panel has issued. Its previous report, in 2007, was more hopeful. While it did warn of risks and potential losses in output, particularly in the tropics, that report found that gains in production at higher latitudes would most likely offset the losses and ensure an adequate global supply.

The new tone reflects a large body of research in recent years that has shown how sensitive crops appear to be to heat waves. The recent work also challenges previous assumptions about how much food production could increase in coming decades because of higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The gas, though it is the main reason for global warming, also acts as a kind of fertilizer for plants. . . .

On the food supply, the new report finds that benefits from global warming may be seen in some areas, like northern lands that are now marginal for food production. But it adds that over all, global warming could reduce agricultural production by as much as 2 percent each decade for the rest of this century.

During that period, demand is expected to rise as much as 14 percent each decade, the report found, as the world population is projected to grow to 9.6 billion in 2050, from 7.2 billion today, according to the United Nations, and as many of those people in developing countries acquire the money to eat richer diets.

Any shortfall would lead to rising food prices that would hit the world’s poor hardest, as has already occurred from price increases of recent years. Research has found that climate change, particularly severe heat waves, was a factor in those price spikes.

The agricultural risks “are greatest for tropical countries, given projected impacts that exceed adaptive capacity and higher poverty rates compared with temperate regions,” the draft report finds.

If the report proves to be correct about the effect on crops from climate change, global food demand might have to be met — if it can be met — by putting new land into production. That could entail chopping down large areas of forest, an action that would only accelerate climate change by sending substantial amounts of carbon dioxide into the air from the destruction of trees. . . .

* * *

Justin Gillis, "Climate Change Seen Posking Risk to Food Supplies: Science Panel Says Output May Drop 2% Each Decade, as Demand Rises," New York Times, November 2, 2013.

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).

A Comet Passes

The death of Randy Udall, at the tender age of 61, is a great loss to the community engaged in energy and environmental issues. The following tribute was written by three of his close friends and captures something of his vital contributions and ineffable charm. Randy could write circles around virtually anyone in the business; he managed to combine hilarity and grim tidings in a way that spoke to a profound understanding of the human predicament.  His two daughters, Ren and Tarn, were students of mine at Colorado College--fabulous students, I might add, who did their papa proud. We grieve with them and their family over the loss of this remarkable man.

From Sally Odland, Steve Andrews, and John Theobald, writing at one of Randy's favorite haunts, The Oil Drum, "A Comet Passes": 
 

Last week our universe was rent asunder by the untimely death of our great friend, colleague and mentor, Randy Udall. The passing of this lanky, unprepossessing comet of a man with his wide-ranging intellect, uncompromising honesty and stiletto wit leaves a wide vacuum in its wake. 

We knew Randy primarily through his crusade to bring honest discussion of America’s energy predicament into public dialog and policy. Randy started tracking and writing about world oil and gas depletion in the 1990’s. He co-founded the US chapter of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil in 2005 and spearheaded five highly touted and provocative energy conferences, creating for a few years the ultimate big tent for international energy thinkers. He was famed for his poetic speeches, wicked humor and accessible metaphor. And also for his insistence on speaking truth to power, no matter its rank. 

Randy was a formidable autodidact. When he designed and built his passive solar house by hand, he taught himself plumbing. Auto mechanics? No problem. In his two decades working with CORE—his Colorado energy efficiency group—and ASPO-USA, he taught himself the math and technologies of renewable energy and fossil fuels along with a fair bit of geology. He learned by seeking out smart doers and leaders to probe them with questions that could vault him up the learning curves. 

Randy was a contrarian thinker. He worked problems from all angles, refusing to succumb to groupthink and revisiting old assumptions whenever new information came to light. Because of this uncompromising truth-seeking and refusal to toe a party line, he held the respect of many people and groups that would not normally sit in the same room much less at the same table. On any given day, his inbox might field emails from climate scientists, exploration geologists, energy historians, economists, utility operators, environmental groups, and—maybe his favorite—the people actually steering the drilling rigs. 

He admired the immense brainpower and ingenuity of petroleum geologists and engineers to find and develop fossil fuels, and he understood exactly how much we rely on them to support the American Dream. All the while, he looked for concrete ways to move houses off energy ‘life support’, individuals to a lower carbon budget and his country towards renewable energy flows. 

There was always solid research behind Randy’s picturesque quips. When he threw out one-liners like “Oil shale has less energy content than pig manure,” you could be sure he had calculated the per-ton BTUs of both. If he noted that “Energy extraction is now the dominant land use in America”, you knew he had run down comparative numbers on acres leasedfor drilling versus agricultural acreage. 

Always present in the moment and engaged with his audiences, Randy connected the abstract world of energy use to ordinary people’s lives. He avoided graphs to tell the story, preferring visceral and iconic analogies. To illustrate the power needed to fuel our electricity appetite, for example, he would show a slide of nude Lance Armstrong on bike, share data from a personal correspondence with Armstrong’s trainer, then inform us all that the most powerful man on earth can’t generate enough juice to run our hair dryers. A presentation to hundreds of professionals in Boston might divert into a technical discussion of CO2 emissions. The same presentation to a group of college students at UC Davis would morph into an analysis of the energy demands of their campus. 

Unlike many pundits, partisans, educators and activists, Randy never punctuated his public conversations and presentations with moral judgments. He refused to jettison facts or objectivity on behalf of a moral crusade. As Garrett Hardin has said, “the tender flower of objectivity is easily crushed by what is taken to be the necessity of the moment.” While Randy made damning comments like “Time may be our most precious resource . . . D.C. is fiddling that away while the petroleum burns” and “Without a scorecard, our policy responses are liable to stay stuck on stupid,” he did not characterize the American life style as evil. Instead he dubbed us “the Oil Tribe” and made people aware of what that actually meant.

 "‘So much for peak oil’ is a popular meme right now” he would say. “But there's a difference between reporting and quoting. All this talk about Saudi America is misleading boosterism. “

 “This notion that ‘it’s morning in America’ is simply hype. The pore throats in shale rocks are 20,000 times smaller than a human hair. On these rocks, we've bet our energy future.”

 “Eventually, the politics of energy has to surrender to the physics of energy.”

 Randy never played off the Udall family name. Virtually without ego, he shunned all self-promotion. With his eloquence and charisma, people thought him a natural for politics and urged him to run for office to further his message. But, in fact, he had no taste for that. He exercised his public persona at great personal cost and would retreat for long stints to the wilderness to recharge his spirit and soul.

 Randy died like he lived, questing nature’s energy flows, in the Wind River Mountains he so loved. Death snuck up and felled him on the trail. It is not hard to imagine Randy, led by his boundless curiosity, walking through the portal separating his last worldly step from the universal energy.

 We loved Randy like oxygen and will miss him desperately. His was a light the rest of us could navigate by. What a privilege to have been hitched to his star for the ride.

 * * *

Sally Odland is a former oil geologist and ASPO-USA board member, now at Columbia University. Steve Andrews is a retired energy consultant in Colorado and a co-founder of ASPO-USA. John Theobald teaches at the University of California, Davis. Each worked closely with Randy to build ASPO-USA and advance critical discourse on America's great energy challenges.