Arms Sales and Promoting Democracy in Arabia

From Derrick Jackson of the Boston Globe:

ON THE same day President Obama pressed again for peace in the Middle East, the Associated Press reminded us that the United States cannot help itself from flooding the region with the instruments of war, reporting that the nation is “quietly expanding defense ties on a vast scale’’ with Saudi Arabia.

How vast? The part that has been highly publicized is the new $60 billion arms sale made to the Saudis because of the ongoing threat of Iran. The deal sends Saudi Arabia 84 new F-15s and upgrades to 70 F-15s. It also sends them about 180 Apache, Black Hawk, and Little Bird helicopters, as well as anti-ship and anti-radar missiles. In officially announcing the sale last fall, Andrew Shapiro, the US assistant secretary of state for political affairs, said the sales were part of “deepening our security relationship with a key partner with whom we’ve enjoyed a solid security relationship for nearly 70 years.’’

But there are other emerging aspects of the security relationship the Obama administration is not so candid about. The AP also reported on an obscure project to create a special elite security force that would fall under the US Central Command. The force would have up to 35,000 members “to protect the kingdom’s oil riches and future nuclear sites.’’ It would be separate from Saudi Arabia’s military and its national guard and would involve tens of billions of dollars in additional military contracts. But no official of the Pentagon, the State Department, or the Saudi embassy would go on the record to discuss the program.

The sheepishness of the Pentagon was mirrored by Obama’s failure to mention Saudi Arabia once in his speech Thursday at the State Department. Obama urged fresh Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, praised the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, harshly denounced Libya and Syria, and cajoled Yemen and Bahrain to loosen up on their people. Obama criticized in general the “corruption of elites’’ and pushed for women’s rights in health, business, and politics. He said, “the region will never reach its full potential when more than half of its population is prevented from achieving their full potential.’’. . .

Most experts assume that Obama remains mute on Saudi Arabia because it has the largest oil production capacity in the world and its strategic importance against Iran. But these arms deals, public and secret, up the ante on Obama to be far more transparent about what our relationship is to a nation that is assisting the Bahrain government in its crackdown on freedom protesters. Even as Obama praised the people of North Africa who have risen up for human rights “in the face of batons and sometimes bullets,’’ he is sending yet more bullets, planes, and missiles to nations that fall far too short on human rights.

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.

China's Coal Problem

Coal has played a huge role in China's development; Richard Heinberg says "it may not be an oversimplification to say that the fate of China’s economy rests on its ability to maintain growth in coal supplies." Heinberg also explores the problems of China's investment led export boom and vulnerabilities it has from an aging population, but it is the physical restraint he begins with and which he evidently thinks is primary.

China relies on coal for 80 percent of its electricity and 70 percent of its total energy; coal also supports China’s steel industry, the world’s largest. Altogether, China is one of the most coal-dependent nations in the world. In order to become the world’s second-largest economy, it has had to more than double its coal consumption over the past decade, so that it is now using nearly half of all coal consumed globally, and over three times as much as is consumed in the next nation in line, the U.S. (which prides itself on being “the Saudi Arabia of coal”). . . .

The nation has recently updated its proven coal reserves to 187 billion metric tons, putting it second in line after the U.S. in terms of supplies. That would be about 62 years’ worth of coal at 2009 rates of consumption (over three billion tons per year). But this simple “lifetime” calculation is highly misleading.

Reserves lifetime figures are calculated on the basis of flat demand and lose meaning if demand grows over time. China’s coal consumption is accelerating rapidly, so that the expected “62 years’ worth” must be adjusted downward. Demand forecasts from China’s Energy Research Institute would reduce the reserves lifetime to about 33 years; but if coal demand were to grow in step with projected Chinese economic growth, the reserves lifetime would drop to just 19 years.

Yet this still doesn’t capture the situation. Production will peak and decline long before China’s coal completely runs out. Further, as with oil production, coal mining proceeds on the basis of the “best-first” or “low-hanging fruit” principle, so we must assume that China is extracting its highest-quality, easiest-accessed coal now, leaving the lower-quality and more expensively mined coal for later. Unlike the U.S., China does not have vast deposits of surface-minable coal; over 90 percent of China’s coal comes from underground mines up to 1,000 meters in depth, and those mines face increasing engineering challenges.. . .

China has few options for reducing its reliance on coal, since the fuel is used in so many ways. In addition to powering the electricity and steel sectors, coal provides winter heat to hundreds of millions of northern Chinese; it is also used in the cement, non-ferrous metals, and chemicals industries. While China is rapidly expanding its supply of natural gas,to replace just the coal used for heating would double total gas consumption.

China is quickly developing alternative energy sources. But can these be brought on line fast enough to make a difference? Let’s do some numbers. China aims to have 100 gigawatts (GW) of wind power capacity by 2020, and the nation’s leaders plan to expand installed solar capacity to 20 GW during the same period. These are truly astonishing goals, and, if China even comes close to accomplishing them, it will become the world’s renewable energy leader. But there is a problem. Total Chinese electricity generation capacity is 900 GW currently; with seven percent growth, that means the nation’s electricity demand in 2020 will be something like 1800 GW. Wind and solar together would supply less than seven percent of that. The only thing likely to boost that percentage much would be a dramatic reduction in growth of energy demand to, say, two percent annually.

The situation with nuclear power is similar: China has 11 atomic power plants now and is in the process of building 20 more, with a target of 60 GW of generating capacity, or possibly more, by 2020. But this will supply only between three and five percent of total electricity demand, depending on energy demand growth rates. In late 2010, energy policy makers in Beijing evidently began to take notice of the looming electricity supply problem, and rumors circulated of new efforts to construct up to 245 new nuclear plants over the next two decades (the U.S. has only 104 in total). If this new target is real, and if the Chinese succeed in achieving it, a large fraction of new electricity demand for the coming years could be met through sources other than coal—but China would still have an enormous (though more slowly growing) coal dependence to feed. Meanwhile, China’s soaring demand for uranium would push up global prices for this energy mineral.

In 2009 China was a substantial net importer of coal, having been a net exporter every year through 2008.[7] China could import more coal to enable further growth, but the biggest exporters of coal—Australia, Indonesia, and South Africa—have much smaller reserves and production rates. The entire seaborne trade in steam coal (mainly used by power plants) currently amounts to only 630 million tons per year, and China could absorb this much with only three years of continued growth in coal demand. That’s not going to happen, though: Other nations need that export coal, too—including India, also a major coal-based economy, and also a country needing to import increasing amounts of fuel.

The conclusion is unsettling but inescapable: China’s reliance on coal cannot be significantly reduced as long as its demand for electrical power continues to grow at anything like current rates. And even if energy demand growth tapers off and alternative energy sources come on line quickly, the country’s ability to supply enough coal domestically will still be challenged. This will drive up coal prices worldwide, while choking off economic growth at home. China’s energy economy is unsustainable and will cease growing in the foreseeable future, impacting many other nations as it does so.

Arctic Sea Ice Fails at Resistance

As noted by Arctic Sea Ice blog, the anomaly trend line in the graph below, dated May 2, 2011, seems to have dipped below 2 standard deviations again.

In stock market lingo, you could say that Arctic Sea Ice has failed at resistance, and seems likely to test last year's lows.

Also from Climate Progress:

Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School has “projected a (virtually) ice-free fall by 2016 (+/- 3 yrs).” Contrary to some reporting, that projection has been unchanged for years, though Maslowski is in the process of creating a more sophisticated model that he expects “will improve prediction of sea ice melt.”

Here is Maslowski's March 2010 presentation, "Advancements and Limitations in Understanding and Predicting Climate Change." 

His point of departure is that the observed state of ice extent loss is greater than forecast in global climate models: 

In Virtual World, Demand for Resources to Fall

Jeremy Grantham's recapitulation of the case for a steadily tightening set of resource constraints, with demand for industrial commodities badly outstripping supply, has provoked skepticism among cornucopians. Usually the argument is that human ingenuity and efficiencies induced by the market will make the problem of resource constraint readily solvable. As a chart produced in Grantham's study indicates, commodities were in secular decline during the 20th century; only in the last decade has that downward momentum been reversed. Skeptics of the resource-constraint argument usually do not take issue with the assumption that demand will increase, but insist instead that supplies will be bountiful if the price signals are right. Taking issue with that stance is Rick Bookstaber, author of the prescient book on derivatives a few years back. Bookstaber accepts the efficiency arguments (that technological innovation will induce substitution and other efficiencies) and also believes, with Michael Masters, that a lot of the demand for commodities is driven by financial speculation. But the novelty of his argument lies in his insistence that a profound paradigm shift is coming in ways of life that will sharply reduce demand for energy and other commodities: 

People who are staring at a tsunami of demand for commodities from the developing world and predicting a doomsday of $400 oil and $4000 gold are missing the longer-term retreating tide of demand as citizens of the developed world actually demand decreasing amounts of energy, large goods, and heavy infrastructure. We won't be packing up and moving to Mars, as the science fiction solutions to resource depletion propose. We will pack up and move into the virtual world. . . .

In The Technology-Driven Consumption Trap I argue that in the not-so-distant future the main items we will demand, beyond food, clothing and shelter, are “game systems” that approach the level of Nozick’s experience machine, allowing us to have the experience of being anyone we want, wherever we want (even in a world we have designed), accompanied by whomever we want, all in Realicta Immersion 3-D® with full sensory feedback.

Our demand for housing and transportation, two of the biggest commodity hogs, will be lower. McMansions will be totally passe. It should already be dawning on people that most all of our non-sleeping hours at home are spent in the kitchen and its adjacent family room. Living rooms and dining rooms are relics. When people internalize the fact that they spend most of their non-sleeping, non-bathroom, non-eating time in a ten by twelve foot space with their various experience machine prototypes, large homes will, by and large, go the way of cars with fins and chrome.

We obviously will not need to drive around as much, given that so much of what we want is delivered to us electromagnetically. And, getting back to real goods and technological advances, if we take the web-based distribution a few steps further, rather than having thousands of cars running from one store to the next, a couple of delivery trucks will ply the streets. So per-capita consumption of energy and resource-intensive infrastructure will decrease.

Given our evolved interests a few decades hence, most of us will be spending a fraction of our income on consumption. There just won't be a lot that we will demand that requires nonrenewable resources. What we will demand will be in the way of electronic products, which will only consume a few ounces of such commodities. We will basically eat, sleep, work and then veg out. Give us food, plumbing, heat and our two-hundred dollar experience machine games, and we will be happy as a clam.

Much as I like Bookstaber, I have to say that this strikes me as bizarre. Surely he is joking. Technology of the sort that Bookstaber describes would incline people toward solipsism and end with deeply unhappy human beings, however sophisticated their "Realicta Immersion 3-D® with full sensory feedback" and "experience machine prototypes." To quote the eminent philosopher Marvin Gaye: there ain't nothing like the real thing, baby, ain't nothing like the real thing.  

Rapid Atmospheric Heating Before Japan Earthquake

There were warning signs of Japan's 9.0 magnitude earthquake in the days prior to March 11, 2011, when the quake struck. From a physics blog at Technology Review comes the following:

Geologists have long puzzled over anecdotal reports of strange atmospheric phenomena in the days before big earthquakes. But good data to back up these stories has been hard to come by.

In recent years, however, various teams have set up atmospheric monitoring stations in earthquake zones and a number of satellites are capable of sending back data about the state of the upper atmosphere and the ionosphere during an earthquake.

Last year, we looked at some fascinating data from the DEMETER spacecraft showing a significant increase in ultra-low frequency radio signals before the magnitude 7 Haiti earthquake in January 2010.

Today, Dimitar Ouzounov at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland and a few buddies present the data from the Great Tohoku earthquake which devastated Japan on 11 March. Their results, although preliminary, are eye-opening.

They say that before the M9 earthquake, the total electron content of the ionosphere increased dramatically over the epicentre, reaching a maximum three days before the quake struck.

At the same time, satellite observations showed a big increase in infrared emissions from above the epicentre, which peaked in the hours before the quake. In other words, the atmosphere was heating up.

These kinds of observations are consistent with an idea called the Lithosphere-Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling mechanism. The thinking is that in the days before an earthquake, the great stresses in a fault as it is about to give cause the releases large amounts of radon.

The radioactivity from this gas ionises the air on a large scale and this has a number of knock on effects. Since water molecules are attracted to ions in the air, ionisation triggers the large scale condensation of water.

But the process of condensation also releases heat and it is this that causes infrared emissions. "Our first results show that on March 8th a rapid increase of emitted infrared radiation was observed from the satellite data," say Ouzounov and co.

These emissions go on to effect the ionosphere and its total electron content.

It certainly makes sense that the lithosphere, atmosphere and ionosphere are coupled in a way that can be measured when one of them is perturbed. The question is to what extent the new evidence backs up this idea.

The Japan earthquake is the largest to have struck the island in modern times and will certainly turn out to be among the best studied. If good evidence of this relationship doesn't emerge from this data, other opportunities will be few and far between.

h/t Yale Environment 360

US Electrical Generating Capacity by Service Year, 1940-2008

This is quite the amazing graph, the picture worth 100,000 words. Note the huge increase in natural gas generating capacity from 2000 to 2004. Those calling for a natural gas revolution should occasionally remind us that we've already had one. 

There are many other illuminating maps and charts in this presentation by M.J. Bradley and Associates, Benchmarking Air Emissions of the 100 Largest Electric Power Producers in the United States

(via Post Carbon Institute)

No World Market for Natural Gas

This chart from the Post Carbon Institute shows that the price paid for liquid national gas from Indonesia in Japan, and the price for Russian gas in Europe, is over twice that of the levels recently existing in the United States (the Henry Hub gas price in the chart). Unlike oil and coal, for which there is a world market and something of a world price, natural gas prices have tremendous regional variation. US domestic producers would be living in the lap of luxury were they to receive $10 per mcf, but many are unprofitable at $4 per mcf. A period of low prices, in fact, is most likely to cause, at some point, a sharp spike upward, as producers give up on uneconomic plays, and demand grows to take advantage of the relative cheapness of gas.

Wishful Thinking: Replacing Coal with Natural Gas

This innovative map from the Post Carbon Institute (original source here) shows the location and relative size of U.S. electrical generating capacity. Expectations that natural gas might replace coal in electricity generation are wishful thinking at best, according to the Institute. Not only are reserves of natural gas greatly exaggerated, but there are also serious limitations in infrastructure. According to a study by the Aspen Environmental Group, these include "the lack of sufficient pipeline capacity in 21 states as well as the lack of storage capacity on the East Coast, in the Central Plains states, and in Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, and Missouri." Looking at the map suggests, quite strikingly, that a vast area stretching from Illinois and Missouri in the west to Pennsylvania to Georgia in the east is entirely dominated by coal and nuclear.

US Farmland Values 1971-2011

According to John Authers of the FT, a recent conference of Certified Financial Accountants produced gossipy recommendations to buy gold, emerging market currencies, and US farmland. For farmland, the logic is that "agricultural demand is rising and will not go away" but that the "febrile situation in developing countries rules out their farmland as an option – the chance of political disruption to supply is just too great. So buy US farmland – it is a real asset, and it can only grow more valuable as the shortage of agricultural commodities grows more acute. And, indeed, last year the price of good farmland in Iowa rose by 18 per cent, according to the Federal

Reserve Bank of Chicago, with plenty of anecdotal evidence that prices are continuing too increase." Authers then cautions, however, that to get in to such investments "is to make a bet that a bubble is under way and that you will have the wits to get out before that bubble bursts."